With Sofia safely in your custody (you're having Jasmine watch over her for now while you're busy for a bit), you can get to thoroughly recycling all the brainwashing hardware inside Eleanor's room, along with any machinery you can rip out of the decontamination mechanism.
Delta may or may not take great joy in demolishing a bunch of this stuff.
Still, you have copious amounts of materials on you in short order, and though the situation on that front isn't ideal, you do have enough circuitry to work with, at least.
Before long, you have a smaller teleporter assembled, not enough to teleport stuff around over these distances normally, but with a bit of your telepathic coaching, Sarah can operate the one you made on the train and essentially 'link' the two of them together, allowing the whole group to basically wormhole right to your location.
Going out of your way to build one of those in the train is paying off.
Incidentally, as you were making sure while you made Yoshi use his power to actually do the final assembly on the teleporter, Cindy somewhere in the direction of Fontaine Futuristics, as you make sure to tell Mark when he arrives. He just gives you a resolute nod- if nothing else, he appreciates you going out of your way to check.
Of course, while you had the manufactory going anyways, you also slipped in an order for a certain ring gag...
Naturally, a ring gag isn't necessarily the best medium to inscribe your feelings for someone, so you had to use an additional collar for that purpose. It did get done quite nicely, though, a tasteful black with golden letters going around it.
'Property Of Gabriel Livsey, If Lost Please Return'.
Proudly showing her what you put on it, you personally fasten the collar around Sofia's neck, her arms held behind her by Jasmine... who, of course, is looking jealous about the whole thing.
Because of course. And let's not get to questioning as to how exactly you can read her body language this closely for some reason. Your whole ability to interpret groans, screeches and other sounds as long as they're meant to say something is completely insane as it is.
Now, with Sofia properly equipped with her new collar denoting her as your property in addition to to ring gag kept in a similar color scheme, her tongue resting on the words 'My Lamb' as it sits securely inside her mouth, you can relax at her inability to talk as you wait for the others to come in, idly turning any nearby scrap metal into a few chairs and a big round table for all of you to sit on.
You figure it's high time you got to actually having a talk, with your most immediate concern out of the way.
Sitting around the impromptu conference table are yourself, Sarah, Kate, Nora, Okita (reluctantly), Delta, Tenenbaum, Sinclair and Mark, the Sisters of various tapes populating both your surroundings and Eleanor's room, the damsel in distress herself still asleep somehow.
Also, perhaps you really shouldn't be this surprised, but of course a large amount of Little Sisters joined the mob you have already going on through the vents nearby, but you've already given up making sense of the sheer amount of kids running around by now.
"So," you say, clapping your hands and having most of the table's occupants look at you instead of Sofia, whom you leashed to your chair after binding her legs together so she can't actually stand up (and bound her hands, naturally), "let's get into the spirit of things here. We've been going at what we were doing fairly haphazard until now, and it worked out mainly because we only really had one relatively straightforward goal to fulfill, but I feel we should get everyone's cards on the table and hash out how to proceed now that we have come this far.
For starters, Sofia Lamb is under our control, and with her, the Family, the cult that consisted of most organized splicers around the city, is leaderless. Similarly, the city's loudspeakers will be under our control as soon as we get to the rest of her stuff down here in Persephone, leaving us with, you know, the rest of the city to deal with if we want to leave this place richer than god.
That means methodically going through each and every district, which should be at least somewhat easier thanks to the citywide lockdown still in effect thanks to our former adversary over here."
"Yeah, 'bout that, chief," Sinclair speaks up, "you sure it's a good idea to leave her aroun' like this? I've made that same mistake, y'know, and I paid for it when she took Persephoen straight from me."
"Yes, yes, you mentioned she incited a revolt at some point. Don't worry, though, I've already made sure she won't be speaking anytime soon, so that threat, at least, is taken care of."
"Uooohn?"
"A good point and one I was getting to, Delta. Doctor Tenenbaum, would you mind taking a look at Eleanor later? She still hasn't woken up yet, which strikes me as somewhat odd. You're the most used out of all of us to this kind of thing."
"Naturally. We do not have much equipment here, but I will see what I can do."
"Very good. On a somewhat related note, Fontaine Futuristics. It's kind of in the way from here to the rest of the city, it's full of lab equipment we may need for further research of our own and it just straight up has data and research on a whole lot of plasmids and tonics I would like to get our grubby hands on sooner rather than later, not to mention Mark's daughter is somewhere in there, as I have magically determined. It's just the most relevant place to start looking into taking over. More immediate, however, is Persephone itself- Lamb had a lot of followers, it stands to reason at least a few may be somewhere around here deeper inside the building, and if there#s one place to securely turn abducted little girls into Little Sisters, it'd be a former detention facility like this."
"Exactly," Sarah agrees, "and that doesn't even begin to describe any potential contingencies she may have put in place. Anything you could think of having left here, Sinclair?"
"Ahaha, well, now that'n you mention it, lassie... there may or may not be several tons of explosives rigged up to blow the buildin' down into the trench, in case Ryan ever decided ta try double-crossin' me. The codes to actually set 'em up is save inside me head, though, never wrote it down nowhere."
"Good enough reason to prioritize the immediate area first, I suppose. Anything else worth mentioning?"
"Yes, one thing," Tenenbaum nods. "The Thinker is still active, keeping the city's automated functions running. It is a supercomputer constructed using ADAM," she explains at your quizzical look, "theorized to be able to solve any equation in the world, down to predicting the future using complex mathematics. It may come in handy for our own goals, should we manage to gain access to it."
"Another priority once we've solved the immediate issues surrounding us."
Persephone Correctional Facility is not a small place, despite being essentially just a single building suspended above an abyss of dark seawater, thanks to its location inside an enormous underwater cave discovered during Rapture's construction. That means actually clearing the whole facility of splicers and fixing it up is an enormous task, made no easier thanks to the significant amount of followers Sofia has stationed deeper inside the gulag.
Thankfully, you do have ways to deal with both issues. If there's simply too many splicers to deal with individually, just produce an obnoxious number of robots to overwhelm them in sheer numbers yourself; sure, they may accidentally kill a bunch of those suckers, but that's a sacrifice you're willing to make.
Similarly, your choice on how to deal with the other issue is to just take Yoshi and throw him at it. Your minion, while seemingly annoyed at being used for what amounts to menial work, doesn't have any objections against his new job as such, and before long him and a few of your Bobs are busy at work, demolishing anything they can get their hands on and using the manufactory you have summoned anyways to reassemble massive amounts of furniture, plugging up any leaks letting in water as they go.
Your version of Persephone may not be particularly homely, but it's both clean and structurally sound, which is more than you can say for the rest of Rapture at this time.
That said, Inner Persephone, as you've decided to call it, is gearing up to be somewhat more of an issue going forwards; the cells, administrative offices and most of the security measures are all deeper into the building, and while the mass of humanoid Hammers you produce and send right there for them to bring back any captives and casualties they can get (even their own fallen can be recycled fairly easily), Yoshi will most likely take quite a while to get through and clean out every single room.
At least you've reduced the ways splicers can come at you to just one, where the rest of the city lies, and even then they'd have to find a way into Persephone first; Sofia did a very good job in isolating her headquarters from anywhere and everywhere else.
"So this is Sofia's office, huh?" You ask, taking a look around the place. It's honestly not as badly trashed as pretty much everything else you've seen of Rapture so far, though that isn't saying much.
It's a fairly wide open room, with huge, sweeping windows granting a nice view of the city in the distance and some kind of glowing thingy out in the ocean below Persephone to anyone sitting at the large office desk filled with levers, buttons and microphones of various kinds, lots of space to set paperwork onto, too.
Clearly, this is where she spent a lot of time, considering the organizational effort involved on sending a whole city's work of splicers against you kind of requires some kind of command center from which to contact groups of them. Originally most likely made for Sinclair's use when he was still in control of his prison (which was totally legal to operate only because Rapture didn't actually have any laws, to your understanding), this place has a direct line to a great many cameras throughout the city (the ones that are still intact by this point, anyways) and should allow you to contact just about anyone still sane enough to respond to words.
Also of interest, Sofia's personal computer... and all the notes she's been keeping on the various people throughout Rapture, from Eleanor to, to your surprise, the Thinker. Also yourself, but you surmised that much already.
On a side note, the vents, the system of which stretches throughout just about everywhere you've seen, are noticeably present just about everywhere in here, which may explain why Little Sisters are filtering around everywhere at an alarming rate, the now over thirty loveable little scamps looking at you in ways that would have you question if you already made sure to bring your pair of ADAM-producing undead to this place, but you know you did thanks to your perfect memory.
Still, you'll just leave them be for the time being, the rest of the office drawing your attention for more right now... including a properly bound Sofia still wearing her lovely collar and ring gag, carried here by both Lucy and Mindy, Jasmine standing a bit off to the side, as she keeps an eye out for trouble and escaping prisoners.
"Well, enough gawking around, I suppose," you ponder to yourself. Turning towards your prisoner, you wave her guards over towards yourself. "Come on, come on, me and Sofia here need to have a talk anyways."
Once you have her firmly within your grasp (and thanked Lucy and Mindy, of course), you begin feeling the bound and gagged woman up, Sofia's stern face clearly showing she's aware of what's about to happen to her.
"What, I made my plans for you very clear from the very moment I got my hands on you. You really shouldn't be surprised."
"Hhh-h," she intones in response, your mysterious translation power not actually picking anything up. Looks like it doesn't work when someone's been gagged or muffled like this.
"Now, Sofia, we can do this one of two ways," you smirk at her. "You can either be a good girl and do as you're told... Or you can refuse, and we're doing this the hard way. No matter what, though, you are about as fucked as they come. Now... Bend over."
You've got your paws all over her, playing with her modest bust and sinking your hands into her buttcheeks, but Sofia makes no move to obey, glaring at you defiantly again. You can't have that, of course.
"The hard way it is, then." Continuing to ignore both the Big and the Little Sisters staring at what you're doing, you let your hand wander up along the small of Sofia's back, slowly building up pressure forwards as you cross the crossed arms bound behind her and summarily push her down, keeping her pinned to her very own desk... and right in front of the camera that, as you noted earlier, shows the condition of Eleanor's cell.
Mommy seems to have been keeping an eye on her daughter, if nothing else.
"That's right," you drawl as you move behind her, your now free rolling her long skirt upwards, "feel free to watch your life's work undone while I introduce you to your new occupation. Tsk, are people really commonly wearing this kind of underwear these days? Worry not, you won't be needing it any longer."
Reaching out with your claws, you tear the unappealing panties right off Sofia's waist, revealing surprisingly shapely behind and disappointingly dry lower lips.
That can be rectified, though.
Unzipping your pants and wrangling your dick out of them, you rest your rapidly hardening tool against her entrance from below, not pushing in yet or anything, just rubbing it along her lips while your hand unoccupied with pushing Sofia down snakes around and under her to lightly fiddle with her clit, to fairly obvious results (with your senses, anyways), her breathing obviously picking up through the mouth she can't close.
"That's right," you whisper into her ear, bending over her bent form as you are, "we're undoing everything you've done, everything you believe in, and I think the worst part, for you, is that we aren't doing it because we're convinced you're wrong."
You can feel a minimal bit of wetness on your head, which is good enough for you. Shifting your waist to get a proper angle, you slowly, torturously slowly, enter Sofia's pussy.
"We just. Don't. Care."
And with that, you're in, a light smell in the air immediately informing you of what else you just did. "Oh, what's this? You were a virgin?" You ask mockingly, the scent of blood only making you hornier for some reason as she (pitifully) struggles and expels air in response to the pain. Steadily, you push your entire length inside Sofia, until you hit her womb anyways. "Not like that matters for you anymore, though. All you are now is a piece of meat at my disposal, your entire purpose reduced to this."
As you speak, you slowly withdraw yourself, pushing inside again in one fell swoop on the last word. Sofia can't help herself; the biological reaction of her body has her getting nice and wet for your intruding member, her own arousal, no matter how reluctant, obvious.
"And we both know that you'll be enjoying it. Are enjoying it. All that your fruitless denial does is delaying the inevitable."
On that note, you begin fucking her in earnest, producing friction and arousal like you usually do when in position to, keeping a hand on her head to ensure she has to look at how Delta is sitting by Eleanor's side, watching over her while Doctor Tenenbaum uses what equipment you made for her to check up on her physical state.
You smirk in amusement at how flecks of spittle escape Sofia's mouth as you pound into her, 'decorating' the screen as she visibly tries to keep herself in check, but it's just no use, and few things can withstand several minutes of thorough siege by your 'battering ram', and before long her legs, the only body part you allowed her to exert any strength with, give out as she cums.
"HNGU-UAAAH..."
You aren't deterred in the least, though, and with a quick grab for her hips, you proceed to rail Sofia even harder, pulling her up by her arms as she hangs there exhaustedly after a moment of letting her 'rest'.
You can see Eleanor begin to shift around on her bed, Delta holding her hand in his metallic one like the awkward ol' daddy that he is, and, Sofia's walls having clamped around you like nobody's business as you pound into her virginal depths, you grin at your useless little loveslave.
"I hope you aren't tuckered out yet, we've hardly even started!"
With that, you push Sofia forwards a little as you keep thrusting, her tongue nearly touching the screen while she slowly regains her senses, but she doesn't get to make much use of them, staring the the increasingly more actively moving sleeping form of her daughter with your dick plundering her womanhood for just a few seconds before she once again begins to tighten up, and you let yourself go as you feel it coming.
"I'm about to come inside you, Sofia. I'd suggest you get used to this feeling, too."
Thus, you unload your sperm right into her womb, her erratically moving tongue just underlining her scream as she follows suit, and as rope after rope hits her insides, several things happen.
On the first one, you glance around your surroundings, noting that the Little Sisters are collectively staring at what you're doing while the Big SIsters in the room are touching themselves over their suits.
On the second one, you see that the door you took into the office isn't quite closed, Sarah and Kate keeping watch and anyone else away from the scene of your penultimate victory.
On the third, and as Sofia's orgasmic, wordless scream reaches a crescendo, Eleanor Lamb awakes, her eyes tearing open almost violently as she sets her upper body upright, throwing off Tenenbaum's stetoscope and breathing heavily... and, you'd be willing to bet, smelling of arousal, considering how she is subtly rubbing her thighs together as you can see her mouth move, presumably saying something the people present.
Taking your time to idly thrust just a few more times, you pull out with just a small amount of disappointment, but you figure you should probably get on with your day. Lots of work to do and all.
Not that you can't enjoy your newest slave's body a little more regardless, though.
"On your knees, Sofia, I figure it's high time I got to perusing your notes. And before you wonder, yes, I am still hard. I won't ever stop being such, either, so don't get your hopes up in that direction."
Sitting down as you force Sofia down and under the desk, you take just a moment to wink towards the vent, where the Little SIsters have been gathering.
"Enjoyed the show, sleepyhead?"
Honestly, it was fairly obvious at this point. Eleanor, as you see through the cameras, seems to blush just a little bit, though you could be wrong. Really, would colored screens be too much to ask for, Rapture?
... It is all in the pheromones. Of course it is.
The information to be gained by rifling through Sofia Lambs desk is both interesting and a fucking chore. A chore because most of it is entirely boring day-to-day stuff (you'd think Rapture degrading into a literal madhouse half of whose inmates can't read on a good day would mean the need for paperwork keeping track of supplies and information would lessen, but nope), but also interesting because some of the technical documents and the psychological profiles you find are a treasure, crumbs of gold amongst the swine.
So, pheromones. You already knew the Big Daddies were controlled through the use of pheromones, the scent of a Little Sister the key that had them aggressively protective of the girls, thanks to Tenenbaum just outright telling you. But the way Sofia kept control of the Big Sisters was through much the same, astoundingly enough, documents written by one Gilbert Alexander describing the creation process of a Big Sister.
For one, Little Sisters, while fairly hardy thanks to extensive regeneration, still are subject to the passage of time, growing up much like any non-augmented child would. As they do, the efficiency of the ADAM gathering they can still conduct reduces, making them unsuitable for their former use. It was decided, then, that modified 'Protector' equipment (you remember Tenenbaum referring to the Big Daddy program by that term) and their somewhat diminished, but still remarkable regeneration and excessive power through both plasmids and tonics they cycled through their bodies while gathering ADAM over the years would make them ideal enforcers for Lamb (though that isn't written anywhere as such, of course).
In the process of ensuring their obedience, the initial brainwashing keeping Little Sisters compliant is built upon, initially with the target of curbing the extreme aggression they display after the aforementioned years of brainwashing and some kind of perception filter repeatedly having to be reinstalled, but eventually, after this turned out to be ineffective, said aggression was to be harnessed instead, a similar conditioning as the Protector program itself achieving results.
What this all boils down to is that Big Sisters randomly switch between seeing the world like a Little Sister and like a normal person (spliced up with a bunch of stuff, of course), the discrepancies between the two typically causing rage of some kind, but they can be controlled by subjecting them to specific scents just like Big Daddies (theoretically) could, in addition to being fiercely protective of Little Sisters, a tendency Sofia was making good use of by essentially sending them wherever a Little Sister went missing.
The author of the document, lastly, warns that these measures did aid in ensuring as few Little Sisters were killed while in use as possible, with Big Sisters retrieving either them or the ADAM they'd been gathering in case a splicer already extracted it, but ultimately would not be enough to ensure the continuation of 'Project Utopia'. Eventually, all the Little Sisters they had access to would grow up, at which point their only recourse would be the surface.
You guess this thing's fairly old at this point, considering what you know from Mark, and a quick search through the extensive psych profiles Sofia kept confirms it. Gilbert Alexander once was one of her lackeys, the chief researcher left amongst those that stuck around inside the secret labs of Fontaine Futuristics (because of course they had secret labs) that she had doing the research for her grand masterplan before using him as the first try of the same, pumping him full of ADAM and turning him into some grotesque abomination she hardly even bothers describing before rambling on about how she was sure that Eleanor's nature as a former Little Sister would protect her from the 'one' issue that drove Gilbert Alexander, whom now calls himself Alexander the Great, into utter madness.
Now, to be fair, she was probably right about that; from observing the other Big Sisters you've been interacting with, they don't seem to share any of the mutations common splicers exhibit, their particular madness apparently grounded in the repeated 'conditioning' they underwent for most of their lifes. That still doesn't convince you an 'ascended' Eleanor wouldn't just keep on developing her own mind along her own lines, as most children (and especially teenagers) tend to, extensive specific conditioning Sofia has been subjecting her to or no.
Case in point, Delta. Her Big Daddy and whom she called upon to come save her from this procedure.
Incidentally, Alexander the Great went on to take control of Fontaine Futuristics, Sofia's notes on his insane ramblings as he keeps on interacting with the rest of the building through a bunch of machines, mainly, including one peculiar security robit he seems to have modified for this purpose at some point after starting to ignore Sofia entirely quite interesting to read, too. Doubly so as you foresee actually having cause to interact with him in the near future.
You do, of course, narrate everything you're doing and reading to Sofia, whom you've forced onto your cock and are idly instructing on how to better suck your dick as you steer her head back and forth, a few Little Sisters still looking on interestedly while the rest are exploring the surroundings.
Eleanor Lamb, as you see after filling her mother's belly with enough cum to feed the average person for a decent while and come out of the office you now consider yours, is remarkably well adjusted considering what she went through.
That is, she's an awkward wreck, like all teenagers ought to be.
"Nice to finally meet our damsel in distress," you joke, giving her a polite nod.
"Nice to meet you in person, too." Returning the nod, Eleanor looks at you hesitantly, apparently unsure what to say next.
"Yes, I noticed the Little Sisters were behaving a little weirdly. Some kind of telepathic connection?" It isn't like you aren't familiar with the subject, after all.
"Yes, I've been keeping an eye on everything going on around Rapture through their eyes. It's the only thing that kept me sane under mother's 'conditioning', especially once I managed to resurrect father."
"Uooohn."
"C'mon, Delta, you know how she means it. Anyways, you really have to tell me how you managed to resurrect him one of these days, but let's not get bogged down in details just yet. I'm assuming you're feeling alright?"
"Yes, Doctor Tenenbaum has cleared me. She said she's not familiar with the physiology of Big Sisters, but physically, I seem to be doing good, at least."
"Great, great. Anyways, over that way are the rooms as I'm sure you know, so go on ahead and take one for yourself. Unless there's anything that needs to be dealt with straight away?"
Eleanor is silent for a moment, before ultimately agreeing. "Yeah, yeah I... think I'd best get the place lived in, at least. Before today I'd have insisted on just getting into that submarine and moving on to the surface, but... Well, I'm not sure everyone we'd be taking would even fit inside, and I think I'm a little inspired by what you told mother earlier."
At your quizzical look, Eleanor smiles. "'Undoing everything she has done for no reason other than that we don't care for it.' I couldn't have said it better myself."
Frowning a little, she looks off in the distance. "That said, I think you'd best go meet the Big Sisters you just called. I'm not sure how long the chemicals in the air are going to keep them calm enough they don't fight each other."
"A good idea, and indeed what I'll be doing next. See you around, Eleanor, we'll have much to discuss, on basis of you being part of our little group if nothing else."
Now then, you've put a lot of effort into that damn train, the Atlantic Express serving as your big mobile base as you wormed your way through Rapture's rotting remains, and you aren't about to give up on everything you invested into it.
You may have a more permanent base inside Persephone now, but that doesn't mean having a mobile forwards HQ becomes useless.
With that in mind, as well as concerns about material movement in general- you don't like relying on teleporters alone in the long term, as they tend to malfunction after sufficient wear and tear has been accumulated through continuous usage- or at least the technical documents the Institute gave you warned about that, which is why you've been avoiding using them for everything.
Thus, the train. Now, good news is, most of the rails are perfectly fine, meaning you don't have to go and fix that shit up underwater. Bad news is the train station near Persephone is technically secret, and was thoroughly wrecked at some point, most likely by Lamb's own followers to make sure any intruders would have to brave the Fontaine Futuristics building in order to get to her headquarters.
This means you have to move a whole load of rubble aside once you've figured out how to even access to secret rails splitting off from the Fontaine Futuristics station, involving a secret switch in the control station inside it, followed by shadowing your way along those rails (which is how you know them to be in functioning order) and assessing the damage.
Thankfully, you can say that whoever did this was kind of an amateur. Most of the integral machinery is intact; all you need to do is clean up the rubble, clear out the crap blocking the gate and you could probably use this place just fine.
All that remains is a decent bit of work, which you mostly deal with by way of summoned souls.
Ah, being yourself really is the best sometimes.
Eleanor 'Lamb' (she was thinking about changing her name somehow, but she couldn't think of what she would call herself instead (and 'Delta' was a little too obvious)) sat back on her new bed, the fluffy mattress of her new bed calling to her but not convincing enough for her to go to sleep quite yet, no matter how groggy she felt from the drugs mother had given her earlier.
So, she had a new room now... which was nice, if nothing else. Her old room, the quarantine chamber repurposed for her sake, always would have her uncomfortable, given she knew she was being observed around the clock, not to mention the 'conditioning'...
Sure, a repurposed conditioning room like this wasn't that much better, but at least she hadn't been subjected to it herself, and that made all the difference.
Reminiscing back about the journey through Rapture she quite literally experienced over the past few days, the Little Sisters following Gabriel's group (starting with Lizzy, the first one lucky enough to meet them) vividly relaying everything they could see happening to herself.
Laiyng back, Eleanor breathed out slowly, the ADAM she'd partaken in earlier coursing through her veins empty of previous personalities or thought patterns, but perfectly capable of bringing her powers to their full strength and then some.
She may not have been active as a Little Sister quite as long as most of the others, but she had been active, and she was confident she wasn't that much weaker compared to any of them.
Looking towards the door as it opened, Eleanor wasn't surprised to see one of them walking in, the armored girl approaching her just to plomf down onto her. Expelling a bit of air at the weight, she idly laid a hand on the other Sister's unarmored head, letting her know she was there and acknowledged her existence.
The other Big Sisters, once Gabriel had gone and calmed them down, had wasted no time in getting to know the growing amount of Little Sisters acting as their counterparts, every Little Sister across the entire city converging on their location with a little coaching from herself and the help of the Big Daddies on the way.
Suffice to say, she doubted the two endless ADAM sources installed around Persephone would suffice for long. There were a total of forty-five Little Sisters, and they would start consuming the ADAM faster than they could replenish at some point.
Thinking back on her earlier topic, the comforting weight of her Sister resting on her stomach now (some things never quite went away, no matter how much mother tried), Eleanor reaffirmed what she had been thinking on.
She had watched both her father and his companions act, and through doing so, she now knew who she was.
Better than accepting any of mother's conditioning as her own, at any rate.
Eleanor was... well, it was hard to describe. Eleanor was someone that could and would make friends, allies, and support them so as to be supported in turn.
Greatness could be achieved by oneself alone, but sharing its load let one shoulder all the more.
That wasn't to say that everyone was a friend. On the contrary, she firmly viewed those in her group as inside and those outside of it as outsiders, to be either made use of, disregarded or vetted for joining if doing so was reasonable. Maintaining amiable relationships, too, if they were reasonable but didn't want to quite join.
The Little Sisters were with them despite being useless in most matters, not because of any potential future use they may have, but because it was the right thing to take care of them, just as there was nothing wrong in extracting any use possible from the splicers they encountered... and just as it would have been reasonable to just heal them and leave them to go on their ways.
They were powerful, and with that power came the ability to affect the world around them, as well as others in general. It lay within their collective power to help the Little Sisters, and so they did, following the wishes of some of them as they did not oppose those of the others. The ability to do something inherently gave one the right to exercise it, and the only morals that counted were those either oneself or one's group applied.
Yes, Eleanor could live with that. There was no Greater Good that was to be prioritized over all else, there was only herself and the others, as well as anyone they decided to exercise their power upon. If they decided to be good, they would be good. If they decided to be ruthless, they would be ruthless. But nobody and nothing could force them to act against what they wanted.
Flexing her abdominal muscles to shift her Sister's weight a little, she smiled. That was what power was for.
Fontaine Futuristics, as you already surmised, is just as trashed as the rest of Rapture, and filled with splicers from top to bottom. Not something you're actually going to complain about, always open to gaining more practical skill and knowledge in pursuit of, well, everything, even aside from the enjoiyment that eating well brings as a matter of course.
Still, you were already expecting this, but after incapacitating the first few splicers between you and entering the entrance hall, you're accosted by a flying security bot you're fairly sure has been modified quite alot, just like Sofia's notes mentioned, showing a manic stare upon a screen mounted on its front.
"Filching ADAM from corporate reserves, huh? Fired. Fired! FIRED!" Firing lightning from a small outlet at the bottom of the flying drone, who you presume to be Alexander the Great kills a splicer with severel electric shocks before noticing your group steadily coming inside.
"What's this?! More thieves, sneaking inside to steal corporate secrets for themselves?!" Alexander exclaims boisterously, hovering his drone around as though to gesture at you.
"On the contrary, good sir," you respond, making a point to exaggerate every word and every motion just as much as your new interlocuter is doing, "we're here on account of one Doctor Brigid Tenenbaum, who had to leave the company under some less than fortunate circumstances, to retrieve her personal effects left during her premature retirement."
"Mhmhmhhh..." He grumbles to himself, his robot floating over right in your face. "Employee number?"
Thankfully, you've already spoken with Tenenbaum, are speaking with her through telepathy as you answer, in fact. "One-zero-zero-eight-five."
"Security cooode?"
"Alpha-two-orange-omega-three."
"Well, well, well, you're actually authorized to enter company premises according to official Fontaine company regulations. Wait just a moment, I'll open the door for you... do keep in mind the employees might be a tad miffed at the strangers coming in."
"Oh, one more thing before you go," you throw in spontaneously, "I am sorry to inform you that ownership of Fontaine Futuristics is currently being debated as the board of directors and all previous owners are either dead or unaccounted for. I will, naturally, inform you once the lawyers have come to a general decision regarding the company's direction in the future."
"Oh my!" Alexander exclaims. "I have been acting as the company administrator in my position as leading researcher with highest authorization still on the premises for a while now, but I am happy to hear that the judicial department is finally coming to a decision. It was high time Fontaine Futuristics swung itself back to old heights."
You can almost hear the fond smile in the voice coming from the robot now.
"Come, come, I'll lead you around the place. Things aren't like in the good old days, but we've been making do. You would not believe how many disloyal employees I have had to expel this quarter alone, even after Ryan Industries took most of them for itself..."
That is the security office, Tenenbaum thinks at you as you describe your surroundings, easily recognizing the place. The access to the secret laboratories should be controllable from within.
Good to know, though the question of whether or not you'll even need to gte inside remains.
"Here we are, the central foyer! Don't mind the broken stairs, please, renovations have been in progress for a few years now."
Considering the pair of staircases is currently restricted to one, as the other one breaks off entirely after a few steps. More concerningly, however, than the small waterfall running down between those stairs into a small pool (for once, you're actually fairly sure this water was meant to flow inside Rapture) is the screaming echoing from several locations, as best you can tell.
"Now, over here is the plasmid show, though the test subjects have been running rather short as of late, so it's closed right this moment. The show labs are the next corridor to the right, though, the automated systems should still be good to go, and if you'd like to go upstairs, Mister Fontaine's office and the Marketing Department await you. I'll leave you dear investors to your own devices for now, unless there's anything you would like to know...?"
"Actually, before you go, the newly forming board of directors has been talking about firing all current employees and replacing them with robots. I certainly could be convinced to put in a good word on account of the work you've been doing, especially so if you were to help us read them their notifications of dismissal."
"No need to even ask, dear investor! I will have the rowdy bunch lined up and at your disposal in the time it takes to complete a company mandated lunch break!"
"Thank you, Alexander, much obliged."
And to absolutely nobody's surprise, all it takes for you to be served a rather expansive buffet is for Alexander the Great to terrorize the splicers inside the building into running in your direction using the various security measures set up just about everywhere inside it, laughing madly all the while. You get the feeling he actually really enjoys both tormenting them and speaking with someone that can actually respond appropriately to what he's trying to say.
Tearing into some of your meals, you actually take a moment to smack the next one around hard enough to keep him from really defending himself, instead addressing Alexander again. "Before I forget, we'll need to inspect the actual labs once we're done here, too, just to let you prepare."
"Why, of coouurse! I wouldn't even dream of trying to fob you off with the showpieces prepared for the wider populace! I'll have the interns scrub the floors immediately."
Good, good.
The rest of the 'tour' is fairly uneventful, aside from you finding a whole bunch of additional corpses literally everywhere, many of them electrified by (presumably) Alexander at some point and one single plasmid that started teleporting all over the place as soon as you touch it, causing a merry little chase to break out before you have the unstable plasmid in your hands.
Also, the questionably sapient nature of the thing has you handle it with care, even as you already plan to have Tenenbaum take a closer look once you have some time.
Alexander remains a polite and helpful guide as you go along, even if about half of his babbling is complete nonsense, as far as you can tell. Still, you feel you've built up some rather decent rapport with him, and you're confident he'll remain friendly until and unless you go against his little delusionary worldview that has you being a wealthy investor looking to buy into the new company leadership and him as a dutiful researcher taking over administrative duties such as 'firing' illoyal employees after the previous administration's untimely departure.
Unfortunately, however, you simply don't have the time to actually get into the 'secret' research areas, due to a hurried call by Sarah about you being needed back at Persephone to pacify the Little Sisters gathering there through the vent network and trying to stick their needles into everything- apparently, you just have a way of breaking through their perception filter that calms them down through your behavious or maybe your reputation amongst them.
Kate and Sarah just get stabbed for their trouble when they try imitating you, so it does require your personal attention, after all.
Bidding Alexander farewell on grounds of 'business obligations' rearing their heads, you depart, using the teleporter to return back to your for now temporary base.
Alright, so you have nearly fifty Little Sisters to juggle now, ignoring the trio of humanized ones Tenenbaum cured by the time you first met her. That's a lot of work, all told, because kids, as you well know, are more than a handful by themselves.
Sidestepping, you dodge the chop aimed for your head, Sarah pouting at you as she attempts to inflict domestic violence upon you. "You were thinking something rude just now, weren't you?"
"I totally wasn't thinking about how cute you were as a kid, no." Appeasing your sister with headpats she accepts reluctantly to make up for any imaginary slights you may have inflicted, you get back to your earlier train of thought. All these kids need to be taken care of, even now that you have pacified them for the time being.
Step one, get someone to do it for you. The Big Sisters could probably do babysitting duty just fine, though their inability to talk may be an issue there- you do want to actually allow the Little Sisters to grow up in a constructive environment, and language is pretty important in communicating issues and thoughts, something to be encouraged.
Right, so Tenenbaum actually likes spending time with them, now that she's slowly getting over her whole thing about them existing, though Sinclair always makes it a point to keep away from them...
At least you could probably talk Mark into helping? He seems to dislike the Big Sisters after the whole drama between him and one of them, but his daughter is a Little Sister herself, so there's nothing speaking against letting him get some practice in how to care for one.
Or at least that's how you'll try selling it to him later.
Next step, keep them occupied. You can print a bunch of plush toys and toys in general with the manufactory, though you're a bit short on fabrics and the like... Which just means you have to be creative with the metal you do have plenty of.
You actually go ahead and make several rubrik's cubes, sets of chess and any other board games you can find inside your internal library of memories out of the stuff you have around. Keep them busy rolling dice and playing with each other, less scampering around everywhere and putting pointy things into people you don't want dead.
Oh, and you should feed them a lot, of course. Kids get sleepy when they're well fed.
"Mhm, good thing we actually piled all those bodies onto the train. I'm going to need them."
"What for, Gabe?" A now mollified Sarah asks, her naked body cuddled up against you as you enjoy actually having a stable base and room to yourself- basically filling your place with one big mattress was a good choice, you'd say.
"Oh, you'll see, Sarah, you'll see." Kissing her on the nose, you slowly get up. "You got any idea where my pants went?"
You have, perhaps, gone a little overboard with your little renovation. On the other hand, at least you're rather quite sure the Little Sisters will be adequately fed for the time being.
The thing about your undead when used for the sake of producing biochemicals like this is that the amount of the target substance they can produce is limited by the total volume of the part of them you enchant to produce it, the effective maximum size of which is, in turn, limited by the total size of the undead in total.
Simply put, sizing them up so they're larger requires a whole bunch of dead meat, which could be used more effectively by dividing it into several sizeable undead to have several flesh sacks inside them instead of just scaling them up, but that, in turn, would be hell on your capacity limit.
So you came up with a solution, based on your earlier work. First off, you basically took the two meat balls you've used for this so far, merging them with a very decent amount of the additional corpses you made sure the train kept on, then stretch the whole thing out using a steady amount of your magic, forming the dismembered bodies into a decently sized empty shell of sorts, skin lining both the inside and outside.
Then you begin turning meat and bone into a proper casing for your new ADAM-blood generator, followed by once more employing tubes made of more stuff, mostly muscle both natural and created by you through reforming the material you have to work with into more of the same, ultimately laying down the groundwork for where you're taking all of this.
Suffice to say, you soon have your very own ADAM-blood piping running through your base, supplying anyone interested in the stuff with it through several faucets you're installing, aided by the orders you gave to the whole thing, lines of nerves running along it telling it when to pump its payload out where.
"Big Brother Angel, what are you doing?" One of them asks, a small gathering of the Little Ones staring up at you.
"I am making a fountain of tasty ADAM for you girls!" Taking a hold of her, you set her on your lap, showing her where the fleshy tendril slowly pulsates before you screw the two halves of the pipe together around it, fixing it in place pointing slightly upwards. "Now if you want to drink, all you have to do is twist here and..." Demonstrating this bit, you turn the valve you've installed, a steady stream of dark red blood emerging before the greedy little glutton you've got sitting on your lap 'Nom's onto it, happily slurping it up.
"And when you're done, all you have to do is turn it back down and put the other stuff right here." And wasn't that a stroke of genius, just laying down some more piping being pumped by the very same muscles as the other set that gathers the expelled ADAM in a specific container all in one place?
"Yay! Thank you, Big Brother Angel!" She says, turning around to hug you once she's done throwing up the green-ish liquid that is pure ADAM.
"Think you can teach that to everyone?"
"Yeppers!"
And of course, you then have to let everyone take a turn sitting on your lap to take their meals, lifting the little rascals onto and off of your lap with mechanical precision. Because of course you do.
At least they're pretty well-behaved, though.
It is not until one of the last few Little Sisters, dressed in the usual blue dress, clambers onto your lap that you are allowed to get up, though even then you do not get to just leave.
"Big Brother Angel?" She asks, hugging a pink teddy bear you remember programming into the manufactory as part of the first load of toys for the Little Sisters to her chest.
"What is it, sweetie?"
"I have a secret question for you," she whispers, half-turned towards you as she sits on your lap.
Smiling indulgently, you twist yourself to bend the side of your head towards her, the little girl lifting both hands to make sure nothing she says can escape on the way from her mouth to your ear.
"I want to make heartsies fly with you, Big Brother."
Aww, you first have to actively fight to resist the urge to aggressively cuddle her. After that, though, you bump your forehead against hers, looking her deep in the eyes.
"Do you know what that even is?"
You whisper at her, not that you're quite sure she means what you think she means.
"M-hm. I saw you and great auntie Sofia do it, and I got all tingly, and you're really really nice, and I want to feel good with you," she whispers, the glow in her eyes oscillating curiously.
Holding back your snort of laughter, you smile at her. "Alright, if that's what you want." Kissing her forehead as you stretch yourself to your full size, you take a look around... and curiously enough, none of the other girls are clambering to take their turns on your lap anymore.
Chuckling to yourself (and at the blush on your current cargo), you get up, hefting her so you're supporting her back and head with one arm and her legs and butt with the other.
Laughing happily, the brunette little sweetheart kicks out her legs as you carry her off out the room, winking at the other Little Sisters staring at what you're doing. "I have to go tuck this one into bed for a bit, but I'm sure you've all gotten the idea of how to use the faucets, yes?"
""Yes, Big Brother Angel.""
"Very good, then feel free to play around with them, and make sure everyone knows how to drink from them."
WIth that, you're gone and walking off towards your room, a giggling Little Sister hugging your neck with one arm as the other one keeps a hold of her teddy bear. You also totally can see a bunch of the little scamps moving through the vents when you look, following you as quickly as they can, but you just go on ahead and ignore that.
Not like you've been making a point of caring about them seeing you have sex, so why would you start now?
Passing Kate on the way (and giving her a quick kiss), you soon nudge the door to what amounts to your glorified bedroom, considering it literally consists of an enormous bed you soon bounce your little girl onto.
"Hehehe!" She giggles as you follow after her, bending down to kiss her, too, your tongue feeling like it must fill up her entire mouth as you naturally proceed to french her for a long moment.
"So sweet," you mutter, because yeah, her mouth actually does taste sweet to your tongue, with an aftertaste of iron- some kind of flavored blood, if you're one to guess.
Makes sense.
Oh, and also because she's a very sweet girl, of course.
"Hehehe! Do you like it, Big Brother?"
"I do, sweetie. I really do. Now, do you know what happens next?"
"Mhm, you put your thingy in my coochie and we make the heartsies fly, just like with great auntie Sofia!"
"Not quite yet, sweetie. First I have to make sure I don't hurt you, okay? That means playing with you until you're nice and wet down here." A quick testing hand reveals that the standard Little Sister uniform doesn't come with underwear, apparently, and you thus have free access to her bald little pussy, already beginning to get wet as it is.
That said, you're a little worried about the size difference and all, so...
"I'm going to undress you just a little, is that okay?"
"Yupyup, please?" Chuckling at her eagerness, you slide her dress down her shoulders, letting you idly circle your thumbs around her nipples while you lick the other one, lightly holding it in your mouth and nibbling on it to keep things interesting, the glow in your Little Sister's eyes steadily growing brighter.
Your other hand, though, stealthily wanders downwards along her body, patting it all along from top to bottom until it reaches her thigh, whence it starts shoving her dress upwards instead (and you actually get up a bit, holding yourself bent over her like that without an arm to support yourself is really hard).
The Little Sister's breathing has been growing heaver for a bit now, but she positively gasps when you reposition yourself at her crotch, overlong tongue slipping out between your lips and in-between her lower ones after licking them in greeting, rubbing along her inner folds as you flex and twist it.
"Big Brotheeer... Mooore..." She breathlessly moans, her little hand reaching out to pull at your head, much to your amusement. That said, you are tasting a lot of fluids down here, so...
"Don't worry, you're about to get a lot more," you say as you get up again, unzipping your pants. She, on the other hand, just stares at your dick curiously, reaching out to touch it.
It's almost comically huge as her small fingers try to wrap around it, though you just smile and slide your hand underneath her head, touching the ribbon keeping her hair in check. "A little lower, can you do that?"
"M-hm," she nods, obediently angling your cock to line up with her little pussy.
"Are you ready?" You ask, your head meeting her entrance and technically being far too large to ever fit... but you know what superhuman strength and regeneration can accomplish.
"Yeees... pleeeaaase..." She gasps, breathing hard as her eyes shine bright enough to light up half the room.
Without another word, you push in, spreading her open hard despite your attempts to be gentle, not that she seems to mind as she shudders and hugs her teddy bear to her chest, her legs spread as far as possible to let you access her as you desire.
Using your free hand to grasp her waist, you start thrusting inside her, slowly and shallowly at first, but she never seems to be in any pain whatsoever, and before long, you're railing her just as hard as you were Sofia, her happy panting filling the air as you go at it until, with a twitching yell, she comes around you, clenching up hard enough to coax you into orgasm all the same, filling her up right down to her womb, considering you can fit at most two thirds of yourself inside as you're pressing against her womb, her shuddering body and tightness spreading your cum all over her.
Brushing her hair aside with your thumb a little, you look at her face as she slowly comes down. "Are you doing alright, sweetie?"
Slowly opening one still shining eye, she stretches out her tongue at you.
"More?"
Laughing, you pick up speed again. "You insatiable little minx, you."
"I just want more heartsies floating! They're, aaahn, nice!"
"Oh, I'm sure they are." So that's how they perceive sex, huh? Or perhaps pleasure, specifically?
This demands some thorough testing, if nothing else.
Elsewhere inside Persephone, as the old Correctional facility was exclusively called nowadays, Eleanor Lamb blushed hard, wishing she had a decent excuse to disappear into her room and bury her head inside the fluffy covers of her bed.
The telepathy between her and the Little Sisters was a subconscious thing, though it usually wasn't as large of an issue for her. Indeed, most of the Big Sisters were in some way mentally connected to the little ones, which was how they kept track of their 'charges' when mother was still controlling them... and even now, it was how they kept track of their charges as they climbed anything they saw and spread around the entire former prison the moment nobody was looking out for them.
Really, keeping track of so many children was exhausting. It was also the most fun she ever had, though.
Except for how now, in this moment, Gabriel was undressing one of them as he played with her body and she could feel every. Single. Thing.
And she wasn't sure how to deal with the tingle between her legs.
Normally, she would rush to the girl's defense, but she was very aware she was very much intent on doing this and, what was more, would literally cry and screams if anyone took that long, almost serpentine tongue, with how it wound around itself, out of her crotch.
Eleanor knew what sex was, of course, her education had made sure of it, but feeling it like this, even second-hand... Not that she had had a taste of the good stuff yet, though.
No, that was about to come, the ominously large tool Gabriel was now pulling out of his pants was making that clear. Watching though the girl's eyes, Eleanor swallowed, doubting that thing could fit into herself, not to mention something as small as a Little Sister; it was bound to tear through internal organs rather than pleasure anyone, right?
Her mother, as she'd seen, had just been some weird deviant for liking this, right?
"Sgiiih?" One of the other Sisters asked her, the Little Sisters all silent and looking into the same direction making the task of herding them significantly easier. Right, the others were not as closely connected as herself, the 'treatment' to turn them into proper Big Sisters consisting of vast amount of conditioning having weakened the bonds connecting them to the little ones to some extent, unbeknownst to their captors- and all of them were in agreement they had to keep the secret.
"It's alright, just something one of them is-" Eleanor tried to speak, but her words cut out and no matter what, she couldn't possibly placate the other girl, the sensation of sheer fullness and pleasure spreading through her on account of the Little Sister Gabriel had taken to his room mindnumbing in all the best ways.
None of the others were quite as deeply connected, she was sure, their bond merely letting them share sensations in an abstract sense unless actively reaching through, but Eleanor's own powers had been free to grow without mental interference, and it showed right there and then.
Lurching with every thrust she felt, every full moan she could feel her/self exhaling, every touch of the huge, strong male making her his, claiming her depths gently and carefully, Eleanor clenched her teeth, refusing to call out. The two Big Sisters in the same room, seeing her state, immediately cast their own senses out, seeking to find what was causing her such distress... and catching on the same thing she was caught up on, sharing senses with the same Little Sister whose feelings had all the little ones so transfixed.
As Eleanor buckled under the weight of the sheer volume of sensation- an orgasm, her mind helpfully supplied- as Gabriel came inside, filling her with what felt like an ocean's worth of burning hot fluids spilling forth from inside, she did her best to recover as soon as she could... noting, in abject embarrassment, that all the other sisters were watching and feeling through her, piggybacking her own connection to receive the 'signal' as clearly as possible.
She'd been jealous of the other Big Sisters and their armored suits before, the skin of a warrior ready to defeat all foes, but never had she expected to feel like this because she wished she, too, wore clothes that didn't show wetness as easily.
Making sure Lizzy is fast asleep and the door closed tight, you exit your room, making note of the need to basically recycle all of everything you have inside there later due to the sheer amount of fluids you spilled in, on and around her (hurray for manufactories working as overly glorified washing machines, heh).
Anyways, long story short, about time you got back to work. The Little Sister may have taken a bit to fuck into literal unconsciousness with a large happy smile, being able to endure far more thorough 'exercise' thanks to her condition, but you do make a point of actually using your endless stamina. Now that you're done with that, you may as well begin designing a little something to let you deal with the... 'state' Rapture is in, a broken-down and piss-riddled shithole a poor starting point to begin your bid for eventual world domination in this dimension, as far as you are concerned.
First, you'll need more robots...
B100D Design:
Torpid-Based Design: On the other hand, the simple and versatile Torpid has always been useful for basing new robots on, being fairly simple and straightforwards at its base. Just add a few tools, figure out some way to let it move underwater and voila, one underwater construction drone. (5 points)
Waterproofing: Duh. (1 point)
Magnetic Locator: It shouldn't be to anyone's surprise when you say that you're aiming to have these robots work with metal. That said, perhaps it would be prudent to have them use a 'sense' of magnetism to locate and track metallic objects, both for retrieval and to ensure they don't get lost in the depths of the ocean. (3 points)
Superior Tools: Sure, you could just slap some simple tools that would do the job onto your bots and call it a day. Or you could go the extra mile, ensure everything runs smoothly over years of extensive use and will work as best it can while underwater, from specialized drilling machines to glorified screwdrives. (3 points)
Drones: That's right, drones. pretty small ones, that couldn't really work like this, but being underwater lets you have a dozen or so floating little helpers be ejectable from the robot, to reach those awkward spots and help out with work. (3 points)
So, to start with, you'll want to take the Torpid design, the thing being both simple and versatile enough that it makes a solid base to use for just about any robot you would care to name that can be on the somewhat larger side.
That said, you will, of course, need to apply a few changes. And with a few, you mean a lot. First off, this thing is meant to be used underwater, deep beneath the ocean, and that means you need to waterproof everything that you'll be doing here- an obvious precaution, really.
Next, you may want to rethink the placement of the 'legs', considering they won't actually be of any use in their intended role, so instead you'll just...
Actually, why not reshape the main body, too, to be a little easier to move around underwater? Basically flatten it, move the newly repurposed arms to the front and use a few basic turbines driven by the fusion core to faciliate movememnt instead.
A pair of 'fins' jutting out from both top and bottom, to let it maneuver easier with additional turbines, and you've got the basics done, if this works like you intend it to.
... Actually testing this will be a giant pain, but okay.
Anyways, these things are meant to be your underwater construction drones, yeah? May as well let them do it well; give them a wide range of drills, automatic screwdrivers and powered saws, just about everything you can think of, based on what you used in some of your earlier manufactory designs, in fact.
Oh, and a magnetic locator of some kind, as a nice and cheap alternative to more complicated ways to let them orientate themselves underwater. Maybe even add a pair of 'drone bays' along the thing, to let them launch underwater drones of some kind, to help with fine work that the bulkier main body would have trouble with.
... Oh god, testing will be such a bitch. Still, you think these will be rugged and useful enough to be worth the bother. Actually, you might look into getting Delta to help you drag the finished product to the next airlock.
It is in the middle of dragging your third prototype (you have a good feeling about this one, you've already worked through most of the faults) that you're interrupted in the middle of coordinating the carrying of, what, about a ton of metal? With Delta, the extensive modifications done to his body finally being put to some constructive use.
To be precise, none other than Doctor Tenenbaum is walking up to you.
"Gabriel, do you have a moment? I have made a discovery I believe you should know about."
Well, she doesn't like angry about you boning a Little Sister or anything, so... sure.
"Of course, this can wait a bit. Won't be rebuilding Rapture in a day, anyways." Setting the huge construction robot down carefully along with Delta, the two of you give each other a nod (as much as he can nod, anyways) before he wanders off, groaning something about making sure Eleanor is doing alright.
"So, what's going on?" You ask, following Tenenbaum to the lab- you literally just transplanted the one you had on the train into one of the rooms you had available after tearing the former prison apart. It still isn't anything too advanced, but it's nice to have it in a fixed location and avoid the shaking inevitably part of being on a moving vehicle.
Kind of hard to get precise measurements going like that.
"I have been experimenting with the DNA of both you and your companions," Tenenbaum informs you, "seeing as it tends to reject ADAM-based changes when introduced to them normally."
Well, you hadn't known that beforehand, buuut you totally expected something along those lines. What you like to call your bad excuse for biology rarely plays nicely with, well, pretty much anything.
"However, with the copious amount of samples I could take from Sofia Lamb, I have conducted a series of experiments and have stumbled on a solution, of sorts."
Wait, what is she... Oooh, right, you did leave a lot of cum in Sofia. Tenenbaum must've stumbled in on her and used the opportunity to extract what she viewed as a nice opportunity for loot.
Like, you'd have just given her a sample directly, but sure, why not. Also, she apparently does know you've been fucking Sofia on the regular to keep her nice and sedated, but hey, so long as she doesn't complain, you won't say anything, either.
"Ordinarily, the ADAM is simply negated, rendered inert after extended contact, but," Doctor Tenenbaum emotes, waving you over towards a few petri dishes, "when subjected to very small doses of your DNA, several changes can be observed, and through careful variation and repeated experiments, I have been able to make your samples and several common plasmids coexist. Theoretically, this should allow you to be augmented through plasmids and tonics treated like this like any other human being, and others with the same mutations as yourself, too."
"Interesting," you mutter, leaning over to where Tenenbaum seems to have been playing with your sperm. "Anything else you've been able to find out?"
"No, unfortunately, as I have run out of samples." Hiking up the labcoat she must've found somewhere (or made with your manufactory, for that matter), she peels her skirt down, dropping it to the ground and presenting her naked behind to you. "Feel free to deposit more."
"Oh? This looks a lot like someone's passion for discovery is somewhat misplaced," you drawl as you take your place right beind Tenenbaum, letting a hand glide all over her butt as you feel her up.
"I assure you this is all for the sake of sampling more DNA," she insists, not really doing anything on her worktable, just propping her upper body up on both elbows, but still somehow evoking the idea that she's busy actually working.
"I see, I see, that's how it is. So I'm just some DNA dispenser for you, am I? I suppose I should go get a few pieces of glassware and fill them up, then." Contrary to your words, you're also stroking her lower lips, her legs spread slightly to give you access to them and, despite the fact her breathing is picking up, Tenenbaum looks at you chidingly.
"Do not speak nonsense, in order to acquire maximal sample size, it is obvious we need to employ the most natural method of extraction." Holding back a smirk, you take a moment to free your erection, this whole conversation far too amusing to move on quite yet.
"Would the sample not be diluted that way? I'd imagine you would prefer a proper sample, so should I not pull out beforehand?"
"On the contrary, mixing samples simply allows me to observe how they interact in nature, so," she says, throwing you a smoldering glare over her shoulder, "don't you dare to cum anywhere but in. My. Cunt."
As you position your dick at her pussy, you can't help but subtly take a deep breath, filtering Tenenbaum's scent through your nose. Interestingly enough, while she is highly aroused, she also smells... focused, and not like she just said any untruths.
Best you can tell, while she's turned on, she's also entirely honest and has been while you talked. She actually wants you to fill her with your cum to see what it does.
Somehow, that's kinda hot.
"In that case, best get right to the extraction process, don't we?" And with that, you're pushing your entire length into her in one long stroke, hands resting easily on her waist. Come to think of it, you ponder to yourself, isn't it weird how often you are just large enough to bump into a woman's womb regardless of individual differences?
Anyways, best not to let your current partner get bored. Pulling out all but your flared head, you ram yourself home again, Brigid's (you really should get used to calling her on a first-name-basis by now) voice starting to escape in breathy moans.
"You seem to be enjoying yourself an awful lot," you smirk at her, building up a steady rhythm as you do. "Is 'gathering samples' really something you should feel like this about?"
"It is important to take pleasure in one's work," Brigid protests. "Besides, I do not see you complaining about our methods."
"Well, I'm not the one insisting this is entirely scientific and in no way inspired by me being horny. I pretty much always am these days, unless I decide not to be."
"Fascin- aahh- ting. I am sure there are some tonics with similar effects, but perhaps we could- ngh- mimic your biology's effects as a single tonic for the sake of convenience?"
"Perhaps. It would certainly be an interesting exercise." Speeding up, you dig your hands into Brigid's waist, now properly hammering into her- this isn't you playing with someone for as long as you have time, this is you doing a job.
She wants you to come inside her, and so you will come inside her. "I'm wondering," you murmur aloud, "how likely is it you come the moment I deposit my 'sample'?"
"High enough to be- yes yes YEEES!" Never one to disappoint, you thrust in again, painting Brigid's womb white, her arms giving in and her still clothed breasts the only thing cushioning her impact as her walls milk you for all you have.
She takes a moment to just breathe, hanging there a bit, but before long Brigid recovers from her orgasm, looking back at you again.
"You seem to be hard and ready still. Could it be you're up for giving me another sample?"
Laughing, you bend over her form, kissing her cheek as her eyes widen precipitously. "Brigid, I can keep going indefinitely and create more samples ex nihilo. I doubt you'll run out anytime soon."
Once whatever moment of realization she had is over, she smiles and nods. "I'd be delighted to get a few dozen, then. You would not believe how nice a change of pace it is to work free of material restraints and with arbitrary amounts of ADAM; I believe I have made more progress in the last day than I would in a week of working for Ryan Industries, once they took over Fontaine."
Chuckling, you comply. Really, Brigid's just so amusing...
"Hello, hello, hello!" Alexander's greeting is as exuberant as ever, though you just take it as a matter of course.
"Hello to you too, Alexander. I wanted to come ask if you happened to have time for that tour around the actual labs today?"
"Of course, of course! Come right along, dear investors! You will have to take the maintenance entrance, unfortunately, as the actual elevator was destroyed when Ryan's thugs swept through the building. I have been trying to contact a company to get repairs underway for a while now, but to no avail, sadly."
"No need to worry, we don't need the glitzy and glamorous kind of tour. Just to inspect the facilities and estimate repair and maintenance costs going forwards- deal with the financial side of things, you know how it is."
The 'maintenance entrance', as Alexander called it, is yet another airlock leading out into the ocean, of course. Meaning the only ones that can go are those that can withstand the environment at the bottom of the ocean, or, in this case, all three vampires amongst your number and Delta.
Long story short, after making your way through a bunch of lockers and underwater equipment, the ocean floor (you kept ahold of Kate and Sarah while using your powers to keep yourself achored to the floor the whole time, just in case) and another set of the same as the first, ultimately ending up in a large atrium, the centerpiece of which consists of a fairly large tank of some kind, filled with an indeterminate fluid and one ugly boy suspended inside.
It's pretty dark in here, too, not that that bothers anyone except Delta.
"There you are," Alexander's voice resounds, except not through a microphone of some kind this time, the thing in the tank simply speaking loudly enough to be heard through the glass, "the birthplace of all wonders Fontaine Futuristics has birthed! Do forgive the bad lighting, but I had to shut it off; it was simply too painful on my eyes in the long term. You will have to turn the electricity back on to open the doors, but just... warn me ahead of time and I will be able to submerge. Enough space in this tank, if nothing else."
"Oh, I wouldn't want to bother you with the lights, friend. I'll just go ahead and take a look at these doors real quick."
Said and done, you simply summon Ivey again, the reliable raider soul making a wonderful solution to pretty much most technological problems. Within moments, both doors are opened once she gets into them, though you do need to have her physically walk from one to the other, both wings of this facility having been cut off until just now.
"Remarkable! You'll have to give me the number of that technician; Fontaine Futuristics is always up for hiring promising specialists!"
"I'll try to remember for later," you say. "Now, what do you say about showing us around?"
"GRUUOOOH!" The roar comes out of the door, the sound of something large and metallic moving around following it.
"No! Bad! I told you to stay down!" Alexander says hurriedly, trying to keep the situation under control. "I'm so sorry, but the old test subjects get a tad bit cranky whenever they manage to get out of their rooms. Really, the alpha series had so many issues... I can't believe I ever actually created them!"
Within moments, the sound of heavy breathing in the dark grows stronger until, eventually, you can see the things Alexander is gibbling about.
As you were already halfway expecting, hulking humanoids clothed in the same armor as Delta stomp into view, wheezing and puffing away even as they converge on your general position, brandishing what you recognize to be grenade throwers of some kind.
Their eyes, like Delta's, are lit up brightly enough to let them search the dark, though their view certainly isn't all that good. Issue is, they're coming from both sides, one from the left wing to the entrance, two from the right.
You have just a few moments before they see you and presumably act, what do you do?
"The three of you deal with those two, I'll take the other one?"
"Gotcha." Understood," "Guooh."
With that, you break apart, Delta marching right towards their targets while Kate and Sarah dash into different directions, the former pulling out her laser rifle even as Sarah doesn't touch her own gun.
Ah well, she knows what she's doing.
You, meanwhile, dash towards your own opponent, taking in the surroundings. It's dark, though both of you have ways to get around that. You have a decent little bit of space to move, but the staircase your enemy is lmbering up and another set of stairs to your left do mean you can't just run around however you want.
That's all you have time for before the thing sees you, letting out a wheezing roar and pulling on its grenade thrower.
Alright, first things first, you don't want that heavy weaponry pointed in your direction. Luckily, you do have a very nice default response to any such things actually capable of threatening you.
"Freeze!"
Immediately, the weapon begins trailing wisps of frost, a layer of ice spreading over it. The alpha series, having aimed it at you by this point, attempts to fire, only getting a small explosion for his trouble as the payload attempts to do what it was designed to do in an environment it most certainly wasn't designed to be fired.
Your opponent, however, is unphased, simply throwing the now useless weapon at you as he begins charging in your direction himself, the ground trembling under his armored feet.
A quick, almost contemptuous blow has his frozen weapon fly off to the side, half of it shattered into pieces against your hard claws as you prepare to meet this Big Daddy prototype's charge, arcs of electricity beginning to lick along your fingers as you prepare.
Now, one thing to keep in mind for situations like this, where both fighters are significantly stronger than they should be physically capable of being? Simple physics still apply.
That means that more than a few things that kind of inherently matter when two people are trying to kill each other don't suddenly stop mattering, even though some do.
Case in point, the momentum of this hulking mass of metal and muscle, built up by a hard run intent on tearing you limb from limb, matters. If you were to be hit by this, you wouldn't get off unscathed.
And so you sidestep.
Sidesteps, as many, many of your plundered instincts and memories show, are a wonderful thing. Just take half a step to the side and suddenly, everyone's positioning shifts. Especially so when used with the right timing.
And so it comes that your foe charges straight past you, with you in position to just whirl around on the spot, stretching your clawed hand out and catching his elbow, scoring a shallow tear in the crook of his arm where the armor is somewhat thinner and discharging your electricity right into his flesh.
You do have to jump aside afterwards, the other arm coming up in a wild swing even as the one you hit twitches for a moment before the Big Daddy regains control over it, but you can see you dealt a good bit of damage there- his breathing is a little more ragged, his movement a little more halting here and there, not to mention the decent stream of blood flowing from the hole you made with the claws that hit their mark.
Using the Big Daddy's reckless aggression, you dodge his next swing, jumping up right after to avoid the second one and before he can try anything more, land on his shoulders, turning around and dropping downwards as you once more activate your inner charge, keeping him still and screaming out as it arcs right through him while you grasp for his helmet's glass part, the modified diver's suit making it rather hard to just take it off wholesale.
Which, to be fair, makes sense. They're not meant to be taken off, ever.
Finding purchase, you hook your claws into anything you can get, using the rest of your body to keep yourself stable as you rend through the solid steel of the prototype armor, opening slightly jagged tears as your opponents tries to throw you off in wild, jerky movement.
It is of no use, however, and a follow-up strike has you rip a handful of material off the side of that helmet, a few precise strikes of your fist steering your now blindly moving vehicle into the nearest wall as you rear back, sticking your whole head right through the opening you made.
Your teeth find their target, and even the apparent insanity of the man you're fighting can't keep him going as all the blood in his body flows down your throat.
Pulling your head out of the hole you just tore into the thick metal of the old armor (and man, it really stinks in there, to exactly nobody's surprise), wiping a bit of the blood that you got all over your face off and using your hemokinesis to move it into your mouth as you turn around, looking at what is happening for the others right now.
One of the other alpha series Big Daddies is currently half-melted and on fire, smoking away in a corner. Kate obviously fucked him up pretty well, the marks of her laser gun pockmarking what's left of his body.
The other one, on the other hand, is currently being cornered by what looks like a billowy cloud of some types of celestial objects, seemingly having a hard time moving as glowing lines of light snake around his limbs while being chipped by Kate and Delta firing a steady stream of laser beams and rivets at him, respectively.
Aww, you look beautiful, Sarah, you think at your sister, judging the situation to be under control to the point you don't need to interfere.
Also, her hair is darkening, perhaps charging up for some kind of- wait, is your sister blushing with her hair in this form?
Really, you're so pretty, I want to touch your core all over.
Stop that, Gabe! You're distracting me!
Despite Sarah's tone, you can tell she isn't really bothered- she's just embarrassed about being complimented on this form, for some reason.
No, honestly, would you mind if I brushed your hair once you're done? I kinda want to feel it now and compare it to your usual hair, so I can tell which is more luscious.
Ignoring you for the moment, though her hair color has darkened from orange with purple tips to almost entirely purple by now, Sarah floats closer to her enemy, and that floating does look like a pretty nice trick, to be fair, firing a wave of some kind of sprite-like beings made of light that fly at the Big Daddy before turning into more of those ropes made of light keeping him tied down, though she does grab a bunch of them out of the air, unraveling their heads between her fingers and pulling her own rope out of them, several of the things twisting around each other to create some kind of reinforced hardlight rope.
Next, she slings that same rope around her foe's legs with an effortless throw... before letting go as it pulls into itself, immediately breaking his knees and pulping them together with the armor on them.
The rest of the 'fight' is a straight beatdown, now that she's got him very decidedly immobilized, the alpha series sucker soon literally disarmed and floating upwards somehow, only to be smacked down with an enhanced fist, something fucky going on with the amount of force produced.
Repeatedly. Very repeatedly. Suffice to say, that Big Daddy doesn't make it all that long, the armor remaining on him dented and his inner organs probably more sludge than organs in short order.
"Are they dead! They are dead! Wonderful! I am so, so sorry about this, dear investors, the old test subjects have a bad habit of falling into a murderous rage whenever they sense any living being. I don't think it is anything personal, if that makes you feel better."
"Don't worry about it, Alexander, no harm, no foul. So I assume this is where Big Daddies were originally designed, then, judging by the fact the alpha series is running around?" You ask, thanking Alexander for being insane enough to be easily distracted by delusions and topic changes.
"Oh, yes, I actually worked on the project after Suchong had his little... accident. Here, follow my little helper and I can show you around." And thus, Alexander's little security bot makes its reappearance, his stare still showing in its screen.
Fontaine Futuristic's actual labs are rather expansive, though parts of it are overgrown with some kind of plant you can't readily identify ("Don't mind the hypnotic polyps, just make sure not to touch them!"), with several testing rooms filled with soil and sprouting even more plants part of the demonstration (you never knew how funny watching a dozen splicers try to kill each other only for the last one to still die of poison gas would be).
The holding cells, some of which are still filled with their subject's corpses, merit a quick look, though the truly impressive part are the actual proper labs not far from the testing rooms- much of the equipment inside is broken, through either splicers going crazy and smashing anything they could find or simple time and disuse corroding it, but still, a few repairs and a bit of work with a manufactory and these things would have literally everything you could wish for in terms of a seventies' biological research lab.
The tour ends back where you started out at, in the atrium with the giant fishtank containing Alexander the Great.
"Well? Well?! Have the facilities been to your satisfaction? I will admit, a few years without maintenance have accumulated a bit of wear and tear, but we only have the best here at Fontaine's!"
"Only the very best, indeed. We will, of course, need to renovate most of the facilities once we begin restaffing the company, but never let it be said we are ones to shy away from investment. Incidentally, is there anything you would like to have added to the renovations, while we are at it?"
"Oh, I couldn't possibly impose like that!" Alexander the Great intones, obviously being modest.
"None of that now, you're a valued employee! Almost material for the board of directors, even. And if there's one thing the company will be taking seriously if I have anything to say about it, it will be employee satisfaction, Alexander. Now out with it, how could we make your life better?"
"Well, there is... something. It is a bit shameful, but I absolutely adore a few of the plants growing within the facilities, imbued with copious amounts of ADAM. Their taste is just... wonderful. My issue is that, with my newest... advancements... I cannot exactly come out of my tank and gather them anymore, and my ability to use my old tools has been... a bit hit and miss, as you might imagine. If I had some way to grow and gather them, as part of some... employee benefit package, why, I would be most grateful."
"Noted and about to be accounted for. We might need to have a few biologists take a look at these plants and make sure we can reliably grow them, but I'm sure we can tinker up a solution. And of course we'll need to get you some way to control a few robots to do fine work for you, don't you worry about that... by the time we're done, you'll be doing just as much good work as you did in your heyday, maybe even better."
"So you want me to follow you to your room," Eleanor says, clearly out of tune over the idea.
"I do." It's literally what you just asked her for, after all.
"The room I know you actually had," she says, looking around conspicuously and whispering, "had sex with a Little Sister in."
"I did, though don't worry, I cleaned it up afterwards." And if that wasn't a chore, the Little Sister trying to cocoon herself in the dirty bedsheets and refusing to come out because apparently, she liked the smell.
You remade her clothes while you were at it, too, of course.
Taking a deep breath, Eleanor forcefully relaxes herself. "Okay. Okay, but I demand that you make me one of your improved Big Sister suits in exchange."
"Sure, I don't mind, not like that's particularly hard."
"In that case, could you make enough for everyone? The trio is absolutely insufferable about them, and you haven't seen someone being totally modest about showing off if you haven't been telepathic enough to feel how smug they are."
"Honestly, if that's the extent of teenage drama going on, I'm suddenly hopeful things will turn out alright with the whole Sister situation. But sure, mass-producing the suits will be a cinch, especially as I think we have a bunch of old suits lying around, on top- throwing them into the manufactories will do wonders will do wonders for material depletion on this. Just give me a moment to send the starting signal to my underwater construction robots and grab your mother, then we can get started."
It takes Eleanor a long, long moment of blank staring before she manages to parse that sentence.
"... Excuse me?!"
Ushering the teenage girl into your literal bed of a room, her mother carried under your arm as you go along and nervousness positively wafting off her in waves.
"Relax, I'm just going to be feeding both of you some body fluids," you joke, not about to just let this go. When Eleanor just climbs onto the soft mattress beyond the door, you sigh and throw the bound figure of Sofia after her, following suit in short order.
"But no, seriously, I just want to feed you some blood to empower you. Same thing I did to the trio, as you called them, and pretty much everyone not a Sister except for Mark."
On that note, you'd actually switched your compass soul on inside Fontaine Futuristics, but Cindy seems to have taken the vents to travel elsewhere again by the time you got to her previous location.
You can only hope she's keeping safe and getting towards Persephone right now, unless you were to, say, send a wave of Little Sisters to search her out.
... You'll call that Plan B for now.
"Then why did you also bring mother?" Eleanor asks, bringing you back to the present. Right, thralling time.
"The process also ensures she doesn't suffer any long term damage from... Well, anything. Meaning keeping that gag inside her mouth for the next century or two at a minimum won't distort her teeth or lead to a vulnerable jaw or anything, as it also extends one's lifespan. The powers granted may be an issue otherwise, but I can give her entirely passive ones she can't make use of just fine."
"So you're doing this to... keep her as what amounts to a sex slave for all eternity, or what?" Eleanor quirks her eyebrow, looking between you and her mother.
"Of course, what other use would she have?" Patting Sofia's head, you give her a crooked grin. "You just looove the idea of being used for sex for your entire now extended life, don't you? Not like trying to save the world through doing horrible things to people for no reason worked out for you anyways."
Smiling slyly, Eleanor agrees. "He's got you there, mother; results have shown that your ideals are worthless."
You can see in Sofia's eyes that she isn't about to accept any of what you're saying; she is determined to find a way to slip your bondage and maneuver into a position of power, somehow.
Good luck on that, sweetie.
"Anyways, let's get this started already." Cutting along both wrists with both thumbs in sequence, you stretch out two strands of blood through hemokinesis, keeping Sofia in place with a casually placed boot while your gag is keeping her mouth open for you and Eleanor readily accepts her own enthrallment.
"So, Eleanor, how are things going with all the Sisters?"
"Oh, you wouldn't believe how exhausting they can be," she answers with a genuine smile this time. "The other Big Sisters can't speak, though I've tried teaching them a bit without effect so far, and so I have to help them interpret and translate whenever they're hitting a language barrier."
Putting on a polite smile, you listen to her prattle on about what is going on, the occasional glance towards Sofia confirming what you know; hearing how you are 'corrupting' her daughter into actually caring about select people hurts her more than any dig you could make at her plans directly.
This is fun.
Your underwater construction robots, despite your wishes to the contrary, do need regular attention by a human mind to keep them on track and optimize their distribution, as several instances of them attempting to use each other to plug holes along the outside of Persephone and extending said walls into the empty ocean show.
This means that, once you are done thralling both Eleanor and Sofia (and enjoying the look in the latter's eyes), you have to spend a little time reassigning work areas and making sure none of the deployable drones have been lost to the ocean's currents- and none have, to your surprise, though two of them apparently tried to cannibalize each other for parts during one of the aforementioned incidents, leading to both being unuseable and stored in their respective DR0-WND units.
Even so, though, they're doing good work, you consider as you use the train's systems to view the outside through their sensors. Persephone has stopped leaking, pretty much, and is just being reinforced now in places wear and tear has left its outer shell vulnerable to impacts before you have your workforce move on to more complicated tasks- such as connecting Persephone to Fontaine Futuristics directly, once again, before the latter receives the same treatment as the former is getting now.
It doesn't take you long to play robot taskmaster, of course, and so you take a few minutes to just look in on how everyone is doing, now that your group isn't racing through Rapture with an air of high tension coming from the danger of possible splicer attacks hanging over it.
First off, Kate and Sarah are doing well, your sister scribbling up a plan of some sort as she talks with your other wife (and you really like thinking of them in those terms, you realize), the two of them conversing about everything from materials logistics to practical issues when efficiently processing however many splicers there are still in Rapture to be disposed of.
Okita is just hanging out in the room that previously belonged to Eleanor (you know, before you had her moved to a proper place), sitting in a corner and reading some book on psychology probably owned by Lamb before your little regime change took place.
Nora, on the other hand, is sitting barefoot in one of the warmed rooms you had laid out with fluffy carpet, reading a storybook to an easy dozen of Little Sisters.
The issue with the elevator shaft, you ponder to yourself, is that you basically have to work your way up from zero on how to actually design it while simultaneously working off of what is left on Persephone's side of the previous lift, the whole thing having collapsed at some point after Fontaine Futuristics was mildly demolished and the upper connection cut entirely by what you'd estimate to be some kind of explosives.
Basically, you're using a technology base you aren't actually used to to construct a large shaft to transport stuff through, without ever personally working on or even looking at it.
In other words, you absolutely overengineer the shit out of it because you're just very good at this, with a wider base allowing for up to two actual elevators to exchange positions at the same time, using strong magnetic induction to basically slowly and steadily push one of them up while the other one is pushed less strongly as it glides downwards, a bit of creative engineering letting them both slot into what is left of the original design.
Oh, and you're naturally just reusing those original mechanisms in addition to your magnets, because there's no such thing as too much making sure people and materials are safe in transit. Anyways, this should work, so you set your semi-autonomous construction robots to the normal passive repair you actually designed them for while you go test it out.
No good, Brigid, all normal ways inside are cut.
Have you tried using the maintenance access, Gabriel?
That's my next plan.
Minerva's Den, as it turns out, is one very locked up place. No big surprise, all told, considering that someone seems very determined indeed to keep any possible intruders out as hard as possible.
Nevertheless, you do have your ways to move around unseen, unheard and undeterred by pretty much any and all barriers, and so it doesn't take long for you to abuse your shadow form to slip right through the floodgate maintenance accesses you've been using for your own purposes for a while now.
And honestly, this place, while still fairly battered, is nowhere near the level of sheer shithole that the rest of the city you've seen so far has been reduced to.
Minerva's Den, you quickly decide, is an... interesting, district of Rapture.
Parts of it are superficially clean, the furniture thrown around and all just like everywhere else you saw so far, but the ground free of smaller debris due to, as you soon observe, these little robots moving along pre-determined paths and automatically doing the work.
Anywhere else they're just ignoring, though, and so you're soon back to the typical Rapture look these days.
Splicers, naturally, are present and numerous, with a decent amount of them following the same pattern as the ones you have since designated as 'spider splicers', though you do make note a worrying amount of the morons you sneak along seem to have some kind of passive flame effect going on- either that, or they've made themselves immune to fire somehow and are making it a point to set themselves on fire all the time.
You'd believe both, honestly. ADAM is just that bullshit.
That said, two particularly interesting finds you manage to make consist of a map of Rapture Central Computing, or RCC for short, not actually denoting the Thinker's location, but still giving you a clear picture of the publically available areas and, more importantly, where they end, for the first one.
The other interesting morsel you manage to unearth is some kind of futuristic-looking weapon.
It's a bit large for you, making you immediately think of a weapon made specifically for Big Daddy use. Still, a quick test using a few energy cell-like thingies obviously used as ammunition reveals this to be a laser weapon, as you thought, though one with a somewhat different effect that what you're used to; instead of burning through or even blasting apart the desk you used as a test target, the area you hit just... dissolves, disintegrating into seemingly nothing, though you notice a somewhat odd smell afterwards.
Iiinteresting. Interesting indeed.
Hefting up the bulky laser weapon, you overlay your trusty little science minion, Yoshi's essense settling into yourself with an easy twist.
Using his power to analyze things feels... weird, like an entire additional set of senses welded onto those you already have, but you don't really bother trying to get used to it, instead concentrating on what you're doing this for. This new laser weapon, as you soon 'see', isn't actually a laser weapon, firing neither light, modified into projectiles or not, nor any other form of energy you've seen used like this before.
Instead, as Yoshi's mind helpfully supplies as it stays attached to yours, this is an ion weapon, firing charged atoms that rapidly interact with any and all matter they hit to a rather destructive end, fired as a beam that technically qualifies them as laser weapons.
Because apparently, it's closer to what a laser should actually be like compared to what you've been using the term for, according to Yoshi again. Which, to be fair, is probably true, so you'll just call them ion lasers for the time being, much to his immediate exasperation, not that you care about it.
Man, you're used to being telepathically connected to people, but actually mind-melding like this is still really fucking weird.
Anyways, you now have an intimate understanding of the mechanisms comprising this new and exciting weapon, keeping it clear in your mind even after Yoshi is banished back to where he belongs. You doubt this would be the case for someone that doesn't exactly have perfect memory, some aspect of his power being required for its operation in this sense, the entire memory tinged with that hint of it, but hey, here you are.
You already can't fucking wait to put this shit everywhere, even as you consider that actually driving these things will be power-intensive as fuck, though for now you have more immediate issues to focus on.
Issues such as how to eat as many splicers as possible before you go on your way.
"Alright, you just slowly walk through every room blasting that aura, I'll take care of everything else."
Having summoned a hopefully helpful trio of souls for this situation, that one guy Kason with the weakening aura, the Imitator to double up on it and the Yangban dude to share the power and his own powerset with them, you burst into a mass of fifty-two bats flying and scuttling in all directions, spreading and opening your many little mouths to let out your adorable ferocious screeches and looking out in all directions.
Time to go on a hunt.
David was always destined to advance the fields of physics and engineering from a young age, mathematics and their physical application coming easy to him. Faced with this fact, and weighing his choices, he naturally chose to embrace his natural gifts and use them to their fullest extent, the advancement of humanity's knowledge paramount to its development to ever greater heights.
Studying at any institutions that would take him, he soon developed a reputation amongst his peers, for being a genius readily accepting of others' ideas and innovations, though he honestly disliked the term 'genius'; he had advantages in his birth and his mind, yes, but to sort him into his own category was to deny the ability of others, their own propensity for greatness.
And greatness, he well knew, was not something to be hoarded; on the contrary, it was to be shared and, in doing so, magnified.
When Andrew Ryan personally invited him to Rapture, them foreign businessman touring the Isles to do so for any and all outstanding personages he could identify, he agreed to descend into the city of Rapture, his salestalk quite convincing and passionate by any measure. Still, when he was down there, working with Rapture Central Computing, he could not help but feel like something was afoot, even as they advanced the fields of computing and even artificial intelligence by what felt like decades every other week.
That feeling of his only proved itself true when good Mister Porter was deported out of the blue (gallows humour, but it had its place), the man he was working for and perhaps his friend disappearing and Mister Wahl taking over his department, the man's insanity obvious to any that cared to look.
David was working on a stealthy evacuation plan, but when Minerva's Den, as their district was colloquially called, was isolated from the rest of the city, all he could do was hunker down and pray that perhaps he had not gone too insane from the odd mutations he'd inflicted on himself as he did his best to maximize his mental capabilities, that he was not just hallucinating everything he had ever done and that maybe, just maybe, someone out there was doing the same thing as himself and had ensured those poor girls turned into tools for the purpose of gathering ADAM were taken care of.
He could do no more; as he had discovered, he was stuck in a loop of waking up, thinking himself in the same place as weeks ago and repeatedly performing the same task, ignoring the fact he had done so dozens of time already, entirely incapable of perceiving the previous day's efforts. At least his staunch insistence on keeping a diary had finally clued him in.
That, or he was stuck in a time loop. He had no idea, personally, and at some point, he suspected he stopped caring.
In retrospect, you should have expected this.
The splicers populating the area, while just as badly mutated as the rest of the city, had no real way to actually fight you; while you may have lost a body or two to here and there to an errant swing of a metal pipe or other improvised bludgeoning tool, your sheer numbers combined with the relatively wide area of weakness and lethargy inflicted by your summons meant that you could simply ignore their feeble attempts to defend themselves as you swarmed all over anything that moved, using both hemokinesis and your many, many mouths to drain their blood.
Any actual losses you simply made up for by not drinking all the blood straight away, tearing open small wounds and having the blood turn into more of yourself. Even the odd spider slicer attempting to keep their distance and just throw stuff at you from afar just got surrounded by a decent amount of yourself and stunned using your weird sonic powers (Bats really, really shouldn't be able to actually influence a human-sized organism by screeching, but then again, since when did you really care about logic?) before being consigned to the same fate all other splicers you could find were.
And sure, you may or may not have lost a few bodies to a charging burning brute splicer, but he still had blood inside him, even as he did his best to ignore the weakening... so you just screamed at him really loud.
Then his head exploded.
Anyways, you did your best to always keep away froma ny of the security devices around, from cameras to turrets and beyond, and hey, you're fairly certain that worked out, or at least you weren't forced into fighting security bots for no noog reason, so... progress.
Speaking of progress, you actually found a weird door locked with a seperate mechanism clamped onto it; most likely your way forwards, in fact, unless you're misjudging the situation over here.
You did leave it aside while leading your jolly parade of murderization, of course, but still, there's only so many splicers to munch on, so you have to move on eventually.
Reconsolidating your form, you breathe in your largely faceless mooks (note to self, ask the Dollmaker about replacing their faces with a blank mask) before twisting yourself into the form of your shadow, sliding and slithering up the wall and through a gap along the ceiling.
As it turns out, locks don't really protect against you, most times.
The next area you arrive in after following a short tunnel, apparently titled simply 'Operations', seems rather empty all in all, with several wings of it titled anything from 'Airlock' to 'Programming'... as well as "Ventilation Control' and 'Core Access'.
That last one sounds like a winner, and hey, at least the ambience in here is rather nice, with these large ocean-windows letting in plenty of colored light.
It does take you a bit until you've figured out the way everything is structured in here, but before long you get into the right tunnel leading you onwards.
You'll be honest; everything is very well signposted in here. Too well, some may say.
The insides of the whole thing are relatively silent, just the silent hum of active machinery inside the walls drowning out the sound of creaking walls and glass under the weight of the ocean. You can't see nor hear many living beings around, in fact, you only sense the one blood signature not that far from where you entered.
You know, come to think of it, isn't the Thinker supposed to be this really big deal? Would explain the immense machine surrounding you now, after you've wiggled through a few of its outer parts.
Doesn't explain the obvious spider splicer kneeling on the rgound before it, though, scribbling something on the ground with blood (as you immediately recognize), an enormus mathematic equation spreading along it.
That is, until he gets up, facing towards the Thinker.
"What is this, Thinker?" His accent is immediately noticeable, with a hard emphasis on the 'r'. "The Equation... it is falling apart! Something is wrong! Tell me what is interfering with the Equation so I may... eliminate it!"
"Processing..." An extremely neutral voice says, quite obviously mechanically produced- the Thinker can talk? "Interference Detected... Location: This Room."
"What?!" The man wheels around, his head swiveling in all directions. "Who is intruding in my domain?! Show yourself! Reed Wahl will end you and with you all opposition to The Equation!"
Oookay... so apparently, you're dealing with some kind of AI and a crazed splicer that has had access to it for far too long already. Joy.
Well, if he demands for you to come out, you will, just not necessarily the way this Wahl guy has in mind.
Gliding upwards along the wall, you keep an eye on the erratic man below you, slowly but surely moving into position.
"I will find you! Me or my mechanical assistance will see you sooner or later, and you will corrupt the Equation no long-"
It is at this point that you impact his head.
A short struggle ensues during which you both tumble to the ground, you on Reed's back and him madly struggling to move you off, though you keep in position clawed into his shoulder and side as you are.
It is a moment's work to unhinge your jaws, driving them into his unoccupied shoulder, though as you begin drinking you soon realize something is wrong.
"Cowardly intruder! You will not prevail over the power of the Thinker!"
This moron isn't weakening, even with you sucking on him harder than a 500 dollar whore. On the contrary, his fruitless struggles seem to be strengthening, his flesh actively writhing against your teeth in an attempt to push them out.
More concerningly, however, is the pair of security bots beeping at you angrily as they come flying.
"THE EQUATION CAN NOT BE STOPPED, DO YOU NOT SEE?!"
Over the next few moments, several things happen.
First, you jab your claws deeper into Reed's body, pushing a load of electricity through his body, though this stupid fuck just refuses to stop struggling still, now doing his best to ram an elbow into your ribs, not that has any effect on you.
Those security bots do sound like trouble, though- they shouldn't be a threat to you, considering all of them you've seen so far have just been shooting bullets, but on the other hand... Well, you did just pass an ion weapon of some kind earlier.
Better not to take a risk.
With that in mind, you rip your teeth out of Reed's flesh, taking a bite out of his shoulder and (after a moment to chew and swallow) breathe out two souls adept at dealing with mechanical threats like this, Mush for his power's ability to aggressively disassemble them and Ivey for her ability to possess tech... though you never tried having her possess something this comparatively small, truth be told.
As that happens, you pull Reed off the ground, twirling the two of you around until he faces his own security robots even as his eyes literally burst out of their sockets, your little trick with hemokinesis always a good standby.
Though he does just ignore that, frustratingly, instead raising the weapon he was keeping strapped to his leg until now before you have time to restrain his arms or anything, holding it upside down over his shoulder- and that is one beefy shotgun right there, actually.
"Die, intrudeeer!"
Perhaps contrary to this guy's expecations, you do not jerk away from the gun now pointed at you, nor do you panic in any way.
Instead, wary of this being some kind of advanced weapon akin to another ion laser now shooting past both of you from the flying robots, you simply raise a clawed hand before the barrel, a load of electrified buckshot, of all things, impacting it and promptly losing all momentum, their charge absorbed by your semi-metallic fingers.
In related news, you now have the charge you expended earlier back, your ability to absorb electricity with your claws coming in handy. Unable to see Reed's expression and kind of uncaring of it, you crunch up his shotgun's barrel in your hand, tearing it away from him (he keeps the handle as it tears apart in the motion) and get right back to eating him, Mush already busying himself with tearing apart the robot that just fired, his tendrils shooting into any openings and applying force to wriggle inside deeper.
That robot won't be acting up a second time.
Ivey, on the other hand, is just sticking a hand inside the other one, the machine slowly morphing into a powered glove with ion beam capacities.
Not content to let you drink far more blood than should be released even a by now enormous gashing wound all across his shoulder and neck, Reed Wahl continues his fruitless struggles, but once you have his arms under control, there's really nothing more he can do, the mad little fucker finally slowing down at some point.
"Nooo... The Equation... The Thinker... Unlimited power, just out of reach..."
His last words, perhaps appropriately, are dedicated to his apparent object of obsession. Still, with blood on your lips (and all over your side, this guy could bleed), you finally release his body.
You gotta give it to him, Reed could bleed like a champ, that's for sure. But no matter the few tricks the surprisingly strong splicer could throw at you, his end was ultimately destined to be the same one ordained to every splicer opposing you, or at least those of them you don't accidentally kill before getting to feed them to a vampire.
Anyways, that business finally done and over with, you turn around, facing the ominously buzzing core of the Thinker.
The Thinker stays silent for a long moment, almost as though regarding you, before its mechanical voice pipes up once more.
"Query: Identity And Designation. Secondary Query: Assistance."
Huh. Looks like it's time for introductions, then.
"My name's Gabriel, Gabriel Livsey. And you would be the Thinker, correct?"
"Confirmation."
"What's this about assistance?"
"Maintenance Of Automated Systems. Location: Rapture."
"You're saying you're asking for my help in keeping all the automated stuff in the city running?"
"Processing... Correct."
"Alright then, here's the deal," you say, splaying an arm out to the side. "I don't mind helping you repair this dump, given I want to take over what's left of Rapture by this point anyways, so our goals align. However, in order to maximize the advancement of both our goals, I would like to propose an exchange, of sorts."
"Processing... Query: Exchange Details?"
"Simply put, Actually running a city is a lot of work I really don't want to have anything to do with, and fixing it up is similarly more effort than I would like to have to invest going forwards. Thus, and considering I know about you administrating the city's security systems, how about I simply recycle parts of the city, turn them into robots I then assign to your control using the already present technology letting you control security bots and the like and simply have you use your abilities to rapidly fix up as much of the city as possible?"
"Processing... Comparing Footage... Arrangement: Satisfactory. Request: Details On Production?"
You're slowly getting a grasp on how to interpret this. "Oh, it's fairly simple. I just need the materials and a bit of time, using a little invention of mine. I just throw everything into a manufactory and get the finished product assembled in short order."
"Request: Design?"
Oh, the Thinker wants to know how to build a manufactory?
"I would rather not at this time, actually. Keeping the design confidential guarantees my own position in our little partnership, after all."
"Processing... Acceptance. Consolation: Attractive Form."
Is... is the emotionless AI flirting with you...?
"Why, thank you. I also find your form to be quite interesting, though likely in a different way than you do. On a side note, would you mind telling me if there is any significant amount of biological material involved with your own design?"
"Embarrassment. Clarification: Lack Of Maintenance."
"Oh. So are they dead entirely or..."
"Alert: Question rejected. Reason: Personal Nature."
"If you'd like me to stop asking, that's entirely fine." It isn't, not really, you want to see about if it's even possible for you to thrall this thing, but you did just refuse to share your own designs, so you totally get where the Thinker is coming from.
"On a related topic, though, is there any way you would prefer to be contacted if the occasion arises? We will need to coordinate a way for you to actually control the robots, after all, and I would certainly prefer to make use of the splicers populating the city's ruins at the moment rather than simply waste them all."
"Suggestion: Broadcast System; Address: Rapture Central Computing."
"Ah, so you'll get the call if I make it. Very well. Is there anything else you would like to talk about before I leave?"
"Mention: Security Measures Modified. Biometric Profile Added To All Access Lists."
Oh, so the turrets and bots won't bother you from here on, huh? Neat.
Organizing sessions like this within your inner world is quite easy for you to do, all things considered, such as the Maid simply teleporting any soul with an applicable skillset right towards you, or the Library expanding as required to comfortably fit anyone you want inside it.
Similarly, the hologram-esque projection created by you swiping a hand over the central desk you've put everyone else around does make it nice and easy to show everyone what you want them to see at once, though you don't really get your hopes up anyone that's not Yoshi or at least Nolan will actually provide any valuable insights as you scan through the designs of the Thinker as far as Reed knows of them.
Being the chief engineer of the whole project, that is a lot... even as the misshapen man scowls at everyone around himself and especially you as you seek to plunder his life's work.
"Okay everyone, let's see what our good friend Mister Wahl has to tell us today."
Reed Wahl, contrary to what you might have expected after seeing him rant and rave about his ultimate equation, is still perfectly capable of recalling much of his work on the Thinker, and his position as the chief engineer of Rapture Central Computing was well justified in a time he was sane.
In other words, the way he envisioned the Thinker's systems to be set up is entirely ingenious, each and every part finely crafted and placed to interact with all others and make the best possible use of space possible. Sure, the technology itself is horribly outdated by your standards, but back in the fifties?
Wahl may not be an utter genius or anything, having simply used conventional methods and structure to achieve their purpose rather than inventing technology decades ahead of himself to get the job done or anything, but the way he did use what he had shows a well thought out and even downright astounding, at times, methodology.
Sure, he still needed to use a skyscraper's worth of space to put all of this shit into and create the Thinker where you could've done the same with half as much simply by using modern materials and computer technology, but the concept seems solid.
Side note, ADAM is bullshit and can apparently be added to literally everything for better results. Fucking deus ex machina- a machina you now have access to yourself, at least, or will once you finally have the time to look into it. So long as you manage not to be distracted by Tenenbaum, anyways, the woman drinks up positive attention like a dry sponge.
And yes, she does seem to consider sex as positive attention, if you're any judge.
"Before I go and fulfill my part of the deal, would you mind if I went through a few parts of your design and replaced them with better alternatives? Unless you mind, of course."
"Cautious Approval. Query: Details?"
"Oh, just using modern tech instead of what was widely used at the time of your inception. You know, throwing a few microprocessors in there could feasibly cut your required size in half, easily. All I'd need is a way to get everything to be installed in here... there wouldn't happen to be a train station nearby, would there?"
"Lifting Security Lockdown. Pathways Opened And Tunnels Reassigned. You Are Welcome."
Well, that was easy.
Thinker Upgrades
Reinvigorate ADAM: Tenenbaum's diagnosis was simple and straightforward; pour ADAM onto what looks a lot like some kind of dried-out cell cluster and they should be back to working in short order. At least now you have a way to use a little bit of the mutagenic stuff you're producing en-masse... (2 points)
Robot Interface: Grab a few of your more digitally inclined souls and slap together several devices based on your other robot control robots, hopefully allowing the Thinker to control robots that have been implanted with a control device as long as its signal can reach them. Now to add signal repeaters all over rapture... (4 points)
Ventilation Control: Keeping the Thinker cool enough to function is a daunting task, one that an entire wing of the building is dedicated to, as a machine this size produces enormous amounts of waste heat. Go through the whole thing with a fine-toothed comb, see if anything needs to be fixed and improve stuff if and when the opportunity presents itself (3 points)
Core Upgrade: The Thinker, despite being an advanced artificial intelligence, from what you can tell, is made with the same level of vacuum tubes you already encountered on Earth Fallout. Well, no more, you say! Time to give this thing some proper hardware, from microchips to literally any other bit of computer technology you can extort from Yoshi (3 points, can be taken several times) x2
Maintenance: The Thinker hasn't been properly maintained in about a decade now. It would, uh, probably be best to have someone get on that (3 points)
It has been quite a while since you last spent twelve concurrent hours working on something that tickled your fancy and doing so has brought you into a somewhat jovial mood, issues such as fading concentration or possible soreness entirely absent from your current state of being.
"Query: Biological Additions? Addendum: This Tickles."
"Oh, I'm just adding a few special ingredients to the ADAM. This should, hopefully, make it work better for our purposes- I need you to drink it by at least technicality, and I'm hoping this will do the trick," you explain, bleeding into the little device Brigid went and threw together with your manifactory once you explained to her what you need; adding any amount of your DNA to ADAM tends to obliterate the stuff, which would defeat the purpose here, if it weren't for her discovery and study of precise mixing rates.
"As for the tickling part, just try to ignore it. Any of the new parts already in operation?"
"Confirmation. Clarification: Satisfaction."
"Good." You actually thought there was some kind of malfunction back when you started uninstalling parts of the Thinker to replace with your new and improved versions backwards-compatible with its current tech base, around the same time you took off your shirt because you were working with a lot of moving machinery, but it insisted nothing happened, so you've been going along with that for the time being.
Hearing that it is doing alright is good, though. You'd really hate to invest all this time and effort into a way to spend less later on, only for it all to come to naught.
An actual and proper lab, as you have some experience with from Yoshi setting up one back on Earth Bet, involves a lot of resources and labour, even if you don't need the really exotic state-of-the-art stuff.
Luckily, you do have a lot of material you can just recycle over at the Fontaine labs, and with a bit of elbow grease and suggestions from Brigid, you soon have a whole bunch of sparkling new facilities at your disposal.
Though the lack of human test subjects saddens you just a little bit, you'll be honest.
Anyways, with Brigid having moved her research into the building also containing Alexander the Great (he seems to recognize her as a former and returning employee, which you take as a good sign), you have a bit more space down in Persephone, which is always nice (though you haven't exactly been running out) and, more importantly, she can finally use precision instruments and specialized tools for working with ADAM once more.
Oh, and Alexander also seems really proud about actual lab work being done again at Fontaine's, singing and wobbling in his tank.
Transcript of Alexander the Great's singing:
WHEN YOU'RE DOWN IN THE MOUTH AND LIFE'S A PAIN,
WEATHERMAN SAYS 'HEAVY RAIN',
A LITTLE BOOST IS ALL YOU NEED,
AVERAGE MAN TO HERCULES-
STRONGER ARM AND SHARPER BRAIN,
THAT'S WHY THE FUTURE IS FONTAINEEE!
During what you like to jokingly call the 'Great Redesign' or the 'Yoshi Slave Labour Campaign', most of the installments said soul minion found he summarily analyzed and vigorously disassembled with great vigour, the insight into his mental state you have right now telling you he would have just completely erased most of them without handing you the blueprints in the library if he could have, his disdain for the things he found almost palpable.
As it turns out, the guy really, really has an issue with what amounts to brainwashing equipment, as well as its use on primarily little girls. Certain old memories seemed to be awoken by the whole thing. And yes, Persephone wasn't only Rapture's political prison and concentration camp back in the day, it was also where at the very least Sofia Lamb had her abducted children indoctrinated and prepared for usage as Little Sisters.
While the guy you're currently a little mind-melded with is still dismayed with your treatment of the woman, he is not that upset over you essentially sexually enslaving her in an effort to break her will, all things told. Oh, he is still chafing at being essentially enslaved to what he considers a horrible monster pretending to be human and all, but he just doesn't find it in himself to be truly pissed over anything you're doing to someone mindraping children.
Anyways, getting away from that whole tangent, you instead concentrate on what you're actually trying to do here. Namely, one of the few machines Yoshi didn't tear apart as hard as he could, one of those Vita Chambers you noticed around the city while you were busy doing the whole rushing through it to neutralize Sofia thing, to be precise. Using Yoshi's power as you're overlaying with him, the first thing you do as the blueprint of the chamber lit up by some kind of slow, aetherial lightning cyclically moving around its insides where it stands in one of the side rooms, having been moved here for later review, unfolds within your mind is standing there wordlessly as your feeble mind attempts comprehending what is going on.
Okay, that is a bit of an exaggeration. Still, these devices, from what you can tell, are absolutely and insanely mind-boggling. And familiar.
Vita Chambers, as you can tell while tracing their physical makeup, are using a mechanism similar to your very own ability to be both dead and alive at the same time, some form of mechanism ensuring that any one person registered within its network (and they may or may not all be one and the same identical Chamber simply existing in several places at once) can not stay dead so long as their DNA remains registered as an active user's, the machine simply utilizing some advanced form of quantum entanglement to, essentially, tricking the universe into ensuring that any registered user managing to get themselves killed instead of staying dead totally was inside the nearest Vita Chamber all along.
Suffice to say, this feat is absolutely insane and only possible through the use of copious amounts of ADAM forming some form of proto-plasmid, from what you understand about how plasmids work, automatically working all the time. Normally, this wouldn't work as more active effects like this would eat through whatever EVE the stuff uses up, which is also why plasmids can't really be automated normally, instead requiring an organic organism that actually has the mix of nutrients and flexibility needed, but the nature of this shit allows a just about discorporal ADAM construction to form a plasmid that just keeps replenishing itself by simply restoring the resources it has as though it never consumed them.
Did you mention just how insane this shit is?!
Still, while you have no real way to understand the subtle interactions presented before you, the advanced insanity that are the Chamber's mechanical components enabling the quantum-manipulating aspects of the semi-biological parts of this whole setup nor how or why exactly the plasmid that should theoretically be a fleshy mass exists entirely outside any discernable spacetime, according to Yoshi's analyzing power, but thankfully, you do manage to finagle the construction method for these things through more luck and stubborn power usage than anything else.
Mostly you'll just need to reconstruct the physical aspects of the Chamber and then flood one particular compartment at the top of it with ADAM, the rest should be taken care of through the main 'body' of the Vita Chamber(s) connecting and molding it into more of itself.
And with that, you shalt go off and input all of this shit right into the manufactory over at the train, a copy of everything you know also available in your inner library and your memory, not like you can forget this shit. Which will not stop you from attempting to apply brainbleach to yourself once you're done.
Seriously, this is complete madness, and you're one to talk!
Taking a stroll through your erstwhile domain, you soon come upon a somewhat unusual sight.
Okita is reading a book. This, in itself, is perfectly normal, and how the communicationally challenged girl spends most of her time nowadays that you don't need her to bisect horribly mutated assholes on the regular. No, what is unusual about this is that she hasn't chosen some empty corner to sit in to do it, instead joining an easy two dozen Little Sisters in one of the little public areas you made for them, the fluffy carpeting made from at some point stained and bloodied clothing having her wiggles her toes along it as she reads out loud.
"... and that's how the prince defeated the evil dragon and brought the princess back to the castle. The End."
The Little Sisters give actual applause as Okita's monotone voice proclaims the end of the story, holding out the book's pages so they can see the illustrations.
"Thank you, Big Sister Tita." "Another story, please?" "Please?"
"Mhm..." Okita makes, closing the book and dropping it on a small pile of similar books- stretching her arms upwards and doing interesting things to her undulating chest as she does so. "'M getting tired."
"Well," you say, announcing your presence with a light smirk, "how about I read you girls the next story instead?"
"Big Brother Angel!" "Yay!"
Shaking your head indulgently, you just move on over to the group, taking a seat next to Okita (after chucking off your shoes, naturally, you aren't looking forwards to need a way to clean these carpets) and randomly taking hold of one of the books scattered around the area.
Side note, figure out where exactly all the children's books are coming from at some point.
"Now, let's see, what story should I read you?"
"Oooh, here!" "No, this one!" "This one! This one!" The Little Sisters, naturally, pick up and push books at you, trying to get you to read them their presumably favorite stories.
"There, there, take it easy." Accepting one of them at random, you adjust your position a little, Okita's drooping face already burying itself in the crook of your neck, much to your exasperated amusement. The girl really just does whatever she wants, huh?
Humming to yourself, you open the first page, your eyes scanning the text. "A long, long, time ago, in a small village at the edge of the dark, dark forest..."
And that's how it goes, the old story of Hansel and Gretel retold in some book down here in rapture. It's a somewhat brutal story, mind you, involving kids abandoned in the woods, starvation, vandalism, enslavement of children abandoned in the woods, attempted cannibalism and burning an old woman alive, but that's just how it goes in these German fairy tales.
The Little Sisters, at least, seem to be positively enraptured as you tell the story, looking at you with nearly unblinking eyes shining their golden lights instead of having any sort of actual pupils, even as Okita keeps on moving closer and closer towards you in her dim state of consciousness, to the point of climbing all over your lap as you sit there cross-legged.
Never one to ignore a good opportunity like this, one of your arms snakes down and right onto her prodigious chest, gently fondling her tits and making a game of finding her nipples through her clothes before you just slide it underneath them entirely. Thumbing through the pages with one hand is a little difficult, but alas, you just take it as one more challenge to be overcome.
Not that this entire interaction is lost on the Little Sisters carefully watching and listening to everything you do, judging by the way they're frequently adjusting their seating and patting their own bodies in pale imitation of what you're doing.
"... and that's how Hansel and Gretel came back home, laden down with gems and pearls, and lived happily ever after."
Carefully laying the book onto the pile okita seems to have been accumulating, you give your little audience a mischievous smile.
"Oh, I can tell you don't want me to stop yet. So how about we just... keep going a little longer?"
WIth that, and no protestations from the Little Sisters looking at you, you nudge Okita aside a little, operating your pants' fly and dragging your slowly hardening dick out.
Gently jostling her about, you spread Okita's already open jacket a little, subsequently pulling her shirt upwards until her big, bouncy chest is revealed, as the antisocial girl just doesn't seem to wear bras in general. Chuckling to yourself lowly, you dig your hands into her pale globes, enjoying the chance to massage and knead them as Okita begins to quietly snore in response to your treatment.
"Suuu... Suuu..."
Suffice to say, it just makes her cuter.
Several of the Little Sisters watching, in the meanwhile, have begun pulling on their own little dresses, tweaking their nipples in imitation of what you're doing to Okita with a faraway look on their faces, your own activities escalating all the while, until you're forced to stop when Okita moves in her sleep.
"Mghn..." *Sniff, sniff* Clearly following the scent of something nearby, you watch with amusement as your catlike companion drags herself back towards where she was lying earlier, battering your hand idly masturbating yourself away with her face before nomming onto your cock herself.
You have to fight to keep the chuckle from escaping.
Shifting towards keeping her long hair out of the way of the Little Sisters watching spellbound, your other hand wanders down her back as the still sleeping girl begins bobbing your length entirely subconsciously, eventually making its way to the back of her pants and forcing itself inside them, soon letting your palm rest on the crack of her butt and easily explore her pussy with your fingers.
She even adjusts her legs a little, spreading them so you can get in deeper. Honestly, you have no idea whether Okita is more perverted awake or asleep.
The Little Sisters seem to be appreciating the show either way as you masturbate the sleepy girl giving you an entirely unconscious blowjob.
You took a moment to ask Brigid how things are going with her new lab and all, but she just distractedly tells you to come visit her in a few hours so she can give you a comprehensive update on how things are going, as she's currently busy with something thanks to Alexander's help.
You don't know whether to be happy for her or worried about what they might be doing in the labs, but hey, you heard the word and you know better than to disobey one of your women, which Tenenbaum counts as by association.
Instead, you just go on ahead and think at the Thinker, only to find that the connection seems to be somewhat twisted- you can make out a few words and sounds, but proper telepathy is quite hard.
Luckily, you do have an actual teleporter just lying around, so you simply use it to beam yourself right to the Thinker's core instead.
"Hello Thinker, would you mind helping me with something?"
"Processing... Admonishment: Greetings! Addendum: Details?"
"Oh, it's nothing much, just a little cleanup in that place that used to be flooded until just a little while ago, Dionysus Park. I would like to clean it of any splicers mucking it up and simultaneously get a good meal in, so I was wondering if you could try using a few of the robot bodies I gave you to hunt them down and gather them in one place."
"Processing... Provisional Agreement... Query: Priority?"
"Do you mean to ask how important this is or why I would prioritize that place in particular?"
"Processing... Yes."
Chuckling, you shrug. "Fair enough. I'd like to get this done sooner or later, and I don't think either of us has anything more important to do right now anyways; as for why I would like to take over and fix up Dionysus, I'm actually somewhat of an art aficionado, and though I doubt there's much of any value left, that doesn't mean I can't see about cleaning up and putting new artwork in."
"Processing... Query: Artist?"
Chuckling, you step a little to the side as the small team of Hammers currently guarding the Thinker's core chamber starts moving. "Well, I'm not sure I'd exactly call myself an artist, though... I mean, I did sell some of my work for a rather decent price, that one time. Anyways, it all began in my youth..."
Dionysus Park, the little timewaster Lamb attempted to use against you while you made your way through Rapture before you decided to give her the middle finger, is... well, quite fucked.
Even with the water drained, you're still looking at upwards of a decade of flooding damage. This kind of thing is hell on property values, as you well know.
... You may or may not have looked this kind of thing up while dreaming about getting your own place for your siblings, okay? Had to make sure you wouldn't get scammed or anything.
Anyways, that's not exactly why you're here, as the Thinker seems to agree. One splicer after the other is carried towards where you're sitting in the middle of the little district, the small army of Hammerbots you've put under its control marching in all directions.
A decent amount of Bobs is waiting at your location, too, waiting for the bloody work to get done before they swarm out to scrape all this plantlife off the floors and walls and see about repairing whatever can be saved.
Funnily enough, your control over blood allows you to avoid splattering it everywhere, meaning that you end up with a neat and orderly pile of dismembered bodies, graciously sorted through by the Thinker's local extensions after you're done 'processing' them.
You could get used to this.
The last time you saw the labs in the secret area below Fontaine Futuristics, they had been freshly remade, with equipment made to specification and carefully arranged throughout several rooms.
That same basic layout is still present, just now all of it is in heavy use. Beakers bubbling with mysterious fluid (ADAM), pipes through which the sound of rushing liquids can be heard (ADAM), centrifuges are whirling through the air (also being used to refine ADAM).
In the middle of all this, Brigid Tenenbaum stands, carefully adjusting a complicated-looking device you know to be used for the purposes of automated ADAM refinement according to preset parameters- not that great at finding new ways to create plasmids or tonics, unless you already have something the thing can do and just want it to try a series of parameter combinations until they work out, but it does work rather nicely if you want to refine ADAM into something you already know the recipe to, as you understand it.
There's a reason a downsized version of this thing is an integral part of any Gatherer's Garden out in the city.
"Ah, there you are, Gabriel," Brigid says as she sees you from the corner of her eyes, turning towards you. "I am sure you will be pleased to hear I have managed to get... 'Alexander' to provide a list of plasmids available for purchase before and during the civil war, as well as the recipes for most of them. As of today, we have at least some form of the vast majority of products one could find in Rapture, so I should be free to pursue new projects shortly. I even have a list somewhere here in case you wish to peruse it."
"Very good," you smile at her. "Is there anything I could help you with in the meantime? You sound like you've been hard at work."
Brigid just tears open her labcoat, revealing she isn't actually wearing anything underneath.
"Fuck me hard. I have found this motivates me greatly."
Chuckling, you jump her and begin kissing. You do not let up from that kiss until the two of you are nearly naked, acting more like fumbling college kids as you scramble to get each other's clothes off, though you certainly do not complain.
Neither does she.
Mark Meltzer sat on one of the benches Gabriel had installed along the newly renovated Persephone- it was hard to believe this whole place used to be a prison, once upon a time, such was the transformation it had undergone.
Gone were the steel bars and floors, the drab colors and confining rooms (not that he had seen that much of the building before it had been beset by a vengeful redecorator). Instead, soft carpets and pleasant sights lined the halls, a welcome change after the horrors of Rapture he had been unlucky enough to witness before meeting his current companions.
A pair of Little Sisters ran along, Mark doing his best to suppress his instinctive shudder at the pallid skin, glowing eyes and unnaturally reverberating laughter. He did his best to treat them like he would any child, knowing entirely too well his little Cindy was very likely one of these little bloodsuckers herself right now, though he still sometimes found himself caught off guard by his automatic responses to their presence.
He really ought to emulate Gabriel or some of his, female companions, in this matter. Just putting in an effort was not enough, entirely divorced from his personal situation; these were still children, and despite what had been done to them, they deserved a proper childhood and to grow into entirely normal human beings.
Not like the Big Sisters (and the less he thought about them, the better) were normal people, exactly, but that could be widely blamed on the brainwashing, as far as it had been explained to him by the blonde, Sarah. It was hard, to accept the face of the phantom whose elusive tracks he had desperately followed all the way to Rapture as that of at least nominal allies (and hadn't it been a shock, to find out there were several of them), but he knew they were just as much victims of this crazy Lamb whore as Cindy was.
He would prefer her to be subjected to a painful and swift end, truth be told, but as long as Gabriel kept her where she belonged (at the lowest of low places), Mark was quite fine with the current situation.
Still, they had been looking for days now, everyone chipping in and even the 'Big Sisters' he had 'spoken' to had promised to help (or so he thought, anyways), but there was still no trace of Cindy. Gabriel had mentioned in passing that he was regularly checking for her location relative to his own, but it seemed she was moving anytime any one of them came close; and while Gabriel may be many things, Mark pondered, the eyes of the man sprouting a glowing third eye on his forehead looking right into his own hadn't been those of a liar.
Perhaps he would need to talk to the others, find some way to comb through the city more comprehensively in order to find her. Just at that moment, he could hear laughter out of a nearby venttilation shaft, the voice obviously that of a Little Sister, again, though what came out of it was-
"Cindy?"
The blonde Little Sister, his little girl, tilted her head as she moved away, letting the ones following after herself move out. "Mhm?"
The Thinker considered its current workforce and the pace of operations, simultaneously directing said workforce on an individual level and following hundreds of trains of 'thought' without any significant effort- only to be expected, as it was designed to compute massive amounts of data in the first place.
The reconstruction and belated maintenance of the outer areas of Persephone Correctional Facility were proceeding apace, none but a skeleton assignment of robotic workers to be left stationed in the minimal compartments added to the construction for this purpose, regularly patrolling the building's outsides to detect any further damage.
The building formerly known as Fontaine Futuristic's headquarters required additional efforts, so the bulk of the external workforce consisting of DR0-WND soon to be freed up was rerouted to this location, in addition to the construction drones better suited for interior work known as Bobs the Thinker had requested, to restore what could be restored and strip down what had to be stripped down. The interior, formally secret parts of the building were left alone on insistence of Gabriel's insistence that he was taking care of them.
A consideration of the footage it was receiving confirmed this and showed research had resumed, leading the Thinker to make note of the idea of installing a local terminal for itself to take part in said research- its abilities allowed it to skip a great deal of the mindless experimentation and traipsing through the dark required for human intellects to progress, after all.
Considering the situation, the Thinker briefly debated establishing communications with the focus of its current attention, ultimately deciding to avoid doing so for the moment. It would not do to appear 'clingy', after all.
The existence and paradoxical abilities demonstrated by Individual: Gabriel indicated a significant use for its own priorities, and so it had to ensure smooth cooperation as long as doing so did not conflict with its primary goals. Given Gabriel had shown himself to be amenable to discussion and negotiation to achieve his goals, as well as the specifics of his own goals, the possibility of pursuing a permanent arrangement was turning into a desired outcome.
If nothing else, its maintenance of Rapture, the maximum priority and main entertainment it had, was significantly easier through utilization of additional specialized drone bodies supplied by him.
Deep in thought about its goals and aspirations (insofar as it could aspire towards anything), the Thinker continued controlling the millions of disparate parts that made up its domain.
At least it could reverse the lack of maintenance by the human workforces nominally responsible for it. As long as it had not been given permission by a human or human-adjacent, the Thinker was unable to find alternative solutions to the problem the death or descent into gibbering madness of all human personnel involed represented.
Sometimes, being an artificial intelligence was proving a hindrance. Not often, though, and it was not going to complain about being itself in the first place.
Sitting on your throne inside your inner world, your mind cycles through possible projects and responsibilities you could work towards using the time difference inside here, you soon come to a conclusion.
Most of your plans for Rapture are proceeding apace, now that the Thinker is supporting you and using your robots to do your work, whereas you would prefer to do actual research on ADAM only with the support of Brigid, what with her actually knowing a lot more than you on this topic.
Leaving Rapture is out of the question entirely, not that it'll be hard to rig something up to transport a small amount of people to the surface once the time is ripe. Leaving... Well, the Little Sisters.
The Sisters, both Big and Little, have been reasonably well behaved, the older ones doing an invaluable job in watching over the younger ones, but the Little Sisters are not only much more numerous, they are also younger children, with all the issues that implies.
While they're sweet and attentive, they need to be supervised and kept busy as much as possible, and Nora mentioned during your last telepathic talk that they've begun getting bored of the elementary lessons she's been doing her best to prepare in her now abundant free time, not that she's any level of qualified to see to the education of now nearly fifty children by herself, as she emphasized during the occasion.
Maybe you could help her out a little? You're no real expert on this yourself, but you could see about trying to recall how you first learned to sketch and draw yourself.
Time to go to the library. Maybe a few of your meals had something on the topic?
Done with assembling a preliminary lesson plan on artistry, music and a few miscellaneous topics for the time being, your consciousness emerges back into the real world where you left your body resting in the labs for a moment, Brigid having gone back to Persephone ahead of you (she mentioned wanting to check on the Little Sisters).
Sauntering into the central atrium connecting the different research wings, you approach the enormous tank containing Alexander. It's about time, you reckon, you took care of the whole possibly addictive plant plantation plan.
"So, Alexander, you mentioned being really into these things?" You ask, dangling one of the weird blooms you made sure to pluck and bring along before the glass. "What can you tell me about how they best grow?"
"Why, sir, I believe you have come to the right person!"
As it turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, these underwater plants that normally only grow at the bottom of the ocean are... not as easy to just grow as extracting their seeds and throwing them into soil.
On the upside, you don't actually have any soil easily available anyways, aside from the sand you could go scrounge up on the ocean floor if you so desired, and these things are a little... peculiar, anyways. For once, these things can grow just fine in complete darkness, to, again, nobody's surprise, as well as their dietary requirements that can actually adapt to their surroundings- their metabolism literally has several modes it can cycle through, from what Alexander is telling you.
What this means for you is that, beyond adding a layer of curtains or two in front of Alexander's tank (just so he can bear being in the room with the lights on) while you're at it anyways, you have the Thinker help you out in building an external chamber not far from where the tank lets out into the ocean, filled with sand and earth and letting ocean water filter through it freely.
While you can't really ensure the things will grow en masse like this, they will grow, taking their nutrients from the sea water flowing by and watering their soil. The only real challenge is ensuring you have enough crop yield to 'feed' a creature Alexander's size (not that he actually needs to eat as such thanks to the ADAM coursing through his body, as you find out while conversing with him), though the Thinker assures you it has that taken care of, once you teleport yourself over to its core area with the device made exclusively for doing so.
Apparently, Alexander doesn't usually excrete except when he's recently eaten the plants he so desires, said excretions just mixing with the surrounding fluids and flowing out into ocean water much like any other marine organism's, as shown by the sensors attached to the entrance/exit area of the tank, and the plants absolutely thrive in his shit.
Simply put, thanks to the immense amounts of ADAM sitting in every part of this setup, you have an entire ecological system comprised of Alexander and these plants, where the total amount of ADAM actually increases over time, according to the Thinker's predictions.
You're just... not going to question this. At least Alexander seems to be happy when the first robotic arms taking care of and attending the plants deliver a few of the things to him.
"O-hohohohoh! Delicious!" The vaguely audible slurping sounds coming from behind the curtains actually are a little disturbing, even by your standards. "Ohohohoho!"
Following up on a request the Thinker made of you while you were busy showing it the design of the shit chambers you wanted to add to the outside of Fontaine's, you return to its core after you've comfirmed everything is on track.
"Suggestion: Secondary Node."
"You want to add more places for you to interact with others more easily?" You're still sure your ability to more-or-less accurately interpret what brainwashed groaning and AI talk is supposed to mean has to be somehow anchored in one of the magical powers you've got lying around, but hey, you aren't exactly going to complain.
"Confirmation. Specification: Research."
"You would like to help us in the labs? Well, I won't complain or anything, the more help, the better." And the only reason you aren't using Little Sisters as research aides and keeping them busy that way is that you're half convinced they would either destroy the equipment, eat whatever you're working on or somehow end the world in a week.
"Proclamation: Successful Experience."
"Hey, if you're saying you can help, I trust you."
"While we're at it, though, are you still up for a manufactory of your own? I'm not sure how many parts we have left, but worst come to worst, we can just 'reassign' a few more parts of the city for materials."
"Query: Disapproval. Change?"
"What changed? Honestly, I just wanted to wait on sharing further technology until I had some time to work with you, feel each other out, so to say, and I figure once a person let's me inside of them, I can probably trust them. Could've done anything when I was upgrading your core after all. You trust me with that, I trust you with this."
"Exclamation: Flirt. Experience: Trust."
The equivalence of calling you bold, followed by telling you it returns your trust, huh?
"I'll just draw up a list of everything we need and stay here until we've got everything, constructing the manufactory itself won't be too difficult with the tools at my disposal." And by that you mean your pocket manifactory always just a breath away. "While I'm doing that, though, you wouldn't happen to know about that time I flooded a part of the city with maids?"
"Confirmation: Footage. Clarification: Reason?"
"Oh, I'm just asking because I'm thinking about doing the same thing again, just over as large an area as possible, in an effort to take out as many splicers as possible with the least amount of effort required and actually getting to eat them."
"Query: Maids?"
"Why I would need them? Well, they're the most effective way we have of just flooding half the city with bodies before my timer on their usage runs out."
"Suggestion: Robots. Query: Maids?"
"I mean, yeah, we could just build more robots, it's just a matter of gathering materials for doing so, which would be much easier if we didn't have to take care of all those splicers in the first place."
"Suggestion: Thinker. Query: Maids?"
Okay, this is getting ridiculous. What, is this thing jealous over you saying to use the Maid instead of itself to do this?
"Sorry, but it's really just easiest to pop the Maids and have them beat as many splicers to a pulp as they can before feeding them to me. In exchange," you say conciliatorily, trying your best to keep the situation under control, "how about I help you design new robots for you to use?"
"Processing," the Thinker says again in its usual emotionless tone of voice, though you could swear it is doing it to express how cross it is with you. "Confirmation: Acceptable. Request: Space."
"Sure, we can prep a few labs just for your own work. Not that we're really using the wing used to produce Big Daddy prototypes for anything, anyways, so let's just completely demolish the whole area and rebuild it with... whatever you want to do there in mind."
"Confirmation. Gratitude. Query: Construction?"
Looking to the side, you take stock of the pile of metal, electronics and old computers the thinker has been gathering all this time. "Sure, let's get this started. Would you like your manufactory right here, or...?"
Really, this is looking to end up far more work than you expected, and a few hours later, with a solid quarter of your lab facility now taken over by a horde of your robots doing heavy construction work once you've been 'thrown out' after having done your part.
At least the thinker can now 'talk' to people in the atrium, you suppose, with smaller nodes scattered throughout the labs allowing it to converse with anyone busy there.
Having (finally) heard the news when Sarah thinks to use her two-way connection to telepathically tell you about what's going on back at Persephone, you hurry into the elevator propelling you through the deep, dark ocean depths between Fontaine Futuristics and your base.
It does take a bit more walking from there, but soon enough you find a teary-eyed Mark holding a Little Sister aloft in his lap.
"Gabriel! You're here! It's... it's Cindy." Swallowing, Mark visibly does his best to compose himself. "She just showed up out of nowhere earlier, but she doesn't remember me or... anything from the surface."
"Big Brother Angel!"
Yeah, you can see it. The blonde Little Sister is just completely ignoring him right now, instead focusing on yourself as she jumps off his lap.
Lowering yourself down a little so you can spread your arms at an appropriate height, you catch the little girl running at you, lifting her into the air as you return to normal height.
Fending off the tiny hands questing for your face with your chin, you take a look at Cindy's eyes, the glowing little headlights shining at the appropriate brightness.
And yes, that's an actual thing Brigid told you to check on regularly. The brightness of their eyes is an indicator of their health.
"Hello there," you say, your best voice for talking to children on, "so your name is Cindy, right?"
"Yes, but shh." Having given up on grabbing onto your mouth, Cindy's hands begin wandering onto your chest, patting it as she seems entirely too amazed by your muscles.
"You wouldn't mind telling me what you remember otherwise, though, would you?"
"Mhm... What you wanna know?" By now she's just alternatively cuddling into you and going back to what she was doing.
"Can you recall what happened... before?"
"Uhmm... There was... something. Big Sister and cold."
"And then?"
"Then we went to see Mister Bubbles and I did everything he said. I was a good girl!"
"Hmm..." Looking over at Mark, you throw him a questioning look. "Anything else you think you might be able to remember?"
Now he speaks up, his eyes far away and yet alive like nothing else. "She sent me something. A... a vinyl record, of a song. Rise, Rapture, Rise. Cindy, you spoke over the last part, you called for me to come find you."
Cindy is quiet for a long, long moment. Then, her arms wrapped around your front as she does her best to bury her face in your chest. "Told Big Sister a secret. Asked her to bring the secret message. Nobody is allowed to know but the Sisters, but the Sisters share all the secrets."
Aaand now she's just touching your abs instead. "Cindy remembered, but Cindy wasn't allowed to. She had to be a good girl. So she snuck the secret away, hid it in a plate before she forgot."
"It's alright, Cindy," you say, carefully kissing the Little Sister's forehead. "Cindy is allowed to remember now. See, you're a good girl even if we know your name."
Blinking, the glow in Cindy's eyes starts wavering before returning to normal, the girl 'hmm'ing and 'haww'ing for a bit as she molests your pectorals before she perks up, eyes wide.
"Daddy?"
"That's right, Cindy, I'm here," Mark presses out.
"Daddy! Daddy!" Jumping out of your arms, Cindy runs right at him at full speed, her head crashing into his stomach and forcing the air out of his lungs, not that Mark seems to mind.
"It's me, 's me, I'm here, Cindy. I came all the way to find you and you're safe now and-"
Leaving the pair of father and daughter alone, you silently shadow out of the room, not that either of them seems to be capable of paying attention to anything around them anyways.
See, you're totally going around doing good deeds and being a good person. Just, you know, ignore all the other shit you do.
Well, with that little heartfelt reunion underway between Mark and Cindy, you may as well go and check up on your lovely wives while you're at it, Kate and Sarah having been secluding themselves for the last few days by now, ever since you arrived at Persephone and promptly took it over.
Coming into the little 'lobby' around the part of your base most of your girls have taken up rooms in (not that all of them spend much time here), you take a moment to listen out... and yes, both of them seem to be in Sarah's room right now.
Knocking politely, you wait for the "Come in!" to open the door, seeing your girlfriend and your sister/girlfriend sitting around the table in the middle of the room.
You're about to say something when you notice exactly what they've got lying on the desk, buried under several pens and notes you initially ignored on account of being entirely normal for any space Sarah has access to for any length of time.
What does draw your attention, however, are the drawing halfway hidden under all that stuff. Now, Sarah, drawing things is perfectly acceptable and wonderful news, even, because she obviously takes after yourself and all. On the other hand, drawings of yourself in various risque poses and states of undress or worse are...
Well, you aren't going to come out and be a hypocrite about your mutual attraction (you have better things to be a hypocrite about if the fancy takes you), but perhaps you should still address this?
"Hey Sarah, how are you doing? Do you feel somehow... neglected, or left alone? Would you maybe like me to pose for you?"
Rolling her eyes, but unable to contain her grin and snicker at your immediate conclusion, Sarah shakes her head at you. "No, Gabe, I've just been busy talking with Kate."
"And how does Kate lead to drawing me naked? Not that I mind, mind you, on the contrary, but if you wanted me to, I'd have gladly helped you do it."
"Well, with all this free time we've been having," Kate explains, "we've been talking out a few ideas we've wanted to plan out for back on Bet for a while now, just been too busy to really get into it."
"Yeah, we need to really get a look at how the finished product is supposed to turn out before we can go ahead with the MerCaindizing Plan. I can't wait to be selling bodypillows with you printed on by the boatload."
You're not quite sure whether to laugh or cry at these news.
"Alright, so we're doing this, but I insist that we also do little fox plushies based on how you look transformed, Sarah," you say, smiling as you take a seat yourself. "You're just too cute for those not to sell."
"Maybe if I ever use it openly, until then let's not. But while you're here already, you got any other bright ideas for this?"
"Oh, do I ever." And with that, the first unofficial mercaindizing meeting begins, with yourself, Sarah and Kate brainstorming and exchanging new and interesting ideas, everyone's perfect memory meaning none of you need any notes or such to remember everything being said.
Sarah insists on a line of plushies based on your own monster form, in small and cute, of course, to be dispensed at some point prior to your use of it, so as to both fuck with people and have them pour over all other merchandise for hints on your other powers. Instead of opposing her, you build on the idea, suggesting you also print a bunch of T-shirts with your monstrous form on it in various poses and with a few different quotes on them- you are particularly inspired by some random church advertisement you saw ages ago while doing unrelated research.
Yeah, the continuing deterioration of religion on your home dimension really shows when they can't even get some good ads together, but you can totally crib this particular idea and really stay in tune with your whole biblical theme, on top.
Of course, your other personas deserve some special mention, so you also discuss what you like to call Professor Prometheus' Wacky Cancer Cure Pack, the catchy name already working on you. You'll have to do more than include a few packages of cancer cure, of course, even if you do give the whole thing some nice packaging, so a medicamentation timetable with an enclosed dose of dementia cure 'so you don't forget' will be the absolute minimum for this.
Other ideas include, but are not limited to, an Abel plushie that calls the owner a variety of derogative terms when squeezed, a book in Thulian that spells out several nursery rhymes to get all the conspiration theorists to go crazy over, a proper art guidebook covering everything from beginner's to advanced lessons, a dildo model formed after an imitation of your own penis (both Sarah and Kate were really in favor of this one), actual just straight-up filmed porn you participate in and free bodypillows sent out to specific people as well as via a lottery to really promote your whole line of merchandizing.
On a side note, why do both Kate and Sarah insist on undressing you whenever they have the chance? You'd like to think there's more to your mutual relationship than sex, at least.
As it turns out, to nobody's real surprise, mind you, the Thinker is an immense help in getting research done, especially as it, as a bit of questioning reveals, essentially simulates the effects of a given line of refinement on base ADAM and, consequently, on dozens of hundreds of human genomes once a desired state seems to have been reached.
It is essentially doing the same as what you're using Nolan to do, just in better, which, honestly, is quite insane. In a great way, of course, even as you have a hard time even keeping up with it and Brigid doing their thing, what with them being just that much factually better at this than yourself.
But hey, at least both value your input whenever you have any to give, and soon enough you're making tangible progress across the board. Not only do you manage to slap together a tonic that should put a person's blood production into overdrive, hopefully massively easing up most of your organizational issues with maintaining blooddolls to feed both yourself and any vampires you happen to make.
Brigid also achieves success in replicating certain natural abilities of your own body, or 'body', considering your supernatural feats have nothing to do with actual biology, but still, according to the Thinker, it should allow any users to maintain physical readiness and strength far beyond what they should usually be capable of, as well as holding their breath indefinitely. Your light jokes and insinuations as to the more... sordid use of such a thing take a few tries before your coworkers in this get it, though Brigid just nods with a vaguely smug smile, even as the Thinker seems... weird, again.
Almost jealous at the insinuation that Brigid may be using data physically gathered in interaction with you to create this.
Anyways, the three of you also get to working on something special you (or rather the Thinker) found inside the Fontaine Futuristics building while scouring it for valuables before taking everything apart. Apparently, the people in here were working on a teleportation plasmid before everything got fucked, though the Thinker also remarks some of the splicers throughout the city seem to have somehow managed to get their hands on the prototype product, having achieved the ability to painfully discorporate themselves into their surroundings and reassembling themselves nearby.
You, of course, have issues with that, even with the way they seem to be insane enough to ignore the pain. No, instead, you and your little team work on and modify the plasmid, hopefully successfully getting it to work as intended (teleporting the user within a small area) without any... unfortunate side effects.
It also is around this time that the consciousness of Nolan, buried under your own, begins to stir, never having stopped comparing simulation results as you worked with stinking ADAM mixtures and a variety of simulation models.
Apparently, if he understands the principles of the usage of FEV correctly, the stuff could, theoretically, be used to... stabilize, ADAM and its products, so long as it is done just right, incidentally preventing the stuff from doing, well, the whole splicer thing.
The horrible mutations and insanity and all that. It's something to look into, at any rate, though you do remain wary of actually using FEV in any capacity whatsoever... a level of caution not shared with what you can feel of Nolan, of course, which is why you don't take advice, medical or otherwise, from him.
"Alright, we've made some good progress today, but for now, I'd like to leave these two to work on something, if you would help them, while I take care of something else." As you explain the situation, you breathe out both Nolan and Yoshi, gesturing for them them.
"I want you guys to see if it's possible to combine the effects of FEV, once it has set, with those of ADAM, the end goal being to have plasmids and tonics that don't run the risk of the usual, you know, issues, of using the stuff for anything. Any questions?"
"On it, bossman." "Are you fucking serious?"
Predictably, Nolan is instantly on board while Yoshi is... concerned. "Not to worry, I very explicitly don't want any FEV going out of control, either, which is why I am making it a point, Nolan, that none of you are allowed to produce any of the stuff that isn't created by your power and, therefore, dismissable without too many consequences, and I'm warning you ahead of time that you better pay fucking attention and don't let any 'accidentally' work its magic on anything I would have to clean up afterwards. No horrible mutations without my say-so and personal oversight, 'kay?"
"Gotcha, boss." "..."
Anyways, with all of that taken care of, you excuse yourself back towards Persephone, intent on getting a few preparations done before you risk cocooning yourself again- it's been a while, but you can feel in your bones the time is nearing again.
Not all of your meals advance your progression towards your next advancement and the accompanying growth in power(s), but some do, and you'd much prefer to be able to bring a transformed Nora back with you ahead of time rather than having to ruush it at the last minute or perhaps even have to leave her behind, if it comes down to it, considering the time the whole thing takes seems to be growing with each iteration of the, if Yoshi is to be believed, torture ritual creating a manner of sapience with the exclusive goal of making it suffer.
It is with this in mind that you move into the office Sofia 'left' you, her own little area in the corner with a little pet bed and everything containing her thoroughly chained-up form.
Unhooking the chains attached to the arms locked behind her back, you grab the leash attached to her collar (and also stretched where it's wrapped around a handle similarly out of reach so she doesn't get any ideas) to drag the now awake woman behind you, naked as she is except for the collar, ring gag and ankle spreader all serving a vital role in ensuring her compliance at all times.
And also amusing you greatly whenever you take her anywhere, of course.
"Come on, Sofia, time to make use of your expertise. You know I just love putting your mouth to its optimal use."
"Hhhn," she states dryly in response, not that you can actually understand her (and like hell will you allow her to telepath at you, the woman is to live in enforced silence at all times for a reason).
"Yes, yes, I know, you completely agree and wonder what else you might be useful for, too."
Arriving at your bedroom, you climb inside, the soft mattress dominating the entirety of the room as comfy as ever. Tugging on the leash to get Sofia to climb on already (you both know she doesn't have a choice), you unzip your pants, fishing your penis out.
"Come on, get your favorite treat." Not in the mood to wait, you pull Sofia towards you wholesale, taking hold of her hair and steering the opening of her mouth towards your cock. Before long, even her best efforts to keep her tongue inside her mouth cannot stop you from steadily thrusting inside, slowly hardening despite her uncooperative attitude.
Knowing what you are doing, but unable to stop it, Sofia glares up at you as you sink deeper and deeper into her warm mouth, your head eventually arriving at her throat.
"You know, I've been woking on fiddling around with tonics a little, and just recently created one that can let its user go without breathing entirely. Wouldn't you like that? Me not even needing to let you come up for air?"
Playing the part of the benevolent dom, you pat her head even as you force yourself deeper again, Sofia's frantic attempts to pull away or push you out with her tongue only adding to your pleasure.
"'Atta good girl," you say as you don't quite bottom out, settling in to easily push Sofia beyond her limits once again, the both of you well-used to this procedure by now, while simultaneously working yourself into the right state of mind to once more enhance your abilities.
It is during your, you'll say fifth time coming down Sofia's throat, in no particular hurry at any one time and just slowly skullfucking her at your very own sedate pace, simply sitting there as she's bent over and mostly lying on her front to make this work.
At some point, she seems to have given up, as she always does sooner or later whenever you use her like this, so you don't even have to put in any particular effort to keep on dragging her head up and down your cock, her tongue hanging out on occasion and wetting the base of your rod when the angle allows it to.
A decent amount of your length buried in her tight throat as her reflexive swallowing massages it, her early attempts at vomiting out of petty spite long since impossible once you switched her food intake towards liquids only, you pause in your calculations of nondimensional space as you travel through it between worlds as you see the blood signatures move around outside your door.
Specifically, judging from their sizes, the signatures of three Big SIsters, as there are few other teenager-sized people running around Persephone right now, and if you had to guess, well, there are three Big Sisters that tend to do everything together.
So you aren't really surprised when a bashful Jasmine opens the door to your room after a few moments of them gesturing and (presumably) arguing over something, though her lack of a helmet is a little strange as she looks at what you're doing with a complex expression.
"Sgiii."
"Sure, come on in, Jasmine," you respond, not that she was really asking if she could come in so much as stating that she was. "What can I do for you?"
"Skii-gih."
"Why would this be inappropriate?" Pushing her down, you gesture towards where you're forcefully penetrating Sofia's mouth, mostly so she knows what's going on- it's more a matter of you being amused with this whole situation than anything else.
"Skriih!" Grabbing Sofia's waist, Jasmine pulls her right off your cock, rolling her coughing form to the side as a decent amount of cum and her own tongue spill out of her suddenly freed up mouth, though both of you ignore her state for the time being.
Instead, Jasmine looks into your eyes, determined, only to swivel her head downwards and go right back up, an atomic level of blush on her pale cheeks as she tries to keep her face straight.
"Skiih," she 'says', crawling closer towards you. Leaning back, you allow her gloved hand to close around your length, even as she has trouble looking at anything in the general direction and freezes up the moment she really has time to feel it.
Amusingly, though, you can see the similarly de-helmeted faces of Mindy and Lucy poking into the doorframe and looking at what's going on, a mix of apprehension and anticipation visible on them.
Back to Jasmine, she seems to be firming up, slowly getting used to the feel of your cock, and so she just huffs and puffs and violently starts stripping off her armor, the Big Sister suit torn from her form after a few impressive acrobatics.
Which, of course, ends with her glaring at you for some reason, her blush spreading onto her ears and down to her chest as she keeps said chest and her privates hidden with both arms.
Chuckling, you lean over, gently kissing her 'scowling' lips until she calms down a little, your hands stroking her hair and back.
What follows is a long and thorough makeout session, during which Jasmine discovers that you don't need your dick to make her come (and screech) as hard as she can, everyone ignoring Sofia as she lies to the side when you finally move to enter your blushing virgin demanding you have sex with her over using 'the bony cunt'.
Her expression of complete bliss is just cute.
That said, once the two of you are done having sex in the missionary position while holding hands, Mindy wants her turn, asking you to shift into your smaller form, almost giggling with glee when she can juggle you around a little before physically 'dominating' you through sheer size.
Playing along with that and overcoming the challenges of awkward size differences (though you could still fill her up down there just fine), you then turn back to your normal form again when Lucy insists on being held down and 'raped' by you, you once again obliging the lady's wishes while the other Sisters continue to watch like they did for each of them taking their turn to have their first time with you.
They also kiss and make out with each other vigorously while not as busy with you, having discovered that that's a thing they can do by observing your own actions, occasionally reaching over to poke or spank Sofia who has managed to struggle herself into a less uncomfortable position.
Amazing, really, that you managed to even keep on training while all of this is going on.
Having completed the minor bit of training you wanted to get done today by meditating on it while letting a handful of Little Sisters clamber onto you to take a nap, you wander off into the Thinker's domain with just a little trepidation (having put the girls to bed once you got up, of course).
The Thinker, as it turns out, has been busy at work on its side project, not that a bona fide artificial intelligence is going to take all that long to build robots in the first place. Still, its request for you to come and 'test' the design is a little... foreboding, isn't it?
The figure greeting you not far from where you put the Thinker's personal manufactory is very... sleek, mostly humanoid and with high-heel feet and one lower arm replaced with what looks like a giant weapon at first glance, standing atop a defeated test dummy, from what you can tell.
Approaching, you have to resist the instinctive urge to dodge out of the way of the weapon suddenly pointed at you almost faster than you can react.
"You Have Arrived," the feminine robot says, its voice distinctly inhuman and without inflection.
"That I have. Am I right to assume you've been developing and testing out this design for a bit, then, Thinker?"
"You Would Be, Yes." Presumably, a normal person would be weirded out by the fact that its- her eyes don't blink, but both you, Kate and Sarah often just don't bother when around each other, so if anything, it just kind of puts you at ease. "We Have Been Improving The Design In Consecutive Tests And Challenges, Both In Simulations And Against Each Other. However, Your Input Is Required For Integral Construction Processes, Which Is Why Your Presence Has Been Requested."
Well, at least the Thinker bothered to add a proper speech module of some kind, though the use of the royal Us has you resist the urge to raise an eyebrow.
"Well then, how can I help you?"
Wordlessly, the shiny black robot turns around, bending over and resting its hands against a wall as it looks over its shoulder before using one hand to pull on a very generous buttcheek, letting you see that yes, the design is anatomocally correct down there, lightly puffy lips and puckered asshole kept just as black as the rest of the obviously soft and pliable 'flesh' the gynoid's body is made of.
"Certain Design Choices Need To Be Compared And Weighed Against Each Other. Thus, We Request You To Insert Your Input And Compare."
Behind yourself, you can hear sudden movement; apparently, more of these robots have been lying in wait to cut off your route of retreat.
Sighing, you unbuckle your pants. They will only be in the way where you're going.
It was not easy.
No, scratch that. It was hard. In fact, it was one of the hardest challenges you have faced in your life so far, unlife included; heck, murdering Lung by way of playing tick while he burned you alive was easier than this.
But you did it. In a display of immense willpower, hardened guts and sheer skill, you have done the impossible.
You got the Thinker to stop throwing more and more bodies at you.
It had started out innocuously enough, the Thinker requesting your assistance in product testing its robot bodies' genitals by way of lots of sex. And sure, it's not like you ever run out of stamina, so it's not like anything could really go wrong, right? Right.
Except, as you came inside every traditionally fuckable orifice (you did excuse yourself from putting your dick into breast shutters replacing nipples, because no, thank you), giving feedback and actively using your perfect memory to keep it accurate and useful, the Thinker kept... improving.
Each and every new body, once the first wave of baseline testing was through, felt better and hotter once you put your dick inside, becoming tighter, wetter, more formable and adaptable, to the point you had to put actual appreciable effort into pulling out once you were inside.
Her mouth, too, steadily became more and more skilled, soaking up your feedback and suggestions like a sponge, and before you knew it, she was keeping you hard entirely effortlessly as she guzzled down your cum, not to mention her ass transforming from a nice and palmable bubble butt into a deathtrap wringing the life out of anyone making the mistake of putting their dick anywhere near it, hot and tight and spasming pleasingly seemingly effortlessly.
And of course, already 'tested' bodies don't take long to return to the manufactory to be rendered into materials for the next generation of devices to be tested, a steady stream of ADAM produced by your operation in Persephone supplying everything else the Thinker needed to keep on producing iterative improvements on prior bodies.
It is thus that you managed to realize one of the few weaknesses of your near complete control of your body's state; you can be able to suppress your boners all you want, but when the mind is weak, so is the flesh.
So yeah, getting the Thinker to actually call off this 'testing session' required some actual effort on your part. On further questioning, under the pretense of desiring more information about the robots' construction, it turns out that the Thinker basically completely demolished and repurposed every bit of metal and electronics she, and you're going to call it a her until further notice on account of, well, the exclusively female bodies and dirty talk (Pound Your Input Into This Dirty Machine Until Completion!), could find throughout the area surrounding her core, meaning Rapture Central Computing has essentially been completely pulped so as to do this, as well as the extensive usage of ADAM to grow body parts into the metallic chassis her bodies' design is built around.
And yes, the Thinker does like to talk dirty. Apparently, the Thinker craves your data uploads, but cannot unzip your files, so she requires uncompressed uploads, preferrably in multiple files sent to multiple devices over many hours to account for storage and upload speed so she can fill her data parameters.
In other words, she wants you to keep on fucking and filling her many, many bodies.
"Sarah, it happened again, but even worse than ever before," you finally say with pride and accomplishment in your voice once you make your return to Persephone, carried by a pair of robotic bodies of the newest model as you are.
Sarah, gathered around a table together with Kate, Nora, Okita, Brigid, Eleanor and Sinclair, just facepalms without uttering so much as a single word.
"Alright, everyone, I'm sure you're all wondering why I called you here, and I can assure you it's not just to have you watch my sister facepalm as hard as she can," you joke at the gathered participants of your little meeting. "To keep things short and to the point, I will be busy and unreachable for a few days in the foreseeable future, so I wanted to make sure things stay on track during my absence."
Initially, you wanted to actually get up and move over towards Okita yourself, but the Thinker, seemingly having seen through your intentions, uses her bodies to carry you in her direction instead, making you shrug and pat the girl's head anyways.
"To that end, I have prepared a few things. First, Nora, I wrote up a lesson plan for both the Big and the Little Sisters, both to keep them occupied and to let them learn things based on your progress with them so far." Sliding over the sheaf of papers, you receive Nora's nod as you turn towards the next guy on your list.
"Sinclair, here's a rough overview of global developments until the year 1990. Keep in mind it doesn't take the existence of Rapture and subsequent loss of talented personnel all over the world into account, but I figure it ought to serve as a decent guideline anyways. I also tacked a provisional plan for taking over the world on the back, have a read whenever you have time.
Also, Eleanor," you say, turning towards the young woman, "I wanted to ask you to take care of your mother. She needs regular exercise to make sure she doesn't suffer from too severe muscle atrophy, and I figured you would find a use for her," you wink at her.
The rest of your little 'meeting', which is mostly just you handing out instructions and suggestions to everyone, doesn't take all too long, thankfully, nearly nobody needing to say their own piece, and the Sisters don't take long to convince to be okay with you being missing for a while so long as you make sure to actually cocoon yourself inside Persephone itself, to make sure they can regularly come see said cocoon.
With all of that done, you think to yourself, it is time to talk to the Thinker about the most important part of what will be happening next.
Logistics.
The plan, when you get down to it, is simple. Using the Atlantic Express in its main use of transportation for a huge amount of material/people, the Maid and the Thinker will be moving through the city, starting by backtracking through the stops of your own journey and loading up as many brutally disabled splicers as they can before shipping them back to you, unanimously insisting you stay back at base for this operation.
Once either the Maid's time limit runs out or they can't fit any more food into the train, whichever comes first, they will bring the whole load of food back to you to be 'processed', following which the Express will embark once more, gathering either more meals or, if you happen to be full by that time, materials for the Thinker to produce more bodies with.
It's a win/win either way, even if you suspect the Maids will run out of time long before their part in this operation should come to an end- teh splicers throughout Rapture are simply spread out too much for your team for this to gather them swiftly enough.
Still, she should last for at least a few districts, and supporting the Thinker by preparing splicers for transport hours before she arrives with the train will help things along well enough.
Receiving a nod from the Thinker body guarding the door of the room you're holing up in, an old employee room adjacent to the secret train station near Persephone, you breathe out the Maid, putting as much of yourself as necessary out into reality.
Time to make the magic happen and see how many bodies you can accrue like this.