A/N: Aaaaaand I'm back! Don't call it a hiatus, I just lost my mind for a couple of months. In the meantime, a hearty thank-you to all of you who viewed, reviewed, favourited and followed! Also, I don't think I've ever received so many reminders for the next chapter...
Xzeihoranth: Yeah, I decided to avoid making any major references to other franchises outside of those weird little cavalcades of shout-outs; plus, I've also been featuring Nyarlathotep in All The World's A Toybox, so I felt it was time to let a Lovecraftian OC take the stage.
BlazeStryker: I'd almost completely forgotten about that one, too.
Frosty Wolf: Your review was absolutely wonderful! I'm glad you liked the story, and I'm definitely thinking of making a story chronicling Elizabeth's visit to Rapture.
Leikiz: I had a lot of fun writing the bastardized Rapture, and I'm very happy to hear you enjoyed reading it. This chapter's going to be more of a chronicle of Fink's last big embarrassment than an exploration of alternates, but there you go; hopefully it'll live up to the standards set so far, but you'll have to be the judge.
Anyway, without further ado, the latest chapter! Read, review, and above all, enjoy!
Disclaimer: Bioshock Infinite is not mine. Also, there's another massive paragraph of references a little ways through this chapter; none of the franchises referenced belong to me, but see how many of them you can recognize.
By nature, most Vigors made a very poor transition from military ownership to the civilian market: along with the many moral, spiritual or practical objections posed by Jeremiah Fink's more vocal critics, many of these wonder-tonics were simply too violent to be applied for mundane uses without a great deal of time and effort on the part of the users – or in extreme cases, modification of Columbia itself. As has been mentioned before, the overwhelming majority of the product line had been intended as crass emulations of Rapture's Plasmids, but without any of the unique social conditions that had made the Plasmids so incomparably successful: because the police department, fire service and the army was still in force around Columbia throughout the Vigors' time on the open market, home defence was not a priority among the Founders with the notable exception of a few desperate, paranoid recluses.
However, everything changed when the tide turned in favour of the Vox Populi – either as a result of events unique to the timeline or as a result of my tinkering with dimensional physics. One way or the other, the revolutionaries began recruiting in bulk, and it wasn't long before Daisy Fitzroy's army had finally recouped its losses from the last major arrest – enough to take the fight to the Founders once again, but with a ferocity unseen until now: bombings, diversionary raids and assassinations increased tenfold over the next few weeks, all building towards the day when the Vox finally rose up in revolution against the Founders. In those dark days, with the police and the army stretched too thin to respond to all the incidents across the city, it wasn't long before the increasingly frightened citizens began to re-evaluate their approach towards home defence – not that it did them much good in the long run. Devil's Kiss, Bucking Bronco and Shock Jockey were all greedily coveted by these desperate survivors, and all too many users ended up launching themselves into early graves in deranged fits of overconfidence.
Only one Vigor offered the defensive capacity to defend against such recklessness, and as such, it was Return To Sender – the very last of the Vigors released on the civilian market and the last true bestseller ever sold by Fink MFG – that truly thrived in this new and uncertain environment.
As with all Vigors, Return To Sender was initially pitched to Columbia's military, it's electromagnetic powers being successfully advertised as a means of making Comstock's troops effectively invulnerable. Unfortunately, the usefulness of the Vigor wasn't completely guaranteed, however, for its most powerful gifts required a certain degree of dexterity and force of will to use effectively: all too many users lost focus, faltered at the last minute, and got shot – or worse still, accidentally ricocheted incoming gunfire into their comrades. Nonetheless, the army was able to rapidly isolate the troops who were able to effectively utilize the Vigor's defensive aspects and assign each of these men to a unit, granting every squad their own portable bulletproof shield.
For months on end, Return To Sender remained the exclusive property of Columbia's armed forces, until – as with Fink's other creations – its mental side-effects became too obvious to ignore. Despite the Vigor's impressive defensive value, it was quickly realized that the addicted troops were too unstable to serve as conventional military, and Comstock had Return To Sender quietly retired from military usage: stocks of Vigors throughout the city were placed in storage, and users throughout the army were placed under strict observation. Naturally, Fink MFG provided free housing and medical attention for all afflicted personnel, guaranteeing a steady stream of research data for the company, a wellspring of profitable manpower, and conveniently obviating the need for any of the Vigor Junkies to re-enter polite society.
With no customers available, Return To Sender languished in storage. Research was limited and practical usage was virtually non-existent. One of the very few developments in the study of the formula involved a primitive attempt to keep the imprisoned Vigor Junkies under control through brain surgery, psychoactive drugs, and even the Possession Vigor. Eventually, one course of drug therapy paid off just enough to make the junkies partially cooperative: for a time, Fink employed some of the more stable "Nickel-Platers" as bodyguards in public appearances, trusting that their powers would defend him from even the most determined anarchist; a few even made it as far as his Centurion program. However, the accelerating physical side-effects of Return To Sender eventually rendered this means of control useless, and the program was quietly shut down.
Then, seemingly out of the blue, Fink decided to have the Vigor transferred to the civilian market.
At this point, even the company itself protested. For the first time in the history of Columbia, the directors of the sales and marketing divisions issued a formal warning to the robber baron; when that didn't work, they compiled a thirty-page report on the unprofitability of the product as a civilian release; when that didn't work, they resorted to an interview with Fink in a desperate attempt to get him to understand a very simple and obvious fact: because the product was so combat-oriented and no mundane applications emerged until comparatively late in subject development, they had no real way to advertise Return To Sender to the public without an extensive atmosphere of panic throughout Columbia, and at the time, the Vox Populi were officially on the run – or so it was believed.
The signs were visible to anyone with eyes to see: Fink MFG was about to release another Devil's Kiss – another Vigor that could only hurt their profit margins and do untold damage to the company's reputation. With several hundred gallons of Return To Sender in storage awaiting sale, economic advisors recommended that these stocks be repurposed for experimental purposes or destroyed entirely, and barring Fink's intervention, the Vigor might very well have been used for little more than feeding the junkies already in company custody.
Unfortunately, Fink's numerous disorders were finally beginning to overwhelm him: his cocaine addiction had reached nightmare proportions, and a burgeoning case of alcoholism – his means of self-medicating his increasingly disastrous headaches – only made him even more unstable. Where once his avarice might have at least granted him the rationality to abandon his plans once they were longer feasible, now his deteriorating state of mind had left him too fixated on attaining the legendary successes of Fontaine Futuristics to draw back from the precipice. He didn't just want money: he wanted a power over his customers that could drive them to war if he so desired it; he wanted the kind of influence that only the religion of the Founders possessed; he wanted the economic authority that could allow his company to stand as a superpower in its own right – for he had seen how a simple fishery had transformed Rapture into a battleground, and lusted for the chance to make that power his own.
Return To Sender was the last of the original formulas, his final chance to make the Vigors every bit as influential as the Plasmids of Rapture and more; once that was over, he'd either have to find some means of producing his own formulas or go back to hunting the possibility space for other means of replicating Frank Fontaine's wonder-product – an unlikely prospect, given his earlier failure to retrieve anything of value. As his chance to claim this Holy Grail of profitability slipped further from his grasp, the angrier he became: shouted arguments became distressingly common around the offices of Fink MFG, bilious tirades following even the slightest provocation – real or imagined. Simple queries from underlings often sparked paperweight-throwing temper-tantrums, and the arrival of the report was enough to send him on a rampage through the executive labs, overturning desks, kicking over blackboards, and even setting fire to several months' worth of priceless research. The executives who'd made the mistake of meeting him in person were actively threatened with exile to the lowest depths of Finkton, and considered themselves fortunate to have left the building via their private transports – rather than via the boardroom window, as Fink had originally intended.
In the end, the hierarchies at play within Columbia ensured that Fink's word was law, and as long as Fink was still lucid enough to maintain his stranglehold, all attempts to alert Comstock to the unrest within the company ended in failure. As a result, Return To Sender was marketed to the public with considerable fanfare from the company: this time, no comical imagery was to be associated with the product, least of all the alluring devils or lightning-bolt jockeys that had decorated the bottles of earlier Vigors; Return To Sender was to be ushered in with displays of heroic imagery – its label and bottle adorned with the plumed Corinthian helmet of a Greek hoplite. In turn, a vast array of gaudy advertisements were unleashed upon unsuspecting audiences, featuring lividly purple testimonies of how well the Vigor had fared in combat, illustrations of magnificently-armoured men repelling bullets with a wave of their hands, and even kinetoscopes featuring films of Return To Sender in action; no comedy, no appeals to mundanity, no performers on street corners, nothing other than the heroic image of the hoplite. Even the instructional animation only maintained its cartoonish style out of a need for verisimilitude.
And when Return To Sender was finally released, the nervous executives soon realized that what they were witnessing was not another Devil's Kiss in action. If anything, it was even worse: within the first two weeks of its public release, stores throughout Columbia failed to sell a single dose of Return To Sender.
For once, the public just wasn't interested. The citizenry had no need or desire for home defence, not while the police and the army were still ably defending Columbia – or so it appeared. Indeed, in some outlying realities where news of the turmoil was successfully suppressed by Comstock and panic purchasing never became a trend, Return To Sender remained a total failure on the civilian market, selling at a loss and ultimately forcing the company to remove it from the market.
Needless to say, Jeremiah Fink did not take the news of this failure very well.
Summoning the company's board of directors to an emergency conference, he railed at them for almost five hours, blaming every single executive in the room for Return To Sender's failure and demanding the immediate resignations of any who'd directly or indirectly opposed the Vigor's sale. It was perhaps the most explosive diatribe Fink had subjected his employees to, rivalled only by the "dismissal" of Scofield Sansmark: the only difference lay in the fact that unlike the unfortunate head of security, Fink couldn't have the directors – upstanding members of Founder society to a man – executed as a warning to other employees… not that he didn't try.
More than once during that delirious meeting, he raved about having the marketing and sales directors accused of treason, jailed for life, even having them executed as Vox Populi saboteurs – and the only reason why he didn't order them arrested on the spot was because he lost his train of thought in mid-rant. When he wasn't making wild accusations, he was flitting madly between the fantastical and the paranoid: convinced that the assembled directors were trying to overthrow him, he did everything he could to convince them that Fink MFG still needed his leadership, bombarding them with his deranged fantasies of astronomical profits and impossible commodities. Envisioning a new product line that could do everything from mowing lawns to guaranteeing eternal youth for its users, Fink ranted at length about he could outdo the Luteces, how he would steal the powers and technology of a million different realities.
Drawing on everything he and his operatives had witnessed through the Tears, he promised his directors access to Rapture's Plasmids, the morphing power of the Escafil device, the life-expanding visions of Melange, the destructive potential of Trance, the near-infinite durability granted by Agartha's Bees, even the eldritch powers offered by the Outsider's Mark and the Marks of Chaos. The Force, John Crichton's wormhole technology, Orichalcum-powered machines, Go-Away Bombs, mind-control ties, Red Sand, telekinetic amulets, armour of adamantium and vibranium, Dragoon spirits, Remaking techniques straight from Bas-Lag, batteries powered by miniature universes, Professor Langstrom's positive viruses, Pieces of Eden, the Big Mountain Think-Tank's inventory, Lyrium-forged golems, every incarnation of Excalibur found in the multiverse, Tavlek Gauntlets, Lantern Rings of every colour of the rainbow, Tokra symbiotes, Basil Carlo's clay, Mystery Vortex snowglobes, Groznium cybernetic implants, a million different forms of vampirism… all could be theirs for the taking – but only if they cooperated with Fink.
Granted, he never once specified how Fink MFG would use these weird and impossible powers, much less reverse-engineer them, but the deluge of information didn't brook much opposition from the bewildered company directors. For the moment, the board chose to cooperate: most of them were stalling for time, hoping that Comstock would one day lose patience with Fink's increasingly counterproductive attitude and have him committed to an asylum – allowing one of them to take the reins.
And then the terrorist attacks started again.
Suddenly, with the police force stretched too thin to defend the people and the army too busy defending vital industry to bother with the citizens, attitudes towards home defence shifted very rapidly. In a matter of days following the first bombing, the people of Columbia wanted something that they could easily use to defend themselves and their homes, and with most of the Vigors being too destructive, too difficult to use or just too disgusting for their tastes, Return To Sender emerged as the most useful of the entire product line. With a single sip, customers could deflect bullets, send them flying back at their opponents, and with time and training, could even turn other metal objects into airborne weaponry. By the end of that first terrible week, every last bottle of Return To Sender had sold out, and Fink MFG was doing serious damage to its previously useless stockpile in order to feed the public's growing appetite. Soon, the manufactory was churning out fresh doses of the Vigor at triple the usual rate, the once-idle equipment unceasingly at work on producing the newly-crowned company bestseller.
Inevitably, the long-term side-effects of Return To Sender became known to the public, for it was being consumed in such quantities that the symptoms advanced at a much swifter rate than before; and even with the bulk of the Founder citizenry too scared to leave their homes except to buy more Vigor, there was still enough opportunities for news of afflictions to begin circulating. Already, the initial results were well-known, with first-time drinkers manifesting silvery-black metallic skin on their hands and fingers, their flesh instantly converted to a substance stronger than steel; as Tear activity increased throughout the body of the user, the transmutation spread to encompass the rest of the body until the newly-minted Vigor Junkie had been completely transformed into semi-organic metal. For good measure, the features of the afflicted changed ever-so-slightly as the metallic growth expanded, often giving them an oddly skeletal aspect: fingers seemed more slender, reminiscent of bare metacarpals; torsos appeared sunken and emaciated; faces grew narrow and gaunt, the eyesockets deep and overshadowing, hair growing sparse and brittle – until it often flaked away as little more than glittering metal fibres.
In turn, the mental side-effects were no less intriguing: users became increasingly stoic as their dosages increased, their metal growths appearing to atrophy sections of the brain concerned with fear and self-preservation. "Nickel-Platers" such as these would often march headlong into burning buildings, wade through artillery fire, and even risk hand-to-hand combat with Handymen if it meant protecting their possessions.
Many such sufferers retreated to the privacy of their own homes once the symptoms manifested, but a quite few were seen outdoors, often in the wake of the few terror attacks to hit residential areas prior to the uprising, for because of their blunted sense of self-preservation, they had no fear of being harmed – or being seen by the public. Against all expectations, responses were overwhelmingly positive: metal skin only granted the user greater protection, as far as the terrified public was concerned, and the fearlessness Return To Sender could only be a boon to one's friends and neighbours. More to the point, many of them had progressed from catching bullets to electromagnetically wrenching guns from their opponents' hands, or even shutting down automated stallions by sheer force of will; several no longer needed to eat, drink, sleep or even breathe, their transmutations having rendered them beyond such pedestrian physical needs. How could such powers be anything other than a benefit?
Jeremiah Fink was happier than he had been in months: confident that Fink MFG was well on its way to eclipsing Fontaine Futuristics in profitability, he celebrated in notoriously decadent fashion, throwing all caution for his image or his personal security to the winds as he sought out ever-more grandiose means of rewarding himself for his apparent success. As a result, the Good Time Club soon became host to a monstrously hedonistic party that lasted for the better part of three weeks: the entertainment escalated from burlesque dancers to prostitutes, from alcohol to cocaine and heroin, from boxing to gladiatorial duels to the death. This bacchanal refused to abate, day or night: whenever something needed to be done in the company, it was delegated to the directors' underlings; if there were issues concerning local security, it was handed over to the police, regardless of how overworked and understaffed the men and women at the Bull House were. Any executives who might have had concerns were deliberately tranquilized to avoid anyone spoiling the fun. Nobody cared what the company workers might think of the festivities, and nobody cared that the fuse of a powder keg might already have been lit; even as the terrorist attacks escalated outside Finkton, even as tensions within the slums escalated, Fink and his executives went on partying. After all, their profits were assured: if the onset of side-effects hadn't scared off the customers, nothing could.
In the final days of Fink MFG, their customers now included families, small business owners, private security guards, and just about anyone within reach of the more prominent "incident zones" – to wit, most Columbia. However, the most profitable clients took the form of wealthy paranoiacs, who bought in bulk directly from the company: convinced that they would be swamped by a tide of Columbia's downtrodden and oppressed, they armed their household staff more often than not, ordering bodyguards, butlers, chauffers, cooks, and even the maids to partake of the Vigor. Oddly enough, many failed to imagine that these servants – several of whom were black or Irish – might have some sympathy with the Vox Populi: as far as these rich families were concerned, the servants owed their lives to the Founders, and would never dare side with their "lesser cousins in Finkton," not even with the fear-eradicating effects of the Vigor affecting their thought-processes; how would they survive without the generosity of the Founders? The few that recognized the danger merely upped the doses of Vigor to the staff, hoping that their addiction might make them easier to control.
It didn't.
What nobody realized – until it was too late – was that the mental side-effects of Return To Sender was not limited to reducing fear: Nickel-Platers became increasingly cold and unsympathetic towards others, seemingly losing their ability to feel anything other than the most rudimentary emotions, and discarding all but their closest relationships. Business associates, employers, friends were all left by the wayside, and only the most-cherished lovers, spouses and children were retained. However, the afflicted no longer regarded these loved ones in the same way as before, and indeed rarely interacted with them at all: they only took measures to feed and protect them – regardless of the cost. In the case of more antisocial Nickel-Platers, many of them simply protected their belongings, their homes, their fortunes, their heirlooms, but as with their more social counterparts, they had lost their ability to appreciate the things they loved in the same way: they merely guarded them, albeit with all the ferocity of a dragon brooding over its hoard. Unlike the manipulative psychopaths born of Possession and the apathetic monsters created by Bucking Bronco, the Nickel-Platers could still remember their old lives, could even "care" about them after a fashion – but had lost their ability to interact with the world in a way more tragic than any Preacher or Hellion.
Thus, when the Vox Populi revolution finally blossomed across Columbia, the servant Vigor Junkies simply walked off the job and vanished into the streets.
Needless to say, the Nickel-Platers did not join the exodus of Founders leaving Emporia and the other Vox-targeted districts, nor did they join the Vox uprising. Worse still, their families were not permitted to take flight: though the spouses and children of such addicts were never physically abused, they were nonetheless prevented from leaving their homes, and any attempts to escape were curtailed by the Nickel-Platers' increasingly versatile magnetic powers. Often, runaways found themselves bound and gagged with strips of scrap-metal to prevent them from running away, and some Vigor Junkies were so determined to keep their families caged that they went so far as to weld the doors and windows shut. In improvised fortresses such as these, the Nickel-Platers remained stubbornly grounded throughout the revolution, leaving only to acquire food for their captives. Nothing would convince them to release their hostages from captivity, especially towards the very end of Columbia's existence, by which time most of these Vigor Junkies were too far-gone to even speak to their terrified charges, much less regard them as living beings.
Given the fact that the Nickel-Platers were so reclusive, Booker and I rarely encountered them: most of them remained cloistered in their homes throughout our journey across Emporia, lurking in cellars and garrisoned in attics. Because we rarely had cause to investigate residences such as these, most of the time we only saw these solitary addicts was on their occasional supply runs; despite their comparative unobtrusiveness, Nickel-Platers were easy to spot – if only because their alien appearances made them a natural target for panicky snipers. With this in mind, it wasn't too hard to follow them across the district, for by then these Vigor Junkies were so powerful that gunfights were effectively pointless: all too often, they left a trail of bullet-ridden corpses in their wake. After the first couple of hopelessly one-sided battles observed in the distance, Booker and I decided to abide by the tenet that discretion was the better part of valour and avoid disturbing the Nickel-Platers unless we absolutely had to.
Across the possibility space, run-ins with addicts such as these occurred only in timeless in which Songbird arrived on the scene earlier than usual, forcing us into shelter in the same basements where the Nickel-Platers were barricaded – along with their families, loved ones or personal possessions. Immediately, the situation quickly spiralled into a bewildering confrontation, with the Vigor Junkies demanding we leave, the families of said Vigor Junkies pleading for us to rescue them, Booker trying and failing to negotiate, and me attempting to make sense of the bewildering Tear activity going on inside the Junkies. Confrontations like these rarely ended peacefully: already the Nickel-Platers had a significant advantage in combat, but with their defenceless families crowded into the cellars alongside them, I couldn't afford to use my powers for fear of collateral damage, so in the end we were forced to retreat.
Our victories in these battles were few – and were entirely due to the fact that Songbird happened to find us. In the end, the vaunted invincibility that Return To Sender conveyed was of little use against my old protector, who rarely gave the Nickel-Platers any time to react before flattening them beneath his talons.
Vigor specialists based on Return To Sender were rare in Columbia, though not for the reasons one might think.
Like the Preachers, the Mariners and other rarefied specialists occurring across the possibility space, the Centurions were only deployed in Columbia in a handful of timelines, usually ones where the struggle between the Founders and the Vox became so extreme that pitched battles were the only possible outcomes. In worlds like these, Centurions were formidable opponents, near-unstoppable titans of sculpted physique and implacable strength, often so impressive that they often accompanied the Handymen to battle – being the only ground forces that could hope to keep up with the gargantuan cyborgs. For a time, they were so impressive that in their realities they became one of the most enduring symbols of Comstock's regime: a company of Columbia's finest soldier was never complete without a Centurion leading the army, and as the iterations of the city grew more extreme, so too did the armies – until all-Centurion armies became almost commonplace, a scenario that only became more terrifying for its rarity across the possibility space.
In the mainstream realities, of course, Vigor-Junkies of this stripe were non-existent in Columbia. In the Sodom Below, however, the mainstream Centurions persisted long after the death of Fink MFG.
The Mainstream Centurions were a fanciful creation at best, the product of Jeremiah Fink's last, deranged attempts at currying favour with Father Comstock. In his escalating madness, the robber-baron conceived of a plan to devastate the Sodom Below ahead of schedule, not through the power of Columbia and its mighty airfleet, but through lone agents – individuals with powers that more than equalled the might of an army. Unknown to the earthly nations and effectively untraceable, these empowered operatives would theoretically be able to inflict catastrophic damage before finally being destroyed, gradually whittling away their defences until the world was ripe for conquest by the Seed of the Prophet. He even suggested that these Vigor Junkies might be able to go dormant, remaining hidden in the wilderness until signalled by radio, and then raise armies in Comstock's name to preparing the way for the inevitable purification – hence their codename.
However, the Prophet turned Fink down: the visions that the Tears had shown him confirmed that the Sodom Below would fall before a Columbia ruled by the Lamb, and nothing done in his lifetime – or that of Jeremiah Fink – would have any effect on the works of the Devil. For good measure, he also forbade even the most basic combat tests, reminding his petitioner that the military had long since dismissed the utility of Return To Sender, having no means of motivating the soldiers afflicted by it. But for once, Fink wasn't listening: in a fit of cocaine-fuelled pique, the delusional entrepreneur threw caution to the wind and ignored Comstock's directive altogether, believing that he would be able to earn his approval through the casualties his brainchild inflicted upon "the Serpent of Nations."
With several Nickel-Platers already held in the company vaults and regularly dosed with Return To Sender, finding volunteers for the Centurion program did not take long. As for properly empowering them, all Fink had to do was repurpose the pumping systems commonly used to imbue the Firemen with Devil's Kiss, and within a matter of days, twenty-four of the original thirty-five Vigor-Junkies had achieved self-sustaining abilities (the remaining eleven having overdosed and died of tetanus). However, complications arose when it came time for the Centurions to be trained for their mission: at this stage in their development, normal means of persuasion were simply out of the question; their stoic personalities were immune to operant conditioning, the transmutation of their grey matter made corrective brain surgery ineffectual, and the Possession Vigor could only last so long, especially given that the Centurions were meant to be operating unsupervised.
So, Fink resorted to his only remaining option – in this case, taking hostages. Tracking down the friends, families, lovers and even personal possessions of the Vigor Junkies, he placed them in custody well out of the would-be-Centurions' reach, and told his charges that they would be reunited with the objects of their obsession when – and only when – their missions were complete. Stubborn as they were, the addicts at least recognized that retrieving their beloveds was impossible without Fink's permission, and agreed to comply with the robber baron's demands.
Each Centurion was loaded into a rocket-pod of the kind more commonly used to deliver pilgrims into Columbia, but instead refitted in order to deliver Fink's operatives into enemy territory: intending to give his metallic warriors an entrance that could not be traced back to Columbia, he'd had the pods targeted at areas where they would not be immediately found; from there, the Centurions were ordered to proceed to highly-populated areas where they would be able to inflict the greatest terror and panic. Indeed, several of them were specifically instructed to march on capital cities, including Washington DC, London, Tokyo, Moscow, Peking, Berlin, and Paris.
Ultimately, the plan was flawed from the very beginning, and a feasibility study would have shelved the whole thing early in the development phase if Fink had been willing to listen. Easily the biggest problems were technical in nature: because the pods were not fitted with Lutece Field generators or automated intelligences (a measure intended to prevent enemy governments from reverse-engineering Columbia technology) they relied on precisely-calibrated engines; when fuel tanks were exhausted, the vessel was to deploy a parachute and land. However, what nobody seemed to understand was the fact that these so-called ascension pods had been originally designed to do exactly that – ascend – and little else: long-distance horizontal flight was not a feasible option because the pods simply weren't aerodynamic enough to fly with any degree of accuracy, and there was only so much that customization could improve. Worse still, with Fink demanding immediate results, the calculations were often inaccurate at best, and the hasty modification of the engines only made the delivery system even more inefficient.
Combine all this with a squad of operatives comprised entirely of emotionally-disturbed drug addicts with crippling brain disorders, and Fink's triumphal enterprise quickly degenerated into a grotesque comedy of errors.
Of the twenty-four Centurions sent into the Sodom Below, only two of them reached their intended targets, and those emerged from their pods to mixed results at best: one landed so violently that it actually triggered a landslide, entombing both the pod and the small town it had been targeted at. By the time the operative was able to dig his way out, a major bandit gang was already pillaging the ruins for valuables, stripping corpses of jewellery and dynamiting their way into bank vaults. The ensuing fracas cost the lives of almost every single scavenger in the area, but eventually the ringleader was able to lure the operative into a collapsing house and pin his head under half a ton of rubble. Blind, immobile and unable to direct his powers without a visual reference, the unfortunate Centurion was left helpless as the remaining bandits wrapped his body in dynamite and reduced him to inanimate scrap.
The other pod failed to stop at the intended time, apparently due to a mixture of engineering errors and the Centurion's misguided attempts to correct the course via magnetism: as a result, it ploughed through five houses, a general store, a mill, a bank, and a number of protective barriers before finally crash-landing in an open mineshaft. Moments later, the impact triggered a cave-in and brought the entire roof crashing down on top of the pod, trapping the operative inside the mine; with the facility too badly damaged to restore to working order, the place was quietly shut down – effectively sealing her inside for the foreseeable future. It took ten backbreaking years for the Centurion to burrow her way out of the initial rockfall, and another twenty to make any progress on her escape attempt, for digging too hastily resulted in further cave-ins which the operate only barely managed to survive. By her thirtieth year inside, she had recovered from the latest crushing damage and had begun gradually carving a path through the rock: it was a long and arduous process, requiring a delicate touch to avoid destabilizing the roof, along with frequent backtracking – for of course, the Centurion had no idea where she was going. Eventually, almost forty years after her arrival, the operative finally dug her way to sunlight in the year 1951, several hundred miles from her original position: with most of her map references hopelessly out of date, however, she most she could do was roam aimlessly across the desert – until she finally found what appeared to be a town in which she could begin her abortive reign of terror anew. Unfortunately, the "town" was situated right in the middle of the Nevada Test Site. Once the smoke had cleared, technicians wondered a bit about the strangely human-shaped puddle of molten debris found in the ruins of the test village, but otherwise thought very little of it.
The remaining twenty-two Centurions met even more ignominious fates. Nine landed in various oceans and were never seen again, ending up either crushed by abyssopelagic depths or becoming so lost on the sea bed that they could never find their way back to the surface. Three more were lucky up to land in a very specific region of the Atlantic, and after forty-five years of fruitless wandering through the deep, happened upon the city of Rapture and became instant celebrities.
Another oceangoing Centurion eventually managed to make his way onto dry land via the beaches of Australia's North-Western Coast, and for the next ten years, tall tales of an implacable "iron maiden" roaming endlessly across the Great Sandy Desert circulated throughout the country; no attacks were reported, either because the operative had given up on her mission or simply lapsed into disassociative insanity (again, I can view the histories, but I can't read minds – and unlike Fink, the Centurions weren't interested in keeping journals).
Elsewhere, a pod aimed at Washington DC flew too low and crashed headlong into Mount Whitney, scattering the unfortunate Centurion's remains over the Sierra Nevadas.
Two pods targeting the south of England actually collided with each other in mid-air, killing one Centurion and leaving the legless remains of the other to crawl ghoulishly into the legends of rural Somerset – quite a detour considering that they were supposed to be heading for London.
Another Centurion missed Texas entirely and somehow landed in Brazil of all places, and the operative's attempt to carry out his intended rampage only concluded with him wandering into the Amazon rainforest and never being seen again.
Four crashlanded in Siberia and quickly became lost in the wilderness; unable to find their way to their original objective, they resorted to preying upon isolated settlements for several years – right up until the new Soviet government finally retaliated with an artillery barrage that not even Return To Sender could repel.
The last found himself in Antarctica, where he predictably vanished into legend: for decades afterwards, research stations abounded with tales of a strange, silent figure roaming the ice, a man who ignored all hails and seemed to ruin compasses simply by walking past; dozens of attempts were made to contact the wandering man, and all met with dismal failure, but ghost stories of isolated bases and camps being slaughtered to the last man persisted right up until the day that Columbia descended from the sky.
Return To Sender's world of origin was the last explored by the Luteces prior to their death. According to Robert, they had been doing everything they could to delay extended testing, for the initial Vigor phenomena had caused no end of chaos around the labs when it had first manifested: the Devil's Kiss and Shock Jockey phenomena had been bad enough, but the magnetic fluctuations of Return To Sender had almost ruined their entire lab, including their Lutece portal. In fact, had the Luteces not been able to isolate and neutralize the manifestations before they'd escalated to full-blown electromagnetic pulses, Monument Island might very well have plummeted out of the sky.
In the end, however, curiosity won out over caution: they had almost reached the end of their roster of Vigor phenomena, and were anxious for new dimensional vistas to explore. So, once they were certain that the laboratory had been properly shielded against electromagnetic distortion, they tentatively activated their portal and opened a Tear to Return To Sender's home dimension.
To their surprise, the world that appeared before them was a beautiful, verdant realm of lush rainforests, vast and peaceful oceans undisturbed by storms, colossal stretches of jade-green grass, and mountain ranges that glittered like gemstones from horizon to horizon. By all appearances, the world was a paradise: volcanic activity was non-existent, and seismic activity never registered; no droughts attacked the vegetation, no monsoons flooded the land, no season fires were ever seen, and even the wind never rose above a gentle gale; fruit-bearing trees were common, and from what small samples the Luteces dared to take, safe to eat from – to the point that poisonous plants seemed virtually unknown on this world; the animal life seemed placid and quiescent, mostly restricted to grazing marsupials no bigger than sheep, kitten-sized insectivores, and brightly-coloured flightless birds. Even the soil samples came back teeming with potential for cultivation.
But despite the splendour and serenity, two troubling questions occurred to the Luteces at this point:
Firstly, how had an electromagnetic Vigor with metallic transmutation effects have originated from a world as fertile and abundant as this?
Secondly, how had this place gone undisturbed for so long? From what little they could tell from the patterns in the sky, this was a reality in which stellar travel was relatively commonplace, so why hadn't anyone attempted to colonize it?
As it turned out, someone already had – several someones in fact: having sent their roving interdimensional eye of a voyage through the rainforests, the Luteces discovered the remains of a starship partially crushed between the roots of a tree; on closer examination, the hull of the ship was degrading at an accelerated rate despite only having been there for perhaps a few days at the very most, almost as if the tree was actually digesting the wreckage. Delving deeper into the forests, they discovered other such vessels, all of them abandoned by their owners and all of them being slowly absorbed into the trees. No bodies were found in or around any of the ships, and fresh tracks were still visible in the soil, so it seemed logical to presume that the crews had survived.
Following the trail of footprints, Rosalind and Robert found evidence of past habitation partially buried in the soil of the grasslands: prefabricated structures, supply crates, vehicles, weaponry, even toys had been dragged beneath the ground, though how this could have happened was anyone's guess; all tests confirmed no seismic activity, no subsidence, no instabilities in the soil. It was as if the ground had simply absorbed the dwellings. Once again, no bodies were found in any of the structures, and in one of the buildings still intact enough to inspect, there were no signs of a struggle – there was even a half-eaten meal left on the table. More tracks were found in the soil some distance away: whatever had become of the colony, the colonists themselves had departed en mass, unhurried and apparently untroubled.
Bewildered, the Luteces continued following the trail until the path ended in a cave at the foot of a towering mountain range. However, it quickly became apparent that this was not a natural structure, for less than a few feet into the "cave," the floor gave way to a massive flight of stairs leading sharply downwards, deep into the bowels of the world. Luminescent fungi provided most of the light, but brackets and sconces lined the walls in places, indicating that torches had once lighted the path. Eventually, after almost half an hour, the stairs ended in a vast chamber several thousand feet across: from what little the Luteces had been able to see of it with their own paltry lights, it could have comfortable accommodated most of Comstock House in its cavernous depths.
At the heart of this gargantuan complex lay a mausoleum, a great crypt of polished black stone and burnished gold adorned with heroic statuary and monstrous gargoyles. The doors had been sealed shut, and for once, the Luteces' roaming eye couldn't pierce the barrier, leaving the true contents of the tomb a mystery to this day… but in the end, even that monument itself was insignificant compare to what surrounded it.
Lining the paths to and from the crypt were thousands upon thousands of gleaming metal statues, an army beyond counting in attendance to protect the occupant of the tomb and ensure that none disturbed his rest. At first, the Luteces assumed that this was some kind of symbolic display, some artistic show of devotion to a long-dead potentate by an extinct culture. On closer examination, however, the figures amassed on either side of that interminable roadway were not statues: they were what Columbia would one day call Nickel-Platers and what Fink would call Centurions, millions of metallic Vigor Junkies standing perfectly still in the stygian darkness of the chamber, all sentinels assigned to watch over whatever lay inside the mausoleum.
Curiously enough, the chamber wasn't filled to capacity. Indeed, some of the guards had taken their positions only recently… and by the looks of things, they'd all taken the trouble of burning their clothes and belongings in ceremonial before lining up. However, also among the ashes of the firepits were several skeletons, many of them wearing the charred remains of gas masks and HAZMAT suits; for good measure, many of them were still impaled on the metal javelins that had killed them.
It took some delving, but eventually the Luteces discovered the truth: the entire planet was a gingerbread house, a highly-sophisticated trap built solely to acquire new guards for the tomb and new resources for the planet to exploit.
Whenever a sentient life-form landed on the surface, automated systems integrated into the surrounding environment began transmitting a signal directly into the minds of anyone with the brainpower to receive it; over time, it would gradually compel the visitor to follow the signal away from their ships and dwellings and into one of the many cavern entrances to the tomb. The air inside the complex was saturated with dormant microorganisms, created by whatever mysterious society had built the lonely mausoleum: once living tissue entered their sphere of influence, the nanites went to work converting the trespasser into another Centurion, the alterations to their brains ensuring that the new converts would be compelled to protect the tomb from anyone who hadn't been altered. Once the transformations were complete, the soil and vegetation would assimilate anything that the visitors had brought with them, gradually breaking down weapons, ships, and even buildings down into fuel for the machines that kept the trap running – and ensuring that no evidence of previous visitors remained to deter future colonists.
Unsurprisingly, it was the microorganisms that had formed the basis of Return To Sender, transfused into the bodies of the Vigor Junkies via the Tears within the fluid. Presumably, with no tomb to defend, the Nickel-Platers of Columbia had fallen back on defending what was most important to them – with an intensity that made no logical sense in a populated world.
But what was in the mausoleum? Why was so much security required? Was it merely to keep the contents of the tomb from being plundered, or were the contents more dangerous than a simple corpse? To date, the Luteces have not been able to translate any of the inscriptions on the surrounding walls, so the answer will not be known until someone can actually go there and open the doors.
However, the statuary upon the mausoleum may offer some hints: once again, the figure of the Angel of Columbia, wings flared and arms reaching out to embrace the observer. But was this meant as the image of a god that the tomb-builders once worshipped, or was this the occupant of the tomb?
But then, perhaps past tense may no longer be appropriate – not with all I've seen…
A/N: Up next... remote possibilities.
