darling it's better down where it's wetter

[did_unkindly]

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

Comments

[did_unkindly]

Rheto-whatical?

"A bit," says Jack. He blasts another cone of frost at the machinery, from a hand covered in gore and icicles. The liquid inside the little pipes is practically crystallised.

"It's... ow."

He jumps as a shorted bit of wiring zaps his hand. Then he deftly swaps it with another piece and -- damnit, isn't there anything whole in here to work with? C'mon.

A few industrious seconds crawl past.

"...slow," he admits, finishing his sentence at last.

[modestman]

Or maybe it's better that Jack works on this after all.

"Anything I can do to help?" he offers, still watching Jack's work. At least one of them knows what he's doing.

[did_unkindly]

He thinks about it. Quickly, because hacking takes concentration and isn't really something you can pause once you've started.

"...Chips?"

He's gotten zapped a fair few times, over here. Could use a health pick-me-up.

Also he hasn't eaten anything off the floor in at least ten minutes.

[modestman]

Chips. An open ended question, he could have asked for anything and he asks for chips. No one can ever say that Jack's a needy guy.

"I can do you one better," Sinclair says, tearing his eyes away at last from Jack's tireless fingers. "I'll be back in two shakes. ...You sure that's all you want?"

[did_unkindly]

Jack nods, eyes glued on the slowly trickling pipes. He gets his fingers under some sheet metal and yanks it back to see what other pipes are underneath.

...Contraband Jesus, this is going to take a while.

[modestman]

Sinclair shrugs. Suit yourself.

A couple floors up, Sinclair unlocks a storage room for the Persephone cafeteria. He grabs a box full of chips and dumps it into another box, taking a few things off the shelf and dropping them inside. Potted ham, beans, instant coffee, along with a few of the nicer things for inmates who purchased the room upgrades: tinned tuna, Hop-Up Cola and a pack of bubblegum.

And a bag of chips, why the hell not.

With a box full of delicious variety, Sinclair heads back down to the dock and makes a mental note not to get his fingers in the way.

[did_unkindly]

Jack is no longer crouched next to the bathysphere. While Sinclair's been out scavenging, he's moved sideways across the room and now he's rummaging around in a trashcan with his left hand. His freshly-bloody right sleeves are rolled up to the shoulder, and the arm on that side looks like it's been mauled by a lightning bolt.

Occupational hazard of hacking machinery.

He's keeping a watchful eye on the entrance, of course. When Sinclair appears there with his gift box, Jack straightens up and makes a beeline for him. His face is tight, but he's not afraid. He's shrugged off worse than this a hundred times before.

(The turrets jostle around in the background, but still remember that Sinclair's a friend. Amazing the intelligence you can coax out of copper and steam.)

[modestman]

"Hope you're hungr--" Sinclair starts, setting the box down next to Jack as he notices the damage he's apparently taken. "...Maybe you oughta take a break, son. You're not looking too good."

[did_unkindly]

Jack shakes his head, two creme cakes already unwrapped and shoved into his mouth with Olympic record-setting speed. Ahhh, sweet sugary hit-point bonuses.

"Mrmrmmmphhmph," he explains. Crumbs fly everywhere.

[modestman]

Ah yes, Rapture nutrition at its finest. Sinclair takes a courtesy step back and decides he'll pick over whatever's left once Jack gets through. If there's anything, of course. The chances are looking rather slim right now.

"I see," he says in response to Jack's commentary. "I take it this means we're not having too much luck."

[did_unkindly]

More head-shaking. But on the bright side, as he gulps down the cakes, he feels his smarting and bloody arm begin to itch. NOW THE HEALING CAN BEGIN

"Shorted out," he says, sheer moments before yanking with his teeth at the tab of a can of tuna. Hey, when you're working one-handed, you've sometimes gotta do things that would annoy your dentist.

[modestman]

Sinclair winces sympathetically. "I wonder if there's any way to shut the power off in those things," he says, daring to reach in the box for whatever he can grab. Which just so happens to be the bag of chips, but at this rate he hopes doubts Jack will even notice. "Think that'd help?"

[did_unkindly]

Jack watches the chips find liberation and then further despair in Sinclair's hands, but with his mouth full of tuna he doesn't feel the need to intercede. Yet. But don't get too cocky with those eats, buster.

Speech is currently impeded, so he shrugs eloquently instead. It's sort of a shrug and a nod, a mute double signal that he's not certain but sure, maybe. Worth a try.

He'd be more enthusiastic, probably, but at the moment he's thinking about his arm. The pain is leaving it in fits and starts and already, he can feel the deep sting of muscle knitting back together.

tuna tuna beans

(there is no spoon, so he drinks the beans like thick beany soda, straight from the can)

(ryan family table manners)

[modestman]

"Hey, where's the fire, chief?" Sinclair says, laughing as he watches Jack drop one can on the ground to move in for the next. "You're gonna choke yourself son, slow down."

Meanwhile, he tears into his own bag of chips and pulls one out, eats it, reaches in for another one. See, Jack. It doesn't have to be a race. It's just food, calm down.

[did_unkindly]

Jack pauses with bean juice on his cheeks, and nods towards his injured arm. Maybe Sinclair missed the part where he was mauled by a lightning bolt. Or maybe he's just not familiar with the healing properties of creme cakes... not much of an education system in Georgia, is there?

Heck, maybe Jack should have suggested a midnight feast to heal up Sinclair's leg, but the guy seemed so dead set on using bandages.

[modestman]

Wow no need to get uncivil, narration. Tone it down there, Sinclair doesn't need your attitude.

He shakes his head and reaches in the box, pulling out a bottle of cola and tossing it to Jack. "Here, at least wash it down with something."

Really though, you're making him ill just watching you.

[did_unkindly]

Jack catches the cola with his right hand. The palm and fingers have healed up just enough to make this a practical rather than a hilariously painful endeavour.

He swallows the last mouthful of beans and smiles very slightly.

[modestman]

The burns on Jack's arm are fading as Sinclair watches, but if another incident like that happens he's probably going to have to make a second trip to the Persephone pantry. ...They'll get more in, they won't miss all this food. Besides, with any luck it won't be Sinclair's problem anymore anyway.

He finishes his bag of chips and gets up to look over the bathysphere. There's got to be some way to turn the power in this thing off, but with the way things have been going lately he wouldn't be surprised if it were on the very bottom of the sphere.

"Hey, kid," he calls over his shoulder. "Where do you reckon the off switch is?"

[did_unkindly]

"They turn off if you break them," he offers, flexing his arm to see how much -- ow -- damage is left.

...Although on further consideration this is probably not a useful observation for their purposes.

[modestman]

"Thanks for the input, sport," Sinclair says, pulling the door open and stepping inside to investigate further. He drops to his hands and knees to feel around the floor for anything that might push up or slide away. Nothing.

He stands up again and brushes off his pants. "There's got to be some way of cutting this thing off from its power supply... how does this thing stay running anyway?" Because if they can find that, they'll at least have a trail to follow.

[did_unkindly]

Wow ungrateful.

Jack gives the issue further thought, while he swigs the cola with a little more restraint than he showed the food. He doubts he's a trained mechanic, but there are at least a few things he knows or has worked out while hacking everything in sight.

"There's an engine. Under the floor, I think." He's felt it rumbling often enough, and the pipes he was trying to hack all had a general floorwards trend.

"Once I turned the power off by putting too much electricity in."

It worked before, it could work again!

[modestman]

"Hm." Sinclair steps back around to the open panels behind the sphere, observing the tubes and wires, hoping they'll tell him something. "You don't think it'll permanently damage anything if you do that?"

[did_unkindly]

"I don't know," he admits through a mouthful of ham.

He'd been kind of hoping Sinclair would be able to field that question.

But he tries to think. He's deferring to everyone else again, when for once in his life he might be an instigator. What does he know, by observation, about the bathyspheres? About machines in general? Think.

Well, the reason he had to overload the core was because underloading it wasn't an option. Not in that situation. But maybe in this one.

"What if it runs out?" he suggests. "The engine? What if there's no gas?"

[modestman]

"That oughta do it!" Sinclair says, snapping his fingers. "Good thinking kid. It can't do a thing without fuel to run it."

He stops to look around the room, scanning the floor for something they can use. "You empty out a trash can, I'll see if I can't find some pipes or something to funnel the gas out."

[did_unkindly]

Jack crams his mouth with ham, and then trots obediently over to the trashcan he was looting earlier. With a clatter, he empties it onto the floor.

Most of what falls out is tat and trash. But there's also a pep bar, stashed there, no doubt, by some poor and hungry splicer with nowhere else to hide his only remaining defence against starvation.

Jack pockets it.