Alex the Great couldn't have been happier. Lamb was gone. She was gone! She'd finally activated those wretched charges and plunged into the depths. Oh how her soothing voice had gotten on his nerves. Oh "The Family" this and "Utopia" that. Give me a break! He felt great. And the best part? He was still alive!
When Lamb had set off her little fireworks throughout Persephone, she thought that it would bring down Fontaine Futuristics because they were "attached."
How wrong she was. Persephone was built in a cavern under Fontaine Futuristics, rather than the underside of his building. There was solid rock between the two buildings, ten meters of it at that. So she'd plunged to her death whilst he lived on.
Of course, the explosions had caused havoc. He'd activated the emergency reinforcements a split second before Lamb had hit the button. The metal shutters had barely closed over his tank before the first explosion racked the entire building. Luckily only a few of the glass panels had shattered and were easily sealed off from the specimen network before too much water was lost. Water was already being pumped in, and Alex had turned the lights off, preserving his eyes from further pain.
Wait…a life boat? Alex had just checked the radar, and saw that it detected a lifeboat had been launched from Persephone with three life forms on board.
Hmm, maybe Lamb had escaped after all. No matter, she was gone either way.
Well what could he do know?
The ADAM in his system hadn't granted him any plasmid abilities unfortunately, so he couldn't go on a rampage, and Delta had severed his control over the security bots so he couldn't wreak havoc. But the ADAM had affected him in another way; he was more powerful in the mind, however twisted it was.
All he needed was a cause to put it too.
"Come in Rapture, come in Rapture."
Oh? Hello! Looks like a cause just found him.
The only sound Becky could hear was the grinding of the wheels and the musical quality of falling water as she stood in the Waterfall grotto. She hardly noticed them, lost in a world of her own.
She gazed at the plaque she'd hammered into the ground eight years ago. She'd only been twelve then. Now she was twenty years old, yet the pain had barely dulled.
The plaque read: Julie Langford. Resting amongst her work and the tools she used when she played her part. 1960.
Becky had had to find someone old enough to inscribe the plaque for her, and to help her cremate Julie's body. At twelve years of age, she single handedly spread her mother's ashes amongst the Rosa Gallica, a place Becky thought her mother would like; her body wouldn't use up space in Arcadia's cemetery and it would feed the plants that saved her trees and subsequently the whole of Rapture.
With her head bowed, she stooped to scrub away the moss that constantly grew over the metal, which thankfully hadn't corroded with the moisture in the air.
Becky still remembered finding her mother on the floor in her office, the combination to her safe hastily scrawled in the poisoned gas condensation on the window. She could still hear the noise of the Central Misting Control Panel as it filled the air of Arcadia with her mother's precious Lazarus Vector, and smell the blood in the air of the dead Splicers that mysteriously cluttered the Research Centre.
Satisfied with her work, Becky stood up and continued to stare at the Rosa Gallica, the most beautiful thing Becky had seen since everything had gone to hell. With all the rubble and leakages and Big Daddies and filthy Splicers…beauty was hard to come by in Rapture, but these flowers came damn close. With her shoulders hunched with grief, she began to walk up the stairs back to her mother's old office.
Her office; Becky had assumed control of Arcadia. After all, someone had to look after Rapture's main source of oxygen, and she sure as hell wasn't going to let the Saturnine have the place, not after he mother had worked so hard on it.
Passing one now, Becky shot a dark look at the entrance to a Saturnine hide out. They had kept relatively quiet since she'd made an agreement with them; they'd leave her alone to work and even agreed to help maintain the trees in return for materials required for their silly little rituals. She agreed to give them things like enzyme extracts and stuff like that, but she'd point blank refused to supply them with blood, as it would mean the grizzly task of getting out her old Little Sister syringe and use it for real, and action she'd vowed never to do.
Becky had been stolen from her mother at an early age to work as a Little Sister. What her captors didn't count on was her ingenuity when it came to escapology; she'd practiced countless times with her mother to prepare for that exact situation. She'd already been equipped with the syringe and had undergone more than half of the mental conditioning before she'd escaped. She didn't even have a sea slug in her belly; the operation was saved till last, the mental preparation done beforehand. She still caught glimpses of angels in place of dead bodies, but that had been reduced to happening once every three months or so.
Still, the syringe still fit in her delicate hands when she held it to remind herself how worse things could be.
As soon as she passed through the doors of the research centre, she activated the security system and stayed there until the rattling of shutters and clunking of locks had finished. She'd removed the shutters that the Splicers had destroyed the night her mother died and replaced them with the spare sets they kept in a secure place. It had been painstaking work carrying the heavy metal, so she'd spliced up with telekinesis to help her. She had been careful though, deciding only to use it when necessary to avoid being deformed by ADAM, or driven mad through overuse. Still, a girl had to have some form of protection in Rapture, and it had proved a smart investment. She'd been attacked whilst clearing up vines in the Tea Garden, pinned down by a sex crazed Splicer. She'd used her plasmid to stab the splicer in the back with the shears she was using as he forced her to the ground, the blood coated tip of the implement stopping barely a few centimeters above her own chest.
Becky took her time walking towards her office, through the relatively clean environment of the Research Centre. When Becky had taken over, she'd spent an entire week cleaning out both the research centre and her office. She supposed it was subconscious, the need to be able to control things in her immediate area when practically all other aspects of her life were influenced by others. She'd used telekinesis to remove the corpses and present them to the Saturnine which had begun their agreement. She'd mopped up blood, wiped windows, thrown out rubble and used plaster to fill in holes gouged out of the walls. The results had proven quite fruitful; she'd restored the research centre to near what it looked like when it first opened.
She passed through the threshold and walked into her office, heading strait for the water dispenser she'd installed into the office. She reached for her mug she kept on her desk and filled it with water she'd flavored with some powdered tea she'd found in the farmers market, relishing the taste of apple instead of stagnant water.
When she'd finished half of the mug, she went over to the safe and unlocked it. She'd changed the combination as soon as she could, afraid a Splicer had seen the combination before she'd had a chance to wipe it away from the window. From the safe she removed a vial of nutrients and minerals she'd concocted into a liquid form and inserted it into the Central Misting Control Panel. Pushing the button, the machine began to slowly fill the entire of Arcadia with the plant's weekly dose of nutrients and minerals. She bit her lip, the sound of the Panel bringing her back to 1960…
Warding away the memories, she walked back over to her safe and withdrew the bottle of Moonshine Absinthe she'd also found in the farmers market. Unfastening the bottle, she allowed only a drop or two to fall into her drink. The color of the flavored water turned a slightly darker shade of green as the absinthe mixed with the apple tea. Taking her drink, she pulled up a chair and put her feet up on the Misting Pannel, feeling the vibrations through her legs.
She sipped from her mug, both relaxing and grimacing as the alcohol warmed he stomach and burned her throat. She set her mug on the floor and stared out of the window at the tree tops. It saddened her to notice the absence of birds nesting between the branches, something she never thought she'd actually miss.
The leaves began to shake on the trees, only slightly at first but then gathering strength, quivering as though blown by a wind.
But this was Rapture, and there was no wind.
Becky looked down at her mug, and saw that ripples had begun to form in the water, showing that whatever it was wasn't just affecting the trees. She looked over at the water cooler at saw that the water was sloshing around, affected but the vibrations coming up through the floor that Becky suddenly began to notice. It felt like an after tremor from some earthquake or something.
Just as soon as it had started, the leaves stopped shaking and the ripples in her mug smoothed out, showing that whatever just happened had finished.
What just happened?
The Misting Control Pannel fell silent, notifying Becky that it had finished with a soft ring of a bell. She detached the vial from the Control Panel and took it into the Research Center, where she refilled it with the same mixture from a water cooler not unlike the one in her office. When it was full, she quickly returned it to the safe, locking it.
That done, she turned to the matter at hand. She walked to the interface near her desk and typed in a few commands using the ancient metal keyboard she'd salvaged from an old typewriter. She checked her local sensors for seismic activity and then sensors across the city. Maybe they lost another district, like Dionysus Park all over again, some stupid Splicer progressing the city further into the sea bed. With another stroke of the keys she printed out a report. As the clunky machinery put ink to paper, she took another swig fro her mug, completely draining it.
As soon as the printer spat out the paper, the tore it from the machine and scanned the information, picking out the only relevant pieces of information she needed.
Under "Sensor," she looked for the initials ADA, which was the short code for Arcadia. Looking at the reading, it said that the ADA sensor had only registered low level activity.
But she saw a trend in the readings, which all got higher as they got to one particular sensor. After that, the readings decreased again.
The sensor with the highest reading had been entitled FTF. That could mean it was Fort Frolic or Fontaine Futuristics. As Fort Frolic was closer to Arcadia, she guessed that it must have originated from the latter.
What confused her most that underneath FTF was another sensor called PNE.
It read blank. But that was impossible, PNE, whatever it was, had to be right next to Fontaine Futuristics, and therefore should be just under the FTF reading.
She was just about to re-print the page when the radio system suddenly crackled to life.