Hojo looked at Szayel like he was some dirt on the bottom of his shoe giving him an unexpected and unpleasant sensation of constantly stepping on something when walking.

"Project S," he answered, "my finest creation. Had I been able to complete my work on the sibling, he'd have been as successful, but," he looked Kadaj up and down, "even the little work I had been able to do seems to have had noticeable results."

The boy's reiatsu control was weakening, however. Temper, perhaps, or something more sentimental carried over thanks to the persistent maternal influence. Sephiroth had been separated from her very young, but her insistence that she'd withdraw from the experiments if she wasn't allowed to keep this one had been problematic. She was too genetically superior a specimen herself, although her mental state could fluctuate, and it would have been a shame to waste her and find another.

In retrospect he should have just brought her into the labs and kept her as a broodmare for superior specimens, but there was competition from other scientists in Shinra at the time, and Hojo hadn't wanted to let them know where he was obtaining his samples. She'd been enamoured of him, and he'd thought her easy to control with that, and she had been, for a while.

"If you had a hope of understanding the contents," he said, to Kadaj, "I'd show you the file containing your experimental data."

He wasn't lying.