SEEING RED
Oh, and you thought YOUR puberty was bad. Well guess what, I'm guessing you didn't have a strange and overwhelming urge to cover yourself in metal and red strobe lights while protecting some sickeningly loving bozo with a drill and his little brat from drug addicts. If so, might I care to estimate that you're an increasingly less proud resident of Rapture, the only city to protect its citizens from "parasites" by locking them in a glorified fish tank at the bottom the slightly bigger fish tank that is the Atlantic. If my increasingly sarcastic and desperate tone haven't already informed you that this is hell in water (Rapture is hell, heh, talk about irony) then let me inform you of my evening swim.
So, after my delicious lunch of potato chips old enough to remember the birth of every sister in Rapture, I got a message from the only voice of reason in this aquatic damnation: Sofia Lamb, Raptures only proud owner of two brain cells to rub together.
Sure, a lot of what she says sounds like mumbo jumbo to me, but the basic idea of her "Family" seems to be that splicers, sisters, and daddies should all work together. Then she starts spouting nonsense about a "people's child" and drifts into lala land, but sometimes she'll request something of the big sisters. Now, I'm not much of a team player, all biological conditioning aside, but the last time I did what she asked I got 50 ADAM of some rouge daddy, so listening to her usually pays off.
And sure enough, this time she needed the help of yours truly. She always had a way with words: "Quadrant 5-A, there is a rough protector in your vicinity." Isn't she simply riveting? So naturally the good natured girl that I am, I go out the airlock and go for a swim.
And as usual, she was impeccably accurate. The big idiot was tramping through the seaweed, as ignorant as a splicer that got its head blended by a bouncer. I sent out my usual cry of warning, and he did his usual moan of stupidity. Strangely, this one seemed a little smarter than the rest of those metallic whales. He managed to not completely miss the ADAM slug around the side of an old wreckage for one thing.
I swam a little closer to get a better look at the triangles on the back of his hands when I suddenly felt that very same pair of hands around my neck. How the hell did that thing react so fast? I knew if I struggled, he'd easily snap me in half, and as much as I love big, final gestures of defiance, I was rather keen on not ending what was certainly to be an epic tale of delicious meals in the future quite so soon. Maybe if I was quite, his dumbness would kick back in and he'd let me go. No such luck, this thing knew what I was. Oddly enough, this thing didn't seem intent on killing me either. He put me in a headlock and dragged me over to an old broken Bathysphere. After hacking (since when can daddies hack?) the door to open again in 30 minutes, he shoved me in and closed the door. Then he kept walking his merry way.
You might have noticed a lack of sarcasm in that last paragraph. That was because I'm still dumbstruck at the thought that a BIG DADDY, the whale of city, could HACK! These things needed the little sister to help them open DOORS!
Time for a nice relaxing 25 minutes to ruminate on the concept.
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Author's notes:
Well, that's all folks! If you have any ideas, comments, or flames (hey, it shows the story was important enough to you to complain about, so I take this as a compliment) then please post them.