Storming out of the Maintenance Area, Stanley wondered how long it had been since he'd injected himself with Incinerate! 3. Though to him it had only seemed seconds between passing out and waking up, in reality he could have been out for hours. As soon as he'd woken up, he'd practiced with his new plasmid ability so that he knew how it worked. Shooting up with plasmids was like gaining a new muscle, and using them was like trying to locate it. It was like asking a person who'd never wiggled their ears or raised an eyebrow to do so. It wasn't as bad when a plasmid upgrade was similar. For example, using the Incinerate! ability to create a burst of fire was easy, and when upgraded to Incinerate! 2, it was the same basic feeling. But now he'd been given the ability to create a continuous jet of flame? That was a different feeling entirely. His hair was still smoking from his first attempts at locating the "muscle". He probably should have put his helmet on first.

He'd eventually found a Welding Glove in an employee locker after having to smash the security gate open with a wrench he'd found, following Thinker's directions. It had taken ages to smash the lock, and a further ten minutes to widen the gap in the stubborn gate enough that he could pass through. Apart from the lockers, the room had otherwise been empty, save the odd splatter of blood (that apparently couldn't be removed with water) or a clip of ammo.

He paused and held the glove up to examine it properly. The glove was made of several pieces either dark or light leather, crudely held together with strong stitching. It looked like it had been cobbled together from off-cuts at a textiles factory. What appeared to be a miniature Bunsen burner was attached to the palm, minus the air valve. The Bunsen burner was slightly conical towards the base, the entire shape curved rather than strait sided. When worn, fire from the users palm would be channeled through the metal cone to produce the same effect as a welding torch, the flame blue with extreme heat.

Stanley strode confidently across Plaza Hedone, unafraid of attack by a Splicer.

Everyone here was sleeping with the fishes, which meant Stanley was in for an easy ride.

Stanley passed several corpses gathered near the doorway floating face-down in the water, each washed clean of blood yet still seemed horribly mutilated by bullets. Somehow being clean of blood made it worse, allowing him to see the internal organs of the bodies without the blood to obscure them.

Stanley repressed the urge to be sick. Sure he'd killed people, but he'd drowned them. He hadn't spilled their guts.

Did that make him a better person? Could you call that humane?

Luckily, there was no one around to contradict him, so he decided he was in the right. The water was deeper here, reaching his knees and freezing his legs. He was starting to get pissed off with the temperature, and he was only gonna have fully immerse himself again.

Shoving the glove in his left pocket, Stanley trudged onwards to Pump Station 5.

He took this time to think again. He didn't know why people were always surprised when he told them he thought a lot; back in Rapture's heyday, they all thought was just a shallow reporter. Everyone would try to avoid him as they assumed he was trying to get close to them in order to glean information for the Rapture Tribune. Well, he supposed that was true; Sofia Lamb could tell anyone that, but that was the only major story he'd pulled from someone. Everything else had been petty things, like outing people who owned crucifixes to the public or selling people's information to Rapture's various marketing companies.

Of course, none of that mattered now. Rapture was down to less than twenty percent of its original population. The figures were frightening, even though he himself had contributed to its degradation.

He had considered the implications this presented. The most pressing of this was the question of practicality; how would they run Rapture now? Are there enough people to actually run it? They needed engineers, shop keepers, messengers. Would entertainment have to be sacrificed to a new way of life because there were no actors? What about news, who would report it? Who would run the transport, restarting the Atlantic express and the Bathysphere system? Restarting Rapture from scratch seemed impossible. It was, in effect, hoping that psychopathic murderers would group together and rehabilitate themselves. It was easier back on the surface. They weren't confined to a certain space up there; they could rebuild a high or as wide as they wanted whereas in Rapture, they could only build within the confinements set from the original construction. They could also travel between town, city, even between country, leaving behind their worries or accepting newcomers with open arms to rebuild their civilization. In Rapture, you were locked in for life, and it was highly unlikely anyone else could join them. As far as he knew, Rapture's self defense systems were still up and running.

And then there was the biggest question of all: Repopulation. How would that work? They could always do it the er…traditional way, but then there were several problems this had. The first and foremost was the biological science behind reproduction. He'd worked close to a fellow reporter who had written a report following an interview with a Fontaine Futuristics scientist. The article revealed that overusing ADAM resulted in an eighty percent chance of becoming infertile. Now, based on the fact that less than one percent of their current population hadn't abused ADAM, Stanley made a rough estimate that nineteen percent of the people living in Rapture could actually pair up and conceive a child. But that's where ethics came into it. People didn't want to be screwing each other just because they had a chance of getting knocked up. They wouldn't. In fact they'd rather pump each other full of lead than anything else.

Of course, they couldn't get anymore people from the outside, not after the Little Sister fiasco Lamb had created. They could hardly entice anyone to join Rapture in its current state anyway.

They couldn't clone people either. Ages ago, there had been a scandal where hundreds of cloned humans were born using ADAM. They had all been horribly deformed, their genetic code far too unstable to support growth. Plus everyone I Rapture would need to be cloned at least five times, and that would mean a significant absence of an adequate gene pool.

During his reverie, Stanley had passed through the entrance to the Pump Station and had begun to descend the steps into the sea water. He'd already passed the main turbines, and they had looked in pretty bad shape. There was no way he'd be able to fix that; he was just hired muscle, not a clever mechanic. The Thinker would just have to find someone else to do fix that.

The water was ice cold here, and the suit was doing little to keep him warm. He briefly considered taking a piss to keep warm, but quickly decided against it. That only really worked in wetsuits, and he didn't fancy walking around Rapture with pee sloshing around his watertight suit.

Here he could tell he was near the source of the flooding. He could see the currents in the water as they rushed off to fill the Alley, bubbling and frothing in places.

He could see a pulsating red light under the water, getting closer with each step he took. They must have been some sort of emergency lights, designed to alert the workers of the station that there was a leak, just incase they failed to notice that they were surrounded with water or that they couldn't breathe.

Stanley gritted his teeth and took the final step down and watched as the water in front of his porthole went from frothing madly to being absolutely tranquil. Underwater, the lights seemed to dye his surroundings alternating bright and dull red, lighting his way to the damage. He struggled against the current, grabbing whatever he could to drag himself forward. He followed the trail of lights through several gloomy rooms: the lights could only penetrate the water so far, and they were all there was to guide him.

Stanley fought through an open doorway, and finally found himself in Pump Station 5 pump room. In the muted light he could make out what appeared to be rows and rows of seats, set out like a church congregation. An altar was set out towards the back of the room, and a large picture hung up on the wall behind it. He couldn't make out what it was a picture of, due to water damage and the low lighting. And on either side of the room he could make out the shapes of the pumps, four on each side of the congregation. They each plugged into the wall and curved upwards towards the ceiling, red lights glowing from in between the base of the pipes. By the strength of the current, he could tell there were either several ruptures in the machinery or one big one. He assumed the first was most likely. Weeds which clung from the pipes whipped furiously in the water, dancing as they were caught in conflicting currents.

Fighting for balance, he soldiered on towards the edge of the walkway he was on, bending his knees to ground himself better. He crawled to the edge and jumped. The water kept him pressed against the wall, but he quickly floated to ground level.

The cracks in the pipes were clear to see, some stemming from the base whilst others ran the entire length of the pipes. Stanley patted his right pocket. This was going to need a lot of EVE, and he'd remembered to grab as many as he could on his way over. Nine EVE hypos sat snugly against his thigh, thanks to the huge pockets of the suit. From his other pocket, Stanley once again took out the Welding Glove and slipped it onto his left hand, closing his fingers around the funnel on his palm to protect it from getting damaged.

The current was unbearable, nearly sweeping him off his feet, but Stanley managed to stride forward and grab a bench. The section under his hand snapped off, threatening to throw his concentration and set him back to square one. He managed to stay where he was, and with a strong lunge, managed to anchor himself to the first pipe.

Jeez, how the hell did I go from a mass murderer to a handyman? Stanley thought, How the hell did they even convince me?!

As carefully as he could, Stanley opened his left hand, his arm muscles aching as he tried to keep it steady. He lowered his hand to the first fissure in the metal, aiming the tip of the metal cone at the breach. He closed his eyes and tried to recreate the same feelings he'd had when he'd tried earlier. It took a while, but eventually he felt the familiar twinge in his arm and brain, signifying that plasmids were being used.

Stanley opened his eyes and saw a large blue flame at the end of the curved cone, the metal on the pipe already beginning to redden with heat. Bubbles were beginning to form around the flame, racing away with the water as he continued to work.

Stanley frowned. The break in the pipe was now orange with heat, but the two sides weren't closing together. Stanley let go of the pipe and smoothed the breach over. Luckily, the suit was water proof and heat proof. Well, not heat proof exactly, but the metal didn't damage the suit. It was like smoothing wet clay, the metal closing over the breach with ease. Stanley had to hold his hand over the hole so that the water wouldn't push the soft metal away. When he took his hand away there was a palm shaped fix on the pipe, the metal sufficiently cool and hard.

Stanley dropped his hand away. He could already feel the drain of EVE in his system, and that was only after one small fix.

Something told him it would take more than nine EVE hypos to fix this place.