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

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.

Jack starts to prod at the keypad, relieved to have won back some of his enthusiasm for the task. They're actually on the right track. They could be out so very soon.

...There's no obvious panel to pry off, and nowhere to cram in an autohack. That's a bad sign. Still, he gets the head of his wrench into a likely spot and starts to lever away at the panel, trying to get it--

ZZZAP!

With a shout of pain, he snatches his arm back and drops the wrench. It clangs loudly off the metal floor. Forcing his way in was maybe a bad idea.

Ow. Sinclair winces sympathetically. He could almost feel that one himself, although quite fortunately he didn't have to. Better Jack than him.

"...I'll look through his desk again."

Jack rubs his arm fiercely as he bends for his wrench -- it didn't get him as bad as the bathysphere did, he doesn't need another spider organ, but damn, it didn't do him any good.

"I'll come with you," he starts to say, but he's interrupted by--

"I can hear you, you know!"

--a scornful voice, presumably belonging to whoever wrecked the guest room.

"Don't get ideas, boys," calls another. "We got here first!"

Jack straightens up quickly. Shit.

But then he hesitates. It's not the fighting splicers that he minds, he's been doing it most of his life -- it's letting Sinclair go alone into the office.

Sinclair exchanges a look with Jack, but the game plan is pretty much already set. Jack has to stay and fight off the splicers, Sinclair's going to get a head start looking for that key code. And they both know it, so Sinclair turns around and takes off for the office before a splicer sees him.

First stop is the desk again, although he feels like he was pretty thorough the first time around. Never hurts to double check. Bottom drawer, all those financial records. All those numbers, that could take him forever to skim everything.

But it would take Ryan forever too. There would be some sort of indicator, a folded corner, a tear even. Sinclair pulls the folder out, thick as it is, and leaves it closed in order to thumb through just the edges of the papers. To no avail, every sheet is as crisp and clean as the day Ryan filed it away. He opens the folder to flip through some pages that way, but the noises from Jack's splicer fight are making him nervous and goddammit he doesn't have time for this.

He shuts the folder and pushes it aside, opening the drawer with the Accu-Vox in it. He pulls it out, turns it over, presses play. Still as silent as last time. He sets it on top of the folder and moves on.

Top drawer. Personal effects. The back of Diane's picture says Diane, Arcadia, no dates, nothing useful. It goes in the pile. Ryan's watch is stuck on 8:48. 0848. ...Unlikely, but Sinclair pockets it anyway and keeps looking.

All the stationary is untouched, nothing else in the drawer has room for numbers. It's not here. Shit.

Okay, okay. Where else can he look? Sinclair glances around, hoping for ideas. He unrolls the blueprint again, scanning it for anything else. Maybe the code is even on here somewhere.

No, of course not, that would be too easy.

But...

There is another room, something smaller...

What is that, a closet? It's pretty big for a closet, but it's too small for anything else that would be useful to Andrew Ryan. It has to be storage.

There could be anything in a storage room. Sinclair gives the blueprint one last look and wanders...towards the sounds of Jack's fight. He's not sure how far off they are, and that is less than reassuring. But he turns the corner and...that should be the door, according to the map.

The light beside the doorway shines a happy green and grants Sinclair passage inside.

And it takes him all of a quarter second to realize that this is not a storage room. He's not sure what the hell kind of room this is, but it is definitely not a storage room. ...Wow.

That sure was a look they exchanged, and it's not like Jack can really deviate from the usual clear-the-room routine, not without coming up with some kind of an explanation for it. And, as he's learned, he's really really bad at coming up with stories on the fly. And Sinclair's relying on him to get rid of the danger, on top of all that -- it's not like he can expect the guy to come with him into the middle of a firefight, chemical thrower or not. We all saw what happened when he did that in Olympus Heights.

And then the moment is past, Sinclair is gone, and Jack kind of has his decision made for him by virtue of not making one.

He's starting to hate it when that happens.

The sound of splicers is coming from down the stairs, somewhere around the waiting room -- and rapidly approaching by the noise of it. He'd better get on. Jack leaves the thrower behind -- he has better melee weapons with more easily-scavenged ammo -- and jogs ahead to cut them off on the stairs.

There are a few of them, a real goon rush befitting of an important discovery. Some with guns, some with ice, some scuttling on the walls. Those sounds of fighting that Sinclair hears will be loud and brutal.

The main attraction in this room is the corkboard that spans one entire wall. There's no getting away from it; no matter where you stand it's in your peripheral vision. And if you turn your back to it and close your eyes, you're still going to have the red lettering caught behind your eyelids.

Would you kindly.

It seems like such an arbitrary phrase to have painted across what looks like hours upon hours, days or maybe even weeks of research. Articles and hastily scribbled notes.

And the pictures.

Ryan, Frank Fontaine, Doctor Tenenbaum, Doctor Yi Suchong...Jasmine Jolene? Sinclair is lost. But he approaches the wall to get a better look, and. That's a picture of Jack. And another on the desk below it all. And another. Ryan was watching him the whole time.

For all the connections Ryan seems to have made with his data, Sinclair's not picking up on anything other than a strong sense of something being very, very wrong.

Scattered also on the desk is another Accu-Vox or two. Sinclair tears his eyes away from the board and pushes play on the nearest one.

He immediately recognizes Doctor Suchong's thick Asian accent.

"Is that your puppy?" he asks. "She's very pretty..."

Jack's lucky enough to take out the two Houdinis early in the fight. Annoying as they are, their chief danger in a fight like this is that they'll keep popping up and following him around while he's trying to take on everyone else. With them out of the way he basically wipes the floor with the rest of the splicers, and gains a king's ransom in cake and health kits for his trouble. But he heals up with a couple spider organs anyway; waste not want not.

He eats and walks, though. He wants to get back to the office in a timely manner -- there's already a dark pit of impatience in his stomach, a feeling like he's left Sinclair alone there for too long.

...This is impossible.

Sinclair sets the audio diary back down, staring up again at the words painted across the cork board.

Would you kindly?

It's some sort of...trigger, something used for conditioning a person to obey. This is... This is mind control.

But what does it have to do with Jack? Is he--

Is this all about him?

Is that boy in the recording...

No, that's. That's impossible, Jack is too old to have known Suchong as a boy. That's somebody else in the recording. But even if the phrase isn't about him, this room is. And the phrase...must apply to him. Jesus, how long has this been going on?

And if Jack is a slave to three simple words, words of which Andrew Ryan was clearly aware, why didn't Ryan stop him as he clubbed him to death?

None of this makes sense. Sinclair frowns and goes for the other Accu-Vox. Maybe that'll clear some things up.

He presses play and again, Suchong. "Advanced Deployment, Lot 111, Doctor Suchong, Client: Fontaine Futuristics. Baby is now a year old, weighs fifty-eight--"

Jack reaches Ryan's office, finds it empty, and goes cold.

He opens his mouth to call for Sinclair, but... he doesn't really need to. I mean technically Sinclair could have left by the door and gone somewhere else but no, what's far more likely is that he has decided to search that long corridor and jesus god they should never have come up here.

He's expended a fair amount of effort to keep the facts of his past a secret, and with good reason.

So he sprints up the corridor as if there are hounds snapping at his heels, and as the door opens he sees Sinclair -- bad -- and hears a tinny recorded voice speaking -- infinitely worse.

Jack does the first and fastest thing he can think of and yanks the audio diary straight out of Sinclair's hand, no preamble, no pause. And it won't stop talking and he's kind of panicking a bit, so with burning hand he straight up crushes it against the wall.

"What are you doing in here?" he demands, as scared as the kid in the recording when his dog's neck broke, and twice as angry. "Get out!"

JESUS

Sinclair jumps about a foot in the air when Jack appears in the room, and crushing and burning the Accu-Vox against the wall doesn't help.

He looks at Jack when he speaks, gets a full view of his face and every little emotion that flickers across it. And yes, the predominant one is fear, next is anger, but it's mostly fear. That in itself answers a question or two.

But after another moment of silence, Sinclair obediently departs. Jack is angry, but it's hard to tell how angry exactly. If Sinclair just found a sore spot, he's more than found it, he's dug his fingers in deep. And he's not sure how deep he would have to go, even by complete accident, before Jack decides to stop him.

He quickly makes his way back to Ryan's office and positions himself at the far end of the room, staring out of the window in an attempt to make sense of everything that just happened. He hasn't been thrown for a loop like this one since... possibly ever. He's usually clued in on things this big, projects and the like. Fontaine was a boastful man, something as successful as mind control should have leaked out eventually.

And Tenenbaum was up on that board. She already knew. She knew, but she was protecting Jack. And Jack thinks she doesn't care.

Sinclair waits for the sound of Jack's footsteps behind him. They need to talk. Jack's not going to want to at all, but they need to.

Jack lets Sinclair blow past him out of the room -- he's rooted in place, this is exactly what he hoped wouldn't happen, he should've ignored the splicers and gone back into the office with Sinclair and just made up an excuse afterwards. He should've destroyed everything in this room when he had the chance. He should have--

--well, he has the chance again now, doesn't he?

His hand's still smouldering. A fireball, and those horrible words are obliterated. Another, and the desk -- the photos, the horrible sneering pictures of people who've lied to him and people who don't even have the decency to exist, they're all going up in smoke, they're all going up in fucking smoke and it's only a pity they can't feel it.

He's not looking forward to going back up to the office, facing Sinclair, but he's got to. And it's with a bitter, ugly expression that he does.

And there they are, the heavy, slow footsteps of someone who just had the skeletons dumped out of his closet on the floor in front of him.

It's not like Sinclair intends to make him examine every single one, but a few questions need to be answered. For both of them, not just to satisfy Sinclair's curiosity.

But he doesn't speak. Apart from the fact that silence is an interrogation technique, to be fair he just walked in on everything that Jack had been trying to hide from him. He thinks Jack at least deserves the first word here.

Jack doesn't waste his time in having it.

"What'd you hear?" he demands. "Did -- did you listen to the other one?"

Believe it or not, he remembers that whole 'keep your temper, don't flip out' spiel that happened what seems like so long ago. And he tries, oh god does he try, he tries so hard, he says hey what's going on. But it's just not happening. The attempt's given up about three words in and his voice and his hackles rise.

Sinclair turns around, reflexively taking a step back. Jack is definitely intimidating when he wants to be.

He shakes his head, still somewhat at a loss for words. "Nothing I particularly understand," he says with a nervous laugh.

Jack is not amused.

"It's a... a trigger phrase of some sort. That's all I know for sure." And he doesn't dare say it out loud, for a multitude of reasons. The foremost of which being that he's not sure if it works on Jack and if it does, that's not anything he wants to even touch. Even if it could come in handy, even if his business sense screams that this could be an enormous asset to him, no. The idea of using it actually turns his stomach.

But he still needs to know.

"...You were conditioned," he says, and it's a statement but it's out there for Jack to contradict if he wants.

When Sinclair moves back, Jack moves forwards. Maybe he wants to be intimidating. Seems like being able to kill things is his only asset sometimes; maybe being intimidating is the only way he can actually come out on top for once in his horrible joke of a life.

When Sinclair speaks, Jack's face twists.

"Don't use it," he says, "or I'll kill you."

It doesn't even matter that it doesn't work any more, just the attempt would be -- he doesn't even want to think about Sinclair trying to use it, it's making him feel physically sick.

Now that is something Sinclair believes 100% without a shadow of a doubt.

He shakes his head, frowning deeply but relaxing a little all the same. He won't use it. He doesn't think he could bring himself to it even if he thought it would benefit him in the long run. Not now. Not anymore. And if that's the biggest thing that concerns Jack then he's got nothing to worry about, which means Sinclair's uneasiness can subside just a bit.

"Who else knows?"

If what Jack's doing is a smile then Carpenter's The Thing is a friendly household pet.

"Only one person w-who's still alive."

For the record, he hasn't backed off a single step. It's not that he knows of a reason to mistrust Sinclair specifically. But there's nothing like a room full of souvenirs of your last major hoodwinking to put the scare in you.

"And it doesn't work any more."

Sinclair takes another step back, but one more will put his back at the window.

He's obviously talking about Doctor Tenenbaum, the only person who's still alive. Probably the only person who realized what they did was about eight hundred shades of seriously fucked up.

But the fact that it doesn't work anymore takes another load off Sinclair's mind. That's one less internal battle to fight.

"How'd you break it?" he asks, keeping his tone quiet.

Oh well so long as there's a weight off Sinclair's mind.

"I'm not gonna talk about this!" he explodes, and wow apparently even looming over Sinclair isn't giving him the upper hand in the conversation, he really is a broken piece of merchandise isn't he.

For Sinclair's part, the narration wonders if it's mixed signals to be towered over menacingly by a guy who looks like he's about to burst into tears.

"You weren't s'posed to know, you weren't s'posed to know about any of it! You shouldn't've gone in there."

Alright, that's fair. That's an extraneous detail, Sinclair supposes he doesn't have to know it.

But really though, this isn't his fault. It's not like he waited until Jack was distracted because he knew that somewhere around here was a room coated floor to ceiling in the private details of Jack's past. There was no way he could have seen that coming.

And then there this sense of pity that squeezes his organs when he looks at Jack's face. The weight of what all this means for and about Jack just hits him, now that he's cleared a small path through what it means for the two of them as partners.

This is someone who never used to have any sort of free will. He was conditioned to obey, he wasn't meant to be a person.

But he is, and Doctor Tenenbaum must have seen it first. Sinclair suspects she helped Jack break out of it. It makes sense, then, why she's so bitter towards him. To give him his free will and then for him to make decisions that work directly against her.

Sinclair takes another second to choose his words, but in the end there's only one way to say what he wants Jack to know.

"Son, you can trust me."

And to anyone else it would sound like utter horse shit. Augustus Sinclair is one of the last men in Rapture anyone would call trustworthy, but he worked hard for that reputation. And this isn't about business. This isn't about earning Jack's favor to gain more information to inevitably use against him, this isn't about collecting weaknesses to sell him out later.

This is about trying to find any peace of mind he can extend to Jack at all. There's a lot they're going to have to work out if Jack decides to continue on with Sinclair, but they're not going anywhere until Jack calms down. And that won't even begin to happen until he stops feeling like he's about to be attacked, like Sinclair's going to peel him down to his scared and vulnerable core.

He hates that Sinclair's looking at him. Pausing before speaking. It must be interesting for him; not every day someone gets to meet a failed science experiment.

"Everyone's always saying that," says Jack.

Except that somewhere in that sentence his voice cracks. And then there isn't just a heat in his face or a prickling behind his eyes; there are tears boiling out and running down his face. He tries angrily to scrub them away and just ends up with both hands over his face.

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