Wow, it's been ten months since I last updated. Sigh...the things you have to do for college. Just to warn you all, it might be another two months or more before I update again with my workload. You've been patient, and since this is probably my longest chapter yet, let's get started!
(Re-edited as of 8/20/2017)
Chapter 10: Hope Born of Redemption
January 20, 1959
Alice stared up at the ceiling from her cot, thinking about nothing and everything at once. The fire that had taken her parents, sister, and nanny from her raged in her mind, the guilt of surviving the horror when they had not eating at her heart and mind. She couldn't remember the exact cause of the fire. Three images presented themselves: Dinah knocking a lamp over in the library, Angus Bumby throwing the same lamp into the library to cover up what he had done to Lizzie, and Jack Splatter wielding a fire plasmid.
Witless came in riding on the Jabberwock's back, threatening to go to the constables if she didn't get her ADAM money. Jabbing an ADAM syringe into her arm, she smiled as her face twisted and warped into something that made the Duchess' look like a supermodel, just before the Jabberwock ate her whole.
The Carpenter, now sporting a painted-on mustache like Sander Cohen's, waved to her from outside her window before Andrew Ryan chased him and the Walrus away, bleeding from the head and wielding a golf club.
Both Bumby and Splatter appeared in front of her, leering before their faces were stricken with death's convulsions. Before they could hit the floor, their bodies were covered in some odd white substance and they had been positioned like grotesque statues. Cohen circled them, taking pictures with a camera.
A shapeless figure was led in by Elizabeth Comstock, Suchong, and Tenenbaum. The former two were clad in bloodstained clothes and appeared to have suffered injuries which looked certainly fatal. The leaders vanished, leaving the figure whose body changed almost constantly from hulking, threatening shapes to that of a wailing baby. The figure left after a while, chasing a cocker spaniel puppy, whose barks were suddenly cut short.
When Radcliffe, wearing a hangman's noose around his neck like a tie, told her that he now suspected her of setting the fire, citing her fascination of it and her violent nature, she set Cheshire on him in retaliation.
She knew that she wasn't guilty of their deaths, though she wasn't sure who was if someone was to blame. She couldn't remember if the fire had taken them when she was eight or nineteen. People couldn't die twice from the same cause. Or was it that they couldn't die once from two separate causes? Or maybe it was both? Maybe one of her visitors knew? Or were they the ones who wished to know?
Alice pulled her rabbit towards her, unable to tell if it was her real rabbit or the surrogate that the Rutledge staff had provided her with. Odd; it seemed to be getting heavier as she pulled, and bigger.
She slowly turned her gaze from the ceiling to her rabbit, the fire mercifully retreating into her subconscious. As soon as she laid eyes on her rabbit, she froze, unable to move or avert her gaze.
In place of her aging toy, a Little Sister was encircled by her left arm, looking up at her with a mixture of fear, hope, and pleading in her yellow eyes. The ugly pinafore dress was ragged and tattered, far more fitting if the pale body that wore it was a corpse rather than the mutated, exploited child playing the role that had been forced upon her. Locking eyes with her, the Little Sister opened her mouth and cried out.
"Save us, Alice!"
Alice awoke with a start, sitting up fast and breathing hard. She glanced down at her rabbit, laying upside down on the floor where it had fallen from her arm. Her fevered dreams settling into her subconscious, she got up from her still-made bed, picked her rabbit up, and set it back on her pillow. Pausing to fix her hair and check the time, she came out of her room and turned to Nanny's to help her get supper ready.
She remembered the events of that lunch just as her knuckles made contact with the door. Lowering her hand, she stared at the door, trembling as the memories of her newest loss washed over her.
Not only was the last remnant of her family gone and Nanny's burned corpse lying just beyond the door, but she had lost every facet of control and let her Hysterical side out. She had no idea that was even possible in the real world, but the damage was done. Both her best friend and an absolute stranger had seen her true self, that mad creature that lurked just beneath her collected façade, waiting at the slightest injury to explode out and wreak havoc upon the focus of her pain and rage.
And as if it wasn't enough that Aster and Tooth had witnessed her transformation into the physical incarnation of her madness and her brutal counter-attack on Splatter (her memory worked just fine while in the throes of Hysteria), but everyone in the Fishbowl had seen the attack. By now, the entire Drop would know about her, and tomorrow, Rapture would know that she harbored a monster within herself, a demon born of her suffering that showed no mercy to anyone that opposed her. At least she wouldn't be on the receiving end of Ryan Security for killing Splatter. Self-defense was the right of every Rapture citizen, after all.
She just couldn't believe that…that Ryan had let Splatter out of prison after he was convicted of murder and "parasitism"! He wasn't going to be hanged (capital punishment was for smugglers), but taking a "loyalty oath", one of Communism's many evils, should not have given him a free pass! Let alone a plasmid.
And of the vast stockpile that was slowly building at Rapture Industries, he had to choose an Incinerate plasmid. Splatter had either been a pyromaniac, or he had chosen that plasmid especially for her.
It was that thought that finally triggered the end of her shock over Nanny's death.
Her lungs suddenly devoid of oxygen, Alice collapsed against the door, fighting for air as her increasing heartbeat thundered in her ears. Her dear Nan Sharpe, the last living link to her family, had been roasted to death at the hands of a spliced maniac (whose mania was there before he touched ADAM). Even though the fault was entirely Splatter's, her brain automatically cycled thought the entire series of events, searching for a way that made it her fault.
After mental hours (actually minutes) of this excruciating subconscious mental exercise, Alice forced it down and forced herself up. Still trembling, her heart feeling like it had been ripped out of her chest a second time, she made her way to the bathroom, mechanically fixed her hair and took the telekinesis plasmid, before going out the door. Even though it was about six hours since lunch, she wasn't hungry, the pain in her heart overpowering any in her stomach.
She found Aster sitting cross-legged outside her door, snoring softly, his head bowed forward and his arms in his lap. Alice laid a gentle hand on his shoulder before continuing on her way.
As far as the world was concerned, she was one of Hatter's automatons, no thoughts or musings forming in her mind as she left the Drop entirely and continued her unthinking tour into Rapture. Her only interactions were when she automatically bought tickets for the Atlantic Express or paid for using a Bathysphere. Those people who recognized her, and who had heard of what happened at the Fishbowl, swerved away from her, not that she really cared. At one point, she walked right past a Big Daddy and his Little Sister, utterly ignoring his warning groan/growl and his whirring drill. There were few things that could have broken her out of her stupor.
It was the bolt of electricity that streaked right by her face that brought her back into the land of the living. And the soon-to-be dead.
Reflexively taking cover, she peeked out from behind the fire-damaged bench to find two splicers duking it out in the middle of Arachne's Web, not far from Market Street and High Street, and home to most of Rapture's textile businesses. A "Jockey" Splicer, purple crystal growths sprouting out of random points in his arms, legs, and torso, hurled bolts of electricity at the security bots that encircled the "Controller" Splicer, the type who enjoyed using Possession and Security Bullseye to take control of any machine that came within eyesight. Rolling her eyes at the Jockey's idiotic targeting of the flying robots when he could have ended the fight by simply killing the opposing Splicer, Alice activated Peeping Tom and crept away from the fight.
Arachne's Web, like most of Rapture, had changed since the war had begun. Splicers were coming out of the woodwork as lethal plasmids became more acceptable and more available. The "Are You in the Know" theaters were spouting more pro-Ryan propaganda than ever. Every single shop now sported at least one Ryan Security Turret, and security cameras were starting to become commonplace, such as the one whose watchful gaze skirted the side of the plaza.
The Controller had enough of his mind left to throw a Security Bullseye globule at the Jockey just as the latter stepped into the camera's line of sight, spattering his opponent in foul-smelling blue ooze and photoelectric insects. Before one could say "ADAM and EVE", the cameras alarms went off, summoning even more security bots to the scene, filling the air with their piercing whistles and rattling machine-gun fire. With the reinforcements assisting the Controller's remaining bots, the Jockey went down under a hail of bullets, his crystals shattering in a shower of sparks as he toppled to the ground.
It was then that one of Ryan's goons showed up in the signature puff of red Houdini particles, the tongues of a Devil's Kiss plasmid licking at his fingers. Dressed in a thick, grey trenchcoat and wearing a welder's helmet over his face, he bellowed out, "Wat's goin' on here? Fightin' in places of commerce is not allowed!"
The Controller's reply to the Houdini was a Possession spector. As the Houdini now turned to a family cowering in front of an ice cream parlor, he laughed, a high-pitched manic chuckle.
"I'm no longer bound by the laws of king, God, or man!" he cried. "Both the machine and the flesh obey me now! No one controls me, I'm finally fr-"
The rest of his sentence was drowned out by the blast of Alice's Hand Cannon and the spattering of his brains, blood, and skull fragments on his surroundings. The Houdini crashed to the floor, his Devil's Kiss grenades dissipating and the ghostly green woman departing from him. The family scurried away, most of the spectators following their example. In a few moments, Arachne's was quiet save for the murmurings of the customers taking shelter in shops and the dying sputter of electrical sparks from the Jockey.
Still hidden from all eyes with the aid of Peeping Tom, Alice put her gun way and began to walk away. It was foolish of her to use up her EVE reserve like this, but she didn't really care. Whether she got thanks, reproach, eyes full of gratitude or fear, or nothing at all, it was no matter to her. All of her powers, all of her weapons, and she couldn't stop Nanny from dying. No matter how much she had destroyed the bodies of Bumby and Splatter, no matter the fact that their victims had been avenged, it didn't change the fact that her family was still dead, that the orphans entrusted to Bumby would always bear the mental and physical scars of his abuse, and that Nanny's corpse still lay in her bed, burned to a crisp and never again to rise. All of the things she could now do in both Wonderland and Rapture, and despite that, she was still like the helpless, confused girl who had been released from Rutledge more than a year before.
She ducked inside the nearest store as her EVE ran out, which turned out to be the burned and gutted Selina's Clothes and Shoe Emporium. Selina lay dead across the counter, the emptied cash register in her hands. Bodies of both customers and employees lay around in various positions, most of them shot, slashed, or burned. Little merchandise was still in its proper place, most of it ripped and torn on the ground, or burned entirely. The remains of a turret lay in a corner, a broken security camera a few yards away. The store had evidently been the scene of a robbery; Atlas' splicers would have ransacked the entire area instead of just one store.
Finding a chair in the mess, Alice settled down. She glanced over at the body of a young woman lying next to a fallen mannequin, both of them riddled by bullets, her blood staining their clothes and faces. Just like Nanny, she had been going about her life, possibly shopping with her friends, maybe even dragging a reluctant and impatient boyfriend or husband along. And here she was, gone, her life taken by the Reaper far sooner than she had expected and far sooner than what should have been fair.
Alice knew he was there before she saw or heard him.
"Yes, Cat?" she asked, her voice subdued. When no answer came, she looked up to the usually talkative feline.
His eyes glowed as they always did, but they were passive, no hint of crazed and illogical mirth in them to be found. His tail lay limply on the ground like a dead thing, while his grin was almost nonexistent, only there thanks to the structure of his face. The only time he had remotely looked like this was just prior to his death at the hands of the Red Queen.
"Hello, Alice." He looked around the store, eyeing a bit of gore next to his paw with disgust. "The surroundings, as macabre as they are, are appropriate for mourning, I suppose."
"What are you here for, Cat?" Alice asked in a cross tone. "Unlike Rabbit's first death, this is not the place for a curt and rude reminder that I must hurry, nor am I in the mood for one. Besides, I have no destination that I must hurry to, not anymore."
Cat nodded his head with her words, before shaking his head. "The first part of that statement is correct, while the latter is not. You do have a destination that you must travel to, it is just more advisable to proceed with caution this time." He looked outside the store window and up. Following his gaze, Alice found herself looking at the glass ceiling of Arachne's Web, straight up through the ocean and to….
"The surface," she said in a low tone, as though it was something taboo and not to be spoken of lightly.
"Yes, the surface," agreed Cat, "filled with all manner of parasite and doubter, if Andrew Ryan is to be believed. Your destination, and that of those whom you save."
Alice's head snapped back to stare at Cheshire. "I can't save anyone, Cat!" she burst out. "My family, the orphans, Eleanor, I couldn't save any of them! Even with all my plasmids and weapons, I was helpless against Splatter, and he used that to murder Nanny!" She deflated visibly and stared at the ground, beyond the comfort of crying now. "I can save myself, and Wonderland, but I can't do anything for anyone in Rapture."
"You saved that family just now from that Possessed Houdini splicer," Cat countered, "and a few days ago, didn't Aster tell you that his friends were able to gather the male half of the Houndsditch orphans from the various corners and rabbit holes of Rapture after Ryan determined that they were of no use to him? They're safe from the likes of Bumby now, thanks to you."
"Circumstances, both of them," Alice replied bitterly. "When did you become so altruistic, Cat. Is self-reliance still a virtue to you?"
"To the bitter end," he growled, startling her. "However, all virtues, if taken to an extreme, become vices. Too much chastity can breed a Puritanical pride, too much thrift turns one into a miser. And too much self-reliance, as Ryan and his sycophants have demonstrated, creates a selfishness and a disregard for human life such that the world has never seen before.
That old fool Wilson recognized your 'hero complex', your urge to help others as you cannot help yourself. Altruism is a virtue, the ability to have compassion on those weaker and poorer than yourself and help them. Capitalism and free enterprise are suitable as an economic system, not as the morals that guide the hearts of an individual and a society.
Your failures are not marks against you; you gave it your best effort and that's all that can be asked of you, no more, no less. But if you lose hope now, if you embrace fatalism and the lack of hope and will that comes with it, then you will have lost everything for nothing. Take up your blade, take up your guns, take up your plasmids, and show Andrew Ryan and Rapture what true altruism looks like!" He stopped short in surprise at himself. "My word, I'm not sure if I've ever been that vehement before."
Alice had listened with varying emotions as Cheshire had delivered his monologue to her. This time around, he had managed to address her current internal struggle without coming off as uncaring, commanding without giving way to being overbearing. And he was right.
She rose from her seat, her smile grim and promising a multitude of deaths to any who stood in her way. "Time to raise some havoc," she quoted, "the dogs of war are loose!"
Cheshire's grin stretched from ear to ear as his tail lashed the air with renewed vigor and his eyes regained their manic light. "I couldn't have said it better myself," he said as he disappeared.
Alice got up and was about to exit the store when she stopped short and eyed the surviving inventory of Selina's Emporium. Checking to make sure no one was passing by, she began rifling through the few racks of dresses that survived the pillaging of the store. The hooks of the hangers screeched as they ran along the railing of the rack, clicking together loudly in the silence of the boutique. Most of the dresses were already soiled with soot from the fire and she had yet to come across one that was in her size. They would hang awkwardly off her svelte frame.
She was on the last rack when she finally hit pay dirt with a blue dress. She pulled it off the hanger and held it against her body, turning towards a nearby dressing room mirror to model it and gauge how well it would fit. It was a full circle swing dress with short sleeves and a modest, scooped neckline. The dress came with a standard white petticoat and a matching belt that would wrap tightly around her stomach and add dimension to the dress' solid blue coloring.
When the dark-haired woman was satisfied with her finding, she moved on to another section of the dress store, searching through the wreckage once again until she found a pack of intact stockings and a pair of heels from the shoe department and headed off towards the dressing rooms.
Once she finished changing, Alice pulled back the privacy curtain of her stall and stepped out into the open, tugging on the belt of her dress until it was centered and smoothing out the wrinkles in the dress. She spent more time than she was comfortable admitting modeling the dress in front of the full length mirror adjacent to the dressing rooms, turning this way and that and admiring the way the dress complimented her figure and the hypnotic swish of the dress' skirt.
The ensemble closely resembled her blue Wonderland dress, with the same blue color and a white belt in place of her apron. She even managed to find a pair of black and white striped stockings to adorn her long legs as they did in Wonderland. Her luck fell short with her boots, unable to find any in her size, but with the positively chaotic condition the shoe section had been left in, she was lucky to have found a matching pair of any type of footwear. Instead of her boots, she had on a pair of black, T-strap swing pumps with a reasonable heel, giving her a few more inches of height.
She left her old dress behind in the stall and was about to leave the store when she caught sight of some coins shining amongst the spilled contents of an upset purse, its owner only a foot away. Alice hesitated only for a moment before she began picking up those coins and continuing onto the pockets of those who had met their ends in Selina's. She began searching the place for anything of value: first aid kits, money, jewelry, and even some nicer pieces of ladies' footwear (the vending machines would take almost anything). The downed turret yielded a few rounds of ammo for the Grinder. In Selina's office, she found a safe which she was able to hack, granting her a small bar of gold, fifty dollars, and a bottle of drinkable EVE that brought her reserve up to half full.
She exited the shop a little richer, with her EVE up to a good amount, looking and feeling like the Alice who had thoroughly trounced the Red Queen and the Dollmaker, and with a discount can of Fontaine Futuristics Beauty Hairspray, the exact same that Nanny had used earlier that day. The tin can with the little white sprout on top guaranteed an unstoppable hold for even the most active women—girl power in a convenient can. It was written in swirly, feminine print across its bright label.
Searching the bodies of the Jockey and the Controller, Alice let out a small scoff as she re-read the slip, wondering if she could really get her money back if she proved the advert wrong. Combat certainly fell under the "active" category, but so far it seemed to be holding up its promise, considering her curls were still in order after everything.
Alice gave the can and the smiling woman on it another look, sneering at the woman's blissful expression as she fumigated her beehive hair with her own can of hairspray, before storing it with the loot from the splicers. Instead of heading straight back to the Drop, she instead opted to check up on Chen's progress with the Rapture version of her Teapot Cannon, and took a bathysphere to the tram station connected to High Street.
If one ignored the turrets and the security cameras being installed in the shops there, along with the subdued, suspicious atmosphere, High Street hadn't changed that much. Alice was just starting to wonder why people were out and about when the PA decided to spout out the newest and most idiotic playlet made thus far.
"Hey Mary! Going to the big game tonight? I heard Ryan's Raiders are playing."
"No way, Jim. It's not safe. Haven't you heard? Atlas' bandits are everywhere!"
"Hold on a second there! Remember what Andrew Ryan says! If you do that, the bandits win! Take your family to Fort Frolic and Arcadia! Go out and shop! It's the Rapture way of life!"
Alice didn't know which annoyed her more about Jim and Mary: the utterly transparent and obvious fact that it was propaganda and therefore something only an absolute fool would take seriously, or the way they portrayed "Mary" as the stereotypical, scared-of-her-own-shadow woman who constantly needed a man to reassure her. Stepping into the elevator just in front of the open bar, Le Temps Perdu, she glanced back at the bar's patrons making a show of enjoying their liquor and rolled her eyes. Fools, the lot of them.
As soon as the elevator began its descent downward, something strange began to happen. The world turned grey and assumed something of a static quality, like an old television monitor without the white noise. For a moment, Alice thought she was about to go hysterical right there in the elevator. Then the ghosts appeared.
There were two of them, a man and a woman. Stepping away from them and towards the elevator's right wall, she studied them with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. Their faces were too blurry for her to recognize, but their voices were as clear as day.
"Where are you taking me?" the man asked, his body rigid with suspicion. Alice realized with a start that she knew his voice from somewhere.
"When's the last time you saw Sally?" the woman said, facing the man while adopting relaxed but ready stance
Over the man's reply of "What?" Alice realized that somewhere, she had heard the woman's voice as well. It was dancing just as the edge of her thinking mind.
"She was taken from you, wasn't she?" the woman asked, her cigarette never once wavering.
"How do you know this?" the man asked in an accusing tone, his blurry right hand almost tightening into a fist.
"She was taken. Down at Sir Prize," the woman continued, gesturing towards the man with her free hand. "You were playing the tables and-"
"She disappeared," the man interrupted abruptly, glancing away from her.
"And…." She continued.
"Cop friend of mine, Sullivan. Says they found her floating in the docks," he explained, still looking out the window, apparently at the passing ocean life.
"You see the body?" she asked.
"Look-" he started to say, looking back to her and raising an arm to point.
"Did you see…the body," the woman persisted, lowering her cigarette. "This world values children, not childhood. There's a profit to be made and men who make it." She tossed her smoking cigarette to the floor and ground it out with her foot. "I'm taking you to one of them," she finished.
They began to fade away as the elevator came to a stop, their last words fading with their forms. Looking out into Market Street, Alice had a faint, ghostly impression of Le Temps Perdu and High Street which too faded away. Pressing a hand to her head, Alice hurried towards Chen's.
"What the bloody hell was that? This can't be a relapse into madness; a random hallucination of two ghosts in an elevator. That's tame compared to my old hallucinations. Boring even. Ghosts are hardly something that my fevered mind of old would conjure. Still, what were those things? And why did their voices sound familiar?"
When the sound of gunshots suddenly rang through the air, causing most bystanders to jump before remembering who kept shop nearby, Alice's run slowed to a walk. It wasn't uncommon for gun fire to escape the soundproof walls of Chen's whenever someone entered or exited the shop, but this didn't sound like the precise shots of someone testing a new gun. Too erratic, too quick, and there were too many different weapons involved (different firearms made different "bangs").
Something was wrong at Chen's.
Coming up to a corner, Alice peeked around to find a man wearing the hockey armor and ammo belt that quite a few of Atlas' fighters favored. He was standing in front of the entrance to Chen's shop, a carbine in his hands, keeping watch. Turning on Peeping Tom's X-ray vision, she looked into the shop, counting four white figures inside along with dozens of blue ammo boxes. One of them was crouching behind the counter, that would be Chen. Two of them were watching his spot while the third was positioning something that also glowed white. It was a turret, she realized.
Turning invisible, she crept up on the Atlas fighter standing guard and hit him on the back of the head with the butt of her shotgun. The thump of his landing went unnoticed by his compatriots. From what Alice could see as she crept inside, the Atlas fighters had been trying to get at Chen before she had arrived, judging by the huge spiderweb cracks in the bullet-proof glass that kept him separated from the rest of his shop. Right now, their plan was to use an RPG turret and a makeshift grenade launcher to destroy the glass and get at Chen.
"Why we botherin' with this slant?" the man pushing the turret into place growled, glaring at his friends for not helping him. "We can take every gun in the place and he can't do nothin' to stop us."
"We'll be takin' the guns, Shorty, after we've had a chat with Mr. Chen," the man wearing a box over his head answered, the box muffling his voice. "Word is this gunsmith has made some kind of new grenade launcher, a special one, and the boss is really interested in it. And Chen here keeps his best stuff in the back, so pipe down and get that turret set up."
"That," the other watcher added, "and he's got skill with gunsmithing, ain't no point in denin' that. We could use someone like him."
"We'd be walkin' out of here with the slant, the launcher, and what else he's got back here if you guys would help-ah, there! Hand me the launcher, Charlie. I hate bulletproof glass as much I hate Ryan."
With the man's back turned to the turret, Alice took cover and turned off Peeping Tom before shooting Possession at the turret. The first RPG shot past the startled complainer and detonated between his friends, killing them in a blast of blood and fire. The second RPG flew over the man as he threw himself to the ground, a rack of guns exploding into a shower of burning splinters and glowing metal shards. The third RPG never left the turret thanks to the survivor's use of Electro Bolt and his shotgun.
Breathing hard and staring at the twisted hunk of metal that had been an RPG turret only a few seconds before, Shorty's beginning euphoria at being alive was cut short as a Hand Cannon was pressed against his head.
"Drop your weapon, get up, leave, and you will live," Alice said in a tone colder than Old Man Winter. "Try to kill me and you will die. It's your choice to make."
Shorty tried to bring his shotgun up and around. The Hand Cannon barked and Shorty's headless body collapsed to the ground, quivering, his shotgun having only made it a few inches off the ground.
"And your choice has made you." She rolled her eyes at the man's idiocy and turned to the counter, summoning a medical kit. "Mr. Chen, are you all right?"
Chen poked up from behind the counter, almost hidden from the spiderweb cracks spread across the glass, clutching something to his chest. "Other than a graze wound, I am fine, Ms. Liddell. Those idiots came in here and shot the place up before I could get behind the glass. If they came back here, I was planning on testing my newest weapon on them, the pigs. Speaking of which…."
The slot pushed out with something in it, something with a very distinctive shape. Walking over to it, Alice found herself staring down at the Rapture version of the Teapot Cannon, not as smoothly put together as the one in Wonderland, but there was no mistaking what it was. Alice took it out of the slot and it replaced with the medical kit before examining it, finding its balance and design to be exactly like the original.
"I finished your 'Teapot Cannon' yesterday," Chen explained as he began to bandage his arm. "My finest work yet, on par with your Pepper Grinder. Built to your specifications, it can shoot anything that a grenade launcher can, and you can fill those pods, which can be made at any U-Invent, with napalm, liquid nitrogen, and anything else you can put in a chemical launcher.
Went out to celebrate and I must have blabbed about it. I woke up with a bad hangover, and these idiots knocking on my door, offering to buy it. I told them it was for a custom job requested by a specific customer and not for sale. They came back with that turret, and now look at my shop!"
Alice looked up at the shop, seeing the destruction the turret had unleashed. Boxes of ammo lay scattered on the ground, bullet holes were everywhere, and what had once been high-quality guns was now splintered wood and cooling pieces of metal. Chen continued, an accent not unlike Suchong's ruining his grammar in his rant.
"First Ryan sends thugs to intimidate me for making Power to People machines for Fontaine and now Atlas' goons are destroying my shop for single weapon! Enough is enough!"
Alice waited for him to calm down before asking, "How much will that be, Mr. Chen?"
He jumped as though he had forgotten she was there. "Take it free of charge, on the house! And take whatever ammunition you need! I'm going underground until this is over. Good luck to you, Miss Liddell," he added. "Thanks to your imagination, the Pepper Grinder and the Teapot Cannon are my finest works yet. Take care of them, and they'll take care of you."
Alice gave him a smile though the glass. "Thank you, Mr. Chen, for your weapons and for your generosity. I'll repay the favor if I ever find the opportunity."
Chen disappeared into the back of the store, and Alice began looting the bodies. She found a few EVE hypos, shotgun shells, and three frag grenades from the launcher, which had somehow survived the turret's attack. The Teapot Cannon already had four pods of napalm ready, along with a note detailing the components necessary for a U-Invent to make more pods and how to program the design into the machine by hacking it. Apparently, Chen had also helped in designing the U-Invents.
Alice discovered that her personal storage had its limits; for example, she couldn't hold more than three hundred and sixty rounds of Thompson Machine Gun ammunition for her Pepper Grinder and more than forty rounds for her shotgun. She briefly wondered what other limits existed for her other inventory.
Just as she was about to head out the door, Alice realized just where she had heard the ghostly man in the elevator before. "Mr. Chen," she called out, "can you tell me how Mr. DeWitt is faring?"
"He went missing on New Year's," he called from the back, tools clinking and banging against each other as he gathered them. "I saw him and a girl, really pretty one, go into Cohen's up on High Street. No one's seen either of them since then, and I don't think anyone ever will again. That Cohen is a madman."
Alice frowned in thought as she left Chen's, headed towards DeWitt Investigations.
'From what Mr. Chen just told me and from that, "vision" in the elevator, that woman was taking Mr. DeWitt to see Sander Cohen about this little girl, Sally. "This world values children…there's a profit to be made and men who make it. I'm taking you to one of them." Looks like my suspicions about Cohen's "charity work" were correct. His finger is in that rotten pie along with Ryan's. But why was that woman taking DeWitt to see Cohen about this particular girl? It's not like they were going to outright accuse him of kidnapping her. Were they?'
Alice's thoughts were interrupted by yet another burst of gunfire just up ahead, this time in front of the Little Wonders Educational Facility. Nearly getting knocked down by a fleeing couple, she came across a sight that she would not soon forget: five people, all of them armed to the teeth with guns and plasmids, attacking a Big Daddy and his Little Sister.
Two people already lay upon the ground. One of them, a black-clad, blonde woman, had apparently been caught in the crossfire, her body riddled with bullets. The other was a man wearing a shirt and overalls. His distinct lack of a head, which was smeared in a hole on the wall and on the Bouncer's drill, prevented any further identification.
"Come on! Give her up, you fat whale!" one of the splicer's yelled, firing a Tommy gun.
The Little Sister's sudden shriek caught Alice's attention. While the Bouncer was attempting to avoid the electro bolts of its attackers, one of the combatants, a thirtyish man wearing a business suit, had grabbed the little girl and was making off with her. Conveniently, he was headed right towards her.
Alice brought her Hand Cannon to bear as she stepped into his range of vision. "Put the girl down," she said in that ice-cold tone. She pulled back the gun's hammer. "Now."
"Go get your own Little Sister, you dizzy twist!" Other than the feral expression on his face and the erratic twitching of his left eye, he could have passed for any ordinary businessman.
"You won't find anything in the daycare if you're that desperate for an ADAM fix!" he added, sneering at her as though she was an ADAM addict with no ability to control her craving.
Alice's first shot sent him stumbling backwards, a look of surprise on his face. The surprise remained on his face after the second shot, dropping him to the floor. The Little Sister scrambled from his dead grasp, crawling into a corner and crying for "Daddy".
Alice turned her attention to the remaining four splicers. The most obvious Splicer of the group, and the biggest threat, the Frosty, froze the Big Daddy, allowing the others to begin closing in on him. Trading in the Hand Cannon for the Pepper Grinder, she opened fire upon them.
For an instant, Alice thought that she was firing the original Pepper Grinder again. The feel of the gun in her hands, the kick as it unloaded its chambers, the popping bangs as the glowing bullets left the twin barrels and flew towards their targets. For a moment, the scent of burning peppercorns filled the air before the real smell of gunpowder reached her nose.
One of the splicers succumbed immediately to the surprise attack, falling to the ground screaming bloody murder with a dozen holes in his back, all of them gushing red. The other Splicers took cover, each of them sporting a few wounds from the barrage.
One of them clambered up the wall and looked down at Alice with a snarl, her face yet unscarred by ADAM withdrawal. "You'll pay for that!" she hissed as she threw two very sharp, large knives at the her. If the woman's evolution continued, she would eventually come to use the huge hooks that Spider Splicers were so fond of.
Throwing up her arm in an instinctive attempt at self-defense, Alice accidentally caught the knives with her new telekinesis, the light glinting off their sharpened edges and reflecting her green gaze. She very purposely threw them back. One of them impaled the Spider through her shoulder, while the other cut a furrow in her face, giving Alice a window to shoot her full of holes while she frantically tried to staunch the bleeding from both places.
She came down with a sickening thud, one hands still clutching her bleeding face, the other trying to wrench the knife out of her shoulder.
The Frosty fired at her now, prompting her to duck the icy projectiles, one of them tracing her shoulder and sending a cold chill through her. The Teapot Cannon came out for the first time and she fired a pod of napalm at the Splicer, the Cannon spitting out the pod with a liquid gurgle. The projectile shattered against the Frosty, instantly engulfing him in fiery napalm instead of boiling hot tea.
As steam billowed off the Frosty amidst the flames and his screams ("Fire! I'm in Hell!") Alice held down the Cannon's trigger and was rewarded with a burst of steam and a shrieking whistle. The next pod exploded when it hit the Frosty, ending his tortured screams.
If the smell of the burnt corpse had been that of burning flesh and not subliming carbon dioxide, Alice would not have noticed the final opponent in favor of nausea. He came at her from behind with a knife in hand, his loud footsteps the only indication that she should duck. At such close quarters, she instinctively went for her own blade, the flashes of blue, red, and black flaring like fireworks with streaks of crimson as she worked the Splicer over. The final slash sent a shower of ADAM-laced blood to spatter against Alice, adding a splatter of red to the white of her belt.
As the body collapsed to the ground, Alice caught sight of her reflection in the broken glass of the Little Wonders' front door. She looked exactly like she did in Wonderland after she had successfully battled and destroyed a band of enemies sent to fight her; the Vorpal Blade dripping with blood, her eyes flashing with the fierce, primal joy birthed from victory, her enemies laying around in various positions of defeat, her breathing shaky and her heartrate settling as the adrenaline began to wear off. The Alice who had fought for and saved Wonderland twice was finally in the real world.
When the Big Daddy broke free of the ice, Alice quickly left her position between him and the Little Sister, not willing to test her mettle against a Bouncer so soon. She watched the pair reunite before getting to the business of draining her former opponents of their ADAM. If the bond between the Daddy and the Sister wasn't a biochemical concoction in their brains made for the purpose of recycling ADAM from dead bodies, Alice would have found their reunion heartwarming. As it was, her heart felt cold and heavy as she headed towards DeWitt's.
Before leaving, she had managed to scrounge some money and an audio diary from the woman in black. Claudia Brown had recorded her thoughts on the diary, labelled "Sinclair's Idiocy" and made just the day before the war started.
"That fool Sinclair is going to get us all killed! With Ryan's approval, he's gone ahead with that idiotic 'Home Consumer Rewards Program' of his. A bunch of splice heads running around with guns and plasmids trying to kill each other while Sinclair's people take notes! I've heard that they even involve taking a Little Sister from her Protector just to put her in one of the vents! What if the splicer decides to keep her for himself? If we lose any of them to these morons, at least it'll be Sinclair's head that rolls, not mine."
Alice had heard of something of this sort starting about the same time as the war. It was absolutely insane the things that went on in Rapture. A company testing "defensive products" in the field in the midst of a war while providing its clients with newer plasmids and ADAM rewards? It was madness. The worst part was that she wasn't surprised by anything of that caliber anymore. When it came to disregarding life in the name of profit, Rapture would have taken first place out of all the nations in the world.
Alice discovered two things when she came upon the former home and business of Booker DeWitt. First, the notice on the door declaring that the private investigator was dead, his business liquidated, and his belongings confiscated by Ryan Industries as no Will existed to distribute them. She wasn't going to find anything there to explain the mystery of the Elevator Ghosts.
The second was the audio diary on the stairs that had somehow escaped notice. To her surprise, the diary had been made by Elizabeth Comstock on New Year's Eve. Wondering what Cohen's Songbird had to say, Alice pressed the play button of "The Trap is Set".
"Of all the cities that Comstock would take refuge in, this is the one I least expected. A city as opposite in its ideology to Columbia as its elevation. What angers me, besides forgetting about Anna, is how far he's gone to become Booker DeWitt; taking his name, his vices, even tattooing Anna's initials on his hand. I've taken his true name as my own to avoid suspicion, but after tonight, there will be no need to keep up this charade, no need to stay in this city of Man. The trap is set, the bait is ready, and Zachery Hale Comstock will finally pay his debts."
The more clues Alice found, the more confused she became. Mr. DeWitt had really been posing as someone else? Why? If he was seeking a new life in Rapture, why hide his identity? What was this Columbia? If Elizabeth Comstock, or whoever she was, was the woman in the elevator, as evidenced by her matching voice, what had she been doing? Taking DeWitt to Cohen to find a little girl? Using her as bait to make him pay for something?
Hearing the utter hatred in her voice as she talked about Mr. DeWitt, or Mr. Comstock, Alice was just able to keep a chill from coursing down her spine. While her hatred for the likes of Bumby and Splatter could burn as hot as a raging bonfire, Elizabeth's seem to be of the opposite kind, a cold, bitter loathing that waited until the perfect moment to make itself known, to wound its targets mentally and emotionally before going for the physical. Whatever Comstock had done, the Songbird hated him for it, and he had apparently paid his debts, with his life.
Putting the diary away with the last, Alice began making her way back to the Drop. Aster would panic if he discovered that she was gone, and Nanny's funeral needed to be arranged. That, and the hunger pains that came from an unfinished lunch were making themselves known. What mattered now was her own survival and that of the few friends she had left. The mystery surrounding Mr. Comstock and Elizabeth could wait for another day, if any more clues popped up at all.
In a way, the Rapture Civil War was a blessing. If she had possessed any power over the forces that caused it, she would have stopped it from happening. As things were, it gave her a motive to finally escape the enormous trap that Rapture was turning out to be, along with the excuse to finally be herself; a warrior conceived of her imagination and brought forth into reality.
BS+AMA=WS
January 22, 1959
Nanny's funeral had taken place about twenty-four hours after her death. Tooth had been true to her word and had managed to arrange a small but beautiful service for Nan Sharpe at Twilight Fields. There had only been a handful of people there: herself, Aster, Tooth, and a few of Nanny's friends and former employees from the Mermaid. Afterwards, her body had been taken to Eternal Flame for cremation, and there, they committed her remains to the ocean. From the first speaker at the service to the moment when the ashes came to rest on the floor of the Atlantic, Alice shed no tears externally. Internally, she wept rivers.
Afterwards, she had cancelled her apartment contract with Sinclair at the Deluxe, gave Nanny's belongings to her friends and former employees (with the exception of an audio diary that she stored away for a "rainy day"), and moved into one of Aster's safehouses in the Warren.
According to Aster, there were about a dozen of the caves-turned-refuges in the massive cave system beneath Rapture, most of them housing the Houndsditch boys. Alice's cave was an offshoot from one of the main corridors. It was smaller than her cell at Rutledge, with only enough space to stand with the bed taking up most of it. The rough walls and ceiling were low and the floor was hard and cold, but it was dry and private. There was a small supply of first aid kits and foodstuffs underneath the bed; Aster had offered more but Alice told him that she was more than capable of finding her own things now. The things that made it a home was the photograph, her old drawings, and the fact that Aster's new home was only a short walk away.
At the moment, Alice was standing at a tram station in Olympus Heights. Aster had come to her a few hours before and told her that his source (she had made a snide joke about most rogues having multiple sources) had told him that a woman matching Tenenbaum's description had been sighted in the area. It wasn't much but even if it turned out to be a false lead, it gave her something to think about other than Nanny's death and funeral. And something to think other than the fact that she was only a tram ride away from her first home in Rapture.
Alice yawned despite the coffee she had drank only two hours earlier at the Bistro. It was getting late, and she found herself wishing for a watch. Aster had told her that he and Tooth would be meeting with their other friends. It was time that she officially met them. He had also hinted at something else that would take place at the meeting. She frowned as she thought about it. It wasn't like Aster to be mysterious like that; he usually opted for a straightforward approach. It sounded like something of great importance, and she'd rather not be late for it.
It was a faint, cranking noise that broke her thoughts. If it wasn't so out of place, she wouldn't have noticed it. Looking around, she realized that she was practically alone. The last tram had pulled away half an hour ago, and the hour was so late that the chatter back at the Bistro had subdued to a low hum. She was the only one present to hear the cranking and see who was responsible.
She noticed that it seemed to be coming from beneath her the same moment that she spied the incline that lead down to the sewers. The cranking abruptly ended and the quiet tapping of footsteps took its place, prompting Alice take out her shotgun and use her Peeping Tom. She saw the woman before she made it beyond the overhang above the sewers. Beneath her, she could make out the pink outline of a door. Alice cursed herself for not using Peeping Tom earlier before turning her attention to the woman.
She was wearing a burgundy dress, her shoulder-length brown hair hiding her face from view. She spun the cylinder of a revolver as she looked around for any one still out. Seeing no one, she turned (Alice turned invisible as she did so) and allowed her sole observer a look at her face. It was a heart-shaped face, her brown eyes projecting an intelligence uncommon even in Rapture. In a way, it was a lovely visage. Any charm that she possessed was lost on Alice, who knew the face of Brigid Tenenbaum from the many posters and the theaters that she had seen since getting out of Rutledge. Here was the woman responsible for the discovery of ADAM and the surviving co-author of the horror story of the Little Sisters.
Alice waited for Tenenbaum to pass her before she stepped from her hiding place, still invisible, and spoke.
"Brigid Tenenbaum."
Tenenbaum shot around, the gun held in both hands and looking for the speaker. The muzzle was a few inches from Alice's, affording her a look right into Tenenbaum's steely, concentrated gaze. The sights of the gun lined up perfectly with the German scientist's vision, following her gaze as her eyes flitted everywhere, trying to locate her target. Alice hoped her breathing wouldn't give her away, especially not at point-blank range.
Finally, Tenenbaum lowered her gun, deciding that she had been hearing things. That was when Alice struck it out of her hands and decloaked right in front of her. Before Tenenbaum could reclaim her gun, Alice put her foot on it and stuck her shotgun right into the scientist's surprised face.
"Riddle me this: why I shouldn't turn your brilliant mind into a mixture of broken bones, brain matter, and lead?" Her voice was an icy venom, her eyes twin pools of green acid. "I'll give you the answer: I have a question for you. Where are the Little Sisters you took from Ryan Industries?"
Tenenbaum's expression turned from fear and surprise to a caution masked by boredom. "And why would I be telling you that?" she replied with a marked accent. "So you can take them back to Ryan, yes?"
"No, so I can take them to a safe place beyond your abuse and exploitation, you selfish, misbegotten, depraved monster!" Standing there, her teeth bared and her nostrils flaring, she waited for Tenenbaum to protest her accusation.
"Monster?" Tenenbuam's eyes left Alice's and fell upon the ground, her mouth and voice taking on a sorrowful note. "Yes, monster. That is good word for me."
Alice blinked, before resuming her hard look. For all she knew, Tenenbaum was a talented liar and manipulator along with being an accomplished geneticist.
"Here in Ryan's city," she continued, looking at Alice with a new expression, "is one who wishes to help the little ones, not for her own gain, but for them." Alice gave a slight nod, never taking her eyes off of Tenenbaum once. "Follow me," the woman motioned, back towards the incline where she had emerged.
As Alice followed Tenenbaum into the sewers of Olympus Heights, she wondered what she was going to find, besides the horrid smell. A laboratory where the Little Sisters' remaining humanity was burned away? A horrible shrine dedicated to the macabre acts that the German woman had committed to the horrors her hands had made? A storeroom where Tenenbuam drowned her guilt with liquor of the surface and of Rapture? Or would she find something that would give her something she had not known in a long time?
They came to a door which Tenenbaum rapped upon in a simple sequence. For an instant, nothing happened and then the door began to open from the inside. Turning on Peeping Tom, Alice looked past the door the instant before it fully opened.
She could imagine all the doors, and what was behind all the doors. And behind this door, incredibly, she could see them.
BS+AMA=WS
In the darkened room, a watch was examined by the poor light of a television monitor before its owner turned his attention back to the monitor. On it, Bunnymund, Fae, North, and Mansnoozie made idle conversation at their "war table", a map of Rapture superimposed with a map of the Warren, their voices laced with static thanks to the jury-rigged camera he used to attend meetings.
They were underneath North's Workshop, at the main headquarters of their little group. Four individuals, five including himself, and maybe a sixth, against one man who built a city at the bottom of the ocean and another man who aspired to conquer that city, both of them uncaring for those poor innocents caught in the crossfire. Things didn't look bright for the odd group.
"Then again," the man watching the monitor thought as he sipped coffee from a thermos, "when have things ever looked bright for any rebel group? There are so many examples throughout history of individuals pooling their knowledge and abilities to fight an impossible enemy. I just hope they can survive this city, let alone succeed in this mission."
When he had first come down to Rapture, the city had proceeded to destroy the very limits of his imagination. An Art Deco style utopian metropolis built on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, housing the best and the brightest of humanity, producing wonders and technology that would have astounded the world. He had come to Rapture at the very height of its progress and prosperity, but now he could only watch as the forces that had driven it forward show their true colors and destroy the city and its people.
Ryan thought of altruism as a blight upon humanity, the source of all its grievances and atrocities. The business tycoon considered property rights, capitalism, and social Darwinism to be the only forces behind humanity's ascension as a species.
From his own standpoint, it was the lack of altruism in Rapture that was contributing to the de-evolution of its citizens. Social Darwinism, no matter if it was based on racial superiority or economic competition, would always have one end: true Darwinism, Survival of the Strongest, the Great trampling on the Small.
"Adam Smith was a genius, but he never meant for his economic system to be the foundation upon which a society is based. The dog-eat-dog morals of free enterprise are prefect for economics, not as the values that guide the morals of an individual or a society." He took another sip of coffee. "If I ever get to writing my memoirs, I shall include that as my official response to Atlas Shrugged".
He glanced back at his watch and sat up. The first real meeting of their little group was about to begin and it looked like Alice Liddell wouldn't be joining them. He liked the girl; she had been dealt a hand that he wouldn't wish upon any of his enemies (and he had some real doozies when it came to that facet of his life), and yet, here she was, fighting for her loved ones as well as herself. She would have made out like a bandit in his line of work, along with quite a few others.
She chose that moment to explode through the entrance into the North's safe house. Speak of the devil.
"Aster, Tooth, I've found Tenenbaum and she's been…." She stopped midsentence and midstride as soon as she caught sight of North and Mansnoozie. "Mr. North, Mr. Mansnoozie, what are you doing here?" she asked, staring at them.
"What am we doing here? We are right underneath my Workshop!" North answered, laughing as he strode over to Liddell and picked her up, kissing her on both cheeks before setting her down. The watcher grinned at the look on her face, like she wanted to simultaneously smack the Russian and smile back at him. He almost laughed when Bunnymund face-palmed over the whole thing.
Both North and Mansnoozie were dressed in their working clothes. North was in his usual black slacks and red shirt that bared his arms, showing off the tattoos written in Cyrillic. Mansnoozie's working outfit consisted of a pair of overalls over a yellow shirt that would have been painful to look at, if the camera could show color. His blond hair sticking out in all directions, he smiled and waved at Liddell, who mirrored the gesture.
"Alice, you found Tenenbaum?" Fae interrupted. "Where is she? What has she been doing?"
"I swear if that kraut laid a finger on those little girls she took-" Bunnymund began to growl out.
"She's done no such thing," Liddell declared. "She's had a change of heart, as hard as that is to believe. She's taken those Little Sisters under her care, and she's even discovered a way to cure them of their condition!"
He leaned back in his seat in surprise and considered what she had told them while the others exclaimed their surprise and wondered aloud how it was possible. They were wondering how the Little Sisters could be cured, while he was wondering how Tenenbaum could have changed in such a short time. It didn't surprise him that Tenenbaum was able to cure the Little Sisters, she had helped to create them after all. He knew of the horrible things that the "Wunderkind" had committed in the concentration camps where, instead of finding monsters and torturers, she had discovered her first true friends in the likes of Mengele and the other Nazi doctors and scientists. Why change her ways now?
"I'm not certain of the exact process," Liddell admitted. "From what she told me, she employed a method where she broke the Sisters' dependence on the slug, thus killing it and allowing her to extract the loathsome thing and some of its ADAM without killing the child. I've seen the results: healthy, normal little girls, and jars containing their slugs." She paused. "Well, the girls' mental conditioning is still in place, but Tenenbaum is working on curing that as well."
"I will admit," North said as he settled back into his chair, "I did not see this coming. Tenenbaum turning from monster into mother; maybe there is hope for Rapture."
Liddell made a face at that as she and the others took their seats. "She would disagree with that statement, no offense meant, Mr. North, and I would be inclined to agree with her. The six of us appear to be the only people in this Godforsaken city that care anything for the plight of the Little Sisters, and I believe it's going to stay this way."
"No argument here," Bunnymund said, wiping his boomerangs with a handkerchief. "So what do we do? Go out there, bump off every Big Daddy we come across, and take the tykes to Tenenbaum, is that it?"
"Ideally, yes," Liddell replied, glaring down at the map of Rapture, "if Tenenbaum had enough supplies to perform the procedure on every Little Sister in Rapture, and the supplies to feed and take care of them until we can organize an escape from Rapture, that would be the case."
Mansnoozie began gesturing with his hands while Fae translated. "Sandy says that we can help with the supplies and housing issue. We're already doing that with the Houndsditch boys." She rubbed her chin in thought. "How's this sound? While Tenenbaum is gathering the things she needs to cure a Little Sister, we help the Big Daddies in protecting the Sisters? Act as guardians to them until Tenenbaum can work her magic, then we take down one of the Daddies and take his Sister to Tenenbaum?" She winced as her words left her mouth. "I know it sounds heartless, the Daddies just want to protect the Sisters, but…." she trailed off.
"We will be doing them a favor," Liddell finished. "They're slaves, the Big Daddies and the Little Sisters, and this is the only way that they will be freed. The Little Sisters by Tenenbaum's hands, and the Bouncers and Rosies at ours. We're saving the Daddies from an existence of bondage to a master that cares not for their humanity, we're saving them from slavery."
Yes, Alice Liddell would have done well in the service of his organization. She wished to do what was right, while seeing and acknowledging what needed to be done in order to accomplish her goals.
"Wait a minute," Bunnymund broke in, "that could take years! There are dozens of Little Sisters out there, and if Tenenbaum can only do one of these surgeries at a time, we could be doin' this after one of those drongos Ryan and Atlas win the war. And if you think savin' the Sisters under the cover of war is gonna be hard, it'll be worse when the winner can devote his resources to takin' us down!"
"It might not take as long as you think, Aster," Liddell replied, her lips twitching up in a smirk. When they all look to her, she continued. "Tenenbaum has been toying with the idea of a plasmid that could cure a Little Sister in mere seconds instead of an hour. When I told her that I was the 'Wunderkind' that couldn't suffer from ADAM withdrawal, she was ecstatic. If you can protect the Little Sisters as secondary guardians, I can assist Tenenbuam with gathering the components necessary to create this plasmid. Once I can save the Little Sisters, we can cut off the supply of ADAM and cause enough turmoil to find a way back to the surface."
They were all silent, until North began applauding her. "Ms. Liddell, I would hate to have you as opponent," he boomed out. "With ADAM gone, Ryan and Atlas' armies will go mad and that will give us window! Brilliant!" He jumped up and began to dance a jig. "We will all be free!"
"Guardians," Fae muttered out loud. "That's what we'll be! Guardians to the Little Sisters and those who wish to escape Rapture!" She was smiling now too, looking fit to pop.
"I came across a…recording of Elizabeth Comstock the other day," Liddell added, reluctantly he noticed. "To quote her, 'This world values children, not childhood. There's a profit to be made and men who make it'." Through the grainy picture of the monitor, he caught sight of the light that burned in her eyes and in her soul.
"I believe it's time someone proved her wrong, proved to her and to Rapture that it is altruism and not selfish ambition that ensures humanity's survival."
Smiling at her words, he pressed a button next to the microphone in front of him. On the other side of Rapture, a monitor set above the camera in the war room crackled and flickered to life, displaying an illustration from a child's storybook. "Hear, hear, Ms. Liddell!" he spoke into the mike. "Does 'The Guardians of Childhood' suit your fancy?"
In the next instant, he found himself, or rather the camera, looking down the barrel of the "Pepper Grinder", her chair laying up-ended on the ground, and the girl herself staring at the unnoticed camera and the monitor that just spoke to them, ready to shoot both.
"Who are you? How long have you been spying on us?!" she yelled, the weapon never once wavering.
"Hold up, Half-pint," Bunnymund cut in. "That's the bloke that told me 'bout Tenenbaum. He wants to help us."
"How do we know that, Aster?" she asked, not taking her eyes off the camera. "How do we know that he's not a double agent for Ryan or Atlas?"
"You don't," he replied evenly. "Looks like you're just going to have to take a leap of faith and see where my instructions take you and your friends, Ms. Liddell. From what I've seen and heard of you so far, you seem more than capable of escaping any ambush I set up, and of hunting me down if I do betray you."
"Alice," Fae added, laying a hand on the girl's shoulder. "He's the reason that we're even here at all. He's the one who found us, saw that we were good people, and brought us together to stand against Rapture's corruption. We trust him."
Hearing the others confirm this, Alice lowered the Grinder, which vanished without a sound. "Very well, I will take your word on him, for now. I care not for those who feel the need to hide behind a mask, whether it be an actual mask, or a camera. Would he at least have the decency of giving us his name?"
"I cannot disclose my name at the present time, Ms. Liddell," he replied, "but I can provide you with a codename. Feel free to call me, 'The Man in the Moon', or 'MiM' for short."
The illustration of a cow jumping over a smiling moon brightened on the Guardians' screen as though in affirmation.
That...was a long one. It's hard to write a good story without a lot of words. I hope you all enjoyed this new chapter of Alice's adventures in Rapture. I thank Scorpiofreak for her role in proofreading this story, for deciding to become WonderShock's co-writer, and because I haven't mentioned her in my author's notes in a long while. Feel free to tell me what you thought of this chapter in a review or PM, along with any ideas or suggestions. Have a great day, and happy writing everyone!