Terribly, terribly sorry about the delay, it's just that I've lost the USB drive I keep this thing in, so I had to start the absurdly long chapter I wrote from scratch. Ha, ha.
…Then I recovered the drive, and said: "Let's use this fancy tool in Word to combine both versions and see what happens!"
Ha, ha. Oh-so-very HA, HA!
Oh, and I own nothing of what I describe here, minus the plot itself. Get off mah lawn, frikkin' lawyers!
Abigail Lincoln stared into the puddle.
The image in the water's still surface, that of a lanky pre-teen in an orange-red grimy jumpsuit with the legs cut off at the ankle and the sleeves rolled past the elbow, bandages covering her hands, her feet and her face; stared back at her with bloodshot eyes.
Her fingers gripped a pair of large meat hooks tightly, almost as if they have been grafted into being that way, twitching on occasion. A battered red cap, dotted with bullet-holes and soot marks and small splotches of dried blood, was perched on her head, a dirty ponytail was threaded through the loop in the back.
A radio was clipped to a belt on her thigh, and a bunch of leather pouches had been tied to her waist on a belt that had had some extra holes punched into it, rather crudely.
The water rippled, and Abby's eyes darted up from the ground and feverishly searched her surroundings. The stalls of the Farmer's market, the rotting food, the trash, the bodies…
A lone Big Daddy wandered round the corner, and Abby put him…it… under the "really seriously ignore" category.
One did not want to mess with a Daddy, especially not a single Spider Splicer, and especially if there was not much of a reward for the herculean feat. Abby was still certifiably insane, but she was not stupid.
Although her friends would probably have voiced the idea out loud: Numbuh One because he would have the suspicion that the thing was following them, Numbuh Two because the Big Daddy had some sort of critically vital component for whatever he was doing and only that specific hulking monstrosity, and not something that wouldn't fill you with holes of painful sizes, would do as a supplier.
Numbuh Four…Numbuh Four would have just wanted something to beat up, period.
Abby had a vague idea of who the three of them were; she only had a few snippets of who they were in her memory. They seemed to know her though, and insisted on calling her either Abby or "Numbuh Five", something the more reasonable half of the voices also did.
She sneaked behind a long-forgotten counter, sat down into the dirt and tiles of the floor and froze. She immediately seemed to disappear, only a faint outline gave a clue that she was still there. She and Numbuh One had been looking for Numbuh Four for the last few hours, and she was exhausted.
You see, Abby had been given the job of being the supplier of the group, being the sneaky one with the Natural Camouflage tonic. Of course, since she wasn't completely cured from being a Splicer, there were times she went completely nuts. So they would have to lock her up in her room. Usually when that happened, Numbuh One was the guy who did the rounds, but this time, the very stupid Australian had decided he could do the job as well as anyone, so he took her map, which was useless to anyone who couldn't crawl on ceilings, and left despite Numbuh Two's better judgment and Numbuh One's now-justified paranoia.
He immediately got horribly, astronomically lost.
So now she and Numbuh One where looking for the squat Aussie. Abby had firmly decided to hang Numbuh Four from the biggest tree in Arcadia when she found him.
The radio in her messenger's bag crackled to life. She froze, before darting for cover in the shadows above her. She longed for Numbuh Two to invent a radio that was anything close to stealthy.
She unclipped the radio and clicked it on.
"Talk ta me" she said, her voice oddly muffled by the bandages.
Hoagie's voice, slightly distorted by static, came over the speaker. "Hello? Home base here, any luck finding Wally?"
"Nah, he ain't here in the farmer's market." she said.
"Just got Numbuh one on the radio, I think he says he's over at Prometheus."
"Did he get any luck?"
Please find him. Pleasepleaseplease find him or Abby'll KILL him when she does.
"Nope."
Ha! So that's your so-called "leader? I've seen better. you've seen better. I don't know why you don't do us all a favour and slit Baldy's ne-
They're lying. They're all lying. They don't know you, you don't know them. Get away. Run. RunleavethemleavethemLEAVE-
ADAM. They have ADAM. They're hiding it from you. You know they have it. You need it. You always need it. ADAMADAMADAMADAMA-
Numbuh five held her head as her mind was suddenly overrun with a cacophony of voices.
'REHIDINGITFROMYUOKILLTHEMALL-
Numbuh five switched the radio off and screamed.
"SHUT UP! ALL OF YOU!"
The unbearable noise in her head immediately ceased, and she quickly left her position on the ceiling, quickly climbing through ventilation shafts before emerging in another of the closed up stores of the farmers market. Making noise in Rapture was a bad idea, unless you were a two-ton behemoth with a drill and an attitude.
Checking and double-checking to be sure she was safe, Abby switched the radio back on, keeping herself where she was with her legs and other arm.
"Talk ta me."
"Geez Numbuh five, can't you get your feet on the ground?"
The silence afterwards indicated that that was supposed to have been a pun.
Numbuh five ground her teeth. "Ha, ha Hoagie, very funny. Yo' say one more of those stupid jokes and Numbah five will..."
Murder! Shish-kebab!
"Okay, okay! Sheesh..." He quickly apologized "Well, Nigel says he's run out of ideas. Where do you think he's gone?"
Abby scratched her head, and poured through her shabby and fuzzy mind. From what she remembered of her acquaintances, Numbuh Four had more physical tonics than was good for him and behaved more like a splicer thug than anything else.
Like a very, very stupid splicer thug.
A funny thing about splicers was that they hated any sort of change in what went on around them. Put a chair someplace it hadn't been before and they'd go nuts.
Ahem.
Well, worse that what they were before.
So, it wasn't particularly weird for splicers to end up wandering around certain places, just because they felt familiar. She made it a hobby to go around, following splicers at random, simply because she could.
So, knowing the stupid Australian, he would be...
Abby blinked, her train of thought ran into a wall in her mind and exploded.
Stupid ADAM...
She whispered into the radio. "Eh, Numbuh two?"
"Yes?"
"Um... before all this happened, wuz there some place that Numbuh four liked to go to?"
"Well... there's the Marathon sports complex that went under last Tuesday and the Le fromage cheese factory, and you know what happened there."
Abby winced; the incident at the cheese factory, involving a baseball bat, four tons of mozzarella, a net, a grenade lobbing splicer and a Rosie Big Daddy was something that would best be left in the dark. So that was out too.
"...and there's also the videogame store at Volta Electronics. Why do you want to know, anyway?" Hoagie continued.
"'Cuz Numbah five thinks that's where the frikin' idiot will be."
Meanwhile, someplace quite far from where Sector V had holed up, something was lurking around.
A small underwater craft, craftily made from what others would have thought of as trash, was making its way through the underwater metropolis. Its single occupant, despite her efforts not to be so, was very impressed with the beautiful city. As she guided the submarine between buildings, she remembered her mission, and directed the submersible towards one of the massive underwater skyscrapers, chosen at random.
She brought neither backup, nor communications, because she was the best operative for the job.
Or, at least, that's what Fanny Fullbright liked to think and say.
The submersible rammed one of the windows on the Rapture metro station.
Abby crawled on the ceiling on the second floor of the Kashmir restaurant, humming a meaningless, tuneless tune to herself as she did.
Numbuh two had told her that Nigel would be the one to go to Volta's, since he was closer. That left her with a lot of time on her hands, and little to do, something she was quite familiar with. Being survivors in the worst city in the world was actually quite boring. As long as you knew what you were doing and got a bit lucky, you would survive; Sort of.
If you didn't, you would be better off getting ready to be another of the corpses that were all over the place, or "angels", like the Little sisters like to call them.
Abby shivered; getting better or not, the mere thought of those little bags of ADAM still made her mouth water and her mind ache at the thought of the red-gold liquid. The fact that her friends told her that the former fifth member of their group was one of them did little to help.
Speaking of Kuki, what was she supposed to look like, anyway?
The others had tried to describe her to her, but every time she thought she had it right, her mind slipped, and blurred everything again. It was the same story for all the other things they talked about: school, mountains, snow, rain, the sun, the surface, the sky...
It was incredibly frustrating.
Right now, however, she had successfully banished those thoughts from her head. She anchored one of her hooks into the crumbling concrete, tied a rope from pouch to it, tied another hook to the opposite end and secured that one into the ceiling as well. Carefully, she lowered herself onto her makeshift swing, taking in the rare peace around her. The others never came here, for some reason she didn't really understand. She, on the other hand, always found the restaurant, usually devoid of squabbles, quite comforting.
Today was as peaceful as it was going to get, the sound of the water below, the sight of the city in the panoramic windows, the soft music endlessly playing in the jukebox, and the statue of Atlas (the Greek one, not the Irish Atlas they knew was hiding somewhere) holding the world on his shoulders. Even the couple that lived in the kitchen was being quiet in their argument.
Abby closed her eyes, taking in the sound she simply couldn't get enough of: Silence.
CRASH!
Abby snapped her eyes open to the cacophonic sound of glass and steel breaking and bending somewhere else and stayed there, shock-still.
Her mind gave.
Numbuh 86, head of Decommissioning, climbed out of the S.U.B.S.T.A.N.D.A.R.D. she had crashed through the wall and gazed around, perplexed.
Behind her, the submarine inflated a pair of A-tubes to make a watertight seal with the glass and steel of the wall, but she neither noticed it nor cared.
What she did notice and care about was how awfully silent the place was. You could hear a pin drop.
She took out her standard-issue S.C.A.M.P.P. and switched on the flashlight, scanning the room like a SWAT officer.
The room was a bit more massive than she thought of at first, with a huge pool of water covering the last three quarters of it. Three ring shaped platforms were lined up near the edge of the pool, linked to dry ground by short causeways, nearly all of which were busted.
That was what worried her the most. She had expected a handful of bumbling adults rushing about at her entrance, not an empty room in an obvious state of disrepair. The place was also as creepy as heck.
She almost went back into the sub.
Almost.
Fanny was way too proud and sure of her own abilities to back out of this mission. She ignored the warnings seeping in the air and set off to find Sector V's base.
Somewhere in the shadows above her, someone whispered.
"Is it someone new?"
Abby was raging mad. Or, more accurately, the bits and pieces of her that were still awake were raging mad.
Like some sort of screaming homing missile, she made a beeline to the bathysphere station. Whoever had made all that racket would be extremely sorry in a few moments.
She skidded into the dark and creepy confines of the dock area and stared at the thing jutting out of the steel and glass of the window, water leaking in through the cracks. A door in the thing opened up a crack and she jumped up, into the shadows.
From the whatever-it-was down below, someone had emerged, holding a curious-looking weapon in its hands. Abby hooked a rope to the ruins overhead and lowered herself as closely as she dared. It was a girl, probably not much older than any of the Little Sisters she had seen, with frizzy red hair poking out of the colander she wore as a helmet. The newcomer switched on a flashlight attached to her weapon and gave a quick scan of her surroundings, before striding purposefully to the waiting room.
Curious, Abby followed her from the ceiling.
"Is it someone new?" she wondered out loud.
The lights flickered in what must have been the place where people wait for their plane. Or submarine. Or whatever they used here.
A big board showed that all of the trips had been delayed. And a poster on the wall said that all bathysphere travel had been denied.
"Stoopid adults..." Fanny scoffed, and climbed up and over some debris, through an automatic door, up some stairs and into some sort of lounge. A big window showed off the city in all its glory, and a model of said city drove the point home, just in case someone dared say; perish the thought, that it wasn't awesome enough.
Despite the suspicious air around the whole thing, even she couldn't help but be impressed by the magnificent metropolis. Maybe she was just in the crummy bit of it.
She pulled a lever set in to the wall and a big, heavy door slid up with a grind; a glass tunnel snaked ahead of her. She plodded on.
The tunnel, after a while, split. One path headed left, the other kept going straight ahead. She paused, shrugged, and chose the latter.
She emerged in a dark room; another vault-like door lay ahead. Two walls, broken at the ends closest to the doors, split the room in three; the left and right bits were lower than the centre of the room.
Water flooded those bits.
She saw someone sitting on the bit that was on the right, against another floor to ceiling window.
She snapped the S.C.A.M.P.P. into ready position. "Don't move!" she barked.
The figure obediently didn't move a muscle.
Keeping her sights on the silhouette, she approached it.
"What the crud is going on here?" she asked.
The guy chose to remain silent.
She moved closer water splashing at her feet"I said, what the crud is going on?" she hissed.
Nothing, she switched the flashlight back on and she saw that the man's head was hung, as if he were sleeping.
She moved as close as she dared and gave the sleeping adult a good kick.
"Oy! I'm talkin' to-"
The guy had just fallen over. It only took one short look at the man's face for her to realize that he was very, very dead.
She screamed, jumping away from the corpse as if its death were somehow contagious.
Something splashed behind her, and she twirled around and fired her S.C.A.M.P.P., squeezing of the shots so fast it sounded like a machine gun, screaming all the while.
She caught the lanky teen with a bandage covered face by surprise, knocking whoever it was out cold.
Fanny continued aiming the weapon at the crumpled figure. She approached it, still hyperventilating. Bandages covered most of her face, but one look at the bright red cap and she knew she was looking at.
Birthday girl.
Quickly producing a pair of handcuffs, she quickly locked her detainee's hands behind her back and and, eager to take advantage or her lucky capture, pulled the unconscious teen in the direction she had come from.
Abby was off in some faraway, ADAM-filled dream when she became suddenly aware that she was being dragged along the ground.
Instinct told her to cut the offender into teeny tiny pieces, and she was about to, when she took notice that her hands were cuffed together.
Instinct now told her to panic.
Wildly twisting her body, she wrenched herself from her capturer's surprised grasp and managed to flip herself to her feet. She started to run, but a concussive blast of energy hit her back nearly knocking her over.
"Don't move ya cruddy teen!"
Abby forced herself to stay still. Like she said, she was crazy, not stupid; she knew when running and fighting got useless, being sneaky became very useful.
So she stayed rock still, save for some small movements to keep the good ol' Natural Camouflage tonic from activating. It could be pretty useful in giving her captor the slip later on and she didn't want to give away any advantages she might have.
"Good, now turn around!"
Abby did, coming to face with her captor.
It was a child, a girl to be precise, not much younger than Abby herself, although she wasn't a Little Sister, much to Abby's dismay.
Then she recognized her as the newcomer she saw in her recent slip of mind.
Her eyes widened between the bandages. She had to tell the others; now. Slowly, inching her hand as best as she could, she felt for her radio, it was predictably gone.
She looked back at her capturer and saw that she was holding the radio in her hand. The redhead teasingly held it out, a smug smirk on her face. Abby threw herself at her.
"Give that back!"
The redhead sidestepped her charge; Abby quickly twisted herself in midair, her feet sticking to the wall like a spider as she coiled like a spring, and flung herself again at her capturer. The newcomer, taken by surprise this time, yelped as Abby crashed headfirst onto her, the radio clattering onto the ground. Abby rolled of her opponent and squirmed her way to the radio, turning her back to it so as to try to operate the thing while handcuffed.
Static came from the device's speaker; looking around she finally recognized the place as the airlock foyer, which was beyond Hoagie's radio range.
Wasting no time in recovering, her captor had regained her footing and aimed her with the bizarre weapon she had.
"Ok, that's IT you stoopid teenager! You're coming with me!" the redhead screamed.
"But-"
"NO BUTS! I'm SICK of this place! So you're gonna be a nice little teenager and come with me for your Decommissioning!"
"Numbah five's got no idea what you're talkin' abou-"
"Oh sure you don't!" she mocked, "I've heard that excuse like eleventy billion times!" she went and forced her to stand up- "Now MOVE!" she screamed, keeping a firm grip on Abby's arm.
Abby stayed silent as they traversed the tunnel leading to the bathysphere station, thinking of a way to overpower her captor once they got inside the submarine and feeling for the lock pick she kept in one sleeve.
Left.
Right.
Left.
Right.
LEFT!
RIGHT!
The door to the station lounge opened, and Abby was struck with a vague sense of familiarity. Had she been here before?
Although it could just as well have been the splicer standing in the middle of the room, with a wooden box cradled in his arms.
The three of them paused all of three seconds. And then the splicer threw a home-made grenade at them.
"Get away from me!"
Abby threw herself to the ground, pulling the redhead down behind her. The explosive sailed over them and into the tunnel, where in exploded, cracking the thick glass. Water dribbled in, but the glass thankfully held.
The explosive-lobbing psycho dropped a smoke grenade, screaming all the while.
"He loves me! The Lord LOVES ME!"
Abby struggled to get up, coughing from the smoke. The grenade freak was gone. Abby was going to be bit thankful, until it dawned on her that the lunatic, having fled downstairs, would find the newcomer's submarine.
She sprinted towards the doorway. The newcomer, apparently thinking the same thing as she, followed her as she went down the flight of stairs.
Awkwardly leaping over a collapsed beam on the ground, she rushed past the waiting area, sharply turning right and jumping down the next flight of stairs. The grenade loving thug was at the bottom, and tossed her another tin full of explosives, which thankfully sailed over her.
It exploded far behind her, followed by a scream, both of which Abby ignored as the splicer climbed into the submarine sticking out of the wall. She screeched into a stop just as she saw the splicer hold a lit grenade above his head, grinning like some deformed buffoon.
"I HAVE FOUND IT MISTER RYAN! I HAVE FOUND THE HOLY GRAIL!"
The ex-splicer barely have time to dive out of the way before the can detonated, along with the rest of the stuff in the box, throwing a shower of metal and plastic debris out of the sub's open hatch.
Regaining her footing, Abby approached the submarine. A sudden noise stopped her in her tracks.
From inside the machine, she heard a trickle of water and the horribly familiar groan of stressed metal.
She backpedalled as fast as one could with their arms cuffed behind them, and ran back the way she came, nearly tripping on something lying on the ground. She squinted through the darkness, and found it was the annoying newcomer.
She was on the floor, bleeding from a stomach wound.
Abby was in the process of leaving her when her ears picked up a sound. The wrecked machine gave a creek, not unlike a badly oiled hinge, that grew into a resounding groan, followed by the dying scream of tortured metal as the hull of the submarine gave in to six miles of ocean water.
Abby had a few moments to admire the frothing wave until it hit her, sweeping her and the screaming redhead off the ground. Struggling with the wall of water, Abby fought to keep herself from drowning.
Fortunately, ADAM hadn't taken the ability to swim from her. She kicked like a maniac, barely managing to keep afloat as the water surged through the bathysphere station, finally exploding out onto the lounge in a shower of spray as heavy doors sealed themselves in the stairway.
Abby, wormed her way across the floor, spitting seawater as she did so. She heard the newcomer gasp for air as she surfaced behind her.
Noticing her captor was distracted and hoping to capitalize on that, Abby pulled the lockpick she had in her sleeve and quickly opened the handcuffs, wondering why she didn't do this earlier.
See? Told you it was left.
No, it was on the right.
Throwing the things as far away as she could, she stood, eyes levelled on her captor. Picking the other girl up by the back of her sweater, she pinned her against the wall, holding her in place by the neck of her jersey.
The redhead wasted no time in protesting.
"Oy! Leggo-"
"Not till' you tell Abby what the hell you're supposed to be doing here!" The former splicer hissed.
The redhead growled. "I'm here to Decommission you, you eejit!"
Abby gave the other girl a violent shake "Enough with that already! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING HERE!" she screamed.
"I'm not saying anything to you, teenager!" the redhead screamed, fear beginning to creep into her voice. "And you are getting me out of here, right now!"
Abby could almost feel her grip on reality slipping as her mind processed those.
Abby released her captor and turned to leave, a weird sound coming out of her throat. "Sorry ta break it to ya girl." She said, her voice interrupted by the wierd sporadic noise that came from her throat. "But you're not goin' anywhere... this is the worst place in the whole world...do ya really think Abby'd still be here if she could get outta here?"She wandered back the way they came, finally identifying the sound she was making.
She, Abigail Lincoln, was giggling. Not like a Little Sister though, she lacked the double voice of those minute monstrosities, and this giggling lack the playfulness of the Sister's.
Abby had to stop wondering about her giggling, because it had now degenerated into fits of hysterical laughter.
Fanny stood shock still, Abigail's laughing echoing through the glass tunnel as she got further and further away from her.
But, for once, she wasn't inclined to give pursuit.
If the dead body was her first true indication that something was wrong in this place, then Abby's shrieking laughter was what told her just how far down the rabbit hole the city had fallen. She gulped as she remembered reading Abby's file in the morning.
The cool, level-headed individual the computer screen had described was the farthest anyone could get to the maddened individual that had now collapsed with laughter on the floor.
Holding the wound on her side, she got closer to the teenager, and asked her:
"What the crud is going on in here?"
Abby held up a hand, eyes screwed shut in concentration as she seemingly fought for some measure of control. Finally, she answered.
"The whole city went nuts...Numbah five'd tell ya the whole story, but not here." She stood up, violently shaking her head. "Now's my turn, who the hell are you?"
Fanny was about to snark a retort, but she bit her tongue. Maybe the teenager really didn't remember anything at all.
"I... I'm Numbuh 86"
Abby narrowed her eyes for a second, before widening. After a second, she spoke.
"Follow me." She said, and strode through the tunnel, Fanny barely managing to keep up with her, her wound giving a dull pain.
"Hey! Wait for- Where the crud are we going?"
"Numbah five calls it home," the teenager said, the doors to the airlock opening, "and she's got a feelin' you'll be calling it that too."
"Oh, and, by the way: welcome to Rapture."
Over four THOUSAND words... just so I could get Abby to say that last sentence.
A new record for me then!
Read, review, and tell me where I went wrong. If Abby feels OOC in some places, don't worry: It's intentional and justified, just like in Operation: A.L.O.N.E.
So that'll be it for Chapter 3, see ya!