I do not own Bioshock, its locations, characters, or devices, that pleasure goes to 2K games and Irrational games. I also do not own Rapture's Delight, but I have no idea who owns it soooooo yeah. I do however; own my OC's and this story.
Chapter 1: A Stranger in the Dinner
A lone young woman reclined in a booth at the Watched Clock diner in Rapture City. She wore a white blouse with a blue scarf and a long blue skirt with black stockings and a pair of nice heels. She had short, raven hair and wide, blue eyes with smoky, blue eye shadow. She was gently dragging on a thin cigarette as her eyes closed and opened slowly, a testament to how tired she was. Hidden within the folds of her skirt lay her broadsider pistol.
The diner was fairly slow that night, only a few customers and four waiters. Maybe because it was just after midnight, maybe it was because it was Christmas Eve, and even if a majority of the population of the city was Atheist, they still were feeling the holiday spirit.
A waiter came to the woman's booth and placed a hot soup in front of her. "Third one tonight, ma'am." He said.
The woman let a cloud of smoke drift gently from between her lips before she grunted. "One night, huh?" she muttered, "For you maybe." She took another drag. "What year is it again?"
The waiter gave her a funny look. "It's 1947, ma'am. That's the third time tonight that you've asked."
The woman stabbed her cigarette into her napkin and shook her head. "Sorry," she said, "My mind has been on other things."
The waiter chuckled. "Well, how do you expect to keep the sweet on your brow if you can't keep your mind in your head?" The woman gave him a week smile at his joke as the young man walked away, gently shaking his head. She sighed and leaned back in her booth, closing her eyes and feeling the muscles in her back gently uncoil. She was trying to forget the events of the past few hours. The past few hours for her at least, here, she had been gone only a few minutes.
She took a moment to enjoy the sounds around her. She liked this diner. The wait staff shared a sense of camaraderie against their customers. It reminded her of how she and DeWitt had been in Columbia.
There was a gentle clink on the table. "I don't want another drink, thank you very much."
"Good, I didn't bring you one."
The woman opened her eyes and stared at the figure sitting opposite her in the booth. "Who are you?" she asked, one finger on her pistol. The figure was clearly male and young. He wore a grey and black striped shirt with a hood. He held his head down so that the hood covered most of his face as well. Strapped over his shoulder was a black messenger bag. He appeared to be unarmed, but the woman had learned a long time ago that looks could be deceiving.
The young man tapped his fingers against the table. He wore several heavy rings of various metals. "Who am I?" he pondered aloud, "Ain't that the million dollar question." The young woman decided to forgo pretense and simply put her gun on the table, in clear view of the stranger. "Easy, Anna, or Elizabeth, or whatever you're calling yourself these days." Said the man, throwing up his hands.
The woman, Elizabeth, sneered and cocked her firearm. "How do you know who I am?" she said through clenched teeth.
The strange young man waved away her question. "So, how long have you been doing it?"
Elizabeth clutched her gun with a trembling hand. "Doing what?"
The strange boy sighed and shook his head. "Please don't play stupid, Anna. I really don't have the patience for it."
"Elizabeth."
"Whatever. Can I butt a smoke?" Elizabeth frowned, unfamiliar with the term. The young man sighed. "Just give me a cigarette."
"I'm out."
The young man leaned back in his booth and grunted. "You avoided the question. How long have you been killing your father?"
Elizabeth was shaking. Her eyes were as wide as the gently cooling soup bowl in front of her. How did he know? "He-he's not my father." She managed.
The stranger scowled. "Is that how you've been justifying this to yourself? Kid, whether you're willing to admit it to yourself or not, Booker DeWitt was your daddy." Elizabeth gulped and glanced quickly down at her gun. "Now, I'll ask again; do you know how long you've spent traveling through time, space, and universes to torment and kill your father?"
Elizabeth stared at the part of the hood where the stranger's eyes should be, as if by simply staring, she could burn holes in the fabric and through the mysterious young man's skull. A single tear fell down her porcelain cheek. "No." she whispered, "I lost track a long time ago." Somewhere, a bell toll, sounding twelve long stokes of sound that reverberated through the water of the ocean, causing every window in Rapture to shake gentle from the vibrations. The wait staff cheered as they entered Christmas Day and the few remaining patrons to the dinner began to sing.
The young man turned away from Elizabeth and gazed at the small party that was congregating around the bar. "As of now," he said, "You have been hunting, torturing, and killing alternate versions of your dad for ten years, three months, eighteen days, and a few hours and minutes worth of change. Do you know what that means?"
Elizabeth was almost hyperventilating. This stranger knew every aspect of her life and had been tracking her all that time without her knowing it. She felt like she was back in her tower in Columbia, being watched from behind the walls. "No." she breathed.
"It means today is your twenty-eighth birthday." Said the young man, "Waiter! A Rapture's Delight, if you please!" Almost immediately, a man swung by the table to drop off the alcoholic beverage. "I'm not usually a drinker," said the young man, "Truth be told, where I come from, I'm under aged, but it's not every day that a lovely lady turns 28 right?" He took a sip and shivered from the taste. Elizabeth was trying to process everything. She was twenty-eight? She had spent ten years finding and killing DeWitts? "Why do you want to kill your father so badly anyway?"
The question shook her out of her reverie, if for no other reason than it was one she could actually answer. "If any versions of Dewitt exist, than they can potentially become versions of Zachary Comstock, who-"
The man threw up his hand to stop her. "Yes, I know the story. DeWitt had the choice to be baptized, if he did he would become Comstock, if he didn't he would become a gambler, yeah, I've heard it before." He took another sip of his drink. "What you fail to realize-" he stopped and lowered his head. "Are you gonna eat that? It's getting cold." Elizabeth used her gun to gently push the cooling soup towards the stranger. He pulled it closer to him and took the spoon from his napkin. "Hmm, not half bad." He commented after taking a spoonful, "Where was I? Ah yes. What you fail to realize is the scale with which you are working with. You've spent ten years doing this. How many DeWitts is that? 1,000? 10,000? How many DeWitts do you think are left?" Elizabeth felt her fear slowly creep back into her heart, being steadily replaced by frustration and anger. Who did this person think he was? The man took another sip of his drink.
Elizabeth took her bowl of soup and pulled it back towards herself. "I don't know how many DeWitt's I've killed," she said, "But each one of them deserved it. They gave me up to settle their debts. They gave me to Comstock."
The man barked a laugh. "I miss that," he chuckled with an air of nostalgia, "Thinking that everything was in black and white. But then I traversed the worlds and I learned differently." He took another drink, "Let me drop some knowledge on you, Lizzy. There are infinite worlds. I know you think you can see them all, but you can't, you can't even see a fraction of them. You can spend your entire life hunting down every single DeWitt, but when you die, there will still be infinite DeWitts to turn into infinite Comstocks that will inevitably cage infinite Elizabeths. What you do makes no difference to this fact."
Elizabeth was numb and breathing slowly. "Constants and variables." She said to herself in a vain attempt to steel her nerves, "Constants and variables."
The young man took another sip of his drink. It was half empty. "Things can only be constant for so long." He spoke solemnly, "But variables, they're the real constants. You can always count on there to be constantly changing variables." In one fell gulp, the young man tipped back the rest of his drink and sighed contentedly as he placed it on the table. The singing was dying down and people were beginning to meander out of the diner towards their homes. The wait staff was glancing anxiously at the odd pair in the booth, hoping they would leave soon so they could close up. The young man leaned forward and motioned for Elizabeth to do the same. She moved her gun so it was pointed directly towards the young man's heart. "Listen to me very closely, Elizabeth." He said, "As you well know, when you leave this diner, you can go in two directions. Going left will bring you downstairs to a lounge. Going right will bring you back towards Cohen's. If you go right, you will never see me again and you will be free to continue killing versions of your father until the world ends or you die, whichever comes first. It may be satisfying to see the man who put you through so much suffer, but the novelty must be wearing off after ten years, no? So that's option one. If you go to the left, however, you'll find me waiting in the lounge. If you go to me, you will pledge yourself to follow my ways and my methods, but if you do exactly as I say, then I can guarantee that Zachary Hale Comstock will never have existed in any world, behind any door. More than that, I can promise you the greatest reward of all." He leaned in closer, "I can make you a daughter again." He whispered. The man leaned back and dug in his pocket. He tossed a few bills on the table and stood up. "I'll only be waiting for a few minutes," he said as he walked out of the diner, "So make up your mind fast."
Elizabeth stared at the space where the young man had been sitting. For ten seconds, she did nothing but stare. Then she broke down. Tears poured out of her, ten years worth of regret and sorrow built up behind the dam of her vengeance. Damn her vengeance. She tossed her soup bowl aside and it shattered on the floor, spilling her remaining soup.
A waiter jumped up. "Hey!" he cried indignantly, "Don't you know who has to clean that!" Elizabeth was in no mood for this. She leveled her pistol at the waiter. The staff gasped and immediately scurried for cover at the sight of the weapon. For a few moments, the waiter stood stock still, his face white as the underside of a manta ray as the gun shook gently between his eyes. After what felt like an eternity for both parties, Elizabeth lowered her gun. The waiter let out a sigh of relief just before she brought the butt of the gun down on his head.
She left the diner and staggered over to the railing across the street. Before her was a massive window looking out over Rapture. A whale lazily drifted by, it's eye darting to her for a moment before deeming her insignificant enough to ignore.
Elizabeth clutched the railing tightly as she used it to pull herself along. She didn't trust her legs to work by themselves. She managed to make it to the stairs where she stopped and stared down into the lounge. The young man was reclining on a love seat with his hood covering his eyes. Elizabeth took a deep breath and too her first step down the stairs. She immediately tripped and fell, tumbling all the way down until she landed on her tailbone with a grunt. She groaned as she stood up and rubbed her sore lower back as she tried to ignore the pain.
She looked up to find the hooded figure standing with his arms crossed before her. "You understand that you are submitting to me." He said, "Once you come with me, you do everything I say, got it?"
Elizabeth slowly nodded. "Do you think you can really wipe out Comstock?"
The young man grinned, "You won't even have to go through any doors. Well, except this one." The young man snapped his fingers. It made a sharp sound like a firecracker that echoed around the lounge. A flash of light appeared behind him as a tear opened in the fabric of the reality.
Elizabeth gasped. "Is that-"
"You didn't think you were the only one who could travel between worlds, did you?"
Elizabeth stared at the tear in wonder. "Well, no," she reasoned, not taking her eyes off the rip, "The Luteces-"
"Bah! The Luteces!" The young man snarled, "Their stupid plans are what got us into this mess in the first place. If anything, you should want to wipe them out instead of Comstock, but I digress. You ready?" Without waiting for a response, the young man stepped through the tear. Elizabeth took a deep breath and followed him, giving Rapture one last look before tearing her gaze away to take in her new surroundings.
The first thing Elizabeth noticed was the heat. It was an intense humidity that caused her to sweat almost immediately. It was fairly dark where they were, but the world around them was lit by streams of liquid red light that flowed along the walls and the rooftops of the sprawling city below them. They were standing over a cliff of sorts, looking down onto a dark metropolis circling a massive lake of red magma.
They were inside a mountain, Elizabeth realized, the city was within a volcano. "Where are we?" she asked.
The young man walked ahead of her and breathe in deeply. "What is it that those troublesome twins always say? The more delicious question is when. Although the where is also a valid question." The young man pulled down his hood, revealing short brown hair with a thin, beaded braid hanging onto his shoulder. "Elizabeth Anna DeWitt," he announced, "This is Kiln City. Oh," he turned back to her, revealing the rugged chin, sparkling blue eyes, and distinctive face of a young Booker DeWitt, "And welcome to the twenty-first century."