[BioLock]

When the footsteps retreat and I take the bag and gag off, I am exactly two steps from where I was before I was abducted, I have also had a little while to develop a plan. It requires a Little Sister. From what I’ve seen though, there aren’t a lot of them in the Medical Pavilion, so I head back to Emergency Access and, with some skilled hacking that it takes several tries to accomplish, hack open a bathysphere to Neptune’s Bounty.

“You made it!” Richard Brook exclaims, with hope shining so close to real in his voice. “My family is in a submarine in the foundation of Fontaine Fisheries, head to the control deck first so you can unlock this damned cage and let me to them.” The fact that I plan to do none of that makes it a little hard to hear him say “Thank you, Johnny-boy. Thank you so much.” but the fact that he has been mind-controlling me pushes me past that.

In front of me a corpse is strung to a pillar, totally bloodied, with a gruesome message reading ‘smuggler’ scrawled below. Past him is a series of vending machines, a Big Daddy corpse slumped to the ground, blood long washed away by the water leaking a steady stream from the ceiling. He has a bazooka, which I take. Seems useful.

The room is halfway collapsed, I have to crawl over a fallen wall to get past it, another of Rapture’s iconic automatic sliding doors leading to a glassy hallway. This particular hallway is flooded, with dense schools of fish crowding any view. An ironic, fallen sign tries to argue that things are fine-- that there’s been 91 days since the last accident, and only 2 accidents last year besides, but based on the decor I’d say that’s not up-to-date.

Through the other end of the hallway I see, or more accurately hear, exactly what I need: A Big Daddy’s thumping footsteps like a heartbeat on depressant drugs. He doesn’t notice me, and neither does the tyke on his heels. She giggles “I hear angels, Mr. B!” I pull out my newly acquired bazooka and load a grenade in before sneaking right up to the back of the Big Daddy. The grenade explodes right into his middle and I reload another before the lumbering giant can try and attack. He has barely lifted a rivet gun when I fire the other shot. He falls. She screams.

As quickly as I can I put a hand to her forehead. She doesn’t fight it, just sobs pitifully. The glow flashes and I set her down, where she wipes her tears and frowns meaningfully at the corpse I created before gently whispering “Thank you…” And she turns to skitter away.

“Wait! Please, wait!” The little girl stops, “I need your help.” Cautiously, she shuffles closer to me. Her blue eyes are suspicious, as they should be, and her thin face quivers at the sight of me-- and I must be a sight, I realize, covered in as much blood and dirt and gunpowder as I am. “I’m looking for a man, Sherlock Holmes.”

At this, her face lights up. “Oh! Papa! He lives at the other side of the vents. Do you know him, mister?” All previous shyness is gone, instead the little girl shakes her little brunette head of hair and waits for my answer.

With some confusion as to how to explain any of my situation, I relent to just saying “Yeah, he… um, he helped me before.”

Tiny hands clap excitedly. “Really!? I’ve never heard of Papa helping anyone . You must be a really good friend. Come on, he’s this way!” She accepts my help into a golden vent in the wall and waits for me to climb up after her. These things really were intended for little girls though, so I have to army crawl very uncomfortably, and much slower.

She rambles on and on about Papa, and how he always has a sour face unless her or one of her sisters is very clever, but the grey ones rarely are. She tells me that the grey ones don’t come back often, and they always walk around with Mr. B. When I ask her though, she seems to have no memory of having literally just been part of that denomination. Instead she changes the topic, saying that her sisters were going to be so happy to meet one of Papa’s friends.

This drags on almost endlessly. My elbows ache and my shoulder hitches when she finally heads toward a light at the end of the non-metaphorical tunnel.

She slides out easily and I follow much more clumsily after her.

There is no way to avoid falling practically headfirst from the vent. I hear the scrape of a chair and some childish giggles.

Sherlock Holmes comes to stand above me. “You--…  You’re the slave.” He seems genuinely surprised at this.

Rolling into a sit, I correct him. “Apparently my name is ‘Johnny-boy.’”

“Unacceptable.” He mutters. Drawing more giggles from behind him.

“What? It’s my name!” I finally stand back up, and see the giggles emanate from a litter of about fifteen to twenty young girls.

He scoffs. “No, it’s not. What about John? It makes you sound less puerile.”

And I don’t even really care, because it isn’t really my name, who cares what people call me. Except: “How do you know it’s not my name?” I demand suddenly, hand going for my wrench.

Sherlock waves me off and goes to sit at a microscope. “The same way I know that Richard Brook is Jim Moriarty and the same way I know that you are under the influence of severe mental conditioning.”

I’m unsure whether I should bother asking how he knows either of those things. “Papa is John your friend?” The girl who led me here asks Sherlock.

He doesn’t respond.

“Papa.” She sings. “Papa, papa, papa!” Now the other ones start laughing, trying to shush themselves with hands over their mouths, but with little effect. “Papa!”

“Sherlock!” I finally cry, because I’m not sure if he’s okay at that point and I still need to use him.

Immediately, he looks up from the microscope and I nod to the mess of giggling child at his knees. “Yes?”

“Nevermind.” She hums, before skipping away to her sisters.

A long-suffering sigh and he returns to his work.

“It’s almost finished.” Sherlock mumbles, I almost miss it.

“Hm?”

“Lot 192, a replication of it. It’ll release the mental conditioning. Dr. Stapleton created it initially, the paranoid bat, in case Moriarty ever tried to use you against her. I got one of the girls to grab me a sample and I’m reverse-engineering enough to fully undo your… condition.” He says all of this without looking up from his microscope, almost to himself. Nodding, even though he can’t see it, I wander a few feet away.

The area is very obviously not intended for anything more than a storage area, with one office where Sherlock works and outside of it being filled with hodge-podge furniture. Weathered metal bunk-beds with dirty mattresses and blankets. Teddy bears, blocks, and other toys that had seen better days. Chairs from restaurants, or wheelchairs. No tables. No dishes. Cans of food on the floor next to chalk drawings.

This is not how children should live.

“You arrived earlier than expected, there must have been a significant loss on Mycroft’s side.” Sherlock says into the microscope.

Looking back to the thin man in the office, I ask “What does that mean?”

Another deep sigh. “You came here to get yourself cured. You only knew you needed to be cured thanks to my brother, Mycroft. Mycroft wouldn’t have told you anything unless it was easier for him to do so than to wait for you to discover it on your own. Thus, Mycroft must have needed you out of Moriarty’s toolbox. So Moriarty must have a one-up on him. Therefore, there must have been a significant loss on Mycroft’s side of the bloody stupid civil war.”

“I didn’t know there was a civil war…” I murmured.

“What did you think was going on? A man with easy access to hacked turret-bots and surveillance couldn’t get through a gate so he could escape with his family in the one working submarine in the whole of this side of Rapture?” He scoffed at me. “Imbecile.” I almost want to rant at him, because let’s be honest that was about as rude as it gets, but he says. “Oh, don’t take it like that, almost everyone is.” And he scoots away from the microscope to another adjacent desk that is a mess of papers and bottles and petri dishes.

Then I step away and he looks up, face grimacing into confusion and slight disappointment. “Where are you going?” He demands, voice more peremptory than his face.

“Out.” I reply tersely. “I need some air.”

Then I walk brusquely out of his office, up the stairs near the ex-Little Sisters.