weathertop | darling it's better down where it's wetter

"Great," says Jack, with just the slightest flavour of I-told-you-so.

Turns out this is just what he needs to bring his mood back up a notch. They're totally getting ahead after all!

Now he just needs to stop thinking about... everything, ha, what a time to start thinking about things. He could really do without these Fontaine name-drops if it's all the same to everyone. They should've put that on the adverts for ADAM: guaranteed to stop you caring that everyone you knew and loved might as well be dead! End creeping discomfort, or your money back!

Anyway.

He plays with the rope a bit while Sinclair ties it, checking for any obvious fraying. He's not hoping for another tumble. But as it turns out, the greatest danger might be slipping on all this... stuff, this kind of nasty covering that smells exactly like some of the older corpses he's plundered.

Dang, Sinclair, you didn't find this in a store-room, did you.

Well, Jack has smelled worse.

Looking down, Sinclair notices the face Jack makes at the rope. He found something solid for you to climb up and what, now it's not good enough? I see how it is.

"Hope you don't mind," he says, "I borrowed it from our friend up here. Not exactly the most, uh...hygienic fella."

It had to be a rope, after all.

"I've seen worse," he answers, repeating the sentiment of the narration honestly enough.

Once it's done being tied, he gives it the same experimental tug he gave the first one, then pulls a 'welp here we go' kind of face and hauls himself onto it.

His hands, as expected, slip a lot. But he's strong enough to make kinks in the rope for extra grip, tensing his arms and forcing each part he holds to be horizontal.

All things considered, he makes slow but reasonable progress.

He tries not to be too aware of the ground getting further and further away beneath him. Or the way the rope sways alarmingly with his movements. He's just climbin'. Yep. He's mostly lived through Rapture so far, a bit of climbin' isn't too risky. Nope.

Near the top, he loses his grip, tries to grab some rope that's a bit too slick with rotting people juice and slides. With an alarmed little noise, he clenches fists and feet and thighs around the rope and makes the mistake of looking down.

He stalls himself two feet further down, and looks up at Sinclair with the fairly undisguised look of a man whose fake-ass life just flashed before his eyes.

Please let that knot at the top be secure please oh please he will kill you if you make him fall again oh my god.

There aren't any incidents after that, but it's still with a certain amount of relief that Jack scrambles over the banister and onto solid ground. Jack leans his butt against the banister and stretches, quite deliberately not looking down again.

I mean it's not the first time he's done stupid acrobatics, but he does usually prefer to have his feet planted on the floor.

A quick triumphant grin is directed at Sinclair.

And it's worth mentioning that between the extended Bouncer search, and getting up close and personal with dead people rope, Jack smells pretty bad. Worse than the usual Rapture combo of unwashed dude and trashcan residue. His hands and clothes are entirely vile, encrusted with who knows what kinds of grime, not that this keeps him from a dedicated attempt to wipe off the one on the other.

Well one thing's for sure: If something were on fire up here, Sinclair would not want to have to rely on Jack to climb up a rope to save him

Another thing is also for sure: when they get back to Sinclair's apartment, they're not doing anything until Jack takes a bath. I mean really, at least the rotting corpse is only one kind of gross. Jack's got a whole assortment, a menagerie of grossness on his sweater alone, never mind the rest of him.

"I spotted a crawl space in the last room there," he tells him, gesturing at the third door. "Looks to go right through to another room. Unless you've got any other ideas." You know. So they don't have to do any more backtracking.

"I want to look at it."

Blissfully oblivious to the dead horse Sinclair's narration is beating, Jack turns towards... actually, hang on, he turns back again, thinking of something.

"...Should we take the rope?"

Sinclair looks back at the rope dangling helpfully from the banister. If they leave it there, anyone could follow them. So even if they don't take it, they should pull it up again. But Jack is right, they may need it again at some point and nobody wants to have to go through that all over again. Granted, maybe the next rope they find will be a little less horribly disgusting.

He shrugs. "If you want to carry it."

You're gross enough, a little extra will hardly even be noticeable.

Sure, it's selectable so it should come in handy.

Jack spends a couple minutes squatted by the banister, pulling out Sinclair's lame-ass knot and rolling up the rope. It's a nice bit of light work to get the cramp from climbing out of his hands. It's also gross as hell. But the man eats stale cake out of trash cans, he's worn Big Daddy pheromones, he is basically immune to repellant stinks at this point.

All gross as hell comers are welcome in his inventory; he does not judge. ♥

Then he leads the way through the door, opening it just a crack at first to check for-----

Huh. Okay, there's no danger per se, but this is still a hell of a room.

However Jack may feel, the stench of dead bodies is not one that Sinclair thinks he'll ever be able to get used to. His nose goes right back into the crook of his elbow.

"And here's the kindly gentleman who lent us that rope," he says, coughing a bit. "Don't think I care to know what happened to him."

Don't get him wrong, his nose is definitely wrinkling at the smell. It's ripe in here, desensitised or not.

"That was nice of him," says Jack, while he fishes half a pep bar out of the corpse's pocket.

Jack's constant desire to stuff his face knows no bounds. It shouldn't even surprise him anymore, really.

Which reminds him, the goodies he found are still sitting in the reception area. While Jack loots the room, Sinclair steps out for a breath of less putrid air and makes sure to get them before he comes back in.

"Thought you might be needing these," says Sinclair, laying the med kit and two EVE hypos out on the table at the corpse's feet.

Oh man, that is a nice haul.

"Thanks, mister Sinclair!"

(And if the way he says it doesn't make you want to say 'you're welcome, li'l Billy' and pat him on the head then I just don't know what to say to you.)

"Sure thing, sport," Sinclair says back, obviously resisting the pat on the head. It is clearly called for, but maybe another time.

"Crawl space is down there. You want to check it out first or do you think we oughta just go for it? There's no other way out of here that I've seen."

Jack scoops up the goods and squirrels them away into his unfathomable pockets. Honestly, part of the secret to success in Rapture is just maxing out your storage space. It works wonders.

"I'll try it," he offers. After all, it's not like there are splicers in here, and if there are any beyond it he's better equipped to deal with them than Sinclair is. It just makes sense.

He squats down by the crawlspace entrance, then gets on his hands and knees and starts to squirm through.

Sinclair kneels down a ways behind him, trying to see through to the other side. If it's not a way out, he's probably going to tear his hair out. They just spent hours trying to get up here, and one more failure on top of all the rest of them might actually make him lose his mind.

"What do you see?"

There's a zapping noise, then a crunch and a wet thud, and then Jack calls:

"Coast's clear!"

Lack of a sense of humor and his awful stink aside, Jack is probably the most useful travel companion Sinclair could have hoped for in their situation. After a few surprisingly quiet noises of violence, Sinclair pulls himself through the crawl space and stands in the next room.

Which is less of a room and more of a long hallway. It appears to turn a corner towards the other end of it, so Sinclair supposes that is their destination. All of the open doors along it make him a bit nervous though; anything could be in any one of the rooms they're about to pass. There's graffiti covering the walls and doors, some of it political, some of it sexual, some of it both.

But for all the crude messages, the dripping paint and messy lettering, there's something about it that really unsettles him. There aren't so many that it's the first thing you'd notice, but all along the length of the wall, there are these butterflies. They're drawn on with a little more care than the angry smears of protest against Ryan, by different hands. Some are small, some are bigger, but they're all a soft blue and white against the furious red that spans the rest of the hall. He's seen them before in a couple other places, but never as many in one spot. He knows what they are.

This must have been a popular area for splicers at some point, an entire hall full of rooms with beds. But looking through the doors now as they pass them, most of the mattresses are missing from the bed frames. There doesn't appear to be a single room that's livable anymore, they're all full of rubble and crumbling furniture and leaking pipes. It's almost depressing, if Sinclair actually cared about the state of Rapture anymore.

He follows Jack in silence, listening closely for any potential remaining splicers who may have decided that a deteriorating home is better than no home at all.

Jack proceeds carefully, electricity dancing at his fingertips. He's had the same thought as Sinclair about the open doors.

He doesn't pay a lot of mind to the butterflies; maybe someone was trying to brighten up the place. Some of the graffiti does make him flash a quick grin, though. Particularly the one about Andrew Ryan's tiny unsatisfying genitals.

(The word 'penis' is hilarious when you're three.)

Then something gives him pause.

With all the junk and broken mess on the floor, wood, water, shrapnel... their own footsteps aren't exactly silent. But still. There should only be two sets of them.

Jack stops moving, and glances at Sinclair to see if he's heard it too.

Sinclair stops immediately when Jack does, freezes and listens. Somewhere around the corner, the tail end of crunching glass before everything is silent. But he heard it, and he nods at Jack to confirm.

Reaching for his gun, he gestures for Jack to go on ahead. The quiet splicers always seem just a little more dangerous.

Jack nods, with a smile. Time to go be way stronger than a normal splicer again!

He steps forward carefully -- can't keep his own feet from making noise on the infinite layers of debris, but he does almost certainly have power on his side, even without the element of surprise. He reaches the corner, hugging the wall, and readies a shot of Electrobolt.

Then he peers around it, aims and------

------it's a human.

A human with a revolver pointed straight at his ugly, smelly face.

Tenenbaum, too, expected splicers.

Or... splicers that weren't him, at least. Although if he's here, that might confirm a theory she has about the window-shuddering crash that went down some number of hours ago. It definitely seemed to be a failed escape attempt by someone, and why not Rapture's latest big man on campus?

Her mouth tightens. Even out of contact, she expected to run into him sooner or later. Rapture is an unfortunate place, after all.

"Jack."

She does not move her finger off the trigger.

He can't see around the corner, but he hears a woman's voice. One word, but she's got an accent...something European, but he'd have to hear more to know where specifically. Anyway, whoever it is, she's definitely not a splicer. And more surprising than that, she...knows Jack?

Sinclair watches Jack's face for a moment, trying to determine how safe it would be to step out and look at her. He doesn't seem to be afraid, he looks. Well. He looks the way he did when Sinclair first approached him himself, only perhaps a little less uncertain.

But he doesn't pick up any signs of immediate danger, so he walks out beside Jack.

...He knows this woman. He's seen her face before, but he can't place a name.

"Have we met?" he asks with a friendly enough smile.

Because she was definitely talking to him.

...Well, that's a turn-up for the books. He may not know her face, but she's seen his plastered across enough businesses.

"I was not speaking to you." And there, that's more than enough time and attention spent on Sinclair. Back to Jack.

"So this is the company you are keeping now."

Hanging around with the guy who sold them those Big Daddy candidates, it's almost like Jack is going back to his roots.

...Ow, okay, she hurt herself with that one.

What has two thumbs and absolutely no idea how to proceed with this interaction?

All right, he's over the surprise. I mean this isn't outside the realms of possibility. Even though he does have a hard time picturing her actually leaving her safehouse.

He still kind of wants to hurt her for abandoning him as soon as Fontaine was killed.

Instead, he says:

"You might shoot me by accident if you've got your finger there."

What? He doesn't like getting shot.

Of course he knows that. She remembers teaching him that, from the laundry list of weapons skills and safety procedures Fontaine drew up for them.

That was a long time ago.

She shakes her head, not looking away from him.

"You assume it would be an accident?"

Sinclair is sensing a bit of tension here.

"I know you from somewhere," he says. If he can place her, he may have a better idea of how to go about the situation they're in right now. Her tone implicated that she knows him as well, but that doesn't surprise him. He's become something of a household name in recent years.

Her tone also implicated that perhaps she doesn't really like him. That doesn't particularly surprise him either.

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