Chapter 14

They were left speechless. No one knew what to say to the girl who had witnessed man that she saw as a father be forced to commit suicide right in front of her by her biological mother. What can you say?

Batman thought that the only reason why Siren hated her mother was because of the agonizing experiments that were done to her. But what he just saw made that all trivial in comparison. She had suffered a worse tragedy than he had and he was surprise that she didn't end up becoming someone like him or worse.

"For almost ten years, she experimented on me," Siren's voice echoed around the Team and Justice League yet she was nowhere to be seen as images of her tortures surrounded them, "At first, her goal was to reverse the previous experiments done to me."

"Previous? Wasn't she the one who made you into that," Robin referred to the younger version of Eleanor.

"That was done by someone else. My purpose at the time wasn't to become a weapon but a Gatherer."

"Gather what?" Miss Martian asked as she wiped the tears away from her eyes.

"My job was to gather and recycle ADAM, the very substance that enhances your body, gives you control over the elements, and drives countless men and women mad."

Pictures of many men and women flashed through their minds. They were all heavily deformed with the cancerous tumors found all over their bodies. Some have mutated so much that they no longer resembled a human being.

"I can absorb memories, skills, and powers through the ADAM-enriched blood that I drink but I'm not the only one."

"Experiencing events that never happened to you and knowing people that you never met drove them insane for they can't tell who they really are anymore. The only thing that remains though was their addiction of the same substance that led them to this pitiful state."

More of these Splicers were attacking Subject Delta while he was defending a young Eleanor who clung onto his shoulders.

"And we, the Gatherers or Little Sisters as we're called, were the richest sources of ADAM that you could find in Rapture."

"The ADAM in our bodies may have made us impervious to damage because of highly accelerated regeneration but we were defenseless, incapable of using the ADAM to grant ourselves powers. So we were all given a Big Daddy, a person who have been heavily spliced to defend us with their very lives. Their bodies were grafted to the very diver suit that you see them wear and they are also incapable of sleep so they will remain ever vigilant for our safety. They will become hostile to anyone who attempts to approach their appointed Little Sister."

"My father even broke my aunt's jaw when she tried to approach me," she told them as she showed them Delta backhanding an African American woman while Young Eleanor looked at the scene with curiosity.

"Is that Grace Holloway?" Green Arrow stared at the woman that was knocked to the ground. He recognized her from the jazz songs that he used to listen to a decade or so ago.

"Yes. She was a good friend of my mother and I was temporarily in her care before I was turned into a Little Sister."

"So that's what happened to her," the green archer said, "I thought that she died or something."

"We're getting a little bit off topic here."

"The next years of experimentation were for a different reason. Once I had known of it, I hoped for a chance to curtail her plot for not just my own sake but for the others as well."

"That chance for freedom from my mother came to me last year."

"The very same time when those girls disappeared," Batman concluded.

"They were all turned into Little Sisters like me but they were different from my generation for we shared a psychic link with each other. Through this, I can enact my plan for our escape."

"The Vita-chamber, the greatest invention of all of Rapture, was the key point to it."

"How is it so important?" Aqualad stared at the glowing Vita-chamber as he raised an eyebrow.

"Its sole purpose was to revive the dead in peak condition."

They were all left speechless and in awe at this statement. The scientists of the underwater city were able to create something that baffled all of mankind: eternal life.

"But it will only revive certain people and it only works if that person had been killed instead of dying a natural death such as starvation or dehydration. So I commanded the Little Sisters to reconfigure the Vita-chamber to my father's genetic code and transported his body to one thus reviving him like he never died in the first place. I was able to send him telepathic messages to guide him around the city."

"I'll take it from here, Eleanor," the booming voice of her father announced.

"And now begins my journey through the crumbling ruins of utopia."

"On my revival, I was contacted by Brigid Tenebaum, the creator of the Little Sisters program."

An old woman appeared before them while being surrounded by young girls.

"Wait, she's the one who turned Eleanor into this," Superboy was outraged that the person wholly responsible for their new teammate's state was still not in their custody. He wasn't the only one that was indignant over this, "The one who turned all of them into these…Little Sisters!"

"Yes, she was their torturer but she ended up becoming their savior for she had developed a cure for their condition and returning them to relatively normal states."

"Relatively normal?" Kid Flash raised an eyebrow from under his mask.

"Can you honestly say that you can immediately go back to a normal life after extracting and drinking blood from countless dead bodies?"

…

"Didn't think so."

"Moving on, she had informed me of where Eleanor was being kept and that if I don't find her in time, my heart will stop and eventually kill me. That last part meant little to me. She practically told me that I should save her or die trying, which was exactly what I planned to do despite the conditioning on my body. All that I had to do was plow through an army of splicers and Big Daddy that were being controlled by Sofia Lamb."

Delta was battling an overwhelming horde of splicers. He had received many injuries from the deranged mutants yet he continued to stand and fight, wielding plasmids and weaponry.

Another memory showed him wrestling with another Big Daddy that had a different suit than him. The other Big Daddy was shorter for it had a hunched stance. Its helmet had eight lit portholes instead of one big porthole like Delta's. They both had a drill attached to their right hands. This battle was even fiercer than the earlier battles with splicers. It did make sense though since they were both made to fight groups of them at the same time.

"But they weren't the most fearsome enemies that I fought."

"No, they didn't even come close to the one being that even I, a Big Daddy, fear."

"What was it?" Robin was almost too afraid to ask. Anything that can scare Subject Delta must be a force to be reckoned with.

"You remember when you fought against my daughter?"

"Uh, yeah. What's your point?" Kid Flash obliviously replied as Robin, Miss Martian, Superboy, and Aqualad paled.

"She was not the only Little Sister that grew up, was she?" Aqualad concluded.

"They are the Big Sisters, a Little Sister that has reached puberty. The ADAM within their body had made them evolve beyond that of any Splicer or any Big Daddy. They are the literally the top of the food chain in Rapture for all that contained ADAM are their nourishment."

A slim figure, wearing a diver suit like what Eleanor used to wear except it had a cage strapped to the back and a harpoon gun attached to the right arm, was crouching over a severely injured Delta. She then began to repeatedly stab the Alpha Big Daddy in various places with her syringe and harpoon until his body became limp and a large pool of blood formed around him.

"If it wasn't for the Vita-chambers reviving me upon death, my mission would have been put to a stop then and there or any other time that I had to face one of them."

"Why? She wasn't even your real daughter," Artemis asked him, "Why did you try so hard to save her?"

"Everything was taken from. My life, my name, my humanity. But in exchange, I was given a daughter to love and care for as if she was my own."

"I may have been programmed to protect her but she is all that I have left. I refused to let her live out her life in that hell especially when I had discovered what that woman had planned for her."

"What did she plan Eleanor for?" Superboy folded his arms as he scowled.

"To transform her into a superhuman being of immense power equipped with all the knowledge of Rapture's intellectual elite. Lamb will then brainwash her to destroy her sense of self and mold her into a mindless pawn for her goals," he answered. He may have said that in a flat tone but the world around them began to rumble at his rage that the Team didn't get the chance to be angry at Siren's so called mother too.

This didn't surprise Green Arrow and Batman because the Dark Knight was able to retrieve this bit of information from the woman herself and he had briefed the League about this already.

"During my mission to save her, I met some people who hindered me somewhat. They were Grace Holloway, Stanley Poole, and Gilbert Alexander."

"Grace Holloway was one of Lamb's most trusted lieutenants and she would send Splicers to kill me. She was quite the nuisance. In due time, I cornered the woman in her safe house."

The Alpha Big Daddy stood before the same African American woman who was slightly older. His drill was poised to strike at the elder woman that was a dwarf compared to him.

"Oh my God," Kid Flash paled at the sight.

"I was tempted to kill her at first. She made my search for Eleanor more difficult even though she claimed to care for her."

The drill began to whirl.

"NO," M'gann cried out to the Big Daddy as if to plead for the life of Grace Holloway.

"But I didn't have the heart or lack thereof," the memory of the Big Daddy lowered his drill and turned away from the surprised old woman before exiting the room, "Killing an enemy in the heat of battle is one thing but killing a defenseless old woman is another. It was a line that even a monster like me wouldn't cross and as much as I wanted to save my daughter, I would never stoop that low."

Everyone sighed in relief that they didn't have to see an old woman get impaled by a drill. No one wanted to see anyone get impaled by a drill especially an old lady.

"Maybe except for the Joker," Batman and Robin thought of the Clown Prince of Crime.

AN:

I won't be updating for a while because of school related stuff.