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

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.

"I'm not a kid," he retorts, regardless of the fact that Sinclair's walking away. "I'm not anyone's kid."

At least Sinclair didn't comment on the unusual murder weapon. Jack really doesn't feel like explaining himself about that one.

Well Sinclair gathered from the wrench that Jack favors blunt objects. The fact that the golf club is currently embedded in Andrew Ryan's skull just speaks to the passion with which he favors them.

But they already had the conversation on why Sinclair has no intention of eliminating the word "kid" from his library of endearing terms. Still, Jack's tone makes him a little sad.

"You're somebody's kid," he says, raising his voice a bit for Jack to hear him. "Didn't you have folks back in Kansas?"

He starts on the bottom drawers of Ryan's desk, rifling through files and folders of papers, financial records, the boring stuff. Nothing there.

Well, it was more a declaration that he doesn't belong to anyone, but since you ask.

"I..."

Jack's answer takes a bit too long to arrive. He doesn't want to tell the truth here, but there's a sentiment fighting to get out.

"They're gone."

He's found some more drawers on this side of the room and he opens one, taking his cue from Sinclair. Papers, nonsense, no big sheet with "SUBMARINE THIS WAY" printed on it.

"I don't want to talk about this, mister Sinclair."

So they're gone too. Ryan's gone. Whatever life he did have on the surface is gone. That's a whole lot to lose before you're even thirty. But sometimes that's just the hand you're dealt. If you're weak, it can break you. If you let it, it'll drag you down and bury you alive. Or, you can use it in your favor. If you turn it around, it can make you great.

It's a little too deep of a conversation for Sinclair's taste, though, and Jack's already shutting down to that anyway so he doesn't say anything. But part of him hopes Jack knows it. Weak isn't really a word Sinclair thinks he'd ever use to describe him.

The next drawer up is almost empty except for an Accu-Vox recorder, which doesn't play anything. Blank.

"You're still their kid," he says.

And the top drawer is a long skinny one below the center of the desk, which reveals a few of Ryan's personal effects. A watch with a dead battery, unused stationary with his monogram on it, a picture of Diane McClintock, the pretty blonde who might have been Ryan's wife if he'd had anything other than ice in his ribcage. And buried under all of it, a paper folder which Sinclair fishes out and spreads on top of the desk.

There are a few papers. The first couple are diagrams of pieces of machinery, and the last few are blueprints.

...Blueprints. Of Hephaestus and Central Control. He skims over them, trying to orient himself. There's the main room of Central Control...the stairs they just took...

"Hey, chief, come take a look at this," Sinclair calls out, dropping their previous conversation per Jack's request.

Jack doesn't dignify you're still their kid with a reply. But he does shut the drawer with rather more force than necessary. Because no, he isn't and he never was except in his head.

He keeps wishing that maybe he could be wrong, maybe the memories are based on something real, because they sure as hell feel real even after everything he's heard. But all the evidence points to nope, sorry kid, you really are a motherless freak. Maybe the realness of the memories only go to show what a number they did on his brain.

Oh god what the hell is he going to do when they get to land and he can't find them.

Jack's composed but kind of red-eyed when he joins Sinclair across the room (but if you mention it he will fucking cut you).

"Blueprints," he realises out loud. "There might be a submarine dock on them."

He's taken refuge back in emotional numbness, but this is still a pretty capital find.

What do you mean Sinclair dropped the conversation one sentence too late? Of course that last little bit was totally necessary.

And as Jack looks over the blueprints, Sinclair gets just a moment's look at his face. But he's not going to say anything about that. He wouldn't. Whatever Jack is feeling for whatever reason, it's justified and Sinclair feels confident that he already knows what it is. There's a lot of emotion in this room for Jack, and whether it's any sort of remorse or trauma about what happened with Ryan or whether it's just general homesickness, he doesn't need the salt in his wounds. No, Sinclair didn't see anything.

"I'm thinking even if it's not spelled out on here, we should be able to spot one a lot easier. If you see any unmarked rooms, any doors that look like they don't lead anywhere, any doors that look different from other doors. Those are gonna be the best places to start."

Well, so long as none of those unmarked rooms are little cramped ones full of photographs.

Jack takes a couple sheets off the top of the pile, glances them over. It's all a bit obtuse and hard to read -- lines on lines on tiny notes on symbols he doesn't understand -- but he tries to work out where they are anyway, going off the shapes of the rooms.

"Where are we?"

Concentrating on work. It's how he's distracted himself from a crushing existential crisis so far and it's how he intends to continue, even if work comes less naturally now for reasons he also chooses not to examine.

That particular room is probably on here somewhere, but it would only catch Sinclair's attention if there's literally nothing else on the map that would indicate a submarine dock. He's tuned in for something bigger than that.

"See these stairs here?" he touches the paper. "Those are the ones we just came up. So we're in this room right now," and again, "more specifically on this side of it."

And he wonders vaguely what Jack did learn back in Kansas. He can't be military, despite his skill in combat, for a multitude of reasons including the inability to read a map with any real efficiency. His skill in combat is what keeps Sinclair from thinking he was just a simple farm boy. That one's gonna eat at him until he finds out.

He didn't even realise there was a map until like halfway through the game, don't expect too much of him now.

But once Sinclair points it out he does recognise the room, with its partitioning and odd bulge off one corner, and their general surrounding area. It probably didn't help that he was looking for it on completely the wrong sheet.

So here's the office, here's the stairs... Jack deliberately doesn't look for the WYK room, because they're avoiding it anyway, and searches instead around the edges of the building. That's where a sub would have to be kept, he reasons. Unless Ryan was planning on carrying it on his shoulders to and from the sea.

He frowns at the paper. They passed through doors here, here, and here as well... so the interlocking symbols there must be doors, it stands to reason. But if this is the corridor from which they got into the office, it... it shouldn't have a door there.

"Then what's this?" he hazards, pointing to the erroneous lines.

Sinclair's eyes snap to where Jack's got his finger on the paper, reorienting himself to figure out whereabouts that line might exist.

The answer doesn't come right away, and he has to force himself to ignore the simmering anticipation that makes him want to say for sure, yes, that has to be it.

He needs to eliminate all the other possibilities first.

"Could be a closet? Something too small to warrant marks on a blueprint," he suggests. It's damn near impossible, but he doesn't want to call it unless he's absolutely positive.

"I don't remember seeing any other doors, did you?"

Jack doesn't really have the energy to fight Sinclair on it maybe being a closet, but he does answer: "I don't think so. Not there."

Sinclair looks up at Jack when he answers and lets himself grin.

This has to be it.

If it's here, that's gotta be where it is.

"Well it sure looks like there's something there," he says. They're close. As in there's possibly nothing more between them and the sub bay than just a door. And they need to find that door.

There's something about Sinclair's grin that stirs some excitement back into Jack. Because -- this really could be it, couldn't it? There's something here they're not supposed to find, and maybe it really is a sub, maybe it really is a way out of this place.

So the corners of his mouth flicker up in answer.

"We should -- go and look." Like, right now.

As soon as he can tell Jack has caught on, there's a new energy in the air that reminds Sinclair of why it's profitable to have a business partner in more ways than just money. And while he's not going to count his chickens yet, he knows he can say with absolute certainty that he would not have gotten this far without Jack. Without Jack, Ryan might still be alive, Rapture would continue it's painstakingly gradual decline and Sinclair would have to suffer through every second of it.

Right about now, Jack's appearance in Rapture feels like providence.

Sinclair picks up the map and holds it in front of them.

"We're here," he says, "that's...there, and..."

He begins walking, away from the desk and past the glass division, mumbling to himself as he tries to match up the blueprint against the room.

"In the hallway outside," says Jack, who may not be the map-reading failure Sinclair accused him of being.

He doesn't leave the room without Sinclair, though, however eager he is to find this sub at long last. And he's keeping an eye on where Sinclair walks.

Hey, he was getting there, don't rush him.

But Jack is right, according to where they're standing versus those suspicious as hell door markings, that should be where they need to go. Sinclair smiles wide at Jack and rolls the blueprint up, heading for the door to the hallway.

Not counting chickens.

There are no chickens being counted.

But if this isn't the door to a submarine bay, he's going to eat his shoe. Or at least he'll eat one of Jack's corpse snacks.

Hey don't just assume he'd give you one of those, the corpse cakes are worth their weight in gold.

Jack heads out of the door behind Sinclair, and with an eye out for danger -- he hasn't forgotten the already-open door and ruined waiting room -- he heads for the wall. It's... blank. Really no sign of a door here, no matter what the blueprints might say. But maybe it's like when he scavenges with that tonic from the leadhead splicers. Maybe he just needs to look again, and he'll spot something he missed the first time round.

He bites his lip, then raps with his knuckles on the wall.

The sound is hollow -- not rock, not water, but an empty space beyond.

Bingo.

The look on Sinclair's face right now is one of pure satisfaction. This is it. This is their sub bay, this is their way out. This is officially the end of the road for his life in Rapture, and thank every god in every religion for that. Thank everything and everyone that could possibly ever be thanked for that.

This is their door.

...Now how do they get in.

Sinclair laughs and gives Jack a solid clap on the back. He's the one who found it, after all, and Sinclair didn't expect that listening for the thickness of the wall would occur to Jack. That was pretty clever, for him.

But it's a brief celebratory moment before Sinclair gets to searching the wall for a seam, a button, anything at all that sticks out. But there's nothing on the wall except...

A Sander Cohen poster. Sinclair will never understand what Ryan saw in that guy.

He approaches the frame and cautiously pushes it to one side.

...The wall is bare behind it.

He pushes it to the other side,

and there it is. A small panel cut into the wall. He pushes on the edge of it and it swings open

revealing a keypad.

There's a code.

"Oh hell," Sinclair sighs. "Alright, let's find this damn thing. He's got it in his office somewhere."

Isn't it obvious? He admired Cohen's carriage.

Jack's surprised by the clap on the back, but manages not to be startled. A moment later he even feels weirdly proud. A clap on the back is something that shows up in his false memories, but it feels quite different to earn one in real life.

"I can hack it, maybe," he offers, stepping forward smartly.

Sinclair shrugs, stepping back to allow Jack access. He did well enough with the turrets, maybe he'll have some success with this too. That sure would save them some time and frustration, not to mention Sinclair is beyond eager to just get in there and confirm with his own eyes that they have their getaway sub.

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