Jack Ryan (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
did_unkindly) wrote2014-03-28 11:59 pm
did_unkindly) wrote2014-03-28 11:59 pm
city of sin application
Work in progress!
Application
Player
↠ Name: Caz
↠ Age: 24
↠ Characters Played: n/a
Character
↠ Name: Jack Ryan/Wynand
↠ Canon: Bioshock
↠ Journal:did_unkindly
↠ Age: WELL. He’s chronologically four, physically about 24 (Bioshock takes place in 1960), and mentally 24-with-gaps. What I mean by that is expanded on under Personality. If this isn’t cool I’m willing to play him more mentally in line with a real 24 year old, we can chat about it or whatever.
↠ Appearance: A brick shithouse. Jack’s built for strength and endurance, with a tall frame, broad shoulders, and strong arms. His hair is short and dark. He’s got kind of a chubby face, with weathered skin, punipuni cheeks, and big baby cow eyes.
He's absolutely riddled with cut- and bullet-scars, and a few he hasn't healed yet as well. On his wrists are matching black chain link tattoos, because Fontaine has an asshole sense of humour.
↠ Reference/History: Here’s a wiki page all about it. The Biowiki has a bit of a problem with discussing theory as fact, but it's accurate in most important respects.
The short version? Bought as an embryo by some jerk called Fontaine. Speed-grown and mentally conditioned to be his biodad’s assassin. Given some cute fake memories so as not to provoke suspicion. Crashed a plane under mind control and went on to have a really bad day in an underwater city full of mutants. Assassinated his biodad. Found out via Fontaine’s gloating that he was a test tube babber, and not a nice young man from Kansas after all. Still pretty angry about that.
Boom, City of Sin.
A note: Bioshock is one of those fancy schmancy multiple-endings deals. This Jack is headed towards the bad end, meaning that as well as killing a lot of scary mutants, he's also engaged in a spot of infanticide. It was the drugs.
↠ Personality: Jack’s personality was designed in a lab to careful specifications. Think of these paragraphs as points on a checklist, ticked off as they're implanted into a little kid's head.
He doesn't give up easily. If you want someone who can brute force his way through a brick wall and come out the other side still running, Jack is your man. He's in a mid-Atlantic plane crash, finds himself trapped in a crumbling underwater city where everyone wants to kill him, and gains frankly terrifying superpowers, and he keeps going. Maybe not entirely stably, but he's still got his eyes on the prize.
He's blessed and cursed with the tendency to trust people and do what he's told. If you seem to know what the hell you're doing, you're all right in his book. He spent a long time following the instructions of a man on a radio, just because the man on the radio said he should; he took it on trust that this guy, Atlas, was telling the truth and would help him. Later he offered the same complete trust to Doctor Tenenbaum, even though he knew she'd spent most of his life treating him as a science experiment, and even when she gave him instructions like 'okay now go pull your own voicebox out through your throat and replace it with a whale noise thing'. As Fontaine put it, "kid, you won't even walk till somebody says 'go'."
And that's not even getting into the little problem of the mind control. Jack has a sort of quasi-Pavlovian post-hypnotic suggestion thing going on: in short, he'll do anything you tell him so long as the command includes the phrase 'would you kindly'. Just slip it in there and see how high he'll jump for you. He knows about the phrase, but all he can really do about it is get mad at you afterwards.
There are other trigger phrases in existence, but the only other one specified in canon is 'code yellow', which causes his heart to shut down. He doesn't know about the others, but he'd thank you not to use them.
Since he's only been growing for four years, little things like 'life experience' and 'post-toddler-level moral reasoning' had to be short-cutted into him via ADAM and mental conditioning. Some things were prioritised above others, and so there are a couple gaps. The biggest sign of this is that Jack has trouble really getting death. I mean, he understands that dead people stop moving and shouting and shooting at him, but the full implications and finality of death are another matter. Especially since about the eighth time he personally kicked the bucket and came back in a Vita-Chamber. Death starts to lose its horror when you see it everywhere around you, and keep coming back from it yourself.
Other signs include certain issues of socialisation, e.g. the fact that Jack seems to think it's perfectly okay to jam yourself with sketchy needles and eat cake bars you looted from corpses. It's practical?? Why are you looking at him like that???
He likes machines. He likes hacking machines, he likes fixing machines, he likes giving machines silly names and then hauling them off into battle as airborne support. And he’s pretty good at it too; Rapture runs on machinery, and he’d have to be getting through a lot of it, so it made sense for the scientists patterning his brain to give him an affinity for that sort of thing.
As befits his stints as an underwater mechanic, he just generally likes solving problems. This makes him a fairly helpful guy, even if he’s more suited to the ‘bash it until it gives in’ type of solution than anything terribly cerebral. He also gets a kick out of stuff like exploring, shooting, fetch questing, all those things you need to do to be a good FPS protagonist. He enjoys target practice even when the targets aren’t alive and running around.
Unfortunately he can often be a bully. Because when you give a four year old near-unlimited power and a playground full of stuff weaker than him to fight, that’s kind of what happens. For the people building him, empathy issues were a feature, not a bug.
One last thing: he has a bit of a problem with ADAM. Because ADAM is very, very addictive. He was made using the stuff, and the good end implies that he can still live a long and happy life without it, so unlike most splicers he seems to be in the clear re: horrible tumorous mutations and raving insanity. But there are also hints that he doesn’t get off completely unscathed. He’s accustomed to getting it in large frequent doses, and he’s not going to enjoy it if he has to suddenly stop.
↠ Powers: BOY OH BOY YOU'D BETTER SIT DOWN FOR THIS.
Note: I'm going to use this space to talk a bit about how ADAM and EVE work, because that's inextricably linked with his actual powers. But ADAM and EVE are just magic drugs and he doesn't necessarily have them at any given point. Extra note: ADAM, EVE, Plasmids, and Tonics are products for sale, and so I figure they might show up in the anything-and-everything shops in the Gardens? Extra special note: If you're not Jack Ryan, then using ADAM/plasmids/tonics (also known as 'splicing') is really bad for you. Just ask these satisfied customers! (Body horror / general creepinesss warning jsyk.)
Here's his Plasmid loadout (aka active superpowers):
- Electrobolt. Shoot lightning out of your hand! Zap people real good!
- Incinerate. Shoot fire out of your hand! Alternatively, cook dinner!
- Winter Blast. Shoot ice out of your hand! Make your whiskey on the rocks!
- Telekinesis. Shoot things out of your hand! And also make them come back!
- Insect Swarm. Shoot bees out of your hand! Yes! BEES! just dO IT YOU PIECE OF SHIT
He's also got a plasmid that allows him to rescue Little Sisters, but wowowowowow that's a whole other tangent that probably wouldn't be relevant unless we got a little sister character (and then obvs I wouldn't try rescuing her unless her player said they were up for it). He owns other plasmids too, but he needs a Gene Bank machine to equip them, and he probably left them behind in Rapture anyway. So I assume he'll be stuck with only these. ("only")
In order to use Plasmids, Jack needs a blue substance called EVE. It works as fuel; using plasmids burns EVE. ADAM is a red or green substance and doesn't give him EVE, though it does (messily) heal wounds a bit via cell-replacement nonsense.
He can replenish EVE via:
- drinking alcohol (small amounts)
- beating people to death with a blunt object (small amounts)
- smoking (small amounts)
- injecting EVE hypos (actually decent amounts)
Jack also has a bunch of Gene Tonics in his system, which are passive, and basically make him harder better faster stronger. They don't need EVE, they just hang out.
You may have noticed by now that Jack is very OP. So I'm thinking, for limitations, we could make his access to ADAM and EVE very scarce. Without EVE, he's got no plasmids. Without ADAM, he's a stressy baby and smokes too much, which isn't very depowering but is pretty funny for me.
Maybe ADAM and EVE make an appearance in the Everything Shops in the Gardens, but for a reeeeeally steep price. (I have no idea how finance works in this game, so I welcome you deciding what a steep price would be and how easy it'd actually be for him to get hold of the stuff.) If Jack usually has to rely on smoking and stuff for his EVE, he will definitely not be throwing fireballs around willy-nilly. And, I'll be honest, all things being equal, he'd rather spend his money on ADAM.
Superpower bonus round (YEAH WE'RE NOT DONE YET): Jack recovers from wounds a little when he eats food or drinks alcohol. He also takes like three bottles of vodka to get a bit drunk. This is all very entertaining, but if it's a bit Too Much on top of all his other abilities, I don't mind dropping it and saying the food and drink in the City is different. He can also gain health by by ripping out the organs of a spider splicer and eating them, so y'know, all the hundreds of spider splicers wandering around the City had better watch out or whatever.
This is probably a good place to note that Jack's canonically carrying around a lot of weapons, so give me a shout if you'd like him to arrive with fewer.
↠ Reason for Playing This Character:He is my husband He's got ALL SORTS of interesting mental ridiculousness going on. I'm not referring to the mind control, though that's fun too; I mean the fact that he was speed-grown and purpose-built and all the ways that translates into the man he's becoming. And okay, also the mind control, because making his life a misery is my national sport.
If someone finds out about Would You Kindly, I will laugh for approx 3000 years.
Since I'm taking him from right after the Big Reveal About His True Past, he's got a lot to think about, and in the game he doesn't really get time to before it's right back on the road to bloody revenge. But in CoS? There's nothing but time. So it'll be interesting to have him thrust into a new setting at the same time as his whole identity comes crashing down. He'll have to rebuild himself to a certain extent. There'll be a lot to work with.
On a related note, basically all the influences in his life so far have been terrible. TERRIBLE. We've got the amoral scientists, the jerkass conman, the awesome dictator libertarian... it's been a party of people giving him really bad life lessons. So I'm interested to see how he does in a more stable and positive environment, such as... well, pretty much anywhere is more positive than Rapture, but for our purposes I've heard of this really great city that has districts based off sins.
Also I'd love to do some good old fashioned wrasslin' and adventurin' with him, since his great loves in life are Fights, Food and F'Exploring. It's not all gotta be tough. Let's go shooting or join Fight Club or whatever it is a young man does for fun around these parts.
Bonus: He's very well suited to being a lackey, for obvious reasons, so I'm sure any resident supervillains might be happy to see him.
Regarding CoS specifically, I greatly Love the setting. And since it's kind of mature in its themes, it seems like a good place to play Jack, since his entire life is kind of messed up and dark and full of drugs and murder and nonsense like that. Also the 1:3 day ratio seems like a v good idea, since in the past, 1:1 games have ended up feeling kind of hectic to me.
↠ What is Your Character’s Sin?: Wrath. He is so mad. So mad. And 'eye for an eye' is kind of the only way he knows of to deal with his problems. He will rip his own throat out for a chance to kill Fontaine yo he doesn't give a shit.
Samples
↠ First Person: (This should be a sample of your character addressing a general network audience by speaking or, if that’s not possible, writing. Pantomime. Interpretive Dance. However it is that they’ll be communicating with the other residents of the City of Sin. This can be a link to a first-person sample or post that you wrote for this character from another game.)
↠ Third Person: Jack has fought a lot of Big Daddies by now. They’ve gone from terrifying monsters to appreciably challenging ones, but they’ve never stopped being monsters. He never thought he’d be turning himself into one.
But he also never thought he’d still be in Rapture right now. He thought he’d be striding out of here shoulder to shoulder with Atlas, as soon as Andrew Ryan was dead.
In just a few short hours, the game has changed completely.
Now, when he finds Atlas, Jack is going to tear his heart out.
His knuckles whiten on the huge iron helmet, and he lowers it over his head. It smells like rust and blood and rot. It’s scuffed from fights; it’s seen and caused a lot of death. It’s undeniably a part of Rapture. And, as it turns out, so is he.
The shortwave radio crackles. It’s Atlas’s frequency. But it’s Fontaine’s voice.
“You think turning yourself into one of those tin men is a two-way street?”
He doesn’t stop talking. Even though he can’t control Jack with a few words any more, he doesn’t stop talking. And his voice is like nails in Jack’s brain, reminding him all the time of what a rube he is. Where he comes from. How everything Atlas told him — even the way he told it — was a lie.
He grits his teeth. When he kills Fontaine, he’s going to start by cutting out his tongue.
The voicebox replacement machine isn’t much farther, and Jack clanks his way towards it, Fontaine’s drawl biting into his ears. Tenenbaum interrupts once or twice, to make sure he’s on the right path, but her voice isn’t much better. She’s hurt him too. She’s next, he thinks wildly, if she doesn’t help him get out of this city.
When he reaches it, he finds that the machine is ugly even for Rapture. Metal restraints curve out to hold a man in place, and at throat height is some kind of blade arrangement, mounted on a steel arm. When he stands aside and pushes a lever, the blades whir and spin, the arm stabs out, and a small black mechanism clinks onto the tiled floor.
A voicebox.
Jack rests a hand on his throat, breathing fast.
He can feel his own quickening pulse there.
It’s necessary.
If he doesn’t go through with this, he’ll be giving up. He’ll have no way to get out of Rapture. And even worse, he’ll have no way to reach Fontaine. The thought of Fontaine getting away, laughing at him as he escapes, fills him up with the kind of injured rage that drowns out any fear or second thoughts.
The radio hisses. “What are you waiting for?” demands Tenenbaum.
Nothing. Because Fontaine isn’t going to escape him.
Jack’s going to remember how much this hurts, and make sure Fontaine hurts more.
He steps into the restraints, looks at the blades, closes his eyes, and pulls the lever.
Application
Player
↠ Name: Caz
↠ Age: 24
↠ Characters Played: n/a
Character
↠ Name: Jack Ryan/Wynand
↠ Canon: Bioshock
↠ Journal:
did_unkindly↠ Age: WELL. He’s chronologically four, physically about 24 (Bioshock takes place in 1960), and mentally 24-with-gaps. What I mean by that is expanded on under Personality. If this isn’t cool I’m willing to play him more mentally in line with a real 24 year old, we can chat about it or whatever.
↠ Appearance: A brick shithouse. Jack’s built for strength and endurance, with a tall frame, broad shoulders, and strong arms. His hair is short and dark. He’s got kind of a chubby face, with weathered skin, punipuni cheeks, and big baby cow eyes.
He's absolutely riddled with cut- and bullet-scars, and a few he hasn't healed yet as well. On his wrists are matching black chain link tattoos, because Fontaine has an asshole sense of humour.
↠ Reference/History: Here’s a wiki page all about it. The Biowiki has a bit of a problem with discussing theory as fact, but it's accurate in most important respects.
The short version? Bought as an embryo by some jerk called Fontaine. Speed-grown and mentally conditioned to be his biodad’s assassin. Given some cute fake memories so as not to provoke suspicion. Crashed a plane under mind control and went on to have a really bad day in an underwater city full of mutants. Assassinated his biodad. Found out via Fontaine’s gloating that he was a test tube babber, and not a nice young man from Kansas after all. Still pretty angry about that.
Boom, City of Sin.
A note: Bioshock is one of those fancy schmancy multiple-endings deals. This Jack is headed towards the bad end, meaning that as well as killing a lot of scary mutants, he's also engaged in a spot of infanticide. It was the drugs.
↠ Personality: Jack’s personality was designed in a lab to careful specifications. Think of these paragraphs as points on a checklist, ticked off as they're implanted into a little kid's head.
He doesn't give up easily. If you want someone who can brute force his way through a brick wall and come out the other side still running, Jack is your man. He's in a mid-Atlantic plane crash, finds himself trapped in a crumbling underwater city where everyone wants to kill him, and gains frankly terrifying superpowers, and he keeps going. Maybe not entirely stably, but he's still got his eyes on the prize.
He's blessed and cursed with the tendency to trust people and do what he's told. If you seem to know what the hell you're doing, you're all right in his book. He spent a long time following the instructions of a man on a radio, just because the man on the radio said he should; he took it on trust that this guy, Atlas, was telling the truth and would help him. Later he offered the same complete trust to Doctor Tenenbaum, even though he knew she'd spent most of his life treating him as a science experiment, and even when she gave him instructions like 'okay now go pull your own voicebox out through your throat and replace it with a whale noise thing'. As Fontaine put it, "kid, you won't even walk till somebody says 'go'."
And that's not even getting into the little problem of the mind control. Jack has a sort of quasi-Pavlovian post-hypnotic suggestion thing going on: in short, he'll do anything you tell him so long as the command includes the phrase 'would you kindly'. Just slip it in there and see how high he'll jump for you. He knows about the phrase, but all he can really do about it is get mad at you afterwards.
There are other trigger phrases in existence, but the only other one specified in canon is 'code yellow', which causes his heart to shut down. He doesn't know about the others, but he'd thank you not to use them.
Since he's only been growing for four years, little things like 'life experience' and 'post-toddler-level moral reasoning' had to be short-cutted into him via ADAM and mental conditioning. Some things were prioritised above others, and so there are a couple gaps. The biggest sign of this is that Jack has trouble really getting death. I mean, he understands that dead people stop moving and shouting and shooting at him, but the full implications and finality of death are another matter. Especially since about the eighth time he personally kicked the bucket and came back in a Vita-Chamber. Death starts to lose its horror when you see it everywhere around you, and keep coming back from it yourself.
Other signs include certain issues of socialisation, e.g. the fact that Jack seems to think it's perfectly okay to jam yourself with sketchy needles and eat cake bars you looted from corpses. It's practical?? Why are you looking at him like that???
He likes machines. He likes hacking machines, he likes fixing machines, he likes giving machines silly names and then hauling them off into battle as airborne support. And he’s pretty good at it too; Rapture runs on machinery, and he’d have to be getting through a lot of it, so it made sense for the scientists patterning his brain to give him an affinity for that sort of thing.
As befits his stints as an underwater mechanic, he just generally likes solving problems. This makes him a fairly helpful guy, even if he’s more suited to the ‘bash it until it gives in’ type of solution than anything terribly cerebral. He also gets a kick out of stuff like exploring, shooting, fetch questing, all those things you need to do to be a good FPS protagonist. He enjoys target practice even when the targets aren’t alive and running around.
Unfortunately he can often be a bully. Because when you give a four year old near-unlimited power and a playground full of stuff weaker than him to fight, that’s kind of what happens. For the people building him, empathy issues were a feature, not a bug.
One last thing: he has a bit of a problem with ADAM. Because ADAM is very, very addictive. He was made using the stuff, and the good end implies that he can still live a long and happy life without it, so unlike most splicers he seems to be in the clear re: horrible tumorous mutations and raving insanity. But there are also hints that he doesn’t get off completely unscathed. He’s accustomed to getting it in large frequent doses, and he’s not going to enjoy it if he has to suddenly stop.
↠ Powers: BOY OH BOY YOU'D BETTER SIT DOWN FOR THIS.
Note: I'm going to use this space to talk a bit about how ADAM and EVE work, because that's inextricably linked with his actual powers. But ADAM and EVE are just magic drugs and he doesn't necessarily have them at any given point. Extra note: ADAM, EVE, Plasmids, and Tonics are products for sale, and so I figure they might show up in the anything-and-everything shops in the Gardens? Extra special note: If you're not Jack Ryan, then using ADAM/plasmids/tonics (also known as 'splicing') is really bad for you. Just ask these satisfied customers! (Body horror / general creepinesss warning jsyk.)
Here's his Plasmid loadout (aka active superpowers):
- Electrobolt. Shoot lightning out of your hand! Zap people real good!
- Incinerate. Shoot fire out of your hand! Alternatively, cook dinner!
- Winter Blast. Shoot ice out of your hand! Make your whiskey on the rocks!
- Telekinesis. Shoot things out of your hand! And also make them come back!
- Insect Swarm. Shoot bees out of your hand! Yes! BEES! just dO IT YOU PIECE OF SHIT
He's also got a plasmid that allows him to rescue Little Sisters, but wowowowowow that's a whole other tangent that probably wouldn't be relevant unless we got a little sister character (and then obvs I wouldn't try rescuing her unless her player said they were up for it). He owns other plasmids too, but he needs a Gene Bank machine to equip them, and he probably left them behind in Rapture anyway. So I assume he'll be stuck with only these. ("only")
In order to use Plasmids, Jack needs a blue substance called EVE. It works as fuel; using plasmids burns EVE. ADAM is a red or green substance and doesn't give him EVE, though it does (messily) heal wounds a bit via cell-replacement nonsense.
He can replenish EVE via:
- drinking alcohol (small amounts)
- beating people to death with a blunt object (small amounts)
- smoking (small amounts)
- injecting EVE hypos (actually decent amounts)
Jack also has a bunch of Gene Tonics in his system, which are passive, and basically make him harder better faster stronger. They don't need EVE, they just hang out.
You may have noticed by now that Jack is very OP. So I'm thinking, for limitations, we could make his access to ADAM and EVE very scarce. Without EVE, he's got no plasmids. Without ADAM, he's a stressy baby and smokes too much, which isn't very depowering but is pretty funny for me.
Maybe ADAM and EVE make an appearance in the Everything Shops in the Gardens, but for a reeeeeally steep price. (I have no idea how finance works in this game, so I welcome you deciding what a steep price would be and how easy it'd actually be for him to get hold of the stuff.) If Jack usually has to rely on smoking and stuff for his EVE, he will definitely not be throwing fireballs around willy-nilly. And, I'll be honest, all things being equal, he'd rather spend his money on ADAM.
Superpower bonus round (YEAH WE'RE NOT DONE YET): Jack recovers from wounds a little when he eats food or drinks alcohol. He also takes like three bottles of vodka to get a bit drunk. This is all very entertaining, but if it's a bit Too Much on top of all his other abilities, I don't mind dropping it and saying the food and drink in the City is different. He can also gain health by by ripping out the organs of a spider splicer and eating them, so y'know, all the hundreds of spider splicers wandering around the City had better watch out or whatever.
This is probably a good place to note that Jack's canonically carrying around a lot of weapons, so give me a shout if you'd like him to arrive with fewer.
↠ Reason for Playing This Character:
If someone finds out about Would You Kindly, I will laugh for approx 3000 years.
Since I'm taking him from right after the Big Reveal About His True Past, he's got a lot to think about, and in the game he doesn't really get time to before it's right back on the road to bloody revenge. But in CoS? There's nothing but time. So it'll be interesting to have him thrust into a new setting at the same time as his whole identity comes crashing down. He'll have to rebuild himself to a certain extent. There'll be a lot to work with.
On a related note, basically all the influences in his life so far have been terrible. TERRIBLE. We've got the amoral scientists, the jerkass conman, the awesome dictator libertarian... it's been a party of people giving him really bad life lessons. So I'm interested to see how he does in a more stable and positive environment, such as... well, pretty much anywhere is more positive than Rapture, but for our purposes I've heard of this really great city that has districts based off sins.
Also I'd love to do some good old fashioned wrasslin' and adventurin' with him, since his great loves in life are Fights, Food and F'Exploring. It's not all gotta be tough. Let's go shooting or join Fight Club or whatever it is a young man does for fun around these parts.
Bonus: He's very well suited to being a lackey, for obvious reasons, so I'm sure any resident supervillains might be happy to see him.
Regarding CoS specifically, I greatly Love the setting. And since it's kind of mature in its themes, it seems like a good place to play Jack, since his entire life is kind of messed up and dark and full of drugs and murder and nonsense like that. Also the 1:3 day ratio seems like a v good idea, since in the past, 1:1 games have ended up feeling kind of hectic to me.
↠ What is Your Character’s Sin?: Wrath. He is so mad. So mad. And 'eye for an eye' is kind of the only way he knows of to deal with his problems. He will rip his own throat out for a chance to kill Fontaine yo he doesn't give a shit.
Samples
↠ First Person: (This should be a sample of your character addressing a general network audience by speaking or, if that’s not possible, writing. Pantomime. Interpretive Dance. However it is that they’ll be communicating with the other residents of the City of Sin. This can be a link to a first-person sample or post that you wrote for this character from another game.)
↠ Third Person: Jack has fought a lot of Big Daddies by now. They’ve gone from terrifying monsters to appreciably challenging ones, but they’ve never stopped being monsters. He never thought he’d be turning himself into one.
But he also never thought he’d still be in Rapture right now. He thought he’d be striding out of here shoulder to shoulder with Atlas, as soon as Andrew Ryan was dead.
In just a few short hours, the game has changed completely.
Now, when he finds Atlas, Jack is going to tear his heart out.
His knuckles whiten on the huge iron helmet, and he lowers it over his head. It smells like rust and blood and rot. It’s scuffed from fights; it’s seen and caused a lot of death. It’s undeniably a part of Rapture. And, as it turns out, so is he.
The shortwave radio crackles. It’s Atlas’s frequency. But it’s Fontaine’s voice.
“You think turning yourself into one of those tin men is a two-way street?”
He doesn’t stop talking. Even though he can’t control Jack with a few words any more, he doesn’t stop talking. And his voice is like nails in Jack’s brain, reminding him all the time of what a rube he is. Where he comes from. How everything Atlas told him — even the way he told it — was a lie.
He grits his teeth. When he kills Fontaine, he’s going to start by cutting out his tongue.
The voicebox replacement machine isn’t much farther, and Jack clanks his way towards it, Fontaine’s drawl biting into his ears. Tenenbaum interrupts once or twice, to make sure he’s on the right path, but her voice isn’t much better. She’s hurt him too. She’s next, he thinks wildly, if she doesn’t help him get out of this city.
When he reaches it, he finds that the machine is ugly even for Rapture. Metal restraints curve out to hold a man in place, and at throat height is some kind of blade arrangement, mounted on a steel arm. When he stands aside and pushes a lever, the blades whir and spin, the arm stabs out, and a small black mechanism clinks onto the tiled floor.
A voicebox.
Jack rests a hand on his throat, breathing fast.
He can feel his own quickening pulse there.
It’s necessary.
If he doesn’t go through with this, he’ll be giving up. He’ll have no way to get out of Rapture. And even worse, he’ll have no way to reach Fontaine. The thought of Fontaine getting away, laughing at him as he escapes, fills him up with the kind of injured rage that drowns out any fear or second thoughts.
The radio hisses. “What are you waiting for?” demands Tenenbaum.
Nothing. Because Fontaine isn’t going to escape him.
Jack’s going to remember how much this hurts, and make sure Fontaine hurts more.
He steps into the restraints, looks at the blades, closes his eyes, and pulls the lever.