Turns out, having a physical copy of my writing seriously helps me get my butt in gear/procrastinate more efficiently. Not that Iwant to procrastinate on writing; it's just easier to decide to sit down and write a couple pages instead of, say, doing the dishes when I have it in writing. Maybe that's not a good thing. Ah, well.
Thank you to everyone who has actually read this far, and extra thanks to the people who comment. It's always nice to read what you think of my story/writing, and especially fun to read what you think is going to happen in the future. ;3
The doors swung inward with little resistance revealing only darkness for a long moment until a click and a whir sounded and several bright lights flickered to life and illuminated the large room before them. At the centre of the room stood a bronze bust of a man holding a somewhat faded red banner reading 'no gods or kings – only man'.
"How optimistic," Lyra commented as she slipped past Phineas and Bianca to get a better look at the inside of the lighthouse. "Tell me, how well did this venture into true capitalism fare?"
"Well enough," Phineas replied evasively. He stepped inside, a little more cautiously than Lyra had, and took a cursory look around. He approached a set of stairs that Bianca only later registered as being odd – they went down rather than up – and peered over the banister, down to the second level. "Still seems pretty nice, all things considered."
"What things considered?" Bianca demanded, lifting an eyebrow.
"It's… been a while, I imagine," Phineas replied a tad hesitantly. "Not many people lookin' to leave, even fewer know where to look if they wanted to get in."
Bianca nodded slightly, moving further into the room and making her way over to one of the sets of stairs leading further down. She didn't exactly buy that explanation he had given her, but at the moment she was beyond caring. After all her skepticism, she was close enough to the mysterious city that she could feel the excitement of discovery sending chills through her, gooseflesh creeping up her arms as she descended the staircase. Was she really looking forward to being proven wrong this much?
At the bottom, she found herself looking most immediately at the other set of stairs, which predictably circled down and ended opposite the one she was on, making this room as symmetrical as the one above. Between the staircases, though, was something Bianca had never seen before. A small-ish bronze capsule of a room, furnished with plush red seats that might not have been out of place on a particularly nice train, was held in place in a pool of dark water by a set of metal arms. Inside, she could see a lever that she assumed would release the thing into the water when pulled.
"What in the world is that?"
Bianca glanced up to see Lyra at the foot of the opposite staircase peering at the capsule, Calvin trailing closely behind her. "A submersible of some sort, I think," she responded, taking a step toward the thing to get a better look inside. She was about to step inside when she felt a hand on her wrist yanking her back.
"It's called a bathysphere," Phineas told her, releasing her arm and giving her a reproachful look. "Don't touch things you don't know about, aye?"
"Bathysphere, huh?" Lyra asked, peeking around Bianca and Phineas into the small submersible. Her grey eyes flickered over to the redhead and she inquired, "Is that how we're getting down there?"
"Aye, assuming that it's still in working order," he responded. He took a cautious step forward, placing a foot inside the bathysphere and testing his weight. When it didn't seem to move, he stepped inside and looked around for a moment before shrugging to himself and looking back at his companions. "Seems alright to me."
"Is that your expert opinion?" Lyra asked. Despite the obvious note of sarcasm in her tone, she followed him onto the vessel without hesitation and sat down.
Bianca was less immediately willing to put her faith in Phineas' 'expert opinion', but as Calvin joined the others, she decided that there really wasn't much choice at this point. The brunette boarded and took a seat beside Lyra, then watched as Phineas reached over and pulled the switch on the wall.
Nothing happened at first, and a collective sigh of dismay went through the party before being interrupted by a whirring and a metallic clang as the opening sealed itself and the bathysphere was freed from its supports. Depth markers flashed by the window as they descended and Bianca felt her ears pop uncomfortably. A moment later, a screen appeared and blocked their view of the window, replacing it with what seemed to be an infomercial about the underwater city.
"I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?..."
"Isn't that the man from the statue?" Bianca asked as a photo of a man in a suit flashed on the screen accompanying the audio. Phineas nodded slightly.
"He sounds like my father," Lyra commented, not bothering to hide her disdain.
"'No,' says the man in Moscow, 'it belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers'; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose… Rapture."
The screen rose on this last word and both females gasped. Beyond the pane of thick glass was a city, illuminated from within and as beautiful as any metropolis ever was. Neon signs advertised products that they had never heard of and marked destinations as though the dark shapes gliding gracefully through the water might have any interest in stopping by Finley's.
"A city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can be your city as well."
They continued along in silence for a moment as a shark swam by alarmingly near their little submersible, its glassy black eyes not seeming to register the life forms just a few feet away behind nothing more than a pane of glass. The shark swam away, but a sudden burst of static made them all jump as something under one of the seats crackled to life. Calvin leaned over and shuffled around under his seat for a moment, resurfacing with an old radio in hand just in time to hear a hoarse male voice croon, "Fresh meat heading for the Kashmir, lovelies."
Bianca's eyes shot to Phineas, whose face was screwed up in confusion as he stared at the radio in Calvin's hand. "Phineas…" she said slowly, her gaze searching and suspicious as the fizzing stopped and the signal went dead once more.
"I dunno," he admitted, his expression still troubled as he looked over to meet her gaze. The redhead gave a forcedly nonchalant shrug and leaned over to dig in his bag – he was the only one who had bothered to take his things with him from the boat, and when he sat up with a revolver in hand, Bianca could see why. Noting the look on Calvin's face as he resurfaced with a gun in hand, he shrugged once more and said, "Better safe than dead, aye?" The shorter man nodded slightly and reached into the inner pocket of his blazer, pulling out a small pistol of his own and checking to make sure it was loaded.
"Guns?" Bianca snapped incredulously. Her tirade was interrupted by a gasp as the bathysphere darkened briefly upon entering what seemed to be a docking station in one of the towering buildings. As they continued through a darkened corridor, her voice dropped to a hissing whisper and she growled, "What exactly is down here that made those necessary, pray tell?"
Phineas looked over at her and smiled grimly, replying simply, "People."
There was a muffled splashing noise as the bathysphere broke the surface of the water within the building. It took a moment to adjust to the darkness, but eventually Bianca was able to make out an enormous pane of glass on the opposite end of the room… and a great deal of debris littering the room between it and them. Broken bottles and overturned tables scattered the floor and the lights flickered, threatening to go out at any moment. She thought she saw the shape of a human picking its way through the mess, but the light went out for a second and when it came back on, the shape was gone.
"It's a ruin," Bianca murmured, turning to Phineas and fixing him with a disbelieving stare. He did not seem to hear her – his hazel eyes were wide and his jaw slack. Whatever he had been expecting to see, this was not it.
"Phin, there's no way… we should g-"
Calvin's quiet suggestion was drowned out by the earsplitting screech of tearing metal and they all let out varying noises of surprise as sparks rained down on them as the ceiling of the bathysphere was ripped open. Lyra let out a scream as she looked up to see a monstrous face grinning down at them from the gash in the metal.
"What the bleeding fuck is that?" the blonde breathed shrilly, clutching her chest and stumbling backward into the seat as the thing leapt off the top of the capsule. "You said there were people down here, not demons."
"They are people. Or, were." The girls' heads whipped around to look at Calvin, whose gaze was directed out the window as he continued, "They've been corrupted by ADAM."
"And who is Adam?" Bianca snapped through gritted teeth. She jumped again as she saw the silhouette of a person – no, two people flit by in the brief flicker of light.
"Shh," Phineas commanded abruptly, squinting through the darkness, the befuddled look returning to his features. "I… aw, fuck." His confusion melted away in favor of something like panic as Bianca finally saw what he was looking at.
At the top of the staircase to the left of them, she could just make out a cluster of yellow lights becoming visible through the darkness of an unlit corridor, anatomically much too high to be at eye level. And now that she was looking, just near it… "Is that a child?!"
"That ain't no child, lassie," Phineas spat bitterly, backing away from the window, his eyes never leaving the balcony. "You speak of demons, well, there you are."
Bianca had no time to dwell on the implications of his words, though, as a loud cackle brought her eyes back down from the balcony to a masked man in tattered clothes who had just flung himself bodily at the bathysphere with a wrench, to little avail. She shrank away, covering her face and shouting, "Shoot it!"
No gunshots ensued, but a scream – that of a child – did, followed immediately by an inhuman roar of what could only be rage. At the bottom of the stairs, another deformed human was brandishing a pipe at a little girl with faintly luminescent eyes as a hulking figure with angry red lights where its face probably should have been on its huge frame revved what seemed to be a great drill mounted on its arm. The man didn't get a chance to run before the behemoth seized him by the head and rammed its drill through his body in a spray of viscera that flew far enough to hit the window of the capsule. Phineas moaned and averted his gaze.
The mutated person outside the submersible, now covered in his friend's entrails, let out a howl of rage, turning to charge the enormous creature and finding too late that it was already upon him. It let out another roar and grabbed him by the head and, this time, lifted the poor fellow off the ground and smashed him face-first into the window of the bathysphere until the reinforced glass was cracked and the man's head was a mess.
The group sat stock-still, flecks of blood and brain matter speckling them where bits had made it through the broken glass. Red light fell on them through the window for what seemed like an eternity until finally, finally, the light turned yellow and disappeared. Bianca let out a noise somewhere between a sigh of relief and a choked sob, letting her head fall into her hands. Lyra wiped a spatter of blook off her cheek and examined her sleeve afterward, completely soundless as she seemed to still be processing what had just happened.
Calvin was the first to regain his senses, shifting to a crouch and peeking out the window to survey the room as Phineas stared straight ahead and rotated the cylinder of his revolver absently. "We need to get going," he said finally, glancing over his shoulder at his shocked companions. When nobody responded, he moved to kneed beside his redheaded friend and jabbed him sharply in the chest with his index finger and snapped, "Come on, you don't get to check out now. Help me get them moving before the Daddy comes back."
Still not entirely responsive, Phineas nodded slightly and moved to a crouch. The shorter man directed him toward the blonde who, beside being a good deal smaller and thus easier to sling over someone's shoulder if need be, was not hysterical, which Calvin did not think his friend could handle in his present state.
Lyra, luckily, came easily enough; she snapped back to the present the instant Phineas touched her hand. Indeed, the girl seemed more prepared to handle the situation than Phineas did.
Her brunette friend needed a bit more coaxing, and even then she could only be led, sniffing, from the bathysphere as Lyra murmured reassuringly in her ear and directed her gaze away from the gore smeared on the floor. They made it to the foot of the stairs before Phineas with a jolt that he had left his bag in the bathysphere and refused to go any further without it. So, the group waited nervously as he ran back through the wreckage to retrieve his things.
Phineas was already in the bathysphere when Lyra wondered aloud, "Did that thing get the one that tore open the sub, as well?" A cackle answered her inquiry and another malformed human, this one obviously female, crawled over the top of the bathysphere like a spider.
The redhead must have heard the shuffling on the roof because he snatched his bag and bolted, although this didn't help his situation much. As soon as he was out the door, the crazed female pounced, a sickle in her grasp. She landed hard on his back and sent him sprawling, the gun in his hand skittering away.
"Where ya goin', handsome?" the woman hissed, positioning herself on the small of his back so he couldn't move. She cackled gleefully and tangled her dirty fingers in his ginger hair, pulling his head back to expose his neck and pressing her blade against his adam's apple. "Stick around and play for a while, I'll make ya feel real good."
He winced as the sickle dug into his flesh a little, setting his jaw against the pain and resolving not to cry in front of a couple of girls so he could at least die a man's death. This resolve did not last overly long as a loud bang echoed and he felt the curved blade bite his skin a little more, letting out a dry sob before realizing he was still more or less intact. The woman's grip on his hair loosened and her weapon clattered to the floor as she slumped on top of him, something warm and wet spreading across his shirt between his shoulder blades – blood. Phineas lifted himself off the ground a bit, struggling a little with the dead weight on his back, and saw Lyra with his gun in her hand, eyes narrowed and a snarl on her lips as she watched to make sure he got up. Bianca was no longer sniffling piteously, and both she and Calvin looked about as surprised as Phineas felt.
"I, uh… urgh," Phineas fumbled for words as he shrugged the woman off his prone form, nothing as she tumbled aside the bullet hole right through one of her eyes. "Good form, sweet'eart."
"Just get your things," the girl muttered, holding the gun out to him as he approached. "We need to leave."
Alright, that's it for chapter three. I hope you liked it. uvu
I definitely have most of the next chapter planned at this point, so I'm hoping to get it all written and typed up pretty soon, but... Pokemon X on Saturday. u So no promises on that front, although something Pokemon-related might be unavoidable at this point since Pokemon: Origins is so awesome and the new game and ugh. This is my priority, though, as fanfiction stuff goes. ouo b
Okay, that's it for this time! Please leave a comment if you have any input or concerns.
