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

darling it's better down where it's wetter

It's been a day, it's been a day, it's been a whole damn day -- as near as it's possible to tell in this soggy excuse for a city. It's been a day since he killed Fontaine. And Jack is no closer to getting out. He's still down here. He did everything he was supposed to do and he's still down here.

All he's found is locked-down bathyspheres. Broken submarines. Even the goddamn boats are out of service. Where's Tenenbaum? Where's his fucking rescue?

Jack stares about into the greenish gloom, checks the ammo in his pistol, and then kicks and yanks off the rusting panel of a vending machine. His hands are soon full of little wires and pipes. A few seconds later, he straightens up with a grunt, and the machine gives him a tidy discount on a couple glowing hypos of EVE.

With his visit extended indefinitely, he's begun to wonder how many of them are left.

Now arbitrarily divided into chapters!
Part One: A Scene at the Rapture Adoption Agency ~or~ You Found [Pot of Ham]!
Part Two: Come On-A My House, I'm Gonna Give-A You Candy ~or~ Sinclair? More Like Sin Pantalones!
Part Three: Dream Sequences are a Fresh New Concept in Fiction ~or~ It's My Existential Trauma and I'll Cry if I Want To
Part Four: Southern Education Jokes ~or~ Engineer, Engifar, Engiwherever You Are ~or~ The Grave Escape
Part Five: Golfing Accident Memoirs ~or~ Mom... Dad... I'm Immortal ~or~ How To Make Friends And Immolate People
Part Six: Is It A Pie? Is It A Plane?? ~or~ Two's Company, Three's a Row
Part Seven: Escort Missions! In Rapture! Council's In An Uproar ~or~ Bioshock: Cheesecake Edition
Part Eight: Bread, Milk, BATTLE! ~or~ Pleasant Conversations, How They Bore Me
Part Nine: Choices, Schmoices ~or~ Baby's First Moral Philosophy ~or~ Go Away I Want To Take A Damn Bath
Part Ten: A Man Snoozes; A Slave Delays ~or~ The Four Second Rule Applies To Drugs
Part Eleven: A Hearty Meal ~or~ Skeletons In The-- That's Not A Closet
Part Twelve: We All Live in a Secret Submarine ~or~ Plasmids: Not Even Once
Part Thirteen: Paging Dr Tenenbaum To Surgery ~or~ Bribery And Deduction
Part Fourteen: The Prodigal Son Returns

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That scenery man. As much as the red skies give off the feeling that they're descending into a circle of Hell, it's still just. Beautiful, in a dark way. The way it is right before a tornado, when the sky is an unsettling greenish gray. It feels dangerous, and with the help of this new toy, that's something Sinclair thinks he can appreciate.

He follows Jack in silence, watching him fiddle absently with a knob on the chemical thrower, hand still shaking slightly. And he thinks he knows what it is, on the strain of why it couldn't possibly be the caffeine, but it's not an idea he's quite willing to entertain just yet. He's going to wait just a bit longer before he decides for sure that something needs to be done about it. Because if he's right, something will definitely need to be done about it.

Jack, meanwhile, is still trying to push down the sick feeling crawling up through his stomach. His head's got to be in the game, here. Then again -- it occurs to him -- when has he not felt something like this, really? When he was adapting to the underwater war-zone? When he was finding out his past and his only friend here were lies? Oh, happy times, sure. There have been ups and downs and sometimes he's been able to distract himself, but the only time he can remember feeling really brave and happy -- the only time that he knows for sure wasn't printed into his head -- was after splicing.

Ugh. He can't think about this. It'll be better when they reach the surface. And they will reach the surface, he has to keep believing that if nothing else.

The red-lit tunnels spill them out into interior ones, gloomy, floored and ceilinged with long brass pipes. The massive 'Ryan Industries' signs aren't difficult to spot. They move without challenge for now; Jack looks suspiciously at a couple of fresher bodies and jolts them with Electrobolt to be sure, but they're dead as the day God left them.

The hallway only has one other door, at its end, and that opens to share with them a pungent stink of decay. The guy on the other side is definitely not faking being dead. The wall behind him is plastered with his dark brown blood, and has been for some days.

Jack wrinkles his nose at the smell. It's worse than it was the last time he passed through here.

Up some shallow stairs, a turret blinks at them, then recognises Jack and stands down. There's only one door here as well. Hephaestus is kind of a bottleneck.

But the room they reach through this door finally breaks that trend. There are more doors, scattered around its fringes, in various states of open, broken or barricaded. Signs pointing the way to Ryan's office glow faintly. Jack gives them a poisonous look.

In the centre of the room, on a raised metal platform, is a table. Above it is a hole in the ceiling. And what do you know? There's a napalm canister on the table, catching the light.

A smile twitches on Jack's face. Familiarity breeds a weird kind of comfort.

"Do you need napalm, mister Sinclair?" he asks, finally breaking the silence.

His test run earlier didn't use up too much, so he wouldn't say he needs more, but it never hurts to have a little extra.

"Sure," he shrugs. Although that's quite a convenient location for a canister of napalm. Right there. In the middle of a table. In the middle of a room. Directly under a pipe, as if someone dropped it there.

But Jack sure seems confident enough. And besides, he's got the chemical thrower now. Whatever happens will be fine. Of course.

A nod. Jack puts the chemical thrower gently down once again. Then he strolls towards the table, a little more slowly and loudly than he's been walking up till now. La la la, no rush, not a fast-moving target.

There's a noise of movement overhead, quickly hushed.

Jack gets within spitting distance of the table before stopping and yanking the napalm can towards him with telekinesis. Instantly there's a scream of "Cheating! Cheating!!" from the hole in the ceiling and more scuffling, less restrained this time. Jack laughs and tosses the can underarm to Sinclair.

"Catch!"

He's got his other hand on his wrench in case the splicer(s) decide to abandon the ambush and attack -- but no need, they apparently know what's good for them.

He knew there was a real sense of humor in there somewhere, a genuine one that wasn't trying to be funny for the sake of amusing others and trying to seem normal. And here it is. Right there. It's possibly the most entertained he's seen Jack since they met.

Sinclair grins as he catches the canister, scanning the rafters for their would-have-been attackers. They're nowhere in sight, despite their comically hushed arguing.

"Why don't they come down?" he asks, quietly enough that he thinks the working machinery around them should cover it up before it reaches the splicers in the ceiling.

He fishes the wrench out of his belt anyway. It's been his longest-lasting friend in this place.

"Maybe they saw me come through here last time."

Jack doesn't mean that to sound mildly terrifying, but nevertheless Sinclair is welcome to ruminate on the many implications of that hypothesis.

Well then. Looks like Jack has a reputation of his own.

Sinclair's grin broadens a little. Somehow it's satisfying to know that Jack has made a name for himself among the splicers. It makes him feel a little safer, and also oddly proud. Jack may not be among Rapture's best or brightest, but he's no coward.

"That might do it," he laughs.

Jack returns to retrieve the chemical thrower -- still smiling, because he feels a mite better than he did before that little display. There's nothing like getting one over on a few splicers to improve one's mood. And it seems to have pleased Sinclair as well!

"They're not very smart," says he to Sinclair, with the air of one imparting an hilarious secret.

"No, I don't suppose they are," he says, still pretty amused at the whole thing.

There's only one door out of this room, Sinclair spies it along a short hall, and he begins making his way toward it. A security camera turns to give him a once-over, pausing for a moment before looking away again. Hacked. At least that's one less thing to worry about.

Jack is a hacking machine. Anything he hasn't hacked he's destroyed -- so really the only machines they're in danger from are ones that have been re-hacked by someone else, or that he hasn't met yet.

He actually hangs back for a second when he sees the door Sinclair's headed to. They're getting close to the office now. Really close. "Mister Sinclair?"

Uh oh.

"Hm?"

He hesitates, not really sure what he was planning to say.

"Uh..."

Shakes his head minutely, shifts the thrower on his shoulder and starts to head after Sinclair.

"The -- the room through there. It might... smell."

There. Perfectly legit. He's just being helpful. No sturm or drang here, no sir.

That's...the opposite of reassuring.

And usually, being the gracious man he is, Sinclair would drop it. The way these things work, he usually ends up finding out one way or another. If he doesn't, it probably wasn't important. But in this particular case, if there's something he needs to know, he needs to know it. And not later. When you're working out a plan of this size completely via improvisation, you can't afford to have variables unaccounted for.

He stops, turns to Jack.

"You don't have to lie to me, son. What's on your mind?"

"I just don't like it here," says Jack, which is completely true if not the complete truth.

He spent so much time and effort here trying to get into Ryan's office, thinking everything was okay and he could go back home once he'd beaten the bad guy, that Atlas had any intention of helping him get home, that he had a home to go to. And for what? To find out he was a - a - a hand-puppet. A half-baked science experiment. Made by Atlas, who didn't even exist. And to get ~talked into~ killing apparently his dad while he had to watch and couldn't do anything--

God, even if the uh ould-way ou-yay indly-kay room wasn't here, it'd still be a place full of horrors. It's hitting him all at once and he's not even in the trophy room yet.

Jack scowls darkly at the floor to cover his upset.

No, he wouldn't really like it here, would he.

"Well. We'll be in and out of here as quick as possible, okay sport?"

But there's more, and Sinclair knows it. He just doesn't know what. He starts towards the door, but stops again.

"You're sure that's it?"

"Uh-huh. Let's go look for the submarine."

Regardless of Sinclair's doorward incline or lack therof, Jack strides towards and through it, stomping his feet a little. He's still frowning at the floor.

Sinclair watches him for a few more skeptical moments before sighing and following behind him.

"If it'll make you feel any better," he offers, "I can scope out Ryan's office. You can watch the door."

"No."

He goes back to scanning the room for splicers. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha NOPE nobody's going in there unsupervised, Sinclair. Don't even try it.

They're standing in a high-ceilinged, stunted hallway. Ahead is the once-locked door with its sputtering circuit breaker. Catwalks climb the walls, and in front of the catwalks are pillars, most with long metal spikes driven into them.

The spikes are occupied.

Hey, Sinclair's just trying to do you a favor alright? Rooms that hold memories that upsetting can be hard to just waltz right back into. He figured he'd at least offer to spare him.

But if he was going to object, the words vanish as soon as they step into the room.

Sure, there were rumors. Andrew Ryan disappears a couple people and nails them to a wall so he can remember them better. But up until now, Sinclair would have boiled it down to scare tactics. Up until now, he would have said that's what Ryan wants you to think.

But now...

Jesus.

He's sure he might have known one or two of these people, if he could even recognize them anymore. Some of them still have identifiable, if slightly decaying faces, but others are scorched beyond recognition. Burned alive?

As time went on, Ryan trusted fewer and fewer people. The number of friends he had was small to begin with, but as his city outgrew him, maybe he thought he'd outgrown his friends. Seems like he missed the fact that he and his city were growing in opposite directions.

"Always did have an eye for interior decorating," Sinclair says, but his disgust overrides the dry humor in his tone. This shit is junked up.

"He said he was gonna put me on the wall too."

Jack isn't looking at the bodies. He's seen them before, stolen creme cakes and a couple dollars off them, the usual. Jack is looking at one of the blank pillars, between a withered woman in a torn dress and another who may as well be headless for how well her corpse is holding together.

The headache's come back, and with it a tone that isn't joking when he says:

"Maybe I should've put him up there."

"Well it's not too late," Sinclair says, and this time the humor does come through. That's a sight he wouldn't mind much himself, and there's a sweet, sweet irony to it.

But he probably shouldn't encourage that, so he enacts a quick subject change.

"Which door?"

A sweet 9-irony?

Jack looks reluctantly at Ryan's office door, then points to an archway signposted Hephaestus Core.

"That's the way to the bottom."

Almost went for that joke. Almost.

"Alright chief, following you."

And he's definitely glad to be getting out of this room, although the image of Ryan on that empty post makes it somewhat more tolerable. Still, death makes him a little uncomfortable, especially knowing the corpses in question most likely still had their sanity intact.

It stopped bothering Jack so much after maybe the hundredth sprawling corpse. Everything dies here, all the time.

Through the archway is a long, red-lit and flooded room, the smell of putrid Big Daddy mixing pleasantly with the smell of putrifying Big Daddy. There's the corpse of one about halfway down, under a leak. It's been there for a long-ass time, but that hasn't stopped the three splicers who are making a game attempt to loot it.

Jack blocks the archway with his arm, so that Sinclair won't go in the water, and throws Electrobolt. Submerged up to their knees, the splicers only have a chance to scream and collapse. If they aren't dead when their heads go under the water, then they are soon after. This all happens without any particular emotional reaction from Jack besides impatience.

Don't worry, Sinclair had no intentions of sharing the water with splicers. But he appreciates Jack's effort to keep him safe all the same.

Watching the scene before him, he fondly recalls that time he completely intentionally shot a vending machine to electrocute a splicer standing in a puddle before him. He's not gonna boast or anything but that was pretty clever. Much more creative than just shooting him point blank. Where's the fun in that?

They wait for the jumping sparks to settle down before they continue, but oh man. Sinclair's come across sacks of horse manure that smell better than this Big Daddy. There aren't many places in Rapture anymore that don't smell like death, but come on.

He holds his breath, rushing a little to exit on the other side of the room, possibly making it out before Jack does if Jack is not in a hurry as well.

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