A/N: Well, here we are, ladies and gentlemen - the penultimate chapter. The second-to-last instalment. I'm immensely grateful for all of you who viewed, reviewed, favourited and followed, and I hope this chapter lives up to the standard I've set so far.
So without further ado, the latest chapter: read, review, and above all, enjoy!
Disclaimer: the Bioshock series is not mine. Also, I must note that in this chapter, I have made use of some of the early concept art for the game as inspiration - again, none of which belongs to me.
As with most things in the possibility space, the phenomenon of Constants and Variables applied to the Vigors: some differences could be found in how they were acquired and when, but the overall roster of Vigors remained the same in almost every world they appeared in.
However, as with all things, there were outliers: just like the unusual incarnations of myself that appeared at the Baptism, just like the wildly-differing Columbias documented so far, there were a few Vigors that existed beyond the pattern of Constants.
Much like the Preachers and other unique specialists, these Vigors only appeared in very rare dimensions where the original product line was either expanded or altered in some way – most commonly because Jeremiah Fink's researchers managed the herculean task of isolating additional Vigor phenomena, albeit only after direct threats against their families.
Given that the New Vigors were often much more powerful and far more exotic than their mainstream cousins (not to mention more useful) the worlds in which they appeared were permanently transformed by the arrival of the new product line. In many cases, Columbia was so thoroughly altered that the Luteces had no need to resolve the situation, usually because I'd ended up becoming a casualty of whatever Vigor-fuelled disaster had befallen Comstock's kingdom. In a rare few cases, the city itself vanished from the sky long before Booker ever arrived.
Bearing this in mind, most of these Vigors didn't have long histories or extensive documentation; even their worlds of origin are a mystery, if only because Fink wasn't interested in researching the phenomena behind his new products before releasing them to the public – another reason why so many of these Vigors resulted in disaster. Even now that the Luteces have begun their own attempts to track down and research these worlds of origin, there is still so much about the phenomena they spawned that remains unknown.
Even I don't know everything about the New Vigors and the iterations of Columbia that produced them, for beyond the reach of Constants and Variables, my insight into the memories of the long-erased city grows indistinct unless I focus all my willpower. In the past three years of dedicated research, I've only been able to unearth a grand total of six. Who knows? Perhaps there are more out there, lost in the fog of dimensional memory.
As such, I can't offer up the same depth and breadth of information I have in previous chapters, only a collection of short histories – a few vivid, fleeting tales of these remote possibilities.
Websmith might very well have been one of Jeremiah Fink's worst ideas, even compared to some of its mainstream counterparts – if only because they'd been advertised and sold in the days before Fink's madness had reached terminal proportions. Putting aside its flaws in combat and the notorious pitfalls in marketing, it remains a perfect example of the one lesson in business studies that Fink evidently never learned: just because you can market a product doesn't necessarily mean you should.
Another mimicry of Rapture's Insect Swarm, Websmith allowed users to summon spiders to attack their enemies and craft cobweb structures at their direction. Having learned his lesson (for probably the only time in his entire life) from Murder of Crows, Fink bypassed his usual pattern of selling the Vigor to the military, and instead rushed it through to the civilian market.
Unfortunately, marketing it for home defence turned out to be a flawed premise: given that spiders generally can't fly, Websmith lacked its predecessor's range and speed, allowing braver foes to simply crush the oncoming tide of spiders under their feet. And while the paralytic venom of the spiders proved lethal in large doses and the fear inherent in their massed assault proved a powerful psychological deterrent, the fact that they were easily stymied by a precipice less than three feet wide proved insurmountable. And while the spiders' ability to craft detailed astonishingly durable structures of out silk was impressive, its utility did little to attract customers – especially once they noticed the flickering visions of urticating hairs appearing on the users' fingers.
Spiders were not a marketable product as far as Columbia's populace was concerned: Websmith terrified them, especially when it came to public demonstrations. The marketing surrounding the new Vigor didn't help, least of all the container design: an enormous spider engulfing the bottle with its legs, the sight alone was guaranteed to induce shudders of fear, as was the product symbol – a menacing crimson spider sitting at the heart of a web. In the end, Fink was grumpily forced to remove the product from the market due to lack of sales and sell it to the military in order to recoup his losses.
In the end, Websmith finally found its niche as an instrument of torture: Comstock's inquisitors loved it, delighting in the terrified expressions of their victims as the spiders flowed over them in their thousands. Oftentimes, they didn't even need to arrange a bite, instead preferring to simply chock their victims' mouths open and send the spiders pouring inside. And as Vox Populi arrests skyrocketed, Websmith was soon accepted in torture chambers all over Columbia, from the interrogation rooms of the Bull House to the "exclusive suites" hidden under the Good Time Club.
Unfortunately, the popularity of the Vigor encouraged addiction, and addiction brought on Websmith's rather grisly long-term symptoms. Within a week, professional interrogators all over the city began exhibiting distinctive shifts in behaviour: asocial tendencies, an unusual craving for raw meat, extreme territoriality, and even attempts to bring their prisoners home with them. Many manifested patches of rough hair, subtle changes in height and build, curious wriggling shapes under their clothes, barely-perceptible malformations of the jaw, and inexplicable facial sores that looked uncannily like eyes.
Soon, disappearances across Columbia prompted a massive investigation, and though the clues often led to a Vigor-junkie interrogator, the trail invariably went cold before detectives could learn the whole story: with their ability to scale sheer walls and gum up skyline rails, the newly-dubbed "Websmithies" easily escaped the investigators. Even the best efforts of the Zealots of the Lady turned up little – in part because their crows usually ended up getting eaten by the suspects.
Eventually, a police inspector managed to track down a Websmith junkie's nest, and brought back troubling news: according to his testimony the one-room apartment had been all but hidden beneath thick sheets of silken webbing, dotted with the heavily-cocooned bodies of several missing persons reported throughout Columbia. Most had already been eaten, but a few of these unfortunate victims were still alive.
The reason for this didn't become apparent until about two weeks later, when perhaps a hundred of these captives abruptly reappeared on the front doorsteps of their homes and businesses, paralysed bit seemingly unharmed. That evening, every single hospital unlucky enough to be sheltering a victim was struck by a sudden infestation of enormous spiders: having hatched from eggs laid inside the returned victim and eaten the unfortunate paralytics alive from within, they burst forth and began hunting for prey, maturing rapidly in the days that followed.
It wasn't until fleeing witnesses reported a plague of eight-legged children feasting on infants in the maternity ward that the scale of the nightmare truly became apparent, and by then, the spiders were already fit enough to leave the hospitals. Soon after, their parents arrived on the scene to take charge of the situation: within a matter of hours, an army of over five hundred juvenile Websmithies was marching to war.
Initially, the Founders appeared to have the upper hand, having superior numbers and greater technology. But the first-generation Websmithies maintained human intellects, and as their offspring matured, they grew more intelligent: give sufficient training, they could operate the airships, the guns, even the factories… and for every Founder they captured, five more Websmithies were born. Combined with their gift for stealth – an almost unheard-of ability among Vigor-Junkies – they had everything they need to devour Columbia from within. Even Comstock's supposed gift for prophecy proved ineffectual: having accepted the pattern of Constants witnessed through the Tears as his fate, the appearance of a foe he hadn't predicted caught him completely off-guard, and the medical hazards of the Tears made it impossible for him to study the future again.
Less than a year after their war had begun, the Prophet's semi-liquefied body was put on display in Victory Square, and Fink was publically devoured. With nowhere to go except a humiliating retreat to the Sodom Below, the armed forced surrendered, allowing the Websmithies to begin remaking Columbia in their image: a vast airborne farm for human cattle.
And as for what happened to me… well, what use would spiders have for Comstock's messiah? Once they'd figured out a way to catch Songbird in their webs, they crossed to Monument Island and did away with the Lamb of Columba – not by violence or even by torture. Instead, in a final act of desecration committed against the Founders' myths, they tied me to a chair and forced so much Websmith Vigor down my throat that not even my powers could protect me against the ensuing mutations.
They made me one of them.
I sometimes wonder if the Luteces tried to send Booker after me in this timeline, if Robert's optimism drove him to continue the experiment in the hope that my father might be able to rescue me from myself. In outlying dimensions such as these, there are limits to what I've been able to see, so I can only ask or guess, but whatever the case, my counterpart certainly doesn't remember meeting Booker – or eating him for that matter – and I suspect that the Luteces will never tell me the answer.
The Peacemaker Vigor was unusual by Fink MFG standards: unlike almost every other Vigor in the original product line, it had no direct offensive capability, not even the reflective power of Return to Sender or the delayed-action effect of Possession. Essentially, it was the one of the rare few nonlethal weapons in Columbia's arsenal:
It allowed users to pacify multiple opponents with a pulse of telepathic energy that effectively disabled their will to fight, leaving them effectively helpless for several minutes. For good measure, the telepathy bestowed upon users often allowed them to direct and control the afflicted for a time, and even gauge exactly when the pacifying effect would finally wear off. In contrast to its more violent counterparts, Peacemaker couldn't be used to force its targets to inflict harm upon themselves or their allies, essentially serving as a pacifistic cousin of sorts to Possession.
Immediately sold to the military and the police force, it proved an immediate success: violent arrests became a thing of the past, and the Vigor proved so effective at extracting confessions that normal methods and even the Possession Vigor were all but outmoded. Peacemaker soon became the perfect means of dispersing protestors, to the point that the Vox Populi were rendered seemingly powerless in their efforts to rally the poor against the Founders. Even rebellions among the military were easily smothered: in this dimension, Cornelius Slate's mutiny never got as far as the Hall of Heroes.
Before long, it was extended to the civilian market, immediately recognized by its distinctive dove-shaped bottle and "chained pistol" logo. Doctors throughout Columbia were licenced to wield the Vigor as a sedative: some used it merely to calm violent patients, while others used it as a less-addictive substitute for morphine. In some cases, it was even used to help soothe nervous personalities and stress-induced disorders, for the euphoria that followed a Peacemaker high lingered for many hours after initial exposures. Even the rage and pain of the Handymen seemed quelled by Peacemaker.
But it didn't last.
For once however, the catastrophe that occurred wasn't due to Vigor addiction or even the simple matter of its discovery; indeed, Fink had been more inclined to study its effects, Peacemaker might have become a permanent boon to the city.
The problem was a simple matter of excess: frequent targets of Peacemaker gradually developed a tolerance to its effects, requiring a more powerful dose of energy in order to maintain effectiveness; telepathic control became less reliable as well, and over time, the euphoria that followed a pulse of Peacemaker gradually soured into a bitter resentfulness that often gave way to anger.
Suddenly deprived of a perfect means of pacifying the Vox, the Founders panicked: soon after, it became accepted practice for police and soldiers to double-dose their targets with additional pulses of Peacemaker, just to make sure they remained under control. If anything, this only allowed the targets to develop further tolerances, requiring even higher dosages – along with further double-dosing.
The end came one chilly November evening when police were called to the scene of a violent protest rally in Finkton. Believing they were witnessing the start of a Vox Populi uprising, police officers armed with Peacemaker bombarded the crowds with the highest possible doses of pacifying telepathy they could muster, hoping against hope that they could suppress "them dirty Vox" before the rioting began. But after weeks of being exposed to Peacemaker at previous gatherings, the crowd not only resisted the calming impulse, but actually grew more violent. Foolishly, the police tried again – and what ensued what nothing short of cataclysmic.
The minds of the crowd rejected Peacemaker on every level, their minds warping permanently under the influence of the Vigor: anger escalated to unreasoning brutality, and hatred accelerated until not even the vaguest annoyance escaped violent retribution. Worst of all, the telepathy of Peacemaker intercepted this madness… and began transmitting it outwards: officer by officer, district by district, the rejection syndrome spread. Anyone who'd been touched by Peacemaker degenerated into unstoppable rage… and by now, that included the entire adult population of Finkton, several hundred formerly-neurotic citizens, an entire battalion of Columbia's military, most of the Vigor Junkies in Fink's employ, and every Handyman currently in existence.
Even the Vox Populi rebellion of the mainstream timelines couldn't match the fury of those who'd rejected Peacemaker: books were shredded, windows were smashed, corpses were reduced to a carpet of thick red mulch; machinery was destroyed regardless of its intended purpose, buildings were either burnt down or blown up, and every unaffected individual who had earned the disfavour of these madmen was brutally murdered. Worse still, as violent as they were, the rejectors were still intelligent enough to operate machinery: within hours of the first outbreak, a ragtag fleet of air taxis, tugboats and warships had taken to the air with the sole purpose of spreading the carnage as far as possible.
Not long afterwards, Father Comstock was drowned in his own baptismal font by his former acolytes, a full year before Booker would have arrived in Columbia.
Elsewhere, Fink – who'd made regular use of Peacemaker to enforce his will in situations where Possession proved too clumsy for his purposes – was brutally castrated, flayed and finally dismembered by a vengeful mob of his female secretaries.
And with so much animosity centred on the Founders, it wasn't long before I became a target, and even Songbird couldn't stop the improvised flotilla that attacked Monument Island – not once the Handymen ganged up on him. I spent the final terrified minutes of my life struggling to open a Tear and escape, but with the Siphon still suppressing my powers, my efforts were in vain. In the end, I could only stare helplessly as my last fleeting glimpses of a world beyond my Tower flickered before my eyes – until the very moment that the Handymen tore through the Tower's foundations and sent me plummeting to my death.
With the last remnant of the Founders' society dead, the rejectors turned on one another in a frenzy of airship collisions, brutal man-on-machine melees, and full-scale brawls on the deck of Comstock's flagship. By the time the last remaining rejector had died of his injuries, there were less than a hundred people left alive in the entire city, and with their government and religion destroyed almost down to the foundations, they had very little reason to remain in Columbia; most simply fled the city to live out the rest of their lives as recluses in the Sodom Below, their spirits broken.
Those who remained behind had no ability to work the city's machines, much less repair the damage done by the rioting. Within a year, the Lutece field generators had already begun to fail due to lack of maintenance, and in the months that followed, the city was quite literally falling apart; by 1918, the last remnants of Columbia had plummeted into the North Atlantic.
King Brawn was an immediate success story in both the military and civilian markets, a triumph in the combined fields of armaments and personal fitness. Another attempt at replicating one of Rapture's wonder-products – in this case the SportsBoost gene tonic – this was one of the rare few that actually worked: essentially, it offered users a temporary upgrade to their strength, stamina and overall musculature.
It was first sold to Columbia's military, who were immediately impressed by its combat applications: on top of being able to erupt into sculptured colossi of muscle at will, users easily shrugged off shotgun blasts to the face without even flinching, and commonly demonstrated strength sufficient to punch through a concrete wall and tear through solid steel with their bare hands. A few even managed to survive one-on-one bouts with Handymen.
Enthused by the response, Fink decided to have King Brawn sold on the civilian market as well, complete with a container in the shape of a buff muscle-man, just to drive home the bodily perfection the Vigor offered: thanks to the beach culture of Battleship Bay and the new craze of bodybuilding, it quickly acquired a vast client base of image-obsessed men desperate to impress their friends and prospective romantic partners. Even the side-effects proved attractive, often surrounding users with phantasmal images of the herculean muscles they would grow if they continued using the Vigor.
Unfortunately, its successes were only temporary: as with most Vigors, King Brawn had been rushed onto the market without any form of testing, but in most cases this didn't prove to be a problem until the long-term side-effects appeared; however, this Vigor possessed a hidden flaw that became obvious within a week of its arrival in civilian stores. Put simply, its cost in salts beggared the reserves of most users as soon as they'd finished their first dose.
Up until then, human reserves of Vigorous Salts had been easy to replenish thanks to the Luteces' work in isolating common sources of Salts and synthesizing its purified variant. However, King Brawn required more Salts than any other Vigor before it, and nothing could replenish a user's Salts at acceptable rates short of lugging an entire tank of it around.
And then, a corporal who'd taken an experimental dose of King Brawn the previous week complained of stomach pains and inexplicable hunger during a raid on a suspected Vox Populi safehouse; minutes later, the soldier was found kneeling over the corpse of a freshly-killed guerrilla, soaked up to his elbows in blood, his mouth full of half-chewed meat. It took almost the entire platoon to subdue the newly-discovered cannibal, plus a head-on collision with a troop carrier ship to keep him unconscious. When questioned, the unfortunate corporal reported that he'd only regained his ability to used King Brawn at the moment he'd tasted human flesh.
Devout, upstanding Founders though they were, the army's commanders realized that the new Vigor was a tactical advantage they couldn't easily do without, especially given that King Brawn had been released during a time of increased Vox Populi activity – a time of great unrest suspected to be the runup to a full-scale revolution. So, despite their misgivings, they not only allowed the corporal to go free, but went so far as to spread what they'd learned to other King Brawn users. For good measure, they also had the cannibals stationed to the most violent zones in the escalating conflict, ensuring that their powers would be regularly fuelled with the bodies of the dead.
Needless to say, Comstock was never made aware of the cannibals, nor was Fink – who was more than happy to allow civilian users to waste their salaries on entire six-packs of Salt if it meant keeping their perfect muscles. In fact, the civilian "Muscle-Men" might never have realized the truth if it hadn't been for a few talkative army privates with a few too many drinks on hand. To most, the notion of cannibalism just to fuel their powers would have been unthinkable, but the confidence King Brawn instilled was almost too intoxicating to resist. Before long, serial-killings began breaking out across Columbia's quieter districts, the perpetrators returning to Battleship Bay the following weekend with muscles bigger than ever.
And then the Vox Populi discovered the truth as well, and everything began spiralling out of control: realizing that their efforts only fuelled their tormentors, the Vox refused to engage, instead stealing several batches of King Brawn and dosing their soldiers with it. And with starvation and crime rife in Finkton, there were plenty of bodies to go around. Unfortunately, as the Vigor's long-term side-effects set in and the confidence of the Muscle-Men expanded, they became increasingly difficult to command – and when the inevitable Vox Populi uprising occurred, the advantage lay with Muscle-Men on all sides of the conflict.
In the aftermath, the once-mighty theocracy and its deadly opponent were left in control of only of handful of Columbia's districts, now known as the Sanctuary Regions: the Founders retained Town Centre, Monument Island, and Comstock House; the Vox controlled Emporia, numerous residential districts, and what little remained of Finkton. Neither side could claim a victory, for the war had not only left the city's greatest manufacturing district in ruins, but it had allowed the Muscle-Men to claim more than a third of Columbia for their own. With Battleship Bay as their base of operations, the Vigor-addled brutes regularly launched assaults on the Founders and Vox, carrying off men, women, and additional supplies of King Brawn. Most of the captives would simply be killed and eaten, but a few would be made to join the Muscle-Man tribes slowly conquering the city from within.
In the abandoned districts that lay between the Sanctuary Regions, Muscle-Men roamed freely, playing amidst the ruins of Columbia's technology and feasting on anyone desperate enough to cross these barren on foot. By now, the long-term side-effects had become apparent: bloodthirsty, vainglorious and barely sentient, they were easily distinguished by their long, talon-shaped fingers, lipless needle-toothed grins, and simian gaits. Emaciated in build and clad in oversized rags, they attacked from the shadows with vicious hit-and-run attacks until they tasted human flesh, whereupon they swelled to gorilla-like proportions and attacked head-on.
Ironically, this reality emerged as one of the few outliers that still abided by a rough pattern of Constants and Variables: Booker was still sent in to rescue me – only this time, he had to contend with attacks by rapacious Muscle-Men on top of the attempts by the Founders and the Vox to break their stalemate.
But that's a story for another day.
Green Thumb was one of the few Vigors never even remotely considered for military usage, and with good reason: it was a tool that sometimes functioned as a novelty, and little else. Unfortunately, it also turned out to be lasting proof that just about anything Fink marketed ended up becoming unimaginably dangerous.
Put simply, it allowed users to control plants, to enhance or stymie their growth at will. At most, it could be used to manipulate flora into performing almost human-like motions, even to direct vines and stems into specific forms, but that was the limit… or so Fink believed.
The profits Green Thumb ushered in were only fair-to-middling, but because it offered significant utility value to gardeners all over the city, those profits remained consistently stable. In fact, the biggest client base for this Vigor was none other than the horticulturists at the New Garden of Eden, for despite the not-unjustified suspicion held towards Vigors, the ability to weed lawns by thought alone proved too attractive to resist. For almost five months, Green Thumb's mushroom-shaped bottles were ubiquitous throughout the greenhouses and parks of Columbia, as were the "Sowers" who used them – easily recognized by the occasional green tinge to their hair and the distinctly wooden feel to their handshakes.
And then, as all things did in Columbia sooner or later, everything went wrong.
It began with an unexpected bout of "illness" among the city's Sowers, one that lasted no longer than a single day. From professional groundskeepers to hobbyist horticulturists, all recovered and returned to work with no ill effects. If anything, they seemed happier than usual – quite conspicuously so, for none of them ever seemed to stop smiling; even growers of black market produce down in the depths of Finkton seemed unaccountably happy. They also appeared more sociable as well, prone to long handshakes, bear-hugs, and as many kisses as they could get away with; they even developed a habit of cooking for friends and loved ones – salads and other vegetable dishes being a common feature – recommending that the recipients share the leftovers with as many people as possible. Vast banquets became common for the Founder elite, courtesy of their devoted gardeners. Even Comstock and Fink soon became the recipients of a platter or two of roast vegetables, and though the generosity did sound a few alarms, food tasters detected nothing amiss.
One week after eating this sumptuous repast, Comstock took to the podium in Victory Square for a public sermon, screamed loud enough to be heard on the other side of Emporia, and then all but burst open as a large oak tree suddenly erupted from his body.
More than half of the citizens who attended that fateful sermon never left the square: the seedlings that had been germinating within them took root long before they could start running, with trees, ferns, shrubs, and even grasses sprouting uncontrollably from their paralysed bodies and burrowing deep into the concrete. Beyond the square, buildings shook and crumbled as newborn trees tore free from the bodies of their hosts, their vast roots crushing everything in their path, until all of Emporia lay in ruins, its crumbling homes and despoiled facades now serving as the foundation of a vast district-wide forest. Any survivors attempting to flee the carnage were intercepted at the gondola station by the Sowers, who were more than happy to incorporate the terrified citizens into their gardens on a more direct basis.
From one end of Columbia to the next, anyone who'd been touched by the Sowers, anyone who'd partaken of the food they offered became a fresh growth of plantlife: even smog-choked Finkton soon erupted with greenery, the once-monumental chimneys and smokestacks crumbling as trees conquered the factories from within and sent their branches soaring a thousand feet into the air, until at last the once-infamous golden statue of Fink vanished beneath the canopy.
None could halt the growth of the plants, especially once the Sowers arrived on the scene: soldiers collapsed into rolling green fields of grass; Motorized Patriots were crushed into scrap metal by the roots of trees; even the mighty Handymen suddenly collapsed as seedlings took root in their remaining organs, dismantling them from within. The Firemen enjoyed a few brief successes, but ultimately Columbia's airborne nature worked against them, allowing the Green Thumb addicts to swiftly force their opponents quite literally over the edge and into the Atlantic Ocean.
Within a matter of days, Columbia had become a forest, and the only form of fauna left alive in the entire city were pollinating insects – the only form of life that the Sowers would permit. Just to make sure that no opposition remained in their new Eden, however, they sent a fast cloud of parasitic spores floating through the air in the direction of Monument Island. My incarnation in that world didn't even have time to panic: all she could do was wonder in confusion at the sound of Songbird dropping out of the sky – before the first creeper tore through her skin.
Most disturbingly of all, the unfortunate men, women and children who'd fuelled all this new growth were not actually dead – or even unconscious. Indeed, they remained fully aware of their condition, their nerves and senses extended through every single plant that had been grown from them, a few even managing to sprout rudimentary faces from tree-trunks – the mouths always open in silent screams. The Sowers paid little attention, and merely went on watering and fertilizing the plants, clucking maternally over the growing plants as if they were children, even as real children writhed in agony beneath the newly-formed soil.
Eventually, the Garden of Columbia left the air entirely, the Sowers gradually piloting it deep into the Amazon Rainforest, where it remained until Booker and I finally erased Columbia from the multiverse.
Masquerade was in many ways an exemplar among Vigors, a cross-section of everything that made the product line extraordinary, dangerous, and utterly stupid. It presented powers thought impossible, it was catapulted onto the market before anyone could research possible side-effects, it was sold to the military to rousing successes, it was made publically available without anyone considering the hazards, and its true potential wasn't realized until it was too late.
During its time on the market, Masquerade eclipsed just about every single other Vigor in Columbia's history in sheer popularity, mainly due to its value in the fields of utility and fashion, but also due to its uniqueness: by nature, products such as these transformed the user both immediately and over time, but Masquerade was probably the only example of a shapeshifting Vigor.
As long as the Vigor was active, users could alter their bodies in whatever way they pleased: they could become perfect doppelgangers of friends and neighbours, they could sculpt their physiques into visions of beautify unknown to Columbia, or they could warp their bodies into living weapons – shaping every limb into an instrument of murder. And there was much more that could be done with Masquerade, but nobody realized this until much later.
Of course, the obvious elephant in the room was completely overlooked. After all, Fink had already failed to take into account the fact that members of the Vox Populi would be able to partake of the "Divine Gift" of the Vigor as readily as any white citizen without divine punishment. The fact that Masquerade could make perceptions of race absolutely meaningless slipped Fink's mind entirely.
Columbia's military made extensive use of Masquerade in the universes where it appeared, but only in combat: despite its many applications in covert activity, commanders refused to allow its use in espionage against the Vox Populi; to do so would have required their men to take on the features of Black or Irish citizens, and that would have been a permanent stain on the honour of any Columbian soldier. Instead, they were content to allow the Vigor-users among their ranks to charge the enemy head-on, defended only by improbably thick hides and handheld shields of bone and muscle.
Eager as always to profit off civilian buyers, Fink made Masquerade available to the general public with great aplomb, advertising it as a cosmetic accessory. Having formulated the product two whole years before syphilis and cocaine left him too ill to function, the robber baron was in his element, and crafted a marketing campaign that easily outshone any of his previous work – in part because this time, Fink actually had a Vigor with non-combat applications and a genuinely appealing angle to offer customers. This time, instead trying to exploit the public's barely-existent need for home defence, he instead targeted something far more widespread in Columbian society and much more lucrative: vanity.
With its carnival mask logo and bottle modelled on the figure of a bal masque reveller in full costume, everything about Masquerade was designed to evoke beauty, elegance, and mystery; the advertising posters took the motif even further, often featuring lurid before-and-after sketches of dowdy spinsters transforming themselves into beauties to rival Helen of Troy. And though preachers continued to emphasize the traditional virtues of temperance and humility, few could resist the lure of Fink's advertising campaign. In the end, Founder hypocrisy won out over traditional mistrust of the new, and Masquerade quickly became a bestseller.
For perhaps three months, Columbian society couldn't get enough of the new Vigor. Having made themselves into their own personal vision of Adonis or Aphrodite, fashionable young men and women rarely missed a chance to show off their "Masquerade bodies", with visits to Battleship Bay and the fashionable cafes of Emporia becoming almost a daily occurrence for the dandies and damsels of the Columbian upper crust; hundreds of Silver Eagles were squandered on stocks of Masquerade, and thousands more were spent on maintaining supplies of Salts. Nor was it restricted to the younger generations, for vanity knew no limits of age: older customers were more than happy to pay in order to recapture their youthful looks, and male pattern baldness easily filled the company coffers a dozen times over.
Eventually, Masquerade became a means of entertainment as well: a popular parlour game in Columbian high society was "the game of masks," in which two Masquers tried to see which of them could take on the most ludicrous form. And once it became clear that the only limits of Masquerade were that of the user's imagination, Fink began staging the Concerts of Shape, where professional Masquers delighted the crowds with ostentatious displays of transformation, warping from human to animal, from inanimate object to machine: experienced performers could even take on the shapes of Handymen and small airships.
And then the Vox Populi got hold of it, and suddenly the elephant in the room became visible; the backlash was nothing short of astonishing, as was the realization of the disaster looming on the horizon. With no way of detecting the shapeshifters among them, Vox infiltrates roamed freely throughout Columbian society, committing sabotage, bombing runs, and even assassinations. Almost a quarter of Comstock's inner circle were killed that month, and nothing could be done to stop the death toll… up until Fink, intent on exploiting the situation for every last penny he could wring from it, began spreading a rumour claiming that experienced Masquers had the power to recognize others of their kind on sight – a spectacular feat of mendacity that skyrocketed Fink MFG's profits in almost every social strata capable of regularly purchasing Vigors.
For once in the possibility space, Fink had gotten exactly what he'd always wanted: a means of perfectly mimicking the successes of Rapture. Not only had he found a utility product that could sell almost as well as any Plasmid, not only had he orchestrated a marketing campaign that could bypass the societal strictures that kept Vigors from being a success on par with ADAM, but he'd even found a conflict which he could exploit just as readily as Frank Fontaine had exploited the Rapture Civil War.
Unfortunately, the mimicry proved to be a little too close for comfort: just as vanity and fear inspired the people of Rapture to disregard the negative symptoms of splicing, fear of the Vox Populi drove the citizens of Columbia to overlook or deliberately ignore the long-term side effects of Masquerade. As long as the Vox were still perceived as a threat, nobody minded that hands occasionally became hooves, or that skin occasionally turned cold and scaly, or that people sometimes woke up to find that they'd been shapeshifting in their sleep; as long as they were private and concealable, they were of secondary interest compared to the Vox. Nobody minded that long-term Masquers became increasingly reluctant to return to their natural forms; after all, their natural forms were no longer safe. And it certainly didn't seem to matter that Masquers seemed afraid to remain alone for any significant period of time; after all, groups offered safety, and who cared if handshakes and hugs began to feel more like merging than anything else?
Then one day, the symptoms were no longer private.
Without warning, Masquers began losing control in public: respectable gentlemen suddenly shrank down into their oversized clothes and emerged as squeaking hordes of plague rats; elegant ladies of the social stratosphere mooed in horror as their finely-sculpted bodies bulged out of shape, and struggled to escape the limelight on legs that were already forcing them onto all fours; soldiers writhed in agony as they erupted out of their uniforms, suddenly more gorilla than human; parents unwillingly took on the forms of their own children, dwindling back into adolescence before the horrified eyes of their sons and daughters – who were already becoming the bogeymen they'd seen in their nightmares; even the Vox infiltrators that the public had feared so ardently were helpless to resist the symptoms, dissolving into flocks of doves so swiftly that few of them even had time to react.
And the transformations didn't stop there: no sooner had they completed the transition to their new forms, the afflicted began to change again, faster and faster until none of them retained a solid form for longer than five seconds at a time. Unable to stop themselves, the Masquers oozed and rippled down the streets of Columbia in vast mobs, their bodies shifting wildly from old to young, from white to black, from human to animal and back again as they frantically searched the city for anyone who might be able to help them.
But nobody could help them: Masquerade had become so ubiquitous throughout Columbian society that only a handful of citizens remained unaltered, most commonly the Handymen and Vigor-junkies of Columbia's military. Even Finkton hadn't been spared the plague, many of the poorest inhabitants having joined the Vox Populi solely for the chance to enjoy walking unseen among the Founders. Soon, Comstock and few remaining government officials left untouched by the disaster found themselves effectively alone in a city that no longer responded to their commands, with only the brutes of Fink MFG maintaining tenuous control of their defences.
And then, the symptoms reached their final phase: drawn by an instinct they couldn't explain, the Masquers began to congregate in downtown Emporia, shapeless beings from all over Columbia suddenly united; then, they began to melt. No longer able to maintain physical cohesion under the onslaught of constant transformation, their bodies collapsed into gelatinous protoplasm and began to slowly merge into a vast lake of undulating slime, broken only by the occasional appendage manifested by the viscous mass – an arm, a face, a fanged maw. Most disturbingly of all, the Masquers no longer appeared to be suffering: even from a distance, the few remaining survivors could quite clearly tell that the lake appeared to be moaning in ecstasy.
And as it oozed after them, its protean mass instantly restructuring itself into forms better adapted to pursuit, they heard it whispering with a million different voices:
"Embrace shapelessness."
"Accept our gift."
"Drink of the Vigor, and you can be like us."
"Join us."
Needless to say, a few unaltered humans were no match for the Masquer collective, and after years of pointless suffering, none of the Handymen retained the will to fight on behalf of a dead city; even Songbird didn't stand a chance against an enemy that didn't have bones to crush or flesh to tear. Fortunately, I ended up as collateral damage of the collective's battle with Songbird, and was never assimilated into its mass; nor did the shapeless being learn anything of Tears or the Lutece portal, so the multiverse at least remained outside its ambitions.
However, it had Columbia all to itself, and that was bad enough: three days after the last survivor had dissolved into giggling protoplasm following an intravenous feast of Masquerade, the city began a slow descent towards the Sodom Below, ultimately landing just off the coast of Maine.
The apocalypse began two hours later.
Father Time offered something few Vigors ever could: a glimpse of a Columbia where Fink recovered his sanity, and not only achieved everything he'd wanted from the Vigor product line, but designs unknown to his mainstream counterpart. In most universes, Fink was undoubtedly a narcissist, a bully, an elitist and a robber baron, but baronage proved the limits of his ambitions; he never sought the Prophet's throne or aspired to rule anything other than his own little corner of the city, remaining perfectly content as Comstock's right-hand-man so long as he was allowed to leech as much money and influence as he could from the Founders. In worlds where Father Time was formulated, however, Jeremiah Fink became something else entirely.
One of the strangest and most powerful Vigors ever formulated, Father Time allowed users to control the flow of time: to speed it up, slow it down, to rewind it, and even to pause it – for as long as the user's Salt levels could sustain the pause, at any rate. Indeed, the only thing the Vigor wasn't able to do was allow for actual time travel, to the Luteces' great relief.
At first, it seemed as though Father Time would follow the usual pattern of being released first to the military and then to the general public with all the extravagance peculiar to Fink MFG's marketing spiels: advertisements had already been designed and printed by the hundredfold, featuring displays of cosmetic time reversal, demonstrations of the Vigor's applications around the house, even fanciful illustrations of harried professionals using it to arrive at work on time – often replete with slogans like "Turn Back The Clock With Father Time!" "Father Time Can Make Those Dull Days Fly By!" "Father Time: Make The Merry Moments Linger!" Fink had even approved a design for the bottle – a gilded hourglass, with the neck occupied by the Vigor's logo of a spectral hand winding a watch. Within two months of the Vigor's discover and formulation, company factories were already churning out thousands of them in preparation for filling and over-the-counter sale.
And then Jeremiah Fink suffered a stroke.
He survived, but was left paralysed from the waist down, and even the most optimistic diagnoses held little hope for the great robber baron: neurosyphilis, cocaine, alcohol abuse and a high-pressure lifestyle had already taken their toll on him, and the overexcitement caused by the discovery of new Vigors had pushed his health past all reasonable limits. At the age of fifty-two, death seemed all but guaranteed for the corporate maverick.
Just when it seemed as though this iteration of Fink would be dead a full year before Daisy Fitzroy could assassinate him, one of his doctors happened to notice a prototype advertisement for Father Time left out on his patient's desk, and suggested that perhaps the new Vigor could be used to cure Fink's apoplexy. Of course, because of the dangers associated with Father Time, it took perhaps a week of additional training before the most advanced of Fink's recent test subjects – a man affectionately codenamed "The Timekeeper" – was able to perform the procedure, but eventually, the new Vigor was put to its first practical application outside of a lab. And to the surprise of everyone, it worked.
Somehow, the Timekeeper not only managed to reverse the damage and nothing else, somehow erasing the effects of syphilis, cocaine, alcohol and stress while leaving the rest of Fink's brain effectively untouched. Fink rose from his sickbed a changed man, his mind clear of addiction and dementia for the first time in years; as his diary later observed, he finally realized the scope of the mistakes he'd made over the last few years, and at long last understood the fact that his business had to change dramatically if he ever hoped to retain his wealth and power – and increase it.
Those who hoped that a cured Fink might be prove a kinder master ultimately hoped in vain: the gentleman who left the heavily-guarded sickroom that day might have recovered his sanity, but he was still in possession all the greed and ambition that had characterized his days in Columbia – and that avarice and hunger was now compounded by a desire to make up for lost time.
Fink's first move was to shut down the mass-marketing for Father Time, ordering the ad campaign scrapped and all stocks of the product itself kept under lock and key. The new Vigor was too powerful to be given to the military and the public so cavalierly, he reasoned, not with the risk of theft by the Vox Populi looming so near.
Instead, Father Time was to be made the exclusive domain of a small but highly-trained force of experts: dubbed "Timekeepers" after his beloved test subject-turned-physician, these specialists were to provide the Columbian public with a wide variety of chronokinetic services on a pay-per-use basis, but only with Fink's explicit permission. No longer would Fink MFG have its most powerful products turned against it in the same way that Possession and Shock Jockey had in the past (the former of which was swiftly removed from the market under Fink's new edict). Thus, Father Time emerged as likely the only member of the new Vigor product line to possess its own official specialist.
Secondly, the Timekeepers-to-be were put through a rigorous testing procedure in which they were infused, trained, and placed under observation, just to make sure that the new Vigor-specialists weren't prone to any of the more troublesome side-effects that their lesser counterparts suffered from. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, it turned out that the symptoms were easily the subtlest of any Vigor, merely inducing a profound loss of identity and self-direction among the Timekeepers, effectively rendering them down into living forces of nature without personality or free will. They proved so quiescent that Fink was able to make them his servants merely by applying what he'd learned of indoctrination techniques so far. Just to be safe, however, they were carefully monitored just in case any new developments emerged.
Thirdly, Fink put his new servants to good use in ensuring his own longevity: in collaboration with his physicians, the Timekeepers rejuvenated Fink into his early thirties, pruned away any remaining illnesses dealt by age and poor lifestyle choices, and ultimately ensured that the robber baron was primed and ready for the next stage of his plan.
And then, in the move that would prove to be Fink's masterstroke, he had two of his Timekeepers rejuvenate Comstock himself; under the robber baron's supervision, they cured him of his cancer, undid much of the accelerated aging inflicted on him by Tear radiation, and promised to remain by his side at all times so that no assassin could ever slay him permanently. This had been intended to be both a boon and an unspoken threat on Fink's behalf, a means of demonstrating just how much the Prophet owed to him, and an implication that all those blessings could be taken away if gratitude was not in evidence.
However, Fink needn't have gone so far: the rejuvenation alone had taken the wind out of Comstock's sails. Having believed for so long and so fervently that he'd been given visions of the future through divine providence, the knowledge that he'd been wrong – that cancer would never claim him and the signs of God's "love" could be erased with a wave of a hand – left Comstock's confidence dashed. If what he'd seen was incorrect, could his prophecy of the Lamb be wrong as well? Could his dream of a purified world have been based on a falsehood? Buckling under the weight of thoughts he could no longer ignore, the fallen Prophet sank into a deep depression – one that only made him more pliable in the long run: at Fink's insistence, he gradually surrendered control of Columbia to the offices of Fink MFG; for the sake of appearances, he was still publically recognized as the head of the city's theocratic government, but behind the scenes, he was little more than Jeremiah Fink's marionette.
With Comstock firmly under the company thumb, Fink was given powers that even his mainstream counterpart couldn't have dreamed of. Among other things, the plans for the Sodom Below were scrapped: Fink did good business with the surface world, and had no intention of ruining future ventures with "the earthly governments." Though the city's theocratic façade required Fink to keep me around, from then on, he only used me as a means of producing more Vigors; and on top of assigning me a Timekeeper for my own protection and longevity, he also began plans for a breeding program, just to see if it was possible to expand Vigor production with another "miracle child."
Then, at long last, the Timekeepers were unveiled to the public in a grand exhibition. In contrast to military Vigor-specialists, these new showmen were dressed comparatively sedately: other than the immaculate white overcoats and top hats they wore, the only sign of ostentation about them were the gilded hourglass bottles of Father Time they kept chained to their belts. Nonetheless, their powers were on display throughout – reassembling broken glass, reviving dead flowers, and even stopping bullets in mid-air.
At the same exhibition, the Timekeepers' list of commissioned services was formally bulletined for the first time: if elderly citizens wished to recover their youth, they could be rejuvenated – for a significant fee; if the terminally ill or wounded needed treatment no physical could provide, the Timekeepers could restore them to full health – in exchange for an exorbitant sum; if construction or transportation needed to be sped up, the Timekeepers could fastforward time and have it done in a matter of minutes – so long as the appropriate payments were lodged to Fink MFG. Eternal youth, perfect health and instantaneous convenience were all within reach of the average citizen, so long as they had the money to pay for it. Those who couldn't afford the prices immediately were set up with a payment plan that would have them indebted to Fink for the rest of their lives.
As before, many citizens were unsettled by the powers on display, worrying that the new services the Timekeepers offered might not fit with traditional Columbian values. Ultimately, though, the benefits were too great for even these upstanding Christians to resist. Columbia had been built on a foundation of dishonesty and corruption, and a few token reassurances from Comstock were all they needed to accept the Timekeepers.
Whilst commercial Vigor-specialists such as these went about their unearthly trade around the highest strata of the city, Fink secretly had a squadron of off-the-books Timekeepers sent into Finkton to root out the Vox Populi once and for all. With a few well-placed bribes and threats – combined with the Vigor-specialists' ability to stop time – isolating the resistance movement was a simple task. Within a day and a half, every last member of the Vox Populi was rounded up and imprisoned without a single casualty incurred on the behalf of the Timekeepers.
Days later, Daisy Fitzroy and her lieutenants were executed before an audience of jeering spectators… but unknown to most of that audience, none of them remained dead for long: Fink, having long since shed the worst of his ostentation (but not all, admittedly), was determined not to waste precious resources, and cheerfully funnelled the resurrected Vox into experiments to learn new applications for Father Time.
Eventually, after a month of aging the Vox by thousands of years, regressing them into infancy, trapping them in endless loops of torture and death, or just leaving them paused in time but still conscience, the Timekeepers discovered – to Fink's delight – a means of perfectly brainwashing future Fink employees: by selectively regressing different parts of their brains, they were able to leave the Vox just intelligent enough to follow orders and operate machinery, while at the same time rendering them childishly dependent on the guidance of their superiors. Now armed a means of guaranteeing total obedience and naïve adherence to his mythological pantheon of animals, Fink had everything he needed to transform the inhabitants of Finkton beyond recognition; within a matter of weeks, every last resident of the slums had been rendered down into near-mindless slaves, and any basis for future rebellion had been lost forever.
With this done, Fink then extended his reach to the upper classes. Even here, there were occasionally rebels, bohemians, radicals and sympathizers with the plight of the Black and Irish populace. However, these could not be dealt with so simply as their Vox counterparts – not without drawing complaint from fellow members of their class; instead, Fink established a unique system of rehabilitation. For the rebellious teenagers and other impetuous youth, he had the Timekeepers set up a secret "Raise 'Em Right This Time" service: parents unable to control their sons and daughters would be extended an offer to correct their behaviour permanently, namely by having the offending youths regressed back to an age in which they could be tutored more effectively – "tutored" being the polite euphemism for "traumatized." From there, the re-educated children could be restored to their original age and returned to their parents… or they could be left to grow up again in as slow and painful a manner as possible, just to make sure the lesson took.
Older and more sophisticated radicals required a far gentler touch: a generous offer would be extended to them, offering certain incentives in return for their silence; if they refused, a Timekeeper would be sent after them. The following day, newspapers reported the tragic but accidental death of the offending radicals. Soon after such announcements, Columbia's orphanages invariably welcomed a new consignment of unwanted children into their ranks.
And there were darker acts committed, either by Fink's design or with his permission: entertainers found themselves trapped in endless temporal loops, doomed to repeat the same performance for as long as the audience enjoyed it; police interrogations became so brutal that suspects were often killed outright – and then brought back by the Timekeeper in attendance for another round of torture; office workers were imprisoned at their desks for months on end, only to discover that no time at all had passed outside their departments; doting parents unwilling to see their beloved children grow up and leave the nest could simply have them regressed back to infancy and raised again – as many times as they could pay for it; more possessive parents had certain rooms of their houses infused with temporal fields to prevent their sons and daughters from aging at all, preserving them like flies in amber for as long as they could be imprisoned inside their nurseries. For families who wanted more children on an immediate basis, pregnancies could pass in less than an hour and begin again just as quickly… and though Columbia's stance on women's rights was astonishingly progressive by the standards of the time, Fink's new shadow government was more than willing to look the other way if a paying customer wanted the pregnancies to continue against the mother's wishes.
There were even prisons maintained by the Timekeepers, nightmarish penitentiaries where inmates were condemned to live out their sentences as bicentennial ancients, trapped in deteriorating, barely-mobile bodies and left in conditions designed to leave them in agony – freezing in concrete cells, tumbling down flights of stairs, and more often than not left soaking in their own faeces. A few particularly twisted penitentiaries did the reverse, and instead had prisoners regressed to as young as four years old, doomed to spend their days on menial labour in worse-than-workhouse conditions, and their nights in labyrinthine complexes specifically designed to bring out the very worst in childhood nightmares. The very worst of them, the Fink Institute Of Reformation, incorporated all of these atrocities - and worse.
And eventually, the Columbia-wide business grew so prosperous that Fink was able to expand his ties with the Sodom Below, and begin making deals with several prominent companies throughout the surface world, offering eternal youth to wealthy businessmen in exchange for difficult-to-acquire resources. In 1921, this bargain was extended to government officials, and perhaps two years later, Columbia opened diplomatic relations with the Sodom Below. In exchange for the services it could offer to the governments of the world, the city was allowed to remain independent – a "mercenary state." The true nature of these services remained unknown to most of the world, just as the pact between Columbia and the "serpent of nations" remained unknown to the citizens of Fink's airborne dominion.
By the 1950s, Jeremiah Fink was the wealthiest businessman on Earth.
By 1984, he was effectively president of the world in all but name, his influence over governments, corporations and even world religions allowing him to manipulate the world in almost any way he pleased.
Needless to say, iterations of this reality where the Luteces chose to interfere were astronomically rare: Booker wouldn't have stood a chance against the Timekeepers in most variations, and even direct aid from the Luteces wouldn't have done much good against an enemy that could undo virtually any victory they achieve.
The only circumstances in which Rosalind and Robert did decide to pit my father against Fink's new Columbia usually involved an unexpected turn of the tide: in realities such as these, the attempt to intimidate Comstock had gone wrong, instead prompting him to declare Fink a heretic and a blasphemer. As a result, a civil war ignited between the Prophet and the robber baron – one that only became more protracted once Comstock was able to capture a stockpile of Father Time and create his own Timekeepers.
As such, it was only once the two had been forced into a temporary stalemate that the Luteces felt safe in sending Booker Dewitt to Columbia in their latest attempt to rescue me… and though the old Constants and Variables had returned, this proved to be one of the strangest journeys any version of Booker had experienced.
In the temporal tug-of-war that had overtaken the city, Columbia had been distorted into a patchwork of warped timezones and bizarre chronokinetic phenomena: the Finkton factories and the slums below technically existed in two different iterations across the city, one of which Comstock had claimed as his own in order to fuel his war effort; businesses on Harmony Lane randomly flickered in and out of existence, often taking unsuspecting customers with them; clouds flowed backwards over Town Centre, wind sweeping the rosebushes in reverse and stormclouds inhaling raindrops from the streets; people who had yet to exist emerged from the waters of the Garden Of New Eden, warping between infancy and old age and back again; the Hall of Heroes often took unsuspecting guests on joyrides through the time-space continuum, offering them visions of the very places the exhibits portrayed.
Even the faction headquarters weren't safe: Fink's offices became a twisted paradise where youth was instantly bestowed on any man or woman who entered, where executives spent their days in a orgiastic haze of lust, drugs and merciless depravity; by contrast, Comstock House became a stultified, lifeless temple to stagnation, where time never passed and scars from the outside world were enshrined as holy relics… and Monument Island, a contested region constantly fought over by warring armies of Timekeepers, had become a wild mosaic of frozen time zones and narrow safety corridors through the madness.
And between the major zones, bubbles of random time blossomed over the rooftops of the residential districts, across the beaches of Battleship Bay, throughout Soldier's Field, and even in the sculptured boulevards of Emporia. Anyone engulfed by these bubbles was subjected to the brief but startling vagaries of random chronokinesis – aging, regressing, freezing and duplicating at random – and often attracted their fair share of gamblers, thrillseekers and drunks interested in seeing what would happened if they stepped inside one.
Booker had to travel quite extensively through these areas, and changed so extensively that it was a marvel that I was still able to recognize him by the end of our journey – especially once our tinkering with dimensional physics accidentally undid the Vox Populi's brainwashing. On the upside, it did mean that Booker didn't have to worry about being recognized quite so often, though it did result in a few amusing moments where I had to carry his now-oversized gear for him until he normalized.
In the end, the Columbia of the Timekeepers was erased from the multiverse like all the others… but not before one iteration of Booker and I happened to notice something rather unusual during the Vox Populi uprising, just before Fink was assassinated. Happening to arrive at his office a little earlier than in other variations, we found him hunched over a jerry-rigged Lutece portal, almost identical to the one that Comstock had used to look into the possibility space. At first, I thought he was trying to flee through it, but as the robber baron struggled to calibrate the machines, it soon became clear that his aim was not escape, but communication.
"Come on," he ranted furiously, as the gunshots of the advancing Vox echoed closer and closer. "Speak to me! You spoke to Comstock long before he met that maladjusted little whore of a scientist, long before he even thought of getting into politics! He said he only heard your voice through this damnable contraption once, but once is enough as far as I'm concerned: answer me! Tell me how to get out of this madness! I did everything right and it still went wrong! Give me a way out of this! SPEAK TO ME!"
Then the portal sparked to life, just long enough for a Tear to open – only for a few seconds, but enough for a voice to ripple across the divide between realities.
"My words are only for my worshippers," it whispered. "You are not among them. But fear not. All will hear my voice in time…"
A/N: Up next... the epilogue.