Raven's World: New Rapture
Episode Two: A Favor for Atlas
Raven stares at the radio in awkward fascination. "Atlas…?", he repeats, scratching his head. He kneels beside the small device as Atlas responds: "That's right, boyo. I'm glad to hear you're not dead." Raven sighs rigidly and narrows his eyes. "That makes two of us…", he replies. "And what do you mean you have some heavy news for me…?" Atlas stalls a bit before answering, as if he was already certain how Raven would take this news of his. Finally, the radio buzzes in again: "Welcome to Rapture, kid. Thousands of leagues and fathoms from civilization as you know it."
Raven stands and attaches the radio's receiver to his belt. "What exactly is this place, Atlas?", he inquires while eyeing the two figures sprawled out on the floor. "I think I can show you better than I can tell you.", says Atlas. "Where are you now?" Raven takes another brief look around before raising his voice to reach the radio. After being reminded of the unpleasant experiences he's had in this room, he uneasily replies; "I'm in some sort of main hall. These two masked crazies just-"
"Splicers.", Atlas interrupts. "What?", asks Raven, rather annoyed at being cut off in mid-sentence.
Atlas continued: "Those masked crazies you're talking about? We call 'em Splicers." Raven wouldn't have to try very hard to remember that. "Anyway, they attacked me with pipes! I knocked one out while he was unaware that I was awake, but the other one…." Atlas urged him to continue. "What about the other one, lad? Would you kindly continue your story…?" Raven suddenly finds the words to carry on. "I-I zapped him with some sort of weird lightning from my hand…" Atlas speaks as Raven examines the steel door (the name 'SECURIS' welded across the top), which appears to be the only way out of the room. Atlas is surprisingly calm in his response. "Ah. So, you've spliced a plasmid into your genetic structure. First time's a real kick in the ass, ain't it, boyo?"
Raven fumbles with the door's controls, which are still short-circuiting. "I take it you've done that before then…?", he asks as the door panel falls from it's hinge, revealing a series of cut circuits. "You have to splice a few here 'n there if you wanna stay alive down here…", came the voice over the radio. In response to the open circuits, Raven's hand glows blue once again. He fires a shotgun blast of lightning, point-blank into the panel and the door flies open as the wiring is overcharged. "What was that?", came Atlas' voice. "You alright, lad?" Raven clutches his wrist and frowns. "I think I just found my way out of here…", he replies, then picks up his trusty wrench before walking through the door.
The hallway beyond the main hall is made completely of transparent fiberglass-like material. Within it, Raven can see the rest of Rapture. A massive cluster of buildings and signs fill the immediate outside area. Neon lights flash weakly on each building, and there are odd lights coming from the towers. A huge structure in the dead-center of Rapture catches his eye. The towering structure appears to be tall enough to stretch all the way to the surface. For some reason, it seems as familiar to him as his own beating heart, which has stopped in his chest more times than he would've liked today. It was how Raven figured Atlantis would look, if Atlantis were styled after New York… "Can you see the city, boyo?" Raven continues along the hallway and holds the radio to his mouth in response. "I'd have to try pretty hard not to…", he says in a trembling voice.
"Now that you're out and about,", Atlas begins in a modest voice. "I have a favor to ask of you." Raven stops, surprised at Atlas' tone. "What kind of favor?", he asks. Atlas's voice is almost inaudible in its humility. "Could you make your way to Neptune's Bounty and find my family?", he requests. It was at this point that Raven had continued walking, and found himself in a small tavern area. Finally, he gives Atlas an answer. "Okay, I'll do it…" He says, then instinctively turns as the door closes behind him. "Just one question… How do I get there?"
Atlas responds first with a long sigh, then an even longer series of words and phrases that Raven didn't particularly enjoy hearing; words like, "journey", phrases like "rooms full of Splicers", and somewhere mixed into those words and phrases was the term "Footlight Theater". But of course, there was also an utterance of the phrase "Would you kindly…?", and how could Raven possibly refuse then? Like it or not, he finds himself on his way down the hall, following the "FOOTLIGHT THEATER" signs hanging on the walls. As the door at the end of the hallway (the name 'SECURIS' welded across the top) opens , he is greeted by humid air, the smell of rotting flesh(not that he could identify it at the time), and the sound of a little girl singing.
Could there be someone else here who hadn't become a splicer yet?
Raven hurries into the room. One quick look around was all he needed to confirm that he had reached the theater. Smooth brown wooden walls, a surprisingly well-kept red carpet covering the bottom floor, and a comfortably small stage protruding from the east wall. The room could've been considered fairly normal, if it weren't for the blood-stained theater chairs littering the floor… The sound of the little girl singing pulls his attention to the center of the floor, where an actual little girl was kneeling beside a corpse, repeatedly jabbing it in the hindquarters with a strange-looking needle gun with a glass bulb at the back. From where he stood, up in the rafters, it looked like she was…taking its blood. Though, Raven imagined it would look like that from anywhere he stood.
Whatever song the little girl was singing didn't sound too much like a song a little girl had any business singing. Evidently, Raven wasn't the only one to hear it. Immediately after Raven sets foot on the thin metal rafters above the stage, Atlas' voice buzzes back in on the radio. "Would you kindly put away your…um…'weapon' for a minute?", he suggests, obviously referring to the wrench in Raven's right hand. He complies, tucking the wrench into his back pocket, then looks over the side of the rafters to watch the girl go about her little bizarro-autopsy routine. When Atlas next spoke, he spoke with disgust. "You think that's a little girl down there?", he asks in a spiteful tone. "Well, think again. It's called a Little Sister. Someone went and took a sweet little girl and turned her into a monster. Whatever you thought about morality up there on the surface, well that don't count for much down in Rapture, kid."
"What's she doing?" Raven asks as he continues to watch the Little Sister jab the corpse's rear end with the needle. "She's gatherin' ADAM from a splicer, most likely.", came Atlas in reply. "ADAM?", Raven inquired. Atlas really started to confuse the hell out of him then. "It's the genetic material that keeps Rapture alive.", he answered in an all-knowing voice. Everybody wants it, everybody needs it." At this point, watching the Little Sister work had grown painfully boring, and Raven continues across the rafters and down the stairs. He stops at a screened window; through which, he can see the Little Sister at face level. Her skin is a pale grey, her eyes are orangish-yellow and blank, and she wears no shoes, only a dirty and worn-out blue church dress and a tattered red ribbon; keeping her scruffy black hair in a crude little ponytail.
"This is what you call a monster?", asks Raven as he approaches the window. "She looks completely harmless…" Atlas replied all too quickly, as if he'd been expecting Raven to say that. "Exactly.", he said in a voice laced with urgency. "It only looks completely harmless. But get too close, and you'll be singing a much, much different tune." Raven prepares to leave through a door in the corner, when he notices a splicer enter the room behind the Little Sister. Instinctively (which is how he'd been doing lots of things today), he knocks on the glass to issue her a warning. The Little Sister stands and turns to see the splicer, then lets out a loud, frenzied scream as it approaches. The splicer, carrying a dull revolver, raises his arm and brings the gun's fuller down upon the Little Sister's head hard. As the Little Sister crumples to the ground, a low rumbling sound shakes the entire theatre. "Remember when I said not to go near a Little Sister?", Atlas asks. "You're about to find out why…"
The rumble escalates into an earthshaking roar. A massive figure leaps from the rafters and lands on the stage in a thick cloud of dust and splintered wood. The figure can be clearly seen when the smoke subsides; a huge, rotund humanoid creature in a strange bronzed diving suit. Its right hand has been replaced by a rusty oil-drill, it carries a tank on its back and wires connect in a tangled mess around its eerily-glowing helmet. The splicer, suddenly overcome with the will to live, empties the revolver's entire six-bullet chamber at the thing, but the bullets do little more than piss it off, to say the least. It charges at the poor, defenseless splicer and swings its drill arm in a horizontal arc, knocking it viciously into the wall, the force enough to split the plaster. The splicer stands, disoriented, as the armored creature fires up its drill and runs it straight through the splicer's lower abdomen. Oh, but it wasn't done there. After it got bored with the drilling, the thing then proceeded to bash the splicer's head repeatedly into the very window that Raven happened to be looking through.
A crack appears in the window. Then another. Then another. Before Raven could catch his breath, the splicer's head breaks through and the glass flies outward. A hail of clear, shimmering projectiles comes flying at Raven, who jumps away and thrusts his back against the nearest wall. The glass rain just barely misses him as he does so, and he slides down the wall into a sitting position to regain his composure. This is much easier said than done, seeing as how he can't take his eyes off the poor splicer, bent - no; bent was too insignificant a word- broken over backward at the waist in the window. The creature beckons to the Little Sister, who seems to have made a full recovery, and follows him out of the theater, skipping happily. Atlas' voice breaks his focus on the splicer. "You alright there, boyo?", he asks as Raven stands and shudders uncontrollably.
"I'm fine.", was Raven's reply. At least all the recent trauma hadn't affected his ability to lie… "What the hell was that thing, Atlas?" He hesitantly leans through the window, his face just inches from the splicer's body, making sure that the 'Dynamic Duo' were out of earshot. He leans back in as Atlas responds: "That's a Big Daddy. She gathers Adam, He keeps her safe…" Raven looks down, the splicer's dead eyes seemed to be pleading to him. He lowers his gaze further to occupy his mind, and notices the splicer's dull, empty revolver. "You won't be needing it anymore, will you, pal?", Raven says to his new friend the corpse as he pries the gun from its cold hand. A quick search of the splicer's pockets uncovers a few extra chamber rounds. Raven flips open the revolver's chamber and spins it, loading all six slots and putting the remaining bullets (he counted twenty-four of them) into his jacket pocket. He then walks through the door and finds himself in another hallway. "Alright, Atlas.", he says, examining the gun. "Where's Neptune's Bounty from here?"
Atlas took some quite some time to respond, but finally did. "You're just about halfway there, boyo. Just down this hallway should be the staircase down to the big split between Medical and Neptune's Bounty." With that, Raven set off down the hall and deeper into Rapture; deeper into the "land of opportunity"; deeper into the dirty little city that seemed to have just completely slipped God's mind…
-To Be Continued