Author's Notes: Hey everyone! I'm SO sorry for the wait for this chapter! I could explain why the wait was so long…but I do that plenty in the closing author's notes.

As always, NO SPOILERS in your reviews!

Here's the twenty-ninth chapter of "Total Drama Raptured": In the House of Upside Down


The Tech Geek had never known such levels of pleasure were possible as he basked in the endless energy surging within his meek body from the recent addition of ADAM. Whatever terror and dread he had felt after the initial rush had long since been removed. His mouth was the largest and silliest looking smile it could be while his eyes were unblinking with a twinkling of bliss shining within their widened light blue centers. He knew what it was like to be in Heaven, to have unshakeable and unbreakable peace.

"Cody! Cody! Cod-you know what, screw this! Snap out of it, dumb ass!" Noah shouted impatiently as he shook the other male of the Total Drama quartette by the shoulders, rocking him back and forth.

Slowly the euphoric haze over the Tech Geek's gaze fled, leaving a much more layered and softened expression in its wake. Cody started to slowly look around, as if seeing the ruin of Rapture for the first time. The previously almost cartoony grin shrank, his mouth now a small and neutral frown that was ever so subtly being pulled downward. As Cody did so, he felt a great shame growing and writhing within him like a swarm of octopi.

"C-Cody?" Noah asked, a little weirded out by the Tech Geek's previously almost inhuman facial expressions. "Are you there? Are you still stuck in la-la-land?"

"I am so fucking high right now!" Cody answered without any sense of thought.

"Fan-fucking-tastic," Noah groaned sarcastically.

"W-wait-wait, wait, I-I think I'm starting to come down."

"Well, that's something at least." Noah said, his tone and expression only half-doubting. "So, what's it like being high on ADAM? What drug is it the most similar to? Heron? Crack? Meth? Low-grade beaver tranquilizers?"

"How do you know what being high on any of those things are like?" Courtney asked.

"I read about them."

"I-I…I don't know what those are like…but-but I-I'm sure they are nothing like what I just felt…or what I saw and did," Cody said, looking as if he was basking in some horrible awe, like he was looking at a evil alien god with features inherently wrong.

"Saw and did?" Gwen asked with a cocked eyebrow, an expression she had perfected over the years. "Cody, you haven't moved since you didn't harvest that Little Sister. You've been standing there with a dazed look on your face. You haven't done anything."

Cody simply shook his head back and forth slowly with a glum look on his face. "You're wrong, Gwen. I-I've seen-I've done thi-things…you wouldn't believe."

Everyone was struck by the seemingly passive but unfaltering look on Cody's face. He almost looked shell-shocked, like some who had seen into the depths of Hell itself.

"Tenenbaum's playing ya for a sap." Atlas said, his voice speaking through the radio. "Those things may look like wee little girls, but looks don't make it so. You'll need all the ADAM ya can get to survive."

The Tech Geek grabbed the radio and spoke into it, his voice soft yet firm and also tired, "I don't regret my choice, Atlas."

"Boyo…" The Irishmen sighed, trying to understand the Tech Geek's decision but failing. There was a brief pause, followed by another sigh. "Well…what's done is done. 'N there ain't no point in beatin' a dead 'orse, now is there?"

"No, there's not."

"'N can I assume that you'll "save" any other Little Sisters that you'll come across?" Atlas asked, adding unintentional condescension to the word "save".

"Yes."

A long sigh was the Irishman's only reply. Nothing more was said on the subject.

"So…asking the obvious," Gwen began after a few moments, partly to break the uncertain silence, "how do we get any of the ADAM Cody just got?"

"Well, people can get ADAM by either drinkin' the foul stuff down like it was good whiskey or just absorbin' it in the skin. 'N since Cody's got all the ADAM inside 'im, I'd suggest against the first option. So that leaves the later. Luckily for you, there's an easy way to exchange ADAM through the skin. Simply put, all ya gotta do is hold hands."

Everyone looked at each other in confusion. Finally, someone said what they were all thinking when they Noah asked, "Atlas, are you fucking serious?"

"Aye. Trust me, boyo, I'm just as shocked as you all are. But I ain't pullin' your chain. It turns out that the thickest skin on ya is on your palm. Who'd 'ave guessed that one, eh?"

"Why does thickness matter?"

"'Cause the skin at any less thickness can't transfer ADAM 'tween people, Noah. I 'aven't the foggiest as to why that is…but that is 'ow it is."

"I guess after all the crazy shit we've seen, this shouldn't surprise me too much."

"Aye, boyo, aye." Atlas responded with a chuckle.

"Uh, Atlas," Courtney said, speaking up, "I have another question. If Cody has the ADAM for all of us in him, and we each would need 80 ADAM to be equal, how can we know if we've all gotten the same amount?"

"Ah, a good question. Well…there ain't no real way to know. Again, I'm sorry to say but I don't 'ave much to tell ya. All I got is that people on ADAM just said they knew 'ow much ADAM they 'ad given. Take that with a grain of salt, naturally, but it's all I've got. Ya'll are just gonna 'ave to trust Cody to give ya all the same amount."

While it was obvious that Courtney didn't like that answer, she bit her tongue, for once. Instead of acknowledging or protesting that fact, she asked, "So who's going first?"

"I'll go first." Noah said, as he started walking his way towards the Tech Geek.

"Why are you so eager?" Courtney asked, with her tone caught halfway between crudely questioning and quasi-concerned.

"Because if we are all going to have to do this anyway, I'd rather get it over with. The Band-Aid principle, and all that." The Bookworm explained as he got next to Cody. He started to reach out his hand, but then stopped half way and looked at the two girls. "If I hear so much as one syllable about me and Cody holding hands, I'll gut you like a fish!"

Noah's instincts proved to be valid, as he already saw Gwen starting to raise a finger with a small smirk on her face, no doubt about to make some joke about his alleged homosexuality even in the brief space of time between his statements. She stopped herself, though her repressed grin said she was still saying it on the inside. Courtney lightly chuckled at the display, and that made Noah feel slightly better…slightly.

Not wasting any more time, eager to get this over with for multiple reasons, Noah's hand clasped Cody's. Shortly afterwards, the meek white fingers unhooked from his tan ones.

The direct shot of ADAM hit the backs of his legs first, and then the back of his neck. Before Noah could question why he felt it in such unrelated areas of his body, he felt something else. Whatever it was, he felt it as it transformed into a spreading wave of relaxation slackening the muscles away from the bones so that he seemed to float without outlines, like lying in warm salt water. It was ineffably soothing. As this relaxing wave spread through his tissues, the cynical bookworm suddenly felt less cynical; all at once, all of that bitterness, all of that disappointment and dread, oozed out of him. Rapture no longer seemed like a terrible place, it no longer felt like a decaying tomb. The fears that had coiled around his core since arriving in the underwater city were now all nonsense.

Noah noticed more changes as the ADAM had loosened more than just his fears. His pulse was extremely slackened, but he did not know how many pulses it was beating; his blood pressure was greatly diminished, at least it seemed to be to his touch; then his pulse returned at instances, imperceptibly, before it completely disappeared.

His pupils dilated, suddenly not reacting very well to the dim lights around him. Flares and flashes of blue shone around in front of his eyes. Vivid bolts of green filled the space. The room shook and vibrated with strong motion. The air was charged with raw energy.

His hands became shaky, abrupt, rapid, and uncontrollable as if attempting to pick up anything but having all solid surfaces become swirls of smoke in the surfaces' shapes. Then Noah, amid a skull that was having a harder and harder time developing thoughts, had one. What if it wasn't the surfaces that were becoming swirls of smoke, but him?

The proof was the sensation of the lower part of his body disappearing into nothingness. His feet, which before had felt like blocks of wood, now had no sense of solidness to them. Looking down, Noah saw himself as having no feet and very quickly no knees too.

Going against his usual preferences, the Bookworm showed a warm, sincere smile. The world had changed. The human world he knew, the one that ate away everything that mattered and kept on eating, was swapped with another, one that was vast and timeless. It wasn't a world of hunger and survival, a world of greed and cruelty and despair. It was something else; it was a realm of life, love and warmth turned into indestructible reality. He drifted through that new world, feeling its warmth stretch out within his cellular landscape while his consciousness was a silver ball skittering through a heavenly maze. The urge to allow his consciousness to dissipate in the soothing silence was quite strong.

So strong that Noah gave into it. Looking around the room, he saw the edges of the world soften and felt a resonance coming from beyond the sky blocked by a leaking metal roof, like the intimation of a hovering wind pulsating with energy. The wondrous sense of life and warmth enveloping all things was pleasant in a way that challenged perception. He smiled and smiled as he felt his body disappear, suddenly becoming nothing more than a mind observing with interest in the phases of experience going on within another person.

Deep within his advanced brain, Noah's nerves became further excited and fired on all cylinders, including several that stretched beyond the shielding of his quite big skull. Every sense livened up and every faculty awakened. A sense of vertigo grabbed hold, dizziness held domain. Waves of a higher form of energy broke against his bodiless form.

The rusted metal floor had been tugged from under his feet, like a magician's tablecloth. Something big, without hands, was picking Noah up and shuffling him like a deck of cards. As reality and sensation became pressed and folded and stacked against themselves, Rapture unfolded, melted away. In its place were shapes beyond human mathematics. The Bookworm found himself flying through a realm of splitting space and torn time. A brief lifetime's worth of toxic waste and psychic trauma birthed from limited perceptions were washed away in stronger waves of mystic energy until a kind of transcendental critical mass. The fabric of reality was torn asunder and what had always been hidden behind its imposing shroud was entering center stage, about to be revealed.


Noah was moving so fast that everything became a series of uneasy forms that his mind was too flat to grasp. He tried to close his eyes, but realized that he didn't have any eyes.

Regardless of that trivial detail, the oppressive and abstract gallery gave away to light; radiant, cherubic, and blinding light. It spread out everywhere, leaving nowhere untouched. As he looked onward with eyeless vision, Noah knew if he had eyes, there would be tears. He was not a religious person, he never put much stock in the idea of God or any concept of the afterlife, but at this moment the Bookworm believed in Heaven.

For Noah, at this time, language itself seemed inadequate for description. He tried to name what he was seeing, but mostly the words would not stick with the fantastical images. The same often applied to the emotions that these sights conjured forth.

Noah managed nonetheless to understand some of his feelings that had been unearthed by this transcendent terrain, such as the bittersweet realization that he himself was a "poor little human who has lost his language and doubts and feels sorry for himself."

Even so, he attempted to put names and words to the vast, cosmic images before him.

He saw vast expanse of prehistoric forests infused with vivid emerald bioluminescence, plants and trees that glowed in the kind of green light usually only seen on deep-sea fish. He saw huge red-yellow fruits hanging from their branches, looking so juicy and sweet. He saw gorgeous lakes, shimmering in the flawless sunlight like the mirrors of this Eden. He saw flocks of birds, with the feathers like oscillating crystalline rainbows, which had purples and greens shimmering along the glittering plumage recasting oranges and blues.

His aerial journal passed these pleasant yet primate places, for a more civilized domain. But it was a domain that was growing out of the ground, crafting itself for his arrival. Massive spears and spheres of shining pink glass rise higher and higher into the sky. By means unknown to humankind, vast shapes and designs beyond human imagination formed. As Noah soars far above it, the world formed, looking like a cross between a modern day civilization and the kind of grand optimistic future envisioned on Star Trek.

Everything had a labyrinthine complexity to it, with vast perversions of geometrical laws. Lofty towers torn the clear blue sky like shimmering scalpels of divinely polished marble. Tubular windowed bridges seemed to knit everything together, interconnecting them. Everything had a scale of gigantism and such a level of detail that it was overwhelming. At the center of it all was a square building, with an electric sign proclaiming that it was a bookstore housing every book that had been or would be written. That pleased Noah.

The same went for the scenes playing themselves out in the windows of the buildings. Noah saw families enjoying each other's company. Young lovers offering the other their virginity with awkwardness tinged with eagerness. Elderly couples reflecting on the numerous happy times. Gay girls and guys embracing and kissing their same sex lovers. Friends of all colors, creeds, and credentials simply enjoying their casual camaraderie.

Noah became conscious of the most beautiful singing he had ever heard in his life, high pitched and ethereal, emanating from myriad voices without one standing out too much. These slender staccatos were so high-pitched they verged on humming like operatic angels.

The world as Noah knew it no longer existed. Reality was not distorted; it was dissolved. "Reality" itself seemed to be nothing more than a distant and one-dimensional memory.

A livid watercolor given impossible, sharp richness replaced it. And it was the better of the two options. It was so warm and good!

What Noah was seeing and feeling was so beyond the little box-world he had known. It wasn't the edges of a cold dead universe where any subjective experience is an error in the data, not to be trusted. It wasn't a cruel cosmic indifference to humanity's pursuits.

It was paradise, it was perfection; it was the life that should have been, that could have been, the triumphs and glories of what humanity could reach.

Noah continued to fly in the air, thousands of feet above the earth. Suddenly, the song of angels stopped, and he found himself back on the ground, thinking: 'It can't stop now.'

But it did. And the world noticed its absence. The once pleasant air became charged with a strange current, as it took on a metallic density. As the metallic tinge became heavier, the air grew dreadful, chilled, and yet stifling. Darkness began to seep into the sunny sky.

The universe had changed, and not for the better. It all started to crumble and fall apart.

The once green and lush terrain had been terra-formed into atrocity. Everything had died. All the rich plants sparking like emerald stars had become withered and sickly brown. Leaves fell from the tree branches with great howling sounds. Huge trees toppled over. Wide, largely featureless flats replaced the living grasses on the ground. Their only features came from being drab-hued, barren, ash-ridden, and full of fissures rimmed with ridges of broken rock. It was a landscape that was broken and tumbled. Everything within sight was a huge mass of ash and slag and burned stone and decay.

Noah felt a tremor in the ground beneath him, and he heard or sensed a deep remote rumble as of thunder imprisoned under the now hellish earth. Smoke began to arise. The thick vapors were pouring from the fissures into great rolling clouds like somber ghosts.

The sky opened, revealing itself as charred and bloodied. Massive mountains of black billowed in the form of raging storm clouds and the red light of a dying sun shined. There was a livid red scar across the blackened heavens flaming like a torch. The stars throbbed and fell onto the soil, kicking up many megatons of debris and radiation. Smoldering lightning shimmered. A great roaring wind scattered everything in its path.

Carried on the winds and the fallout of fallen stars was the forces of destruction itself. There was a roar and a great confusion of noise. Fires leaped up from the soil and licked the clouds. The throbbing grew to a great tumult. The skies burst into thunder seared with lightning. Down like lashing whips fell a torrent of black rain. And into the heart of the storm, tearing the clouds asunder, more dying stars came, shooting like flaming bolts, before being caught in the ruin where they crackled, erupted, withered, and went out.

Mountains slid, collapsed and melted. Vast spires of smoke and spouting steams came billowing up until they toppled like an overwhelming wave, and its wild crest curled and came foaming down upon the land. Their impact caused the land to become heaved and cracked, with fire belching upward and the very earth itself shaking in a deafening crash.

The Composite City crumbled into composite shapes as its citizens followed suit. All the wondrous and shining potential of mankind came crashing down in jagged melted pieces. There previously jolly lives had been broken forever as their bodies shattered and bleed.

Then the ground opened. One could not escape. The rivers unfolded like the mouths of blossoms. Movement became penetration. Then the terror grew stronger. Death hovered all around inescapably. Ravenous children and animals of every shape and form laid sick and dying of thirst, their nostrils plunged into the dry earth. All of their bodies were lean, starved, haggard things, all bones and tight-drawn sallow skin. Their flanks lay bare and exposed, and all around arose a canopy of immense sorrows. The angelic singing had been replaced by the feral noises of wild beasts and the dreadful cries of tortured things.

The skinny, stoic teen found it all to be too much. Even he couldn't withstand the despair. His knees buckled under the weight of it all. He did something they hadn't done in years, he cried. He cried and wept like a grandmother watching her grandson dying in agony. He didn't have eyes or tear ducks but the sorrow was too immense to keep inside. His practiced cynicism cracked. The walls that he had built around his heart collapsed. That was when Noah reached his breaking point, when he reached the logical finale of the line of thinking that had guided him through the stygian mire that was simply living.

This was the actual world, and what he had known until then was a crude, opaque copy.

Going against his usual preferences, Noah wanted to save all of them. But he couldn't move. It felt like a blue whale was resting on his body, pressing him down to the earth. And then the earth opened up and Noah, full of heavy despair, fell into the ebony void. The terror of another dimension swept over his other senses.

Though the closest we, as beings with our feet firmly implanted in the physical world, could hope to understand Noah's current state was that he had lost all consciousness, he hadn't. His state wasn't one of delirium or death or deepest slumber, instead it was that delicate state were one is dreaming but doesn't remember or realize that one is dreaming.

After what felt like eons, Noah stopped feeling inertia. Even though he had no means to measure or determine how it was so, the Bookworm knew that he was free of the hideous alien abyss, of the gibbering, phantasmal darkness without color but devoured light.

As Noah stared upward into the darkness, faint lines of light appeared. They grew sharper, more intricate, and burst into brilliant colors. Sounds came from far away, a sound like a waterfall, which grew stronger and stronger until it filled his ears. The sound of rushing water flooded his brain.

He suddenly knew again of the burdens of solidness as he felt his body return, with all its wet and fleshy imperfections made tangible once again. His jaw began to feel numb, and the numbness was moving up to his temples. His body felt like it was in a condition of emergency. His sensations were sharpened, he became aware of his visceral processes to an uncomfortable degree; peristalsis and secretion were going unchecked. He was more sensitive to the air, needing to breath again, which was difficult and instilled in him a dizziness that threatened to overwhelm him. He could hear his blood pumping through his veins and the digestion process turning what little food remained within him into piss and shit, including the mooing screams of the cows that had been made into the tasty grilled beef he ate in Jamaica.

Overhead the faint lines became brighter, and gradually interlaced to form a canopy resembling a geometric mosaic of stained glass. The bright violet hues formed an ever-expanding roof above him. Within this celestial cavern, the Bookworm heard the sound of water grow louder and he could see dim figures engaged in shadowy movements. As his eyes seemed to adjust to the gloom, the moving scene resolved itself into something resembling a huge fun house of horrors, a supernatural carnival of demons.

The sheer number of the creatures, and the eldritch depths of their twistedness, was more than Noah's mind could grasp. So many nonsensical yet horrifying shapes manifested themselves with no concern for trivial concerns like logicalness and possibility. So many of them Noah never would have been able to describe or even observe. But he was capable of figuring out the appearances of the least bizarre and nightmarish of them.

A ghastly leprous frogman leapt into action. A cross-eyed being with mossy stumps and fungi for a head and pointed buckteeth made lovely-dovey eyes. Something with a boar's head for a belly snapped its swine-stomach jaws. A bulbous being screeched out of its three heads with the same voice coming from a head like a lizard's, a head like a stray cat's, and a head like a doll's. Beasts with pyramidal heads on rose-covered, classically proportioned torsos swayed with blue skirts of flesh at their waists. Men wearing long gas masks and tighty-whites walked on legs made of whale jawbones. Naked women with pulpy orange growths upon their purple-skinned shoulders stumbled unwittingly as the cysts opened their mouths and began to bellow like flocks of strangled storks. Male shapes made of the haphazard newsprint of ransom notes stood alongside gossamer feminine outlines filled with the darkening yellow of dying suns to show breasts and hair.

They all felt like a bad joke, but deadly serious, much like life itself in Noah's eyes.

Noah struggled to grasp any of this; no longer able to tell what was real and what wasn't.

All at once, the mob of monsters acted as one, as legion. They charged towards Noah. Acting before the Bookworm could react, they swarmed him and started attacking him. The Cynic began to understand the true nature of pain as claws and jaws and other less worldly appendages left searing pain followed by a outflowing of blood in their wake. Jagged fingers like metal and tentacles covered in acid worked in concert against him. The Bookworm's capable mind had totally forgotten that he was tripping on ADAM, as far as he could tell, everything, as impossible as it should have been, was all too real. The auditory assaults, the visions of geometric designs, and the combat of demons and zoomorphic forms against him were just as grounded as his time on Total Drama Island.

While being attacked, as his body became more bloodied and broken, Noah felt something else. It was warmth, deep inside of him, seemingly untouched by the pain. It was small and weak, barely more than a candle's flame amid a hurricane, but he clung to that like a buoy in the raging sea. Even so, it wasn't enough to compensate for this horror.

When Noah had abandoned all hope, even with the warmth in his chest, the attacks stopped. He, out of dumb instinct, thanked God for the end of his suffering, ignoring that he still had to go through it at all. Somewhere in the back of his mind, that idea sprouted up like a sapling experiencing hyper-growth. And as it did so, the warmth grew a tiny bit.

The sounds of new figures appearing before the bloodied Bookworm returned him to the current situation. Before him now were four beings with the heads of blue jays and the bodies of humans, not unlike the bird-headed gods of ancient Egyptian tomb paintings. With no words or birdcalls between them, the feathered foursome opened their beaks.

At the same time, some golden energy-essence began to float from his chest up to them. As the heavenly light amid this hell entered their opened beaks, their victim felt his body slowly losing whatever warmth it had obtained. His entire body felt like it was being shut down. Although Noah believed himself to be an atheist, he was completely certain that he was not only dying but that the bird headed people had come to take his soul away. While the soul-flow continued from his unimpressive tan chest hidden by his sweater-vest, he was aware that the extremities of my body were growing number and number. He felt his heartbeat was getting more labored, with larger and larger gaps between each new beat. He started to have a harder time keeping his eyes opened to observe this ultimate death.

By now, any lingering hope of escaping his fate had flowed out of Noah like his blood. He was virtually certain he was about to die. He tried to accept his fate, but he couldn't. Even with his bitterness for life, he felt saddened and mad that he was being removed from it. As he felt this way, a lower portion of his brain began to transmit information that confused and horrified beyond his powers of understanding. He felt so cold, so dead.

That feeling only continued as a new horror walked up between the four bird-people. It was a hulking mass of scales that was at least nine feet tall. It was a grinning crocodilian man with cavernous jaws. Without saying a word and showing that sadistic smile, the newest creature primed one of its fists, with five clawed fingers of dark emerald flake. The fist was sent rocketing towards Noah, aimed at his head, to smash it like a melon.

As Noah stared at the mockery of nature whose toothy grin scared him, the warmth flared up in his chest. It was still weak, feeling like it was being forced down, but it was there. He looked down, unable to bear the beast's ugliness anymore. As he did so, the warmth spread. It began to smolder in him, becoming tightened and pure, focused and directed. Riding off of that warmth was vivid anger, anger at this thing, at Rapture, at everything.

The clawed fist came closer to him, moving with alarming speed. Noah hardly noticed.

What had his attention far more was the surging of warmth and wrath within him. He felt himself slipping deeper and deeper into the rage, and he welcomed it. He preferred it. His fists, as limp as they were, shook with tension. His teeth clenched. His unimpressive muscles rippled pure fire and unadulterated rage. He welcomed all the changes as his mind slowly left him, releasing itself from the painful burden that his body was enduring.

Echoing in this second, before his mind fled into unknown terrains of ebony consciousness, it left him a parting gift. Some familiar quotes, two repeated lines from the same poem, which may have been left as uplifting boost or cruel joke, by Dylan Thomas.

'Do not go gentle into that good night.'

The tightened fist of claw and scale was millimeters from the Bookworm's face, determined to force its way all the way through this creature's tan, soft and hairy flesh.

'Rage, rage against the dying of the light.'

But it stopped.

A confused grunt escaped the grinning crocodilian man, who wasn't grinning anymore. Instead his scaly face showed a look of surprise and disbelief at what he saw.

The meek, cowering mass of scale-less flesh and fur had somehow caught and stopped his fist. Despite his limbs being less than half as thick as its, the crocodilian was paused.

The reptilian humanoid's confusion only grew as his prey's body seemed to change before him. The blood that had been streaming along his body started to glow. Crimson light was flickering around the wounds and seeping out just as much as the bodily liquid. Soon Noah's entire body started to cast off a ruby radiance like the luminosity of ADAM.

Noah then slowly lifted his head up, to gaze at the predator with the inversed role now. When he did so, the crocodilian man recoiled with his fist was still caught in Noah's hand. The Bookworm's eyes had vanished, leaving pupils that were white and deathly.

Then it happened. Noah felt the pure raw power lying within unleashed all on its own.

Feeling a surge within him like no other, the Bookworm exploded with raw rage and was consumed by vivid crimson light that blasted the space around him and shined brighter. As the light shined like a sun made of blood, Noah forced his hand holding the clawed fist of his foe forward. The muscles of this reptilian, so massive and obvious, didn't even register to Noah as the scaly limb bent to his whim like a green hardened marshmallow.

"AAAAAAAAAAAHH!"Noah roared, with a voice that sounded like there was another person with a deeper voice shouting at the same time as he was, as he forced the crocodilian man's hand further and further against the arm that it was connected to, never considering when he would-

SNAP! POP!

The arm of the crocodilian man snapped and tore as Noah kept forcing the hand further back. Erupting from the green and scaly limb was a shower of blood, of bright blood. The red stuff flowed like paint from the brush of Jackson Pollock. It wasn't a slow seeping of bodily lubricant, not a passive release caused by injury. It was an angry and expressive spurt of organic pigment infused with unnatural vivacity, emblematic of the Bookworm's visceral explosive rage. It was more undulated chaos and fury than a realistic body fluid.

As that bright blood was spilled, Noah felt the growing energy within increase in power. The rubicund blooming surrounding him increased in its sparkling wine-colored luster. The wounds on his body began to heal and the coldness clinging to him was forced away. In there place was a feeling beyond anything else Noah had ever experienced in his life. It was unlike anything else, even the previously unimaginable highs and lows of his drug-fueled odyssey. His body was still of flesh and blood but it no longer seemed weak. Blood thundered through his veins as a euphoric rush coursed through his very being. Power beyond the understanding of common people flowed through every part of him. His hair stood up bolting upward, like a field of blackened corn surrounded by burgundy. There was a buzzing at his temples, in his lungs, at his groin. Especially at his groin! His hard-on was raging; it was an erection so powerful that it was like discovering the joy of lust all over again as the pulsating of his penis overwhelmed most of his other facilities.

Expect for one. One thing that even the aroused charge couldn't overwhelm was his rage.

The rage manifested itself as the crimson energy surrounding Noah suddenly exploded. A massive blood red pillar of fire and light awoke from the Bookworm and shot upward, filling the entire cavern with a great glare and heat.

Within the epicenter of the eruption stood Noah, black against the glaring crimson pillar, tense, erect, but still as if he had been turned to stone. His glare amid the fire lingered.

He was scarcely more than the shadow of a living thing, a creature now wholly ruined and defeated, though his body was no longer bloodied and broken. And yet he was filled with a hideous lust and rage. The human stood stern, untouchable now by pity or fear.

The Bookworm savored the look of pure horror on the intimidating crocodile man's face. "Wh-what…what are you…?" It asked, terrified, struggling to speak in a human tongue.

Noah, even amid the volcanic rage and matching boner, took a moment to consider this. Given his love of books, he had read so many great quotes to say in this situation. But he found that none of them could do what he believed himself to be justice…aside from one.

Burning in Noah's chest was a wheel of fire. Out of that fire there spoke a commanding voice, a voice that was several attempting to fuse together in an impressive display but not being fully successful, a voice akin to the ancient wrath and vengeance of God.

"I AM BECOME DEATH, THE DESTORYER OF WORLDS!"Noah roared, his voice ringing along the roof and walls of this place, becoming even more like a wrathful god's. With that, Noah lunged at the crocodilian creature. "HYAAAAAAAH!"

He began to move. His feet pushed off the ground, and his whole body rocketed forward. Streaking as a vivid crimson comet, Noah moved fast and hard through this fragile place, this paper world that these previously frightening monsters lived in.

He paid no mind to how he had blasted through the imposing reptilian body of his tormentor. There had been no detectable difference between traveling through the air and its body. He had stuck the beast with the force of many cannonballs and exploded from within its scaly hide amid a shower of shining blood like the chest-bursting offspring from Alien. He doesn't even realize he had stopped moving until he heard several shocked gasps. They were behind him. Had he really fired past all of the monstrosities without trying?

What he noticed more was the sudden sticky dampness surrounding him. From head to toe he was covered in some liquid, his hair was matted, his tan skin faintly glistened in the low light, his clothes were thoroughly stained, and he had lost his hellish red glow. Noah wasn't sure how he realized it but he soon became aware that he was covered in blood, and that he must have resembled a clothed baby fresh from its mother's womb.

Those details were lost as the blood that clung to him vanished, being absorbed within him. As the blood seeped through his skin and sweater-vest, he felt the power return. He saw the crimson filter through which he saw this realm as his hairs stood up on end again. More importantly, the pure rush of a first orgasm, the heroin bliss of a junkie, the ecstasy of ADAM, had electrified his nerves, pleasured his flesh, and silenced everything else.

In his current state, that of the after-glow of a virgin's first climax, Noah's normally capable thinking powers had been dulled to a few small kernels of mental ability. He felt very good. He was furious at these nightmares. Killing them released their blood. He liked the feeling he got from their blood. He wanted more, much more. And he'd get it.

With those thoughts and nothing more, after simply standing there and smiling at them, Noah lunged once again. He was determined to become Death, and that's what he did.

He was a blur of blood and blood light, leaving a gust of death and gore in his wake. His limbs powered by ADAM moved with speed and strength difficult to grasp. It was like the world slowed itself down and morphed itself into a glass world for his consideration. Everything was so slow and so easy to shatter, making his horrific prey the ideal targets. Monstrosity after monstrosity felt the pains of their bodies being torn into gory pieces. Sometimes, some of the beasts with eyes, ranging from the hexagons of flies to the optic gill slits with no earthly equal, caught a brief glimpse of the bringer of their deaths.

Noah's mind was hot with wrath and the memory of evil. All of the countless kinds of cruelty wrought upon him came flashing before his eyes, further fueling his efforts. His heart had become volcanic, restless rivers and sulfurous currents of lava had replaced the blood in Noah's veins. As the lava within him rolled, his wrath grew many times over.

He was no longer merely a teenage boy on a super-drug. He was an erupting volcano! His skin was fire and heat! His veins flowed with the scolding rocky blood of the Earth! His wrath burnt away all! Noah felt like a true demigod contained in a pitiful mortal shell.

Before he had been drifting in an ocean current where nothing seemed real. Now, this psychedelic fever-dream felt all too real, and he was thankful for that. It was real, so wonderfully real. Noah stopped turning all the things that he was feeling inside his head into words. He didn't give the words the dignity of an imagined corporal form. They blew away. Everything else was what he focused on. Everything else just happened.

The future and past no longer mattered to him. There was only the moment. And what a wondrous moment it was. So many delights awaited his eager body.

Every strike resulted in a crimson storm as red lightning bounced off in all directions. Jagged bolts in blood's color fired off, causing random monsters to feel either the sting of severe burns and blisters or the million agonies of exploding into piles of gore and ash. Noah's fists were solid tan storm clouds, effortlessly bringing righteous judgment onto all. They surpassed even the famed lightning bolts of Zeus himself. Noah surpassed Zeus.

Indeed, Noah was a god! But not just any god. He wasn't the wishy-washy Bible God who started out as a small-minded, petty sadist. He wasn't birded-headed Ra, he wasn't cyclopean Odin; he wasn't faceless Allah or the Meek Carpenter or the king of Olympus. He wasn't even Shiva, who's words he had borrowed for his assertion to the crocodilian. Instead, Noah was the new kind of Lord, the only kind that had true power in the world.

The Lord of the Hard-On!

Oh, yes, Noah was hard, so, so, painfully hard.

Every movement, very attack, every thought, caused a surge of raw pleasure to shoot through his shining form. It was like a never-ending series of orgasms made even stronger by being bereft of delusional ideals like love or any deeper emotional connection weighting it down. This was true pleasure; this was true power, this was true hunger!

Noah had never felt so completely hungry as he did at that moment. He closed his eyes, and all he could see was red. He could see the insides of his body, red. The many beasts, red. The previously jet-black cavern, red. The very air he breathed, red. It was all red, an electric, shimmering red, like vivid blood, like ADAM. It made his groin twitch and his mouth salivate. He was so hungry, thirsty and horny. All he could think about was how he wanted to hold onto this wonderful ecstasy. He had so little control that he abandoned himself to a set of instructions that seemed to be coming from outside of himself, from a vague presence that he didn't question or be bothered by.

Attack. Kill. Harvest. Repeat.

As Noah proceeded to do so, the world around him had changed amid the carnage. The qualities of the world's light reminded Noah of those night scenes in movies that are filmed at day by a dark filter; somehow, not really dark, because of them dimly glowing. Everything was slowly changing from pure black to mostly black with some dark red. Even amid the much brighter red of his bloodlust, the Bookworm realized this change.

But of far greater importance were the goal at hand and the creative ways to fulfill it.

Attack. Kill. Harvest. Repeat.

Noah squared off against a two-legged beast that walked like a four-legged beast. It was the size of an elephant but its low-level body had its quasi-human head level with Noah's.

Its body was made off of sections of blue-grey armor separated by purple spaces that brightly popped against their dullness, with about half of that length being a part of the long segmented tail with a magenta scorpion stinger at its end. Its two legs, which bent backwards like those of a praying mantis, were emerald green. Its head was dull grey, in the shape of the fictional Valentine's Day representation of a human heart, with vast peach spaces around the almost beady yellow eyes with pinprick orange irises. Its smiling face was filled of curving teeth the size of a T-Rex's steak knife-like teeth. Its bright red lips were lush, lumpy, and stretching over a foot off the face from the left-hand side, with them glowing in the seductive scarlet glow of ADAM. The scorpion stinger laced tail attempted to attack him. It was effortlessly dodged. Just as easily, the being's tail and two limbs were all snapped off and removed from its body as blood and bone fell everywhere. It was not dead. Realizing this, Noah lifted its head to his, to silently gloat.

The foe spat on Noah, with saliva like neon green sliding down his glowing crimson cheek. The Bookworm sneered as he wiped away the meager assault with his hand, amused by his wounded foe's resolve amid certain defeat. As fast as a blur, he drew his hand back and jabbed his pointer fingernail into the creature's right yellow eye. In and out. In and out. In and out. The beast cried out loudly in severe pain as the petite digit shining like a blade baptized in bloodiest battle gouged out its inhuman cornea. The gory finger probed deeper and deeper into the increasingly vacant eye socket as the eye slid down the foe's grey cheek like a tear stream of yellow candle wax and carroty gems. The monstrous being's depth perception was skewed as the finger left and the fist it was connected to splattered brain chunks like ripe oranges along a floor covered in gore.

Attack. Kill. Harvest. Repeat.

Noah rushed ahead, determined to impale the next foe on his mere fist as well. But then he heard something that his normal human ears would have missed. He quickly ducked.

Something passed by his head and exploded behind him in a vivid flare of golden fire. The ebony floor was seared by streaks of golden glimmering, like polished honey.

Looking upward, the Bookworm saw his attacker, with a fresh swirling globe of buttery blaze waiting in its beak. It was one of the four Egyptian bird-people from earlier. Its three brothers in blood, its birds of a feather, were all hovering around it, also preparing to fire. Noah grinned, he was particularly eager to vanquish these eyesores, remembering what they had attempted to do to him when he was powerless.

After tightening his legs and crouching down, Noah fired up into the air like a crimson comet, unknowingly carrying a few of the foes nearby along with him upward to their doom. Due in part to the distraction of the various bodies shooting up towards them all at once, the bird-people were at a loss. Before any of them could really know what was happening, they felt twin surging pains along their backs, the cold air of the realm piercing them from behind, and themselves crashing down onto the floor in writhing pain. It took them long in their confusion to figure out that Noah had ripped their wings off in mid-air, with him leaping from one to the next as if jumping across stones in a river. The Bookworm savored their confusion and the small amount of blood pouring out of them and into him, before, grinning like a madman, he began stomping on them. Their writhing bodies, made dumb by the unknown feeling of movement without their wings, were flattened and splattered in explosions of gore, gold, and feathers as feet bound by sneakers and sadism pounded away at them like jackhammers in a maddened frenzy.

As he crushed them into plumy pulp, some small bastion of personality amid the buzzing, electrical chaos of Noah's skull had a thought. These things had tried to steal his soul, and had been partially successful. A part of Noah imagined that some globs of golden light would return to him. Whenever metaphysical things were stolen by a foe, defeating them returned them, as if that was an absolute certainty. But they didn't. Only the bloody red of death and ADAM escaped them and entered Noah. While the Bookworm knew he should be a little concerned about not reclaiming his soul, his humanity, it wasn't of importance. The pleasure and power he felt now more than made up for that. This idea was strengthened by the creatures that had been caught up in his ascent falling down around him, like massive raindrops of many technicolor plasmas and mangled limbs. The surge of power and pleasure only made him eager to obtain more and more and more.

Attack! Kill. Harvest. Repeat.

The Bookworm squared off against a being of mainly humanoid shape but with a mouth like a spider's and skin that was a bright purple wielding two long board swords. Before he could blink, Noah ripped off the foe's arms and held its two blades himself.

Before the swordsman could react, he felt his own blades shear through his lean neck, acting like the blades of a scissor closing on a piece of paper. The head shot upward into the featureless skyline of shadows from his shoulders on an arching fount of vivid blood. Below it, the swordsman's body staggered and crumpled drunkenly, refusing to die while the bloody stubs that use to be hands searched for the severed head twenty feet in the air.

Noah swiftly joined it in the air, savoring the look of shock on its inhuman purple face. After a few seconds to marvel at his handiwork, Noah slammed the severed head. It fired off like a cannonball towards a small mob of gathered abominations. They all exploded.

Attack! Kill! Harvest! Repeat!

The tan teen shining like a supernova of blood grabbed the enormous arm of a tall, muscular light blue monster with deer-like antlers, a reddish-brown beard, darker blue marks under his eyes, and a stitch on his forehead that was dressed in a sleeveless white shirt, turquoise pants, and dark purple boots. Keeping the limb as wide as his whole body still with one hand, Noah's other punched the creature's unprotected side. He punched and punched and punched and punched until its cerulean bulk was made into red bloody chunks, until the only solid piece of its chiseled body was the arm that Noah held onto.

ATTACK! Kill! Harvest! Repeat!

A tall, gaunt, grey-skinned humanoid that was naked sans a drooping gasmask charged at the Bookworm like a chimpanzee. Even with its huddled gait, Noah landed a blow on its knee, causing its entire leg to break in half. Its gasmask-covered head was then removed.

ATTACK! KILL! Harvest! Repeat!

A paw swiped at Noah. He effortlessly dodged it, and as he did so the Bookworm observed the creature that had managed to almost catch him off-guard. He first focused on the paw, fully two and a half feet across, and equipped with formidable talons. After it came another paw, and after that came a great black-furred arm, with both paws attached by short forearms. Two pink eyes shone as its barrel-sized body wobbled toward Noah. The eyes jutted two inches from each side, shaded by bony protuberances overgrown with coarse hairs. But the head was chiefly terrible because of the mouth. That mouth had great yellow fangs that ran from the top to the bottom of the head, opening vertically instead of horizontally from where a nose would be to the base of its spine at the back.

Noah held the creature's head-jaw open with ease as he reached into its exposed cranium. After a few seconds of searching blindly, he found something and started to pull on it. Holding the creature's brains in his hand, the Bookworm was rewarded for his patience as he released the beast's head-jaws, causing them to slice its own brain in half.

ATTACK! KILL! HARVEST! Repeat!

A multi-armed being charged Noah with four hands each bearing a long sword whose blades surged with crackling lightning cascading around their curved edges of harsh steel. His form was that of a slightly aged but muscularly toned older man, with a long grey beard. There was a third eye in his forehead. His neck was blue, with what appeared to be the imprints of mighty hands pressed into its flesh. His skin was somewhere between white and tan, his clothing a fifty-fifty spilt between that of the ancient Greeks and that of the ancient inhabitants of India. It was Zeus fused with Shiva, West fused with East. Noah, a by-product of a similar union thanks to his Eastern heritage and his Western development, took particular delight as he rushed towards the false, apocryphal god.

He dodged the blades of bolt, before breaking one over his knee in a bright torrent of energy. In the sightless flash made by the sword's shattering, Noah leapt above the Zeus-Shiva, stood up behind him before he could turn around, and drove his glowing red hand into the white-tan flesh at the base of the being's godly spine. As ichor as golden as honey but as poisonous as acid flowed from the moral wound on the supposedly immortal foe, Noah's shining rubicund fingers curled and twisted something around them. With a violent yank, the hand was removed, with something following it. It looked like a long, branching patchwork of thin Christmas tree lights without any bulbs. But despite that, it still glowed, pulsating with the same cerulean color that the blue bolts of lightning adoring the swords had emitted. As the last link of this bodily chain-patchwork, the Zeus-Shiva fell down, suddenly powerless to move. After all, Noah had just ripped out all of his tendons, what connected muscles to bones and allowed essential powers of motion. Grabbing the crippled god by his hair with one hand, the Bookwork held him there, daggling in helplessness, as he wrapped the shimmering string around his bruised neck.

After being wrapped around the Zeus-Shiva's neck a few times, the noose of tendons was pulled. The throat already bruised and blue became even more so as it was compressed. The supposed god felt rather pathetic ragged gasps escaping his throat while his divine lungs burned. His allegedly superior mind began to fill with very mortal fears and dreads. He tried to resist the strangulation but his efforts were utterly futile. The last thing the Zeus-Shiva saw before slipping into death was Noah's atrocious smile, a curved abyss guarded by teeth shining like bloodied rubies and flashing a savagery of animalistic dimensions, with both illuminated by the hellish light of his slaughter.

Noah had accomplished one of his goals. He had become God.

ATTACK! KILL! HARVEST! REPEAT!

Some legless floating form with a massive, cluttered, and unregularly shaped head made up of many human skulls fused together as a single top slowly crept towards Noah, with a thick vapor rolling off his decaying form in grey miasmas of pestilence and fatalism. As the reaper of this realm approached its prey with its tattered grey robe dragging on the ground as dark as night, several other monsters were exposed to the gas billowing from the passive being, and the second they did so they instantly got sick and rapidly decayed even as they lived, experiencing the pains of decomposing while alive. The Bookworm's meek hands easily held the floating form still with the subtle dangers of that life-draining mist powerless before his might, as he head-butted the creature. Every blow was like a hammer pounding on an anvil, producing a thunderous clang and a shower of sparks. With each new strike, the deformed skull made of many skulls was pressed and hammered until it became a single featureless mass that bled profusely. Noah smiled even more proudly and sadistically as he watched Death itself die before him, as he felt his head hammer the supposedly unconquerable metaphysical force with ease.

Noah had accomplished another one of his goals. He had become Death.

ATTACKKILL! HARVEST! REPEAT!

Suddenly, the already amazing power flowing through him felt like mere magic tricks. Noah found that an even greater feeling was pumping through his body shining of ADAM. More than anything, he was eager to test this new power out for the first time, to find some sorry creatures to end as painfully as possible while getting more ADAM.

He got his wish. He noticed some of the creatures not yet killed looking upward. He did too. He saw black specks starting to slowly drop from the sky by the hundreds. As they got closer, thanks to the endless bright red ADAM glow, Noah got a good look at them. These so-called specks were actually large, shiny, black creatures with stubby pterodactyl-like wings and huge whale-like bodies. Their heads were not visible to him.

The Bookworm focused his will power into his hands, which glowed more brightly. Cascading crimson currents danced around his clenched fists, crackling like thunder. Seconds after forming this electricity out of nowhere, the Bibliophile started using them. He hurled hellish storms towards the descending army of aerial leviathans. Noah's mighty bolts peeled apart their blubbery hides, and caused them to fall to the ground. As they fell, explosions akin to falling stars ruptured the shadowy landscape, spilling seemingly endless gallons of blood, which Noah greedily consumed with savage gusto.

ATTACKKILLHARVEST! REPEAT!

From the falling and fallen carcasses of the great sky-whales came a horde of new foes. They swarmed like a mass of loci taller than humanity. Noah studied the newest threat. They were shocking and uncouth black beings with smooth, oily, whale-like surfaces for skin, with the faint luminousness of that oily covering being the only way to see them, since there bodies were pure black with no other colors present. They had unpleasant horns that curved inward toward each other, bat-wings whose beating made no sound, ugly prehensile paws, and barbed tails that lashed needlessly and disquietingly. Worst of all, instead of faces they had only a suggestive blankness where a face ought to be.

Once again, Noah merely focused harder and bent this reality to his whims. He moved his hands slowly back and forth, producing a lingering glow, which started to shift and grow. It undulated like a river, and grew brighter and brighter like a shining sun. It was fire. Soon the flames fed and fed on each other, slowly become a literal sky being set on fire. He weaved a great firestorm, which he unleashed. The net of crackling energy caught all the remaining foes in the sky, setting them all ablaze as if they were flies in a bug zapper. Millions of smaller bodies fell among their much larger kin, adding even more blood.

ATTACKKILLHARVESTREPEAT!

A sound from his level caused the Bookworm to not stare into the black sky anymore.

A mob charged Noah. He readied himself for the next onslaught but then he paused. He counted ten opponents rushing towards him, bearing clubs made of twisted alien bones and expressions of wrath that would have inspired fear in even the most fearless of men. But that wasn't why Noah paused. He paused because of what these ten beings appeared to be, his family. He saw his mother, father, and eight older siblings all charging him. They were not deformed or monstrous in any way save for the wicket expressions shown. As they ran to him, his family shouted harsh insults and biting comments that would cripple the self-esteem and drive of any person who had loved them.

Noah grinned, unfazed by the threat. These creatures were no different than any of the others he had faced, they were horrible, cowardly, and petty meat sacks filled with what he wanted, with what he would take. With a mere thought, and no hesitation, the closest family member, his third older sister, was turned inside out; her innards made outwards as they splattered on ebony floor with a wet slap. The nine others around eyed the pile of bone, muscle, skin, and blood that was once a daughter or sibling of theirs. Then their gazes went to Noah, who grinned savagery with his teeth flashing like a feral beast.

Nine more humans exploded, with pained shouts bespattering all over like their insides.

The Bookworm climaxed several more times than usual after each fresh murder in rapid succession as he came to known what each of his family members had tasted like as their ADAM-enriched essence flooded his being like a nine-course meal.

ATTACKKILLHARVESTREPEAT!

Noah unleashed the same psychic shockwave, but on a different scale, a dimensional scale. Billions upon billions of monsters suddenly vanished in bursts of viscera and downpours of crimson and haphazard bodily remains. Their death cries, in pitches and languages beyond human ears, cried out all at once before being suddenly silenced. Everything that had once been trying to destroy their human prey had been destroyed.

The Bookworm gazed at what he had created, the battlefield of bloody, dead living things surpassing even the bloodiest of humanity's wars and genocides that stained all in red. The currents of blood and gore and mangled limbs and torn faces reached Noah's knees.

ATTACKKILLHARVESTREPEATATTACKKILLHARVESTREPEATATTACKKILLHARVESTREPEATATTACKKILLHARVESTREPEATATTACKKILLHARVESTREPEAT!

Terrific convulsions shook the nightmare realm as the night began spouting volcanoes that fringed the dark terrain with vivid red pillars of pulsating power and elemental fury. The universe itself was starting to crumble, to rip at the seams, from Noah's raw power.

The scarlet shockwave obliterated everything under its blood-colored aura and flame.

The Destroyer of Worlds smiled. He was content.


The end of the endless monsters and the world defining blood red had radically eased his condition, but it did not prevent Noah from having many additional visions of a more superficial nature. These were confusing, but manageable and enjoyable. He made fabulous journeys at will through distant regions, even into realms outside of the galaxy; created incredible architecture and partied with sardonically grinning demons. He traveled through the suddenly thin veil of time. Before him, the magnificence of plant and animal evolution, hundreds of millions of years of activity, took place on a scale and with a vividness impossible to describe. He saw the dinosaurs turn to ash, and then into birds. He saw a time over ten centuries into the future with technology he couldn't even grasp.

He saw a version of a 1912 where a city floated in the sky over America that was equally confusing, with the Founding Fathers worshipped as prophets, crippled men morphed into hulking and gorilla-gaited monstrosities with a similar vibe to Big Daddies, and a False Shepard seeking atonement as reality itself was torn and opened by his efforts.

The cynical and stoic Bookworm often found himself laughing aloud at the incongruities of his new adventures. Everything washed over him like a gentle wave at great speed.

It was impossible to see and understand everything.

Gradually, the fantastical images began to fade as they continued to fall in front of Noah's vision, like slow and silent snow starting to melt into water mid-descent. The frenzied blood lust that had consumed Noah's core with the vivid passion of a molten planet was just as gently evaporated. There was only serenity now; all defenses fell.

The featureless void he had been floating in started to become less featureless as shapes and colors, however broken and muted they were, started to fill out the space before him. Rapture began to return to him like a developing photograph. He entered his body again.

Despite the lingering caresses of the ADAM high fondling his mind, Noah had returned.

His eyes slowly surveyed the art deco terrain as if seeing it for the first time. He noticed the taste of metal in his mouth, specifically copper. He smelled the reeking decay, the heaving sea of air hammering his nose with the scents of rusted metal and sewer gas. He felt the phantom twinges of his solid body bending to the laws of a reality set in stone.

The Bookworm's emotional state was in flux, conflicted between multiple possibilities. On the one hand, he was happy to be in a place that made more sense, if only by a little bit. Already the previously over detailed recollections of the monstrosities he had seen and the emotions he had felt were starting to fade from his mind, in same way one attempts to remember a dim and formless dream. But on the other hand, he was eyeball deep back into his insecurities and his fears. The tension between the two resulted in a middle ground fairly familiar to the teenager, one of melancholy and disappointment.

The ADAM had spread through his body in an injection of dreams. But now the dreams were gone. He felt a sudden pity for the violated veins and tissues in his body, along with a lingering sense of longing for the ADAM high, while licking his lips a few times.

Noah's dark brown eyes surveyed the landscape and noticed three sights worthy of note, the other three cast members of Total Drama. Cody looked the same as he had before, with him having already experienced what the Bookworm had. But the girls were a different story. Both Courtney and Gwen were still in the tendrils of the ADAM high. Now able to look at it from a distanced perspective, he saw how unnerving being on ADAM appeared. Their beautiful faces appeared to be untouchable by any human emotions. The envelope of personality was gone from both, dissolved by their ADAM-hungry cells. Their faces, either mocha or pale, were blurred and unrecognizable, at the same time shrunken and tumescent. The closest thing to humanity on their faces was how their lips sometimes curved into faint, flickering smiles. The smiles lacked subtlety or humanity, not feeling entirely right.

Seeing that made his conflicted feelings on leaving the ADAM high even stronger. Noah was eager to look away from their faces, finding Courtney's especially painful to watch. He wondered what horrible yet wonderful illusions they were experiencing, yet he had a good idea of what effect they had, as he occasionally saw a faint moistening of their crotches. Were they feeling the sadistic bliss that he had felt? He knew that they were.

"A-Are you okay, Noah?" Cody asked, with a soft voice filled with clashing emotions, no doubt from the same feelings the Bookworm was currently experiencing.

The Bookworm turned to his fellow Geek, and simply stared at him for a few moments. Eventually, Noah found himself able to put his thoughts into words, to sum up the metaphysical odyssey that he had just experienced.

"I am so fucking high right now!"


No one said anything after Gwen and Courtney fell down from their ADAM highs. All of the four teenagers were dealing with emotions too complex and private to talk about. For a few moments, they all just stared at each other. There was no sound until the radio crackled.

"Now that ya'll got some ADAM, ya need to spend it," Atlas' voice said to the teenagers, "If you cross paths with another of 'em Gatherer's Garden machines, make sure ya pick up a new Plasmid or two. That's if the price ain't too dear, of course."

The teens were tempted to ask questions about how you purchased superpowers with genetic currency or how they would be able to determine if they would have enough ADAM for "the price" but they said nothing, still feeling the effects of the ADAM high.

On the other side of the room, was a Gatherer's Garden machine. The teens looked at each other, silently asking if the others were seeing this too. Unable to determine if they had missed that due to the drama that had played itself out when they had entered the cast room, the teenagers noticed that this dispensing machine looked just like the others they had seen. It was very dirty and dark purple in color. On either side was a statue of a grinning little girl that was as tall as Cody was with four mushrooms sprouting from the ground in front of them. The girls and mushrooms were also purple and covered in grime.

As they approached, they heard some lightly rusted gears turning. Though cautious, the teens proceed and noticed that all that had changed was a song filling the air. It was a song sung by a little girl, likely no older than the true age of the seen Little Sister.

"In the Garden we are growin',

"Many changes there'll be flowin'

"If you wanna be amazin',

"See the flowers we've been raisin'!"

The singing was unforced and expressive, containing the natural adorableness and whimsy of a Shirley Temple number. It was oddly pleasant to hear, but it also felt as out of place amid the ruin and decay of Rapture as a flat screen TV would have in 1776.

Ignoring that, they looked at the Gatherer's Garden, and noticed it had a list of Plasmids and Tonics, their prices, and a brief description of each. They all read them silently.


Medical Pavilion Gatherer's Garden Machine Prices:

Health Upgrade: 40 ADAM: Physical Gene Tonic: "One of the bare essentials of Ryan Industries for a reason, this upgrade will increase your body's overall capacity to withstand injury and pain. You'll not only be harder to hurt, but also have a greater pain threshold to boot! Only enough Gene Tonic for one injection!"

EVE Upgrade: 40 ADAM: Physical Gene Tonic: "The other bare essentials of Ryan Industries, EVE Upgrade lives up to its name by making the human body capable of using a additional usage of EVE for any Plasmid! That one added blast of Electro Bolt or Incinerate may be the one that lets you win the day! Only enough Gene Tonic for one injection!"

Enrage: 30 ADAM: Plasmid: "Developed for today's uncertain environment, Enrage will make your victim forget what side he's on, and attack anyone nearby. Just make sure 'anyone' isn't you! Only enough Plasmid for one injection!"

Armored Shell: 10 ADAM: Combat Gene Tonic: "Useful in any hazardous situation, Armored Shell offers fantastic protection against life's bumps and bruises. All piercing and bludgeoning will not affect you by fifteen percent! Don't be a softie - use Armored Shell now! Only enough Gene Tonic for one injection!"

EVE Link: 10 ADAM: Physical Gene Tonic: "Get more out of your First Aid Kits with EVE Link! This revolutionary Gene Tonic causes your body to produce EVE whenever you use First Aid Kits. One Plasmid's shot worth of EVE is generated whenever a First Aid Kit heals you! Doesn't work when using Health Stations! Only enough Gene Tonic for one injection!"


All of the teenagers quickly agreed that the Health Upgrade and EVE Upgrade Tonics were essential, and purchased them as a pair. But that still left the others to consider. And they also agreed to not use all of their ADAM here, in case other and more useful Plasmids or Tonics presented themselves at other Gatherer's Garden machines. While the idea of Enrage was tempting, everyone chose to ignore it, not liking the fact that it might make already dangerous enemies even more threatening. Cody and Noah both purchased EVE Link, liking the idea of replenished Plasmid shots. Gwen also invested in Armored Shell, wanting to be more resistant to harm after her brutal brawl with Steinman. Plus it would only add to the small natural toughness that every new bit of ADAM added. Only Courtney chose to not purchase anything aside from the twin "bare essentials of Ryan Industries" with the justification that she wanted to save the ADAM for later.

Despite some reservations and some doubts, the teens were satisfied with their choices. They noticed a large bulkhead door on the wall to their right, roughly under the balcony that Tenenbaum had been standing on. As they approached it, the door slid upward.

Courtney and Noah walked through it. Cody was following behind them when something grabbed his wrist. Out of instinct, the Tech Geek flinched and started to prepare a Plasmid. However, when he noticed it was Gwen, he instantly relaxed and stopped. Normally, if Gwen had been touching him, Cody would have felt insanely happy. However, given that this was Rapture and she had that same intimating stare fixed at him, he felt anything but. Honestly, he felt more unsure and worried.

After several long feeling seconds, he finally croaked out, "G-Gwen?"

"Cody," The Goth said, with her voice not sounding harsh but not sounding accommodating either. It was as cold and hard as her current facial expression. "I need to know something. Why did you not harvest that Little Sister?"

"W-Why?"

"It doesn't matter!" she harshly spat, "Just fucking tell me!" A second later, after noticing Cody's recoiling, she softly but not warmly added, "Please."

A pause. Cody was so close to spilling out his reasoning for what he had just done, why he might have just doomed them all. He wanted to resist, to not reveal the depths of the naiveté that Gwen had made it quite clear that she detested. He let out a sigh and looked her right in the eyes. The irises were black, too black, that's what he thought to himself. They were so black that his own teal eyes shined in them like the grass or the sky after a week of spring rain. Cody had stared at Gwen's face so many times but it felt like this was the first time he was truly looking at it. He was amazed by what he had found amid its sexy features. There was a piercing, electric intelligence that he had been too stupid to notice before. Those eyes, so beautiful and powerful, saw right through him with absolutely no effort. The Tech Geek had a sudden, very dismaying realization that he had to tell the truth. There was one simple, unavoidable reason for why that was the case.

Gwen was way smarter than him.

"…I did it because of you…"

Cody's words, as fragile as wheat blowing in a gentle breeze, filled the empty room. Amid the silence they sounded like blaring sirens. Pregnant within this quietness of apparent calmness was a maelstrom of insecurities and worries. The Tech Geek winced in anticipation of the Goth's reaction, fearing some loud shouts of shock or some clever yet biting quips. His eyes were shut and his face was scrunched, waiting for the backlash.

But for what felt like several prolonged eons, it never came. Only silence filled the air.

Eventually, when the sheer monotony of the silence overpowered his nervousness, Cody slowly opened his eyes and dared to look at the face of his Gothic crush. As he did so, a part of him wondered if he was still trapped in the hallucinatory grasp of the ADAM. Only that, he thought, could have explained the sight before him.

It was still Gwen, the same person who he had developed such strong feelings for. Her face was the same…but she felt like a different person now. The hardness was gone. The pale fury and steel-like determination blazing in those teal orbs was almost nonexistent. Her eyes didn't convey the same almost freighting indifference and coldness of before, and they didn't show despair or doubt either. They showed something more common, but more striking. Her stare was the mundane stare of a teenage girl deeply confused. Otherwise her face looked the same as always, though he thought, believing it to be some kind of trick, that there was some faint color, in a light pink hue, on her alabaster cheeks.

"W-What?" The Goth asked, her raspy voice sounding unusually soft.

"W-Well…you see…" Cody began, feeling as awkward and silly as a naïve little kid, "I-I saw that Little Sis-that little girl…looking so scared, sobbing…looking at me like I was a splicer…" He then paused, as he looked down at his sneakers. Gwen noticed a very tiny glistening starting to manifest itself around the eyes that were mostly hidden to her. Still looking at the floor, and his feet, the Geek continued, "I was going to do it, you know. I was going to get all the ADAM I could get. I was gonna harvest her. I'm so tired of being scared and weak and useless, Gwen. Even as she was crying…I was going to…to…"

Cody, with his voice starting to sound choked, allowed that sentence to die, not being able to voice the horribleness of what Gwen could easily figure out would have been said. "I-I needed something-anything, to give me the will to do it. I was so desperate. I don't know why I did it…but I looked over at you, thinking that would give me new resolve. But when I looked at you…I thought-I thought…I…" He spoke mournfully to the floor.

"Y-yes?" Gwen asked, trying to keep the anticipation she was feeling out of her voice.

The Tech Geek realized a sigh, as he brought his focus back to Gwen, as he looked into her eyes. "I thought about you…and how you had to be that age once, how you used to be a little girl. That made me think, 'could she be what you are now?' Then, I thought, 'could she grow up to be as smart, tough, resourceful, and beautiful as you are now? Could she make other people happier just by knowing them?'" His lips started to ever so subtly quiver, as the smallest of smiles tugged at the corners of his lips. "Could I really do that? Could I snuff out something, someone, so full of promise?'" His voice cracked a little with a brief gasp to some words, as the small smile tugged a bit harder.

Cody paused again, and as he did so his eyes started to glisten a little more strongly. The corners of his mouth were no longer tugged on; a more melancholic expression took root. "A-and then-then," his voice got a little hoarse, as he swallowed loudly at the same time, "I looked back at her and…and I thought," His unimpressive chest heaved a few times. He closed his eyes and looked back at the floor. A few faint sobs escaped him, resisting the effort he was making to keep it together. "'W-what if that was you, Gwen? What if someone came to you as a little girl…and they-they wanted to…to…'" He stopped abruptly, brought one of his hands to his mouth, and started to quietly sob uncontrollably.

As the Tech Geek heaved and sobbed, the Goth stood there looking completely dumbstruck. Even amid the wonders of Rapture, the sight before her was shocking. Never in a million years could she have imagined that Cody would have done something like that, that he would have shown such bravery and resolve amid so much fear and pain. Even more than that, one thought rung loudly in her mind like a thunderous church bell.

'He-he did that…he was mature and selfless…because of me…'

With that thought guiding her, the previously frozen teenage Goth acted. She placed one hand on Cody's shoulder. A part of her wanted to hug him as he cried, as she had done earlier when he had killed his first splicer. But she didn't. She held her hand there, and patted his shoulder a few times. Even after she patted him, Gwen didn't remove her hand. It was all she could do. What kind of response was truly fitting for this sort of situation?

In addition to that, another reason for Gwen's inaction was the clash within her core that this caused. After almost dying due to a makeshift grenade, she vowed that she would be strong and ruthless in order to survive Rapture, to act as a blunt heated rod of iron. She wanted to keep that fire, that strength, that anger, churning within her; but the vice-like grip of her fury slackened, even if only a little, as she stared at the outpouring of emotion.

Eventually, with her previous distaste for Cody overpowered by her current sympathy for him, the Goth formed what she hoped would be a fitting response.

"C-Cody…I'm very proud of you."

After a few more sobs escaped Cody's lips, he turned his gaze towards his pale crush. His teal eyes were also red. His stare was focused even as it appeared glassy. "R-Really?" He asked, with a tone lightly chocked by sadness, but also something resembling hope.

"Yeah-uh," Gwen said as he nodded, finding her mouth oddly contorting into a small, pleased smirk. Then, as quickly as it appeared, it vanished, as the Goth felt the unfamiliar feeling linked to it. Expressing emotions of most kinds, outside of sarcasm and disgust, usually was something of a trail. For likely about a minute, she just stood there, rubbing her arm as he stared at her. She was struggling to figure out how to express herself further with words without sounding sappy or feeling cheesy.

Eventually, despite her not fully wanting to, she gave Cody a very brief hug instead. Her body tensed up and became rigid, but she was sure this would convey her message well.

The look of shock on the Tech Geek's face proved that this was true. But in more ways than the Goth intended. Cody also noticed how inelastic and harsh Gwen's soft, curvy body felt, how forced the gesture was. And that reminded him of her true thoughts on him…and how low they were. Even amid the long dreamed-of hug, his head titled to the side and moved slightly downward. His eyes look sullen, his cheeks wrinkled, and his mouth fell subtly closer to a frown even as the blush on his face remained intact.

Gwen ended the hug. When she did so, Cody presented a slight smile, for her sake more than his, though exactly why he didn't know. Then the semi-false smile was erased.

"Gwen," he began, starting something he didn't want to do but knew he had to, "I-I…I know you don't like me, even as a friend." He gulped as his voice got a pitch lower, more melancholic. "I, uh, I read your journal while you were out cold…so you don't have to humor me like that." His expression was sad and grim, but not teary-eyed or angry. "You might not like me…but I promise I'll get you out of here. I will." He said with finality.

The Goth stood there in shock. Normally, that reveal about her diary being read would have sent her in a nasty rage. But after the particularly emotional and draining experiences of today, she did nothing. It felt like a meaningless drop of water in the bucket. More than that, she focused on the seriousness on Cody's normally goofy face. His face wasn't the face of a annoying little brother.

"Hey guys! Get a move on already!" Someone called out into the room. Cody and Gwen looked and saw it was Noah, who didn't look pleased at the two taking so goddamn long.

Getting the message, they started to walk towards the door leading from the room. As they did so, the PSA system of Rapture came to life.

"A Rapture reminder: We all make choices, but in the end our choices make us."

As she followed behind the other three teens, Gwen thought something that should have been insane as she felt some unknown heat on her pale cheeks. She focused on Cody.

'For the first time since getting here…I agree with Rapture.'


The journey from the Gatherer's Garden machine was thankfully uneventful. After a short collection of passageways, the teens found themselves in the lobby where their makeshift base camp had been. Seeing the two still working hacked turrets in the distance, with several decent sized piles of slain splicers around them, did help them feel better. But what helped even more was that in a few more minutes they could finally leave Medical Pavilion for good!

The quartette found their steps to be a little livelier…until something appeared that stopped them dead in their tracks.

There was a Big Daddy, walking with a Little Sister traipsed along. The grim golem hefted its large drill as he thundered behind the little girl with slow, heavy footsteps. She was ahead of him, swinging her glowing red ADAM needle in a sweet imitation of her Protector's power drill. But sweet wasn't a word that the teens would ever use to describe either creature. The Big Daddy was especially horrifying, with its large, rusty drill being smeared with blood and other unthinkable things. The Rapture titan lumbered along, moaning a low empty moan that rumbled deep in the back molars of the four teenagers.

The teens all froze up. Despite this being the third time they saw a live Big Daddy, this encounter was by far more terrifying than either of the other two. The main reason for this was because they were so close to the bulky behemoth, there was no thick glass or ocean to divide them from it. And what made it even worse was that one teeny, tiny, little detail about their original perception of the Big Daddy turned out to not be accurate. When seeing it through the glass at the Footlight Theater, they all gauged it as being about as tall as Courtney, the tallest of the four teenagers. As they now knew, that was wrong. It towered over Courtney! While just a guess, they pegged its height as being at least ten feet tall. Its lone metal-gloved hand, on its left arm, swayed as it lumbered, revealing that it was likely as big as their heads, capable of crushing them like melons.

The Little Sister, happily singing some tune to herself, suddenly paused and gasped. "Look Mr. Bubbles!" she chirped gleefully to the dreadful drone that followed behind, "Angels! So many angels!" With her distorted voice sounding like it was on the verge of ecstasy and elation, the Little Sister skipped over to the nearest of many corpses. Once there, she started to needle its bloated belly and harvest ADAM. Wet sounds from the drug's extraction filled the air, and made the teenagers turn away and violently retch.

For whatever reason, as the Little Sister started to harvest the nearest corpse on the pile that had been created by the two turrets they had hacked, the Big Daddy noticed them. Its expressionless helmeted head turned towards them, eight green portholes blindly staring. While remaining just as vacant, the stare changed by becoming a sickly yellow. The teens tensed up at that and as it emitted a sharper, stronger sound; a low warning growl ordering them to not even think of approaching its Little Sister. They all got the message right away. Even the slightly enticing glow of the Little Sister's ADAM needle didn't overpower their intention of not messing with this mighty mechanical monstrosity.

"'Old on there, kiddies," Atlas' voice called from the radio in Gwen's pocket.

After fishing it out and bringing it to her face, the Goth asked, "What is it, Atlas?"

"I'm sure ya'll are ready to move on from this feckin' nightmare but there's somethin' ya gotta do first 'fore leavin' Medical for good. You're ready now."

"Ready for what?"

"It's time to take on one of 'em Big Daddies."

There was a thick, tense silence for several painful seconds.

"WHAT THE FU-!?" Gwen loudly shouted, before abruptly stopping at noticing the cyborg turned towards her for a few seconds before staring off into space once again. "What the fuck are you thinking, Atlas!?" she asked, now harshly whispering into the radio's speaker, "That's a goddamn motherfucking Big Daddy over there, ya know!?"

"I know that, laddy. I know that ain't a leprechaun ova there. I know it won't be easy, but it's the only way to get to the Little Sisters…and the ADAM they carry. Ya gotta do it. That ADAM boost ya'll just got will only take ya so far with all of Rapture after ya."

There was a tense silence following that. It was the result of two great forces fighting within each of the teenagers, the desire avoid fighting a Big Daddy clashing with the knowledge that Atlas was right. Sadly, within each team, that dreaded knowledge won.

"Fan-fucking-tastic," Gwen said in defeat, more or less speaking for the quartette.

"I know its bad, lassy, but it ain't all 'opeless. Ya got a few things workin' for ya."

"Like what?"

"Well, for starters, there's four of ya 'n only one of 'im. He can only target one of ya at time. So when he's going for one of ya, the other three can 'ammer away at 'im!"

"I can't say I like the idea of possibly being the one targeted, but a fair point. What else?"

"You've got two turrets 'ere that can pump him fulla lead 'n distract him for ya. Also, when they get destroyed, they'll make a lil' kaboom that'll damage 'im some more."

"Good, good. Do you have anything else? Any other little uplifting bits of advice?"

"Just one more, dearie. I'd recommend goin' to that creepy clown Vending Machine ya'll hacked earlier in the lobby. You've all got more money rattlin' in your pockets, so why not use it to get yourselves some pretty new bullets 'n EVE hypos, right?"

"That's actually a great idea."

"I tend to 'ave those from time to time." His Irish brogue broke into a light chuckle that spread to the four tense teenagers. "Okay, once ya get the laughs outta your systems, ya should get movin'. Oh, one last thing, when, not if but when, ya kill that big lug, remember to search some pouches on his waist, sometimes they are programmed to gather certain supplies 'fore bein' sent out with their Little Sister. 'N don't worry about the big fella goin' anywhere while your gone. He's gonna stay by his Little Sister till she wants to go, and she won't till she's gone through every stinkin' body there. You'll 'ave plenty of time."

"Oh, truly we are blessed," Gwen said sarcastically with some small mirth before pocketing the radio. After doing so, the small mirth left her as she looked at the others. Looking on the obvious worry and dread etched on their faces mirrored her own. That remained the case as the Little Sister had moved from the previous corpse to the next.

"I feel like we should look for a save point," Cody said without even realizing it, once again wishfully hoping that this epic of derangement and despair was just a video game.

Courtney and Gwen would have rolled their eyes at that statement, if the mechanical monstrosity that shook the very floor they stood on hadn't frozen them in place.

For several minutes, none of the four teens could comply themselves to move or speak. As terrified as the teens had been of facing Steinman, that was sizably dwarfed by the fear they felt at the idea of clashing against this deep sea-diver fit for the bowels of Hell.

Eventually, one of them finally broke the unspoken stalemate that had gripped them.

"All right, let's get going," Noah said, "or we're gonna be late for our certain deaths."

With that, with it being the single most nerve-wrecking experience among a staggering variety, the four teenagers from Total Drama slowly walked forward, past the Big Daddy.

Partially because they knew it was the smartest option and partially because of their fear, the quivering quartette made their way to the vending machine for some added supplies. The bullet or dose of EVE that brought down this Big Daddy might not be acquired yet. Of course, that was being very optimistic, assuming that anything would bring it down.

The grim golem's amber portholes watched them with artificially generated indifference. It remained as still and unprovoked as it had been, only uttering a brief groaning bellow when they were at their closest to the Little Sister harvesting from the pile of corpses.

But as loud and rumbling as the bellow was, it wasn't the sound they focused on most. Instead, it came from the Little Sister. She was singing, singing as she gathered ADAM.

The cheerful song of the Gatherer's Garden machine was still fresh in the teens' minds. All the adorableness and whimsy of that recorded message was absent in this singing. Indeed, the Little Sister harvesting almost sounded like a different being from the elated little ball of energy in a dirty purple smock that collected ADAM with such pure gusto.

"In the house of upside down…

Cellar's top floor, attic's ground."

Instead, there was some bellowing breathiness to the words, with what sounded like inhuman sighs of despair passing between the pale, corpse-like lips of the Little Sister. It was a somber, breathy, mournful, and quiet whisper of a song without any added music. If terror hadn't frozen their eyes, the teens may have started to shed some tears hearing it.

"In the house of upside down…

Laughing cries and smiles frown."

As her limbs mechanically, passionlessly drove the needle into the bullet-ridden bodies of the dead, the Little Sister sung with just as much zapped passion and robotic disinterest. Could it have been that the mental condition inflicted upon her had briefly worn off, revealing the true despair hidden beneath those glowing eyes and her upbeat demeanor?

"In the house of upside down…"

Her words were those of one whose dreams had been stepped on more than the floor, to the point where they accepted this mockery of normality as what their life was to be, to the point where only the opposite of logic could offer any comfort to their battered will.

"Found is lost and lost is found."


Ok, so, that was the next chapter of "Total Drama Raptured". I hope you liked it.

We've got A LOT to cover in this author's notes so let's not waste any time! Firstly, I couldn't have imagined that this chapter would be the HARDEST chapter I've written for anything! But it was…oh man, it SO was! And what's so odd about this is that it was so difficult for a variety of reasons. You see, the three scenes that gave me so much trouble did so in different ways. And me covering those scenes and the reasons why they were so hard will make up most of these closing author's notes.

The first was seen of the ADAM vision scene, with me having to restrain myself! Lol As long as that scene was, what I had originally written was so much more for that! And that's partially because I did A LOT of basic research to make this sequence. You see, in all the Bioshock stories I read, no one really described what it was like to be on ADAM. So I had a totally untapped aspect of the Bioshock experience to use. And I knew I wanted to do something unique, I wanted the ADAM sequence to be part realistic depiction of drug effects and part impossibly exaggerated bullshit like those old drug PSA's who clearly had no idea what drugs were actually like. I'll have a little more to say about this shortly but first I need to state a simple fact.

Damn! This chapter was chocked-full of references and shout-outs! While I'll talk more about the two most important in more detail, here are all of the others. From literature, there are references to: H.P. Lovecraft's The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing, Clive Barker's Books of Blood (specifically the short stories "The Midnight Meat Train", "The Skins of the Fathers", and "Rawhead Rex"), and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Return of the King. From anime, there was: Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Dragon Ball Z, and Yu Yu Hakusho. From movies; Pink Floyd's The Wall and Yellow Submarine. From TV shows, Star vs. The Forces of Evil, and the first season of True Detective. And finally, from video games, the God of War series and the first Dark Souls. Let's see how many of you can find the references! Lol

But there were a few other sources of inspiration that were WAY more than those! And they all have a starting point, William S. Burroughs. He was a popular author who has left what many consider to be the definitive accounts of drug abuse and the effects of drugs on people in fictional form. You see, along with being a college professor, writer, and scholar, Burroughs was also chronic drug addict. During the 60s and 70s, he became one of the most honest voices about drug use. His early novel "Junkie" was an almost autobiographical account of his days as a heroin user and low-level dealer during the 1950s. In fact, before Noah "disappears", or the first chuck of the ADAM sequence, was based off the Burroughs's descriptions of heroin. Then there was his later work, "Naked Lunch" which is an undiluted fever-dream of a novel that's easily the second trippiest bit of surreal and borderline psychotic piece of literature I've ever come across! Lol

Please note how I said the second most, because Burroughs also indirectly led me to the trippiest thing I've ever read, and the single greatest inspiration for this ADAM sequence. He led me to accounts of Ayahuasca, or Yage. Yage is a VERY powerful brew that comes from indigenous tribes in Peru and that many western scholars have tried over the decades since the 1950s. And man, what they say its like makes every other drug high look like a joke by comparison! Let me put it to you like this, at its peak being on Yage is a experience like a detailed and vivid metaphysical spiritual quest that feels more real than reality itself that is meant to purge the human body of both physical and psychological toxins. By the way, "ayahuasca" translates to "vine of the soul." I've read like five to ten different accounts of people's visions on Yage and they usually followed the same general pattern. First, reality seems to dissolve away. Second, they find themselves in a heavenly realm that is both a natural paradise and based off of their culture's perceptions of perfection. Third, things get frightening as everything gets horrible, thanks to either a palpable general feeling of hopelessness or many twisted monstrous forms appearing to terrorize the user of Yage. Four, a gentle shifting of the mental landscape to one that is soothing and cleansing as reality slowly returns to the user of Yage. And that is the pattern that I've hopefully recreated in this sequence. Let me know if I succeeded. Also, the only thing that I added was the big chuck where Noah goes violence crazy and attacks the twisted creatures. That's unique to ADAM.

One person described being on Yage as returning "to the cosmic uterus and be reborn. It is to tear through the placenta of ordinary perception and enter realms where death can be known and life traced through sensation to the primordial source of all existence." Also, another account cites that after one of his Yage trips, William S. Burroughs, "mentioned that at one point he felt himself change into a black woman, then a black man, then a man and a woman at the same time, with everything writhing as in a Van Gogh painting. He had achieved pure bisexuality, becoming a man or a woman at will, awash with wild convulsions of lust."

Yeah, THIS is the level of the pure bat-shit insanity of Yage, people! Oh, and for whose of you who think that I took this vision of a drug odyssey too far, please keep this under consideration…the following things used in this sequence came DIRECTLY from the different visions that people have had on Yage, even ignoring the general outline of the sequence: the Egyptian bird-headed people, the grinning crocodilian man, and the legions of sky-whales. And believe it or not, I didn't include ALL of the crazy shit that I read about! For example, I didn't speak of the man-sized grubs that are surrounded by a blue mist and that croak like frogs or the race of ancient alien reptilian creatures that are responsible for all life on Earth and that rest at the base of every human's spinal column! Yeah, you read all that right!

Okay, that's enough about Yage…though I could say more.

Let's move on to ADAM. Or more accurately, let's move on to the ADAM pricing system. As those of you who have played Bioshock know, the prices for the Plasmids and Tonics were higher in the game. In fact, I cut the prices for them all by half. My reason? The teens won't be able to get nearly as much ADAM as the protagonist of Bioshock was because they won't be fighting nearly as many Big Daddies as he did. I didn't want to deny the teens the possibilities of getting the coolest Plasmids and Tonics later in the game by making the prices too high. Some Gatherer's Gardens or Plasmids might be the game's prices but I'm unsure at the moment.

Next, let's cover ADAM and the teens. You see, adapting the video game to a more descriptive format means I have to explain things in detail that the game does not. For example, how does ADAM work in the body? I have decided on a system. This will cover both the amounts of ADAM in the teens and the states of said ADAM. Please bear with me and let me know if anything I say doesn't make sense.

The way I have, ADAM comes in three states once someone obtains it. They are "Total ADAM," "Used ADAM," and "Remaining ADAM." First, "Total ADAM," which is the total amount of ADAM that teens have gotten, from every Plasmid, Gene Tonic, and Little Sister. This number also represents the overall toughness and strength of an ADAM user, despite what happens with the next category. That would be "Used ADAM," or the ADAM that the teens have used for Plasmids and Gene Tonics. And finally there is "Remaining ADAM", which is the ADAM that hasn't been spent yet. Because it hasn't been used yet, it's still in your body. It's like gas that hasn't been used in a gas tank yet; it's there but untapped. This is both a pro and con because you can get more useful stuff…but this is also the ADAM that can be taken from you. And yes, that will be an element of this story later on, but I won't explain quite yet how it works. But I will say…the hints are in this chapter. ;)

Now, despite the teens have no idea themselves, here are the different ADAM levels for each of the teens. I've been keeping track of this since the beginning but here is the first time I'm sharing it with all of you. If you would like, I'll explain the reasoning for each of these numbers to you in a PM if you wish. Forgive me for that but this whole chapter is already long enough as it is. Cody has 140 Total ADAM, 90 Used ADAM, and 50 Remaining ADAM. Courtney has 140 Total ADAM, 80 Used ADAM, and 60 Remaining ADAM. Gwen has 145 Total ADAM, 90 Used ADAM, and 55 Remaining ADAM. Noah has 140 Total ADAM, 90 Used ADAM, and 50 Remaining ADAM.

Moving on, let's talk about the scene between Cody and Gwen near the end. That was a scene that I had been thinking of ever since this story got started! Which is why I'm not sure if I did it well! Lol. But seriously, I'm unsure how I did with that scene so please tell me, okay?

Okay, one last final thing…the next chapter is it! It's a long awaited Big Daddy fight! OH YEAH! I'm SO EXICTED to FINALLY get to this critical point! It's going to be blast to write! :) On that note, this chapter is the reason why I fought what is widely regarded the worst chapter of this story the way did. That chapter was chapter 18, Vestibule. I'll admit I could have done it better but the idea was that I would set up the hacked turrets for this upcoming fight way before it would occur without it feeling forced or unnatural! Please let me know if this makes that chapter even the tiniest better in retrospect, okay?

Once again, as always, please don't leave any spoilers in your reviews, ok?

Until the next chapter, please read, review, favor, follow, and spread the word!