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

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Absolutely, there's nothing particularly wrong with the situation. It's more just the improbability of it when you're used to how things work on the surface.

He might even be more upset by that sweater Jack he just washed it, are you serious. Do you need a napkin or something.

But it's helping him feel better, and Sinclair can breathe a little easier knowing Jack's in good enough shape to keep going. He can't remember where he saw the last Vita Chamber, and waiting for Jack to find him again could be just as dangerous as going to try and find Jack. It's altogether more convenient if Jack just doesn't die.

On that note.

"We need to keep moving, kid. I'm sure there's more where they came from."

Jack swallows the final mouthful of his hearty meal. He's still a bit battered and bruised, but those open wounds are so healed that you don't even know.

God, it feels so much better already.

Of course, his spirits aren't allowed to be raised for long, as his eyes go to the puddle of ADAM. Or... to what used to be the puddle of ADAM. It's been stepped in, run through, splashed about, trodden into shoes and into the cracks of the stone. The stain's still visible but there's no way he's getting any more of it up.

Instead of answering Sinclair, he swears under his breath.

Jack's gaze leads to the puddle he'd been trying to suck up into his needle and isn't that just in the true spirit of Rapture? Find a thing that everybody wants and in the process of fighting over it, they trample the value right out of it.

But Sinclair did make a promise earlier.

"We'll find you an alternative, okay chief? We'll figure out how to get you more, but right now we gotta keep truckin'. That there should tide you over until we find more."

He has no idea how they're going to do that, unless Jack rescues enough little sisters to eventually equal what he would have normally gotten otherwise. But that second conversation with Tenenbaum is looking more and more extremely necessary.

"Okay," says Jack, but his voice is just barely on this side of vengeful. He's got the syringe out of his pocket and he's trying to guesstimate how much might be in it -- forty, maybe fifty ADAM? It would have been more if those fucking splicers hadn't shown up -- he's not really in a position to kick the one he's sitting on but the sentiment is there.

He shoots up the ADAM anyway, and shudders. It's a relief, but a small one. A negligible burn.

He is so mad at Tenenbaum right now you have no idea.

It's clearly not the boost Jack was hoping for, but it's better than nothing. His hands keep still and he looks a little more relaxed, if still pretty irritated. He's handling it better than a full blown splicer would, and that's what counts.

"After you," Sinclair says, stepping back to let Jack decide their direction.

And then... the next several hours are searching. Lengthy, fruitless searching, while machinery boils and buzzes above and around them, and splicers cackle and sing to themselves -- not always from a distance. Jack is some definition of tireless, dispatching them when they come too close and leaving no cake or pep-bar uneaten. But he moves more heavily and answers more shortly than he did a day or two before. Even after they find and rescue another little sister.

So far today, from several hours and two Bouncer fights, he's spliced nearly what he would from a single harvest. Yesterday, half of that. The day before that was just a single harvest, and he can't believe how much it's dropped from his first couple of days when he was running around half-mad from ten harvests or more. He can't believe how quickly he got used to that.

It's kind of scary. Scratch that, it's really scary, and that just makes his mood worse. He wishes he'd never realised it.

Sinclair asked about doors, huh? There are plenty of those. Doors leading to hallways leading to rooms, but none of them leading to a dock or a place that might hide a submarine. The lower levels exhausted, their search moves gradually back upstairs, until eventually they find...

...themselves back in the trophy room, surrounded by Ryan's congregation of worms.

Hours and hours of effort and coming up dry...Sinclair's not completely unfamiliar with how that goes. Sometimes it's just a necessary step towards getting results.

That doesn't make it any less frustrating.

When they're faced again with the collection of bodies, pinned up on the wall like sigils, Sinclair has to sit down and take a breather.

After a moment of letting the strain dissipate from his calves, he looks over at Jack.

"We'll find something in Ryan's office. He's got something up there, I know it. We won't walk away from this empty-handed."

Jack's leaning against that empty pillar, resting the back of his head against the cold stone. He's not tired, exactly. But his anger and worry have drained into apathy and he really doesn't know if that's better or worse than before.

But at least he's not as reluctant to go near Ryan's office as he was this morning. Memories schmemories... he just wants to get this search finished with some, any, degree of success, and then go back to Olympus Heights and hibernate.

"Alright."

Sinclair keeps his eyes on Jack a few seconds longer, trying to assess whether or not he's alright to keep going or if they should give it a few more minutes.

"Think you'll make it? Or do you want to look for another Sister?"

"I'll make it," says Jack, as if he doesn't understand why the question would even be asked. He's made it this far; of course he'll make it.

He's made it all the way through physical trauma and through highs and lows of awful emotion. Just being a bit listless doesn't count.

(The tremor is creeping back into his hands, almost invisible for now.)

Jack sounds almost offended; his humor's obviously growing shorter. Not a good sign, but Sinclair's always been pretty good at tempering a disagreeable demeanor. As long as Jack keeps away from any sort of violent reactions, they're in the clear.

So Sinclair follows Jack out of the trophy room, down the hall and through a couple bulkheads before he recognizes where he is again. At the end of a short corridor lies the control center of Rapture. It's looking a little neglected, which is something Sinclair might worry about if he didn't have plans to be out of here in the next day or so. Somebody else can figure out how to make sure this city keeps running. Or not. Once he's out of here, the whole population can drown for all he cares. In fact, he hopes the whole population drowns. The tiny fraction that doesn't deserve to die will then at least be put out of their misery.

But it's darker here than he's used to, even in Persephone. Maybe it's because they're deeper down, or maybe it's the red cast on the room from the volcano.

He's got a good feeling about this place. They're close.

"We can skim this place first and then head up to the office, if you want."

"I've looked around this room before."

Pretty thoroughly, in fact. Had something to do with the one and only other door, the one that he thought was the only way to Ryan until he found that loose grate. If there was a way to a sub here he would have found it.

The room's only a wall's thickness away. Jack's tense, as if expecting an attack, even though they can see from here that there are no splicers in the room.

"I'll... try and open the door. You can look."

Sinclair nods his concurrence and takes off for the wall in the opposite direction from where Jack goes. It's lined with control panels and desks, buttons and knobs and lights that mean next to nothing to Sinclair, but if he can spot any kind of departure from the typical, that's all he needs. Something that stands out.

Meanwhile Jack heads for the door, the one that was busted beyond trespass last time he was here, and finds--

--it's open.

Not wide open, not even visibly open until he gets close and starts examining it. But the doors are thrust slightly apart, a small amount of light escaping through them. He throws up dust as he gets close, the motes spiralling in and out of this almost imperceptible glow.

Someone has been through here.

He thinks he might prefer the apathy, because this makes his stomach drop.

Reaching the end of the wall...there's not really anywhere else to go. If there were anything hidden in this room, it probably would have been here. So either Sinclair missed something crucial or it's just plain not here.

He turns around to check out Jack's progress, and there's definitely more happening on that side of the room than on his. He gives the length of the wall one last skim for good measure and rejoins Jack.

Jack, who is looking at the door in his way like it caught him stealing two Silver Eagles from a cash register in an ice cream shop in a parallel universe.

"...We going in there?"

It worked hard for that money!

"Uh-huh." Jack gets his fingers into some of the door's moulding and pulls. Then tugs. Then strains. Then, at last, shifts the door enough to get his fingers in the gap and pull some more.

And this is why it's useful to take a guy around with you who's built like a brick shithouse.

Jack's concentrating on getting it open, so he doesn't look inside right away, but as the door opens Sinclair will be able to see a more recently-spoiled room than he might be used to. There's no rotting corpses and the lights are all on, but the trash cans are overturned, and there are holes torn in the couches. It looks like it was some kind of waiting area, lushly-appointed, with paintings on the walls and coffee tables on the floor. To their left, it rises into a broad staircase leading out of sight.

The helpful green Office of Andrew Ryan signs have a presence here as well. They're on the right track.

"Looks like we're a little late to the party," Sinclair says. Although to be fair, this place still looks one hell of a lot better than the majority of Rapture.

...Having said that, it sure didn't take long for it to start its descent into the unholy mess it's about to become.

The last time he was in this room was around the time he first came to Rapture. The first step in growing any sort of roots in this place was of course going to be figuring out how to make himself necessary to The Man. That conversation was probably the most civil one they ever had; everything after that remained professional with deep undertones of distrust and spite. Which is the way things went for most people who had to do business with Andrew Ryan. No one really liked him, but it was almost impossible to get anything done with him working against you.

Almost.

"I doubt there'll be much in here, but I can look this room over anyway if you want to go on ahead to Ryan's office," Sinclair says.

If Jack is gonna need a minute to himself, he should at least have that option. It's some heavy stuff, Sinclair gets that.

Jack pauses, slowly stretching his arms, giving the question really good consideration. He pays more attention to it than he does to the new room, in fact.

And he... does want to see. It's not like Sinclair's going to backtrack as soon as he's gone and shimmy through the crawlspace on a whim. And Jack just has this impending sense of doom about Ryan's office. A feeling he wants to dispel before he goes in there with anyone else.

"...Good idea," he says, nodding without looking at Sinclair's face.

Now that the door is open he sets off up the stairs, not wasting any time.

Sinclair watches Jack disappear up the steps and frowns. For having such a hesitance about coming here in the first place, he took off in something of a hurry. And that tugs at Sinclair's curiosity something awful, but an offer is an offer and Jack took him up on it. So now he's going to search this room.

For what, he's not really sure. If Ryan was hiding a sub anywhere, he wouldn't have left evidence of it in a room for his guests. But nonetheless, Sinclair picks up a newspaper and shuffles through it, magazines, observes the pictures on the wall. There's a group photo of Rapture's Best and Brightest, opposite a poster for one of Sander Cohen's god awful productions. Sinclair can thankfully say he's never had to sit through one himself.

He kills about three or four minutes that way before he runs out of ways to stay occupied and decides to find Jack again.

And maybe he ought to announce himself coming up the stairs, but he's not sure what he's about to interrupt, if anything, so he keeps quiet.

He's not about to interrupt anything, at least not right away. The landing of the staircase is a hallway that curves away to the right; when Sinclair turns the corner he'll find a long stretch of uncluttered wall on his left and a door with a sparking panel to his right. And beyond them: the actual door to Andrew Ryan's office. Or at least it had better be this time, jesus christ, this place has more entryways than Return of the King will have endings.

The door is closed; Jack is inside.

Jack...

...when he gets to the office, he has to hack the door. And that itself tells him that either it's someone else's home now, or it's untouched.

And it's the second possibility that turns out to be true.

Ryan is still lying on the floor. There are still bullet-holes everywhere from the bots that strafed Jack as he escaped. He doesn't check yet to see if the red Fontaine Futuristics sign is still in place; he's already crouching next to Ryan's body.

It's soft, beginning to rot. His face is eggshell white, but where he touches the floor, where Jack can see skin, he's turned an ugly blotchy purple. The smell is getting towards horrendous. Which is to say it's not much worse than any other part of the city you could name.

The broken golf club is still embedded in his skull, for fuck's sake.

Jack reaches out to touch it, pull it out or something -- but he can't, he pulls his hand back as if it's been burned.

Well it may not particularly look like interrupting anything, but it feels that way. Sinclair walks up to the sight of Jack crouched over his father's dead body and wonders briefly if he ought to go back downstairs and wait a while longer, but the sound of the door sliding open has probably already alerted Jack to his presence.

It smells something terrible in here, but after the room with the decaying Big Daddy, it's nothing he can't tolerate.

Sinclair gently clears his throat.

"Waiting room's got nothing."

Jack stands quickly when he hears the door open, and turns to see Sinclair -- and then doesn't move, standing between Sinclair and the body, feeling strangely as though he's hiding the evidence.

"I... haven't looked around yet," he admits. "I had to hack the door open."

"Whoa," Sinclair laughs softly. "At ease, soldier. Take your time. I can start looking if you need another minute."

He gestures back to Ryan's desk on the other side of the glass divide to let Jack know he'll still have a small amount of privacy if he wants it.

Jack finds his gaze pulled back down and behind him, back to Ryan. Back to the guy who's apparently his father. Not that it matters, it's not like they ever did... father-son things, or anything. It's not like he even thought anything of Jack, he called him less than human.

One thing he will admit to, though: looking at the broken club is bringing back awful memories of moving and not being able to stop himself, aware for once of the fact that he wasn't in control of himself at all. He tenses, scowls at the floor, looks up at Sinclair for a moment.

"I don't," he says.

Sinclair lets his smile fade a bit.

"Kid," he says, sighing like he's searching for the right words. "You don't have to be a tough guy about everything. Go ahead and take as long as you need."

And with that he starts for Ryan's desk, actually somewhat curious about what he'll find. This is a rare opportunity, and although he's not sure exactly what he's looking for other than evidence of a submarine, he is sure he'll know it when he sees it.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject