The drive is fairly pleasant, all told, the train compartment you refurbished before it started serving perfectly fine to house everyone in your group capable of actually lying down.
Meaning Delta was acting the part of the train conductor, not about to take his massive armor off unless he can help it and Jasmine keeping hers on, too, instead choosing to sit towards the edge of the field of bedding you put up and playing with the Little Sisters happily interacting with her. Tenenbaum wasn't far off, for that matter, keeping an eye on everyone as she slowly ate a can of sardines, already having fed the humanized former little sisters earlier.
Incidentally, those same little girls are mixing in with the Little Sisters just fine, kind of fitting into their former crowd so seamlessly it takes a bit of searching to make them out due to their non-glowing, human eyes and non-resounding voices, the difference in skin color hard to make out in the lighting of the train's lights.
Their behaviour really wasn't that different, though.
You, meanwhile, were kind of occupied keeping the mob of little girls entertained, and Okita joining them for some reason didn't help at all. The others were either watching as you told made-up stories with bemusement or training with the time you currently had.
Until you arrive, of course.
Said arrival is heralded by a hard braking, though luckily enough nobody falls off the soft covers.
Delta, everything alright?
Guoh...
You can just think at me in words, Delta.
Ice... blocks... passage...
Okay, I'll come on over and have a look.
Sinclair... radio... warned me...
True to Delta's word, as soon as you get outside sitting in Jasmine's shoulder cage as you usually do, you can readily see the issue. The gate that would normally open when a train gets into the station is frozen shut, a big fat mass of ice blocking it off from access entirely.
"Well, this is... an issue."
"That's one way to put it, young man," a man says, coming out of one of the nearby automatic doors, smelling like he may have been living in the room you glimpse on the other side for a while.
Good, though, because you were already preparing to mow down another lunch box after you saw his blood signature, but he seems to be pretty much unmutated and sane.
"I've already introduced myself to Delta and the good doctor, but for the rest of your jolly troupe, my name is Augustus Sinclair, Esq. I've been going to ground ever since Lamb took control of the city, but as you see I've been a little stuck here for a while now."
Well, doesn't he just sound positively friendly and trustworthy? Still, Tenenbaum introduced him, so you'll just assume you can work with him for now.
Just also not going to trust him, especially not blindly.
"Gabriel. Gabriel Livsey. So, you wouldn't happen to have a plan ready on how to get through this chunk of ice?"
Sinclair, for his part, spends remarkably little time being flummoxed by the fact you are the guy he's speaking to. "Indeed I do, young man! You see, I just so happen to know that the amusement park right in that direction over there used to sell a nifty little product called incinerate. If any of you gets the plasmid, we could just use it to melt the ice long enough to pass right on through."
"I suppose there is a but in there somewhere?"
"There is. In order to actually get at the stuff, you'll need some ADAM, and the Little Sisters producing the stuff don't part with it lightly."
You share a look with Tenenbaum, who is already hauling bottles she refilled with the gathered ADAM from your earlier experiments out of the storage compartment.
"Don't worry, I think we got that covered."
Sarah, what does your power say on this guy?
Untrustworthy, but not inherently so. He'll cooperate and share information, but he's likely to just cut his losses and run if things look bad.
Gotcha, thanks.
"Before we do that, let me check something really quick, though." With that, you steer Jasmine (whom Sinclair's been eyeing with obvious wariness all this time) towards the ice, stretching an arm out to touch it.
Okay, so good news, you can shape the ice just fine, scraping great gouges through it as though it were butter with your current capabilities. Bad news, after some point, it's also just very, very hard to get any further, and you don't have any way to actually warm the gate itself back up, keeping it blocked and unoperable.
"No easy way through this, I suppose."
"Sgiii?"
"Nothing, nothing. I just wanted to try and see if the ice was physically blocking the gate, but it looks like the issue goes deeper than that. We'll need some way to warm it up and melt any ice in the internal mechanisms themselves."
Not one to hesitate in the face of obstacles, Jasmine tosses a few fireballs at the gate, but unfortunately, they aren't strong enough for your purposes; they do warm parts of the metal up, but you'll need something more thorough to do this... or just demolish the gate entirely, for that matter, though it's probably easier to just get that plasmid, after all.
Still, it's an option.
"Alright, here's the plan," you say once you've rejoined the others. "Sarah, Nora, would you mind staying at the train with Doctor Tenenbaum, take care of and protect the Sisters while we're out?"
"Sure, why not."
"Gladly."
You'd actually noticed Nora seems to have really taken to the girls, and they in turn have latched onto her as another substitute mother next to Tenenbaum.
"As for the rest of us, time to really get some use out of these robots." Snapping your fingers, you cause the Hammers to stand up where they're sitting inside the train, marching out in perfect lockstep and arraying themselves before you.
"Let's go have fun in the park," you smile. Only for Okita to pluck you out of the carrying cage, holding you to her prodigious bust.
"My turn."
"Sgiih."
You sigh.
The way to the park leades you through a small foyer of some kind, notable for a 'Circus Of Values' positioned inside and a small basin of water, with more rock solid ice inside. Oh, and a little mural painted on on the wall, showing some kind of indistinct figure with a few words written around it.
We Will Be Reborn. She Is Our Salvation.
Just as cheery as the rest of this place, really.
A quick shot out of Delta's rivet gun ends the crazed splicer taking potshots at the circus from an elevated position in the next room (apparently he hated clowns or something) and then the Hammers had to go in and take position before Jasmine would walk inside, completely insistent you don't out yourself in danger even after you mentioned you aren't exactly susceptible to guns. Anyways, here you are; the entrance of Ryan Amusement, with a dozen Hammers, Delta, Kate, Okita, Jasmine and yourself.
All that remains before you can get inside is to overcome your latest obstacle; the door and its automated admittance system.
"Welcome to Ryan Amusement! Please insert your ticket to proceed. Children under three years pay half price!"
Now... How exactly are all of you getting inside?
Idly fondling the boobs you're pressed up against, you sigh. Honestly, you don't know why you expected an actual obstacle.
Breathing out... Ivey, if you remember the correct one (your meals kind of blur together sometimes, it happens), you order the former leader of the raider gang called the Rust Devils to go and possess the ticket machine, forcing the thing to acknowledge that everyone in your group, including the robots, has input a ticket before you breathe her right back in, you give everyone a nod.
"Let's get this over with already. The sooner we tear that Gatherer's Garden out of wherever it's stuck, the better."
Once again sending the Hammers ahead and pocketing the promotional tonic apparently handed out as a free sample to anyone entering this park (a 'sports boost', according to the label) for later analysis and possible mass production, you soon arrive inside a grand foyer, with several little exhibits to the sides of the second floor you've found yourself in and a ground floor, both of which also have several doors leading onwards.
You sigh, again. "Now where should we go from here? Anyone see any maps?"
It is Okita that comes to your rescue this time around, holding up a flyer of some sort with the hand that isn't holding you to her chest.
"Saw this earlier and picked it up. Getting lost is boring."
"When did you pick it up? You carried me the whole way."
"You didn't notice...?"
"... You know what, ignore that question."
Okita just giggles. Annoyingly, it's an extremely cute sound.
"Alright, so according to this map, park security was to the side of where we came from, soo... anyone think we should go back, take a look around the place? Worst come to worst, all we waste is some time, but I'd really rather not have a bunch of splicers sitting in our back waiting to ambush us."
"Sounds good."
"Mhm."
"Uooohn."
"Sgeeh."
With the majority in favor, you have everyone get right back to where you started out from, keeping towards the right and into the 'employee only' area behind the cash registers you see lining the countertops along the wall- this is most likely where tickets were sold, once upon a time.
Once inside, you make note of the many cabinets all around, many of them obviously already ransacked and strewn in every possible direction, but many still closed after that whole civil war business. A possible source of loot for later, and if nothing else the mechanical components may be worth recycling them.
Further inside, you come across a seperated space inside the wall protected by security glass, a bunch of guns attached to the wall inside it.
As it happens, security glass is not Delta-proof, and so he now sports a brand new machine gun with an actual rotating barrel and all. It's a charming design, if nothing else, even though you made him promise to never actually use it.
At least not without a thorough redesign first.
Further back are an office, a lounge room with a nice window to the deep ocean outside, a few benches and a TV and a bunch of more offices. You did kind of get bored, so you made a point to have Delta smash as much furniture as he could, ordering the Hammers to carry the pieces back out with you and actually finding quite a lot of stuff inside- rivets for Delta's gun, food and drink (especially coffee), a few weird blue syringes Delta pocketed and quite a lot of loose change, probably a few hundred dollars by now when combined with what you still had lying around from the first train station and surroundings you ransacked.
The interesting part, though, came when you found the end (spying a Little Sister hard at work, by the way) and returned, your loot in steady hands, only to hear voices from the entrance hall.
Several voices, at that.
"Okay, I see... Ten splicers, I'm pretty sure. How well can you locate them, Delta?"
"Uoohn."
"Guess you gotta practice with it a little, then. No matter, though, let's just take care of this. Hammers! Advance! Shoot to disable over kill!"
Within moments, the dozen robots you're commandeering drop everything they were carrying, marching right through the door that opens based on proximity of moving human-sized objects and drawing their laser guns, shots ringing out from both sides in short measure.
"That's the first wave taken care of. Now, everyone, let's go ahead and just overrun these poor fuckers. Do try to keep them alive; I'm fine with putting them out of their misery, but we do need some food."
With that, you go shadow, gliding right out of Okita's grasp, oozing down her body and across the ground to follow after your bots. Funnily enough, Jasmine comes blasting after you, jumping with enormous strength and blasting foreballs at anything and everything in sight in search of you.
You yourself, meanwhile, are taking a look around and picking your target. The splicers have been splitting up, but they're dropping one by one, holding out rather well despite the way firepower is slanted against them even with just the Hammers aiming for their limbs and, in two cases, moving in to employ their arm blades.
Could have something to do with the way they're quite obviously stronger than they should be, jumping around and climbing rubble here and there, or maybe with the one fucker throwing fucking lightning at your bots, stunning them for a few seconds each, annoyingly enough.
Doesn't mean they managed to really do much else, though. Especially not once you appear right behind lightning thrower guy's back and jump, slamming a fist against his head.
You'll be eating well later.
"Alright, so let's get to the Hall of the Future already and get that damn plasmid."
"What makes you so sure that's where it's being sold?" Kate asks you, checking over her laser rifle, the (still living) bodies now in your possession bring piled into a corner in the background now that you've had Nolan ensure they're staying sedated.
Turns out his power does come in handy, every now and then.
"Because the map literally has a female figure holding up a plasmid or tonic or whatever. Plus, it fits into their naming scheme, so I figured if we're looking anywhere, that's the place to start."
"Eh, fair. So how's it feeling in there?"
Grumpily pushing Jasmine's hands trying to wrap duct tape around your legs to make you stay inside her shoulder cage aside, you sigh.
"Let me be honest here, I've had worse."
The Hall of the Future is less a hall, honestly, and more a series of rooms, though the place you enter as you get through the door seperating it from the big central part of Ryan Amusements does fit the bill somewhat, being a wide place filled with advertisements for a variety of plasmids.
Oh, and another pair of splicers you have captured swiftly and easily enough, both of them quarreling over what looks like an inactive turret of some kind and thus quite distracted.
You also have your Hammers literally hack the turret out of the ground, categorically refusing to leave behind another type of technology pertaining to one you've already worked with- the turret itself is fairly basic, merely being yet another gun on a swivel when you get down to it, but maybe the targeting mechanics will let you improve on your own work at some point, if nothing else.
So, going through what feels like an extensive tourist trap of some sort, it doesn't take you long to find what you came for, at the very end of the last corridor of the whole layout. A Gatherer's Garden, lit in neon pink and continually playing a stupid song of some sort.
"Okay, so how does this work, exactly?"
At your question, Delta once more goes to take one for the team, grabbing the basket full of ADAM bottles you took with you and pouring their contents into a part of the machine, soon receiving one of those characteristic vials from it in exchange.
Repeating the same procedure as the first time, Delta injects himself with the brand-new plasmid, immediately wielding a fire in his hand. Grunting a little, he pushes the basket at Jasmine, who takes a moment to really understand where he's getting at before nodding her bulbous helmet.
Before long, you have two new users of the plasmid, not wasting any time in trying it out when the automated advertisements start trying to get them to light a fire in a little fireplace not far from the Garden, promptly igniting the oil leading from it to the mannekins supposed to simulate a happy couple.
Interestingly, the fire doesn't need to travel from them to where they aim, simply spontaneously bursting from anywhere they gesture towards.
"Okay, now how do we get this thing back to Tenenbaum? She mentioned she'd need the insides of the machine to work her magic with."
In response, Delta spins his drill.
It takes quite a bit of work to actually get the Gatherer's Garden out of the Hall, the whole thing being quite bulky and heavy, but you do, thankfully, have a sheer unlimited source of labour to take care of shit like this.
Sure, the Hammers weren't built to handle heavy loads, but enough of them working together are still strong enough to just lift and carry the whole complex bit of machinery out of there, though you may want to look at their servos after this.
On the way out, another splicer or two show up, the poor things entirely insane and incapable of really comprehending that trying to fight a numerous, well-armed group such as yours is kind of a lost cause, but alas, they are simply added to the pile.
The pile that has, by now, grown quite a lot, amounting to a total of fifteen splicers numbly lying around incapable of really moving.
... Actually, with them plus al the other loot, you may need to go twice to ferry everything back to the train station, even with the robots' added pairs of hands at your command.
You tried. You really did.
One can say whatever they want, but when you entered your inner palace and had the Maid bring you to 'a place where you can train', you had expected her to teleport you into an empty room, or maybe an abandoned part of the palace. Maybe out into the woods where you'd have some space for moving around.
But no, instead you were inside a seemingly endless mob of Maid bodies, hoisted up into the air and your clothes pulled on from all directions, stripped from you no matter what you tried.
""We have been very lonely, master. Lonely and jealous,"" they'd said in a perfect chorus. ""So the time has come for us to pamper the master in his current form. The master's training exercise is to be pampered by us.""
You will never again look at silver spoons the same way. Or at jelly, for that matter.
You're not going to lie, that was the perhaps hardest ordeal you've subjected yourself to yet. Still, you eventually escape, taking the coward's way out by evacuating yourself from the palace.
After a few minutes of trying to regain your emotional equlibrium, the relative peace and quiet of the small army of Little Sisters clamoring about nearby soothing your nerves, you go to approach Tenenbaum.
Actually, are there more Little Sisters now?
You know what, fuck it, you aren't even going to question that.
"So, everything you need in there?" You ask, stepping next to her.
"Hardly, but enough to get started. This Garden was meant to dispense a few chosen plasmids only and it shows. Still, I should be able to use the sequencers within to allow us access to most low-level plasmids and tonics, at least."
You now have access to pre-made level 1 plasmids and tonics
"In order to make use of them, though, we might need a large amount of EVE. It's a mix of the material that ADAM grows out of; it gets consumed upon active usage of plasmids and was the main division line between whether we categorized a substance as a plasmid or a tonic."
"I suppose it's the stuff in those blue syringes Delta keeps pocketing and stashing away?"
"They are. You say Subject Delta has been gathering them?"
Wordlessly, you point off to the side, where Delta is busying himself transporting crates visibly filled with bright blue.
"We found a lot of them."
"I... see." Forcefully tearing her eyes from the sight of several of those crates, Tenenbaum returns to carefully manipulating a few pieces of intricate machinery torn out of the Gatherer's Garden, not looking like they were meant to be used manually.
"Mind telling me a bit about what you're doing? I'm not exactly a geneticist, but I am supernaturally intelligent and possess perfect memory, so I do try to gather as much information as I can whenever possible."
"I do not mind. Though it has been a while since I found myself in any position to pass knowledge down, so forgive me if I don't make sense to you."
One thing that somehow bothered you about this whole park was... well, it was the ride advertised all over the place. Journey To The Surface.
More specifically, the fact you just couldn't find the damn thing.
Admittedly, that only lasted until Okita pointed the sealed door out to you, but still.
With that, you're off to have Delta do horrible, horrible things to the door with his drill, the material it is made of durable, but unable to withstand your work indefinitely, and so it is that before long, your little expeditionary group makes the Journey To The Surface.
Of course, the very first thing you see is some kind of office space to the left, made up to look lived in at some point, you think, though it's kind of hard to say after a long, long time of everything getting destroyed. Sitting behind the office desk is an elaborate mannekin looking like an actual man, though again, long years without maintenance and disuse had the paint come off.
Literally, you can see the metal underneath the colorful coating.
Driven by a morbid sense of curiosity, you push Jasmine to approach the little exhibition, allowing you to press the big red button on the speaker standing before all of this.
"Why hello there," the thing exudes as a light goes on to shine at the now suddenly moving mannekin, gesturing vaguely as though it was doing the talking, "my name in Andrew Ryan. I built the city of Rapture for children just like you, because the world above has become... unfit, for us. But here, beneath the ocean, it is natural to wonder if the danger has passed. If those we left behind will ever come to their senses. So, let us imagine, you and I- What life before was, on the surface."
"... Well, okay," you say after a brief stunned silence, "anyone wanna bet this is a bunch of government-mandated propaganda?"
"No bet, it's fucking obvious," Kate answers. "You did mention Andrew Ryan was the guy that built this whole place, didn't you? Of course he would want to indoctrinate the youth. Heck, it's something me and Sarah were talking about doing on Earth Fallout at some point."
"Since when are we calling it Earth Fallout?"
"Since it became confusing not to have names for all those parallel dimensions and Earth Nora after the first good thing we got from it being vetoed by her."
"Eh, fair enough."
Leaving that whole... thing, behind, you approach some kind of balcony overlooking a larger room filled with a whole bunch of what look like some kind of bathyspheres or something, those funny balls people could sit inside and dive (you'd actually looked that shit up once) lined up on some sort of tracks, a series of stairs leading down to it.
Oh, and a bunch of debris blocking those tracks intermittently, but that goes without saying in Rapture these days, it seems.
More importantly, however, is the movement you spy both down along the tracks and on a small platform on the opposite corner of the room. Looks like you got company, after all!
Cursing as you duck out of the way of a lightning bolt, you adjust that. Less company and more food. Sure, they were going to be food anyways, but now you'll make them suffer beforehand, too.
The following battle is short, brutal and to the point.
Jasmine screeches loudly.
Delta begins taking aimed shots with his rivet gun, nailing limbs anytime a splicer moves.
The Hammers split up, half taking position atop the stairs and the other half moving down to get in close and disable anyone they can under covering fire.
Kate cackles as she starts firing her laser, literally blasting her way through cover and killing more than one of the splicers by accident.
You try to get a shot on something, but Jasmine is rushing around wildly trying to keep any bullets and plasmids from hitting you.
The splicers are scattering and trying to shoot everyone else.
Jasmine screams, lifting a trio of those bathyspheres and slamming them into anything that moves downstairs.
Everyone else is looking at her, but she's too busy crushing splicers to care.
All in all, it's a very loud, very brutal and very fun battle.
The next exhibit, after a bit of walking uphill, is an only somewhat crappy rendition of a farmhouse, a farmer standing before it working with a hoe and his son and wife looking at him as they stand before the door.
This time, the whole song and game starts up automatically as you approach. "On the surface, the farmer tills the soil," the voice says from above this time, the light going on to showcase the farmer moving his tool along the ground, "training the strength of his arm for a home and lands of his own."
Now the light becomes red. "But the Parasites say no! What was yours is ours!" A pair of giant arms stretch from the ceiling behind the farmhouse, taking the roof of the house off and sticking one hand inside. "We are the state! We are god! We demand our share."
You are, once again, lost for words for a moment before you and Kate chuckle, the whole thing just too funny especially given your own activities both on Earth Bet and on the recently dubbed Earth Fallout.
"That's certainly one way to look at taxation," you eventually say, watching as a curious Jasmine walks over and pokes the farmer's mannekin, its head falling off all but immediately.
"Any thought about declaring yourself a godking or something of the sort? I could certainly see the people in Fallout accepting you as their new religion," Kate suggests, leaning on the exhibit's fence.
"Nah, religion always turns out badly. If they decide to get weird over me demanding human sacrifice at some point or something of their own accord, then sure, let them, but otherwise I'm keeping my hands off the whole thing."
You keep on following along the course the ride would have taken in its day, walking through a disproportional film set showing a surface city of some sort, the bit where a parasite arm would come out of a courthouse sadly looking like it doesn't work anymore, passing by another Andrew Ryan in his office telling you about how Parasites do not create anything of their own and only take from others, whereas in Rapture, one owns what one is owed.
It's all very fascinating, but more in a giggle-inducing way than what you believe he would've wanted.
The next two exhibitions require a little time to move your sizeable group through after it's waded through a bit of flooded cardboard city, this time showing how science and art were maliciously oppressed and only allowed to exist in the service of The Parasite (and seriously, those giant arms used to show The Parasite are hilarious).
And honestly, you'd like to see any government or state try to limit your art. Really, and if you'd have to make it skyscraper-sized and force people to look at it. If people don't care, fine, that's just a completely normal thing, but if someone tries to repress your work, everyone gets it shoved right into their face if that's what it takes to make them acknowledge it.
Oh, and you pass by a few interesting rooms, with the maintenance room especially full of useful shiny things, but you let it be for the moment to move on to the seemingly last exhibit, yet another Andrew Ryan explaining why Parasites are evil and would bla bla bla, you've kinda stopped listening at this point.
"You know, not to toot his horn, but Ryan had a few good ideas and all. He just obviously took them too far," Kate says, gesturing at the general devastation around you.
"Obviously is an understatement, a state without control may as well not be a state at all. Ryan went and turned Rapture into complete anarchy, and as much as a simple social program to ensure none would starve on the streets would have... probably not kept all of this from happening, but it at least would've kept him in power a while longer. ADAM-based gene modding obviously was what turned people into insane psychopaths, so maybe basic product testing would've done the trick, too."
"Careful, you sound a lot like a parasite there, Gabe," Kate teases you, rifling through the 'office'.
"Oh pooh, screw Ryan and his opinions. Humans, people as a whole, are incapable of making their own decisions on a large scale. They need to be told what to do; it's for their own good, really. Leaving everyone to make their own decisions inevitably leads to chaos and breakdowns."
And that is that, pretty much.
On the way back, riding on Jasmine's shoulder as you are, you decide to use the opportunity to try and get her to take her helmet off.
You really want to see her face one of these days.
"... so really, it'd be fine, Jasmine."
"Sgeee."
"Come on, I'm sure you're very pretty underneath the helmet."
"Skiiih."
"Of course I wouldn't hate you if you aren't. You're my Jasmine, regardless of how you look."
"Guiih?"
"I'm just really, really curious, that's all." And you may or may not be planning to surprise her. Just a little.
"... Giiih."
"Alright, if you'd like to."
And with that, you're off, Jasmine carrying you into one of the side rooms as you wave the rest of the group onwards, mentioning something about you taking stock of the loot inside the maintenance room before you move out of sight.
Finding a dark corner isn't hard in this place, and so it doesn't take long before Jasmine lets you down by unlatching her shoulder cage, carefully lowering you to the ground before, with no little trepidation, she reaches for her helmet.
"Oh, wait, before I forget," you say, reaching for your pocket, "I got something for you."
Strictly speaking, you stole one of those butterflies Lamb's religious followers stick to the walls all over the place and just replaced parts of it with very thin ice you formed out of some water, but hey, it looks pretty enough.
Especially when combined with Jasmine's smile.
"You look very pretty," you say when she's finally got it off. "Honestly, it's a shame you don't show it more often."
Her blush, beyond being very cute, shows you how much she cares about your opinion.
Alright, so with you and (re-helmeted) Jasmine back at the train station and the rest of your group out and about again (Delta groaned something about wiping out any splicers nearby thanks to his sonar power) and Kate deciding to take a break for a bit (presumably more because she wants to play with the Little Sisters too than because she's tiring of the killing of splicers), you'll just leave amassing more warm bodies and loot to them and proceed to go ahead and have a good ol' mass feeding between yourself, Kate and Sarah.
Jasmine needs a little time to cool off anyways...
The little spot of feeding frenzy is fairly enjoyable for everyone involved; except, perhaps, the splicers, but then again, who really cares about their opinions?
Not you, certainly. Neither do Sarah nor Kate, and even the Little Sisters watching treat the cold blooded mass murder as something entirely normal.
As do Nora and Tenenbaum, with Okita considering the whole affair as so inconsequential she isn't even letting up off that book she found somewhere. Though, Tenenbaum is watching the whole thing with clinical detachment, going so far as to take notes.
Still, nothing that stops you, and soon after you overcome the rush of information and practical knowledge now flooding your mind, you turn towards Tenenbaum yourself.
"So, you wouldn't happen to know exactly what parts of a splicer are the ones controlling plasmids, and which ones I can safely transmute into other material?"
"I assume you are intending to do something similar to the ADAM dispensers?"
"I am indeed. In fact, while we're at it, may as well add another dispenser for EVE this time, just to make sure we won't run out anytime soon."
"... And as long as the spine is intact and connected to the brain, the functionality of the plasmids should, in theory, be retained. Do you have a way to test whether the reanimation process reactivates the ADAM structures?"
"One moment." Chanting the spell to animate the collection of corpses you've been working on, just half an oversized torso and an arm.
"Try to use a plasmid." As soon as you finish your sentence, the arm twitches, a bolt of lightning streaking out of its hand and impacting the wall.
"The functionality may be slightly diminished from the baseline if I remember correctly, but it seems the plasmid's basic functions are still present. Fascinating."
"As I said, the process of necromancy generally lets the affected bodies use any biological functions they had when alive. The trick is to avoid changing any parts that still have a use. While winged animals can still fly after being killed and reanimated, if I were to, say, mold a corpse into having wings, it would be unable to fly even if the wings were functional, as they wouldn't be a natural pre-existing part for the undead to make use of."
"Faascinating."
"I happen to agree. Anyways, let me finish up assembling these guys and see how they turn out."
"So, how exactly does this whole plasmid creation process work?" You ask Tenenbaum, eyeing the complicated pieces of machinery you unearthed from the Gatherer's Garden.
"I do not mind showing you the intricacies, though we are hardly working in lab conditions. Simply put, the purpose of all this is to program the ADAM being put in to become a specific type of cell with downright impossible properties instead of simply replacing and healing any organisms it is introduced into. This ability does, by the way, allow for some astounding uses in the medical field..."
Train Upgrades
Automated Defenses: Your materials, especially circuitry and such, are getting rather tight, but... Well, better safe than sorry. Install half a dozen laser turrets throughout the train, set to devastate anything hostile (4 points)
Automated Point-Defense: You are kind of worried about possible attacks on the train while underwater. Why not go and... give it a few little slug throwers, that automatically shoot down any projectiles high-yield enough to be an isse through the armor (3 points)
Enhanced Comfy Compartment: You have a bunch of beds, pillows and teddy bears, the works. That said, with a lot of new fabric to work with, you could totally add a few giant plush toys and curtains (2 points)
The Little Sisters, somewhat unsurprisingly, react with happiness to the enormous teddy bear you carry into the train, to the point you have to physically defend yourself against being dragged inside and cuddled, your smaller size and leverage working to your detriment.
It is only the promise of more oversized plush toys that saves you from spending an hour or so tiring the girls out until enough of them go to sleep you can sneak past the rest. You actually think they might be sleeping in shifts now that so many of them are in one place, taking turns sleeping and drinking from the ADAM producers.
You mentally thank Tenenbaum for asking you to have the manufactory spit out a few buckets for them to throw up their ADAM into before someone comes along to move it into a container of some sort.
You, uh, you think you might just have to find a way to dispose of the stuff safely at some point. The ADAM tank you also put in that compartment is filling at an alarming rate.
It is around the time you assemble the third giant toy, a rabbit with really large floppy ears the design you drew out this time, that the others you sent to take any and all salvage they could carry as well as any living prisoners they could find return. And before you're swiped up by an overexuberant Jasmine, you have time to see the true reason everything is just getting worse.
Two more Little Sisters, coming in riding on Delta's shoulders. There is no escape for you, it seems.
"Alright, time for some business talk," is how Sinclair approaches you when you finally get Jasmine to let go of you for any length of time (to practice with her new plasmid powers, once she has both Electro Bolt and Incinerate to play with).
"I'm always up up for that kinda talk," you answer, letting up off the manufactory as you were adjusting the turrets being produced. "What do you wanna talk about?"
"Well, I'm not about to ask where all yer shiny stuff's comin' from," Sinclair says, "but what I'm interested in is whether you'd be open to makin' this whole shebang a business partnership, of sorts. Y'see, all this nifty stuff here- the machines, the endless ADAM- it'd be worth a fortune up on the surface, to the right buyers. Now, don't go tattlin' this, but in the same place Lamb's made her headquarters in, under Fontaine Futuristics, I've got an escape submarine stashed from my old days. Might be a bit of a tight fit, but I figure we could get there, find Eleanor, and skedaddle right out of this city with everyone on board. In exchange, all I ask for is that you cut me in, let me negotiate deals and all and before we know it, we'll be sittin' back on out own tropical island. How's that sound?"
"You know, Sinclair, I got a better idea. Why don't we go ahead and just take over the world once we've taken over Rapture? Think about it, this is the only place in the world any of this superscience can be found. Once we take it, we can just force everyone else to play by our tune, the easy way... or the hard way."
"You don't think small, do ya, champ?" Sinclair responds, obviously thinking about it and rapidly reassessing his options. "You do realize that we'd need to not only get rid of Lamb, which I'm still gunna say I'm skeptical about, but we'd also need to deal with her cult that's pretty much taken over the city, right?"
"And all of that is an issue we can solve," you counter, "all we need is to take out Lamb first, and the rest becomes a disorderly mob. And a disorderly mob is... dangerous, in its own way, but it can be managed. It can be controlled. And it can, ultimately, be split and eaten one splicer at a time. We have literally unlimited ADAM here, and more importantly, an unlimited source of robots and more superscience. I can create more people with powers, raise an army of the dead. Once we're in position, we could take the entire world for what it's worth and more."
"Woah, easy there, chief. You're talkin' just going up and conquerin' the known world, an' I doubt the big countries would look all too kindly on that kinda behaviour, an' nukes are still a thing, last I heard."
So nuclear weapons are a thing here, too... You're starting to think Earth Bet might be the outlier, here. "Oh, we wouldn't go and conquer, necessarily, but, you know, if we were to surface and approach the right people, get them to cooperate with what we want, using our technological advantages... Well, I don't see the world complaining about being uplifted into a new age, a new age whose strings we pull. I have knowledge of technology from entirely different dimensions, advances none are liable to have dreamt up, if Rapture is to be taken as an example for this Earth's current state. Just buying up the world is entirely doable, if we only do it right."
"... Alright," is what Sinclair eventually comes up with, "alright, alright alright."
Taking his eyes off your face for the first time since this conversation began, the sleazy businessman begins pacing a little, walking to and fro and a hand wanders to his face. "So what you're saying is, you can do that. You have the capability to do that. I'm guessing you don't really need the submersible for that, either. Alright, so let's say everything goes as you say. We get topside, with Rapture clear of anyone that opposes us. You have Tenenbaum, the Sisters, all of them, behind us. How would we even start in something as... big, as taking over the world?"
"Ah, you're thinking too far ahead already, Sinclair," you tease him in your boyish guise, "the first step would be easy. Downright trivial, even." Stretching your neck for more theatrical value than anything else, your condition wonderfully preventing you from ever being sore or your muscles getting tired. "First thing we do, we start a company. A company that sells the big things, depending on what time period we're in."
"It's 1968 right now, chief, in case you weren't sure."
"Ah, the seventies! Wonderful. So yes, anyways, as I was saying, the first thing we do is making money. We find the right market and get rich off it, I'm sure I don't need to tell you how the whole spiel works."
"You don't, no. There's a reason Sinclair Solutions made me Ryan's go-to problem solver, or why among all these sad sacks I'm still sane and unspliced."
"And from there, well, we just snowball things, selling technology and buying companies and people all the way until we own all the first world nations in the world. The rest... is child's play. And think of it this way, we'd even be doing the world a favor! If Rapture's proven anything, it is that most people simply cannot be trusted with the big decisions. But that, that's why we're here, Sinclair. I'll be honest with you, I don't give a whit's ass about what you might or might not have done with your life before now, but you've got a decent head on your shoulders and you seem the kinda man that can appreciate simple logic.
The only way humanity can really prosper is if we guide it into doing so. And there ain't no reason not to get richer than god while doing it, is there?"
Sinclair just looks at you.
"I'll be honest, you had me at buying the world. So long as we end up on top, I don't give a rat's ass about anything else. Though, speaking of, funny story, that... You are sure you ain't just looking into stringin' me along until you find the next best guy to make deals in your stead, are ya?"
"Please, if all I wanted was a few paperpushers, I could just buy them. You're above average far as 'making deals' is concerned, and that's all it takes for me to go ahead and hire you on. Not like I'm particularly interested in the business side of the business, mind you, just so long as I can delegate all the actual work to someone while I grow fat and powerful off the blood of any enemies we might have is perfectly fine far as I'm concerned."
"Oh yes, 'bout that... Should I be worried you're gonna decide to eat all hoomans or something sometime down the line?"
You give Sinclair a grin with your jagged, sharp teeth on full display. "Why would I ever do that? No farmer would slaughter all their sheep, after all."
With that, you turn around. "But I'll let you dwell on that whole idea for the time being. This is all far in the future after all, anyways, we'll still have to take care of Lamb first and foremost. Unless you'd like to ask anything pertinent?"
"Yeah, 'bout that, chief... Guess I should mention it now. Lamb's sitting in Persephone- used to be my old grounds, actually, back in the day, when I ran it. Used to be the place where Ryan and his 'council' put anyone they found too disagreeable; or just didn't want to stay around. Just, y'know, in case that comes up."
"Duly noted and added to the archives of things I likely won't ever care about again. Anyways, would you mind holding this?" You ask, handing him a turret chassis. "I need to adjust these things, but it's pretty hard for me to reach the ceiling like this."