Codename: Kids Next Door is property of Mr. Warburton, Bioshock is property of 2K games.
Sorry I couldn't update. It is the result of a bunch of situations that, frankly, do not concern any of you.
Now, can we please move on?
After a while, the adrenalin rush started to fade, and the wounds the grenade had given her started to register as pain.
It eventually got to the point that she had to stop. Numbuh five kept on walking, not noticing her absence until after she had into some restaurant.
She doubled back, exasperation written on her face.
"Now what?" she called out, "Did ya find another dead guy or somethin'?"
Fanny didn't answer; she was staring at her hands.
She was bleeding; blood had soaked through her green sweater. Some was dripping down on the floor.
She had seen her fair share of cuts and bruises as a medic and over her career as a commander.
But she had no idea someone could bleed so much.
She was only mildly aware that Abby was practically dragging her into the restaurant. She laid her out on the badly worn carpet, the banisters of a flight of stairs in front of her.
Abby crouched next to her and took a look at the wounds, lifting Fanny's sweater and blouse. She sucked her breath through the bandages.
"Now, you stay right here." She said, getting back to her feet, "Numbah five's gonna get something to help ya."
"Ho-how bad is it?" Fanny said, her voice beginning to tremble as the implications of a grenade wound started to sink in.
Abby shrugged, "Ah, nothing a med kit or two can't help." She said, and started walk away from her.
Fanny frowned and took a look at the wound herself. What she saw was an oblong, red hole in her skin, pooling with blood. She managed a strangled scream.
"Med-kit?" she screamed, "Th-this isn't a game! I don't need a med kit, I need a cruddy doctor!"
Abby nearly tripped when she heard this, snapping her head back to stare at her like she was the one out of her mind. She slowly shook her head.
"Oh, no you don't." she said, her voice alarmingly soft, "Trust Numbah five, you do not want ta see a doctor here." She paused, and hurried of into a passage that had a broken sign saying "Restrooms".
Fanny tried getting up, mostly to tell her how insane she was, but was stopped by a jolt of pain from her midsection. She contented herself to gritting her teeth.
A minute or so passed, and Fanny was beginning to think that Abby had abandoned her. She narrowed her eyes, both in pain and suspicion.
Cruddy teenager.
She was getting close to blacking out when she heard footsteps going up the stairs in front of her.
She called out for help and the footsteps stopped momentarily, before resuming, much more quickly now.
A man in grimy pants, tattered shoes and dirty white shirt trotted into her field of view. Fanny would have thanked him, but then she looked at his face.
It was as close to the definition of ugly as one could possibly get. The left side of his face was hard, almost like porcelain, and frozen in a smile that showed far too many teeth for comfort. The other side looked like melted plastic, the skin so saggy and loose that the guy had been forced to hold parts of it up with a handful of rusty safety pins. His mouth was twisted into something that might have been a huge grin, once upon a time. Bloodshot eyes stared at her.
"Now look at what we've got here, what a nice little lassie right on my doorstep." He muttered, his voice sounding almost metallic.
He twirled a rusty knife in his hand, his smile going all the wider as he knelt down next to her. Fanny squirmed away from him and a tumors filled, mottled hand seized the front of her sweater, pulling her into a seating position. The knife teetered dangerously close to her neck.
Fanny tried twisting out of the man's grasp. Any other day she would have succeeded, but unfortunately the wound had weakened her badly. She could only manage a meager struggle against him.
The knife touched her neck.
And then a bandaged hand slit the guy's throat with a meat hook.
Abby roughly pushed the dying splicer over to the side. He hit the floor with a solid whack. There were a few gurgling sounds, and he stiffened, lying in a small pool of blood.
Making a mental note to go through his pockets later, she waved the small, pencil case-sized tin in front of the very pale Numbuh 86, now also covered in Splicer blood
"Medkit." She stated, "Ought ta fix ya right up. Now, don't move a muscle."
Despite not having ever used a med-kit before, -the special organ Abby, along with some other Spider Splicers, possessed being enough to handle most injuries-, she had seen Numbuh One and Four -especially Four- use them enough times to have a moderate idea of what she was supposed to do.
She sat down next to Numbuh 86, popping open the metal lid of the thing. Inside was a wad of cotton soaked in alcohol in a small glass jar, dry cotton packed into a small cardboard box, a pair of pliers and a mouth-wateringly small syringe of medical-grade ADAM.
Abby stared at the lovely red goo for a moment.
ADAM ADAM ADAM ADAM ADAM ADAM-
Take it! You know you want to. Leave the girl and take it!
Nigel will want to talk to her.
Who cares about Baldy! Take the ADAM and RUN!
SHE'S TRYING TO KILL YOU! RUNRUNRUNRUN-
RUN-take the ADAM-HIDE-TAKE IT-HIDE-NIGEL IS WATCHING-HIDE-KILL HER!
Her hand trembled as it passed near the precious fluid. With a truly titanic effort, she wrenched her eyes from the pristine glass syringe and grabbed the box of cotton.
The voices screamed louder, and Abby did her best to ignore them.
Following the instructions on the inside of the metal lid, she started by moping of the blood from the wound. A piece of metal had lodged itself insede the wound, so she used the pliers to take it out.
Numbuh 86 had her face all scrunched up in pain.
She then opened the jar with the cotton soaked in disinfectant and cleaned the wound.
With a trembling hand, she picked up the ADAM sryinge. Slowly, fighting every step of the way, she stabbed the needle near the wound. Numbuh 86 gave a small yelp.
Abby pushed the plunger, slowly, until the ADAM got to work and the wound eerily closed shut, not even leaving a scar.
Abby removed the syringe, and stood up; helping a very bemused Numbuh 86 back on her feet. The redhead poked her stomach gingerly, mouth slightly open in surprise.
"Feelin' better?" Abby asked.
"Much." Numbuh 86 replied, still very surprised. She glanced at the dead Splicer, "Did you-"
"-kill him?" Abby finished for her. She gave a shrug. "Well, he was about ta cut ya into little pieces, so he was kinda askin' for it." she said.
Numbuh 86 went slightly red in the face, and muttered something akin to a "thank you", before taking up her previous, commandeering attitude.
"Now, you're going to stay right here, teenager! And when I come back you're gonna take me to sector headquarters on the double! Am I clear?"
Abby, with great difficulty, did not kill her. She just gave a sarcastic "Yessir".
The redhead gave her the best death glare she could under the circumstances, and walked purposefully towards the restroom.
Halfway there, she broke into a rather undignified run.
Abby rolled her eyes, muttering "newbie" under her breath. She looked at the glass syringe in the palm of her hand.
To her infinite joy, there was still some ADAM in it.
Wiping the needle clean with her sleeve, she rolled up her sleeve, jabbed the needle into a vein and pushed the plunger, with an ease anyone else would have found greatly disturbing.
The voices were immediately silenced.
Abby had once heard Numbuh Two ramble about how a small dose of ADAM would temporarily fix some of the wrongs larger doses of the same stuff did to you.
She felt good. Not ADAM-happy good, but more of a mended, stretching-after-you-woke-up kind of good.
Abby felt better that she had in weeks.
She hummed a song as she waited for Numbuh 86 to return
On the other side of Rapture, someone else wasn't feeling so carefree.
At all.
You probably know who I'm talking about by now.
Wallaby Beatles, AKA Numbuh Four, finally gave upon trying to find some sort of sense to the map that now rested in his pocket of his trench coat, neatly rolled up into a ball.
To clarify what is a rather odd piece of clothing, especially for a child: it had been "liberated" from an ex-Rapture cop that had, at the time, been engaged in attempting to bludgeon Numbuh Four to death with his baton. The unfortunate was-once-a-man accidentally fell from a balcony that lacked a railing (or parts of its floor) and had had the unbelievably bad luck of grazing a little sister on the way down.
There wasn't much of him left afterwards.
After the dust had settled, Wally, over Numbuh Two's insistence that he needed something from the 'Daddy that was "getting away", Numbuh One's constant comment about how suspicious he looked, and Numbuh Five's constant mention on how ridiculous he looked, he had taken the garment as his own, along with his share of the guy's wallet and food.
Wally had, rather crudely, cut the thing into something approximating his size, and had used some of the material to patch up the big hole in the back. The thing was still too wide, and the sleeves were not quite the same length and it didn't look nearly as good as what he thought it did.
On a rather surprising flipside, it turned out to be very practical. There were a surprising amount of pockets inside, and he had stuffed every last one one of them with med-kits, food and ammunition for a shotgun he, sadly, hadn't found yet.
It still looked very silly.
That being said, he was currently trying to figure out where he was. Wally wandered down some of the more familiar-looking hallways.
He ended up at Volta Electronics, oddly enough. He scratched his head, wondering how he got there. He certainly hasn't taken any bathyspheres, or the Atlantic Express.
Wally blamed the map.
Seeing where he was now, Wally turned around to find the way home.
He suddenly heard the chillingly cheerful voice of a Little Sister.
"Look Mister Bubbles, look at all the pretty lights!"
Wally's eyes went as wide as saucers.
"Kuki?" he muttered in disbelief.
Fanny turned off the faucet in the ladies' room, muttering a few choice words in Gaeilgewhen she found that the towel was a filthy rag on the floor. She flicked a few wet locks of red hair away from her face and dried it on her sleeve.
Fanny's hands were shaking; it was beginning to dawn on her that she was stuck here in this insane place, with only this teenager and the rest of the useless Sector V for company.
She came out of the bathroom, definitely not feeling quite as sharp as she had this morning. The teenager was waiting for her just outside, twirling something in her hand.
She tried not to wince: it was a revolver, an adult weapon.
The teen stopped twirling the weapon just long enough to thrust it in front of her, grip-first. Fanny, with plenty of hesitation, took it. The weight of the thing felt unfamiliar in her hand. She missed her KND-issue blaster.
Abby quickly told her the basics of how the pistol worked, gave her a few pre-loaded cylinders and beckoned her to follow.
As they went through the ruined men's restroom (Fanny tried not to think about this too hard) she dared to ask:
"Where did you get this stuff?"
"From the jerk that tried to kill you."
Fanny recoiled, she had half a mind to simply toss the revolver away.
"You just-" she started.
Abby violently stopped and spun around to face her, her bandaged face a scant few inches from Fanny's own. She nearly walked right into the teenager.
"Now listen here," Abby said her voice dangerously level, "Numbah Five's got no idea what kinda world you come from, but in here, half of everything you own comes from somebody who's dead. Numbah Five don't like it any more than you do, and she'd rather not go around looking in anyone else's pockets, but in Rapture, we've got not much of a choice. The whole city's gone crazy, and everything's just fallin' apart…"
She resumed walking,still ranting as she ducked through a hole in the wall, coming out into what looked like the top of a theatre. Lights on metal girders shone down on the stage below, whilst the floor they were on overlooked both of them. Abby kept on talking, nimbly jumping down to the stage below, while Fanny carefully went over the girders to the other side of the room, and down a ruined flight of stairs, thankfully not missing anything of the other girl's monologue.
"…Well here's the plan: Numbah Five's gonna get you ta the safe house on Mercury suites, and if ya wanna get there alive, you've gotta follow some rules."
They passed through the Theatre entrance and through a hallway. Abby stopped talking until a group of people, just as deformed as the one that tried to kill Fanny, disappeared round a corner. Both of them crept on as stealthily as they could, watching from the large windows that overlooked the miniature plaza below as the handful of people disappeared to the right.
Abby continued from where she let off as they hurried downstairs through the ruined staircase and into a hallway. The sign on the wall read "Neptune's Bounty".
"Ok, rules. Rule numbah one: Stay the heck away Little Sisters-"
"What kind of a rule is that!" Fanny interjected as they slowed down to catch their breath.
Abby held up her hands, "Trust me, you'll know." She said. They reached a small room with a single spherical submarine, floating on top of a wide vertical column of seawater. Once they were inside, Abby continued.
"Rule numbah two: Numbah Five is your friend, and if Numbah Five tells ya something, you're gonna listen. Ok? Rule numbah three: that gun is also your friend, you're gonna be keepin' it loaded, and you're gonna be holdin on to it." She fired a pointed look at the redhead. "Got that sister?"
Fanny nodded, trying not to think about the lump of metal in her holster.
"Rule numbah four: Abby's friends are your friends too. And you don't shoot your friends." She paused, and added, "Except for Numbah Four, you can shoot him plenty of times."
Fanny recoiled slightly. She looked at Abby, trying to see if she was joking.
She hoped she was.
"Oh, I almost forgot, if ya start hearin' voices, don't listen to them!" She abruptly raised her voice, twisting around to face… whoever it was she though was behind her. "See? No one's gonna listen to you now! NO ONE!" she screamed, managing, in those two words, to sound more hysterical that anyone Numbuh 86 had ever met.
Fanny cringed at this display. By the Rainbow Monkey god, Abby sounded as insane as freaking Numbuh 473.
…Well, maybe not nearly insane as Numbuh 473. At least she hadn't professed a desire to rig the planet to explode.
Yet.
She decided it was best if she got Abby distracted in something that wasn't the voices in her head.
"So, how do we get this thing moving?"
Abby pointed at the raised panel on the back of the submersible. "You just pull this lever here. The whole thing's on autopilot, some of these thing only go between two places." She grinned as her hand closed on the leaver. "This 'sphere's got the scenic route to Neptune's. Hope ya like it!"
She pulled the leaver, closing the hatch and starting the submarine's journey into the depths.
"Bouncer" class Protector unit number 7748, was in what might have been a cheerful mood.
Then again, the Little One was safe and singing, so there was really no reason not to be in a cheerful mood. For the 'Daddy, at least.
The Little One merrily skipped ahead of him, his own ponderous form a few feet away. Despite his appearance, he could move very fast when he needed. He simply didn't find any reason to do so. The Little One probably also knew, but it didn't stop her from complaining.
"We need to find more Angels Mister bubbles!" she said, her black hair, the most intriguing feature this little one had, bobbed in the neat ponytail as she marched ahead of him.
He gave his response: a deep groan that echoed through the empty lobby.
"GRAAAAAAAH."
"Don't worry, Mister Bubbles, there's always Angels here!"
This little one seemed to like this place, and the 'Daddy had kept finding her here. He didn't mind.
The Little One sniffed the air, smiled, and hurried over to one of the several corpses.
"Look Mister Bubbles! An Angel!"
The Little One knelt beside the corpse and plunged the long needle into its neck. As she operated the ghastly apparatus, she hummed a peculiar song.
Soon, the Big Daddy found itself humming alongside her. The song was incredibly catchy.
He didn't mind.
There was a mechanical groan as the airlock door slid open on its tracks. The four armed hand crank jammed momentarily, refuse on the tracks jamming the wheels that once let it glide smoothly. With a sickening crunch of rubble and garbage being pulverized, and not a small amount of effort, it suddenly broke free of the obstruction and slammed into the wall.
Numbuh 86 rubbed her hands on her skirt. Why, if all the other doors were automatic, did this one have to be manually wrenched open?
It was then that the smell hit her. A more observant individual would have noticed that the stench was similar to the stench caused by rotting meat, but Fanny wasn't an observant individual. She was an impatient hot head, and a kid to boot. She didn't do observant.
She did, however, recognize the stench as the most god-awful smell she had ever come across.
"Holy... What is that crud!" she cried, holding her sleeve to her nose in an attempt to filter out the stench. "Where is it coming from!"
Abby grimaced, and simply pointed at a bloated corpse on the floor.
Numbu 86 felt sick. "Let's get out of here." She said weakly.
"Numbah Five thinks we should." Abby agreed.
They quickly left the area, Abby didn't even bother searching the corpse's pockets.
Rather counter-intuitively, Neptune's Bounty referred to two different places in Rapture. There was the unloading area, where all the fish were collected from the submarines via airlock and hauled over to the neighboring market, and the submarine docking area, where the subs themselves were held, ready to tow huge nets through the ocean.
The docking area was massive, fairly larger than the Bathysphere Station where Numbuh 86 had arrived. A long, rectangular room, with two rows of four large pools with enough space for five of the submarines (now filled with refuse), and a truly massive window filled the longer walls, the thick glass reinforced by a grid of steel beams; one side looked into the ocean and the other gave a truly epic view of the city.
On the way there, Abby had explained that, after The Fall (whatever that was), most of the Submersibles had been either sabotaged, or been seized by desperate civilians, only to be blown up by torpedo launchers situated around the city.
Whoever had been in the business of blowing up submarines had been really, really good at their job. Hollowed husks drifted outside both windows, along with bloated bits of people.
The plan had been to use the Central Bathysphere hub in one of the lower levels of the Docks to head to Mercury Suites, where Sector V's Headquarters was located (Fanny was shocked to learn they hadn't built a proper Treehouse, but had kept it to herself, at least for now).
The short stairwell that had taken them from the Bathysphere Station opened into one of the shorter walls of the room. On the other end, Fanny could see the scissor gates of a heavy-duty elevator.
There was a cackle of static behind her. Abby unclipped a short-wave radio from her belt, and waved it around, trying to find a signal.
Numbuh 86 looked on in curiosity, as the Teen wandered through the room, waving the radio around, the static remained the same.
It wasn't until she pointed the device up that the continuous noise started clear ever so slightly.
Without a word, Abby clipped the radio bent her knees, and…leaped into the ceiling, sticking to it like a freaking spider.
Fanny stared in fascination as Abby called down to her.
"Stay here, Numbah Five's gonna call ahead. Remember: if it's ugly, shoot it!"
The teen crawled around the ceiling. She then fiddled with what looked like an air vent, opening it, she disappearing inside.
After a few moments, Numbuh 86 recovered from the small shock of spider-teen's demonstration, and her training kicked in. Drawing the pistol from its holster, she held it in the ready stance so familiar to her.
She had to think tactically. Secure the area, cover the entrances, defuse booby-traps and ambushes, do something.
Considering how surreal the day had become, it was probably for the best she stuck to what she knew.
She gave the room a good sweep, opening some of the crates, getting a few candy bars, a battered med kit whose contents appeared reasonably intact, a pair of pre-loaded cylinders for her pistol, one of which had an orange band that claimed they were "anti-personnel rounds", and a pair of big, vial-like syringes filled with a blue, glowing liquid that the label called "Eve". She resolved to ask Abby about the last ones.
The area seemed reasonable safe; she found a place, in the center of the long glass window facing the ocean, where she could cover the bathysphere entrance and the elevator at the same time. Apparently, someone had had the same idea as her, and had moved a few empty crates there as cover. The only thing that was worrying was that a piece of debris had collided into the window facing the city, and the pane had gotten a long, thin crack in the process, which was now letting a trickle of water in.
Fanny sat down, her back resting on the cold glass, and waited.
Accelerating playback: five minutes later.
A sound caught her attention: ponderous, heavy footsteps.
Numbuh 86's heart raced, she scrambled from her seating position and crouched behind one of the crates. The footsteps kept getting closer.
She risked a glance over the top of the crate, her eyes darting from one side of the room to the other. And then something caught her eye.
Outside, walking on the ledge of the window, was a man in a diving suit.
A big man, a really big man.
He was carrying what looked like a toolbox on one hand, and a massive rivet gun on the other, hefting it by the handle someone had thoughtfully put on the top of the tool like a briefcase.
But what really caught Numbuh 86's eye was the helmet: a soft yellow glow emanated from the portholes.
Fanny carefully crept out of cover and towards the man, weapon at the ready. Just because she was curious, didn't mean she was careless.
The man stopped in front of the cracked window pane. Carefully, he set down his rivet gun and tool box, and started to work.
Numbuh 86 looked on in curiosity as the huge man opened the toolbox and picked inside. Even from her safe distance, the guy (at least, it seemed like a guy. Fanny would prefer it if there was a girl under that helmet) looked way too big to be normal. He had to be at least seven feet tall.
The diving suit fellow pulled out what seemed to be a roll of metal and a handful of bolts. He unrolled the metal tube, reminding Numbuh 86 of the metal shutters people used to keep their shops locked and threaded the nuts through some pre-made holes. He pressed the metal plate to the pane, so that the edges of the thing rested on the metal surrounding the glass. He shifted the impromptu patch until he was satisfied, and unclipped a pistol like contraption from his back, applying it to each nut, tightening the seal the patch was making.
The trickle of water stopped.
The man in the diving suit stood back to admire his work, picked up his things, and left, his heavy footsteps marking his war. Never once did he even glance at the bemused girl who watched him work.
Fanny went back to where she was before, still waiting for Abby to come back. She never quite could get the sight of the huge man in the diving suit fixing a city that badly needed fixing, out of her head.
She absently wondered who it was.
And that's that.
Four thousand two hundred and thirty nine words (at least, according to Word)… who said I can't write long chapters?