Dysmey Post > Projects & Stuff > Bioshock 2 > Levels > Mournful Adonis
You walk to a vent. You pound on the vent twice. A Little Sister appears and shows you a doll, saying Look daddy, it's you!
. You lower the Little Sister to the floor. Then you follow her to a room which contains a dead body; there she extracts and drinks its Adam-rich blood. The Little Sister, after sniffing out more Adam, runs off. You follow her through a party of normal people, who give you a wide berth.
Suddenly, you hear the Little Sister scream. You emerge onto a balcony over a lobby, where the Little Sister is being manhandled by four splicers. You crush one underfoot as you jump off the balcony. Another zaps you, but you shrug it off, and drill one of his compadres. You knock another (Nadeli Atkins) off her feet. You try to dispatch the last splicer, the one who zapped you: But he hits you with a plasmid and tells you to stop. You stop — a mind control plasmid!
A woman in harlequin glasses, a dour face and a long plain dress walks up. Pushing the Little Sister behind her, she denies that you are the girl's father. Then, the woman proffers a gun and delivers commands in this order: Take off your helmet; take the gun; shoot yourself through the head. Helpless from plasmid, you do as you are told.
You then find yourself staring face-down on the floor. You thought you were dead, but now you are not. You get on your feet, turn around, and discover why: A vita-chamber. But the fact of your new life is nothing compared to the awe and distress you feel on looking at the Adonis Resort atrium where you are forced to shoot yourself. The place is ruined: piles of rubble strewn with hanging tendrils of seaweed, glowing pink corals and barnacles like light bulbs. On the picture of Rapture's tallest building, overlooking the lobby, is scrawled the message Fallen, fallen is Babylon.
Well, if the KGB or the CIA had not found this place, the Southern Baptist Convention sure had, you think.
There is nothing for it but to climb the stairs, during which you see a Little Sister peer out a vent. An entryway is blocked by glowing pink coral; you smack the coral with your arm to save fuel on your drill. In the hall beyond, you have to crawl under a fallen pillar. You turn into the entrance to the Adonis Baths. Inside that big room with an empty pool, something tall and thin with a spherical head bounces around before vanishing through a window over a sign titled Plasmid Treatments
.
The pool room itself is just an empty pool with surrounding patio. In one corner is a shorted-out generator (don't ask what a generator is doing so close to a pool, okay?). The room is accessible from three doors: Yours, a side bulkhead with no power to open it, and a door under the Treatment sign. On the floor of the pool itself is a graffito left by the creature: Lamb is watching. What is this thing the creature has for young sheep? Next to the generator is a tape from Big Kate O'Malley, who supervised the help.
Lesson one, mop jockeys: You are under the ocean now. If you feel the soft patter of rain on your hat, you're already fired. Lesson two: you can jumpstart a dead generator with a direct spark, but clear the guests out of the pool first! Scares these rich pricks to watch a working stiff hurling thunderbolts, ya follow me?
Yes, ma'am! Jump-start generator, right! Now to find some way to do that. Let's look in Plasmid Treatments, the only other accessible area.
You find the corridor is roughly L-shaped. First, you wait for a Grossman splicer to gun down an obstreperous Ladysmith patient, then try out your drill on him. To your right is a locked sauna room with the code (1540) written on the window; unlock it, and a dead body plops out. The tragic figure is Rachelle Jacques, who left an audio diary about her lazy husband.
There is a sign on an easel: Invigorating! Electrifying! Feel the spark of vivacy at the fingertips of our specially trained therapists. GET CURRENT WITH ELECTRO BOLT.
And, wouldn't you know it, there is a Gatherers Garden machine at the far end of the hall, with a bottle of plasmid gift-wrapped in a bow.
As you approach the vendor, you see behind the cashier's desk — a shrine: A poster of a handsome blond woman with harlequin glasses and a plain dress. The shrine is decorated with candles and blue paper butterflies. The graffiti on the wall identifies the woman as Lamb
. Okay, that must be the Lamb who is watching. In time, you will find out why you should care.
Also behind the counter, but within reach, is an Eve dispenser: Press F
to release a vial; press F
to take the vial; wait five seconds; repeat until you get your maximum of five vials.
Opposite from the counter is the source of the poster's face: A picture of Rapture's Best and Brightest 1952. Shown, from left to right, are Tenenbaum, Cohen, person as yet unknown, Ryan, Lamb and Suchong. Nearby is a can of drill fuel. Nearer the vendor are therapy rooms, one of which has a charred body, both of which have money.
As you approach the vendor, you are struck by a vision. Your vision is enveloped in a pinkish white transparent hue, in the middle of which is the face of a young woman with big blue eyes. Her voice calls out to you: Father! Then the vision dissipates.
The vendor itself is surrounded by chalked messages: From Eleanor. Please hurry Daddy. The bottle itself has a bow on it. You pick up the bottle, extract a sample into a syringe and inject yourself. And, like Jack Ryan before you, you cry out to the ceilings as you spark all over the place. As you fall to your knees, a Little Sister comes up to you. Daddy's been sleeping for such a long time. And Eleanor misses you so much. Find her, and you will be all better.
Then the long tall monster appears, snatches up the Little Sister, and runs out of the room, shutting the door to the pool behind her — all in one second.
This is no problem, now that you have Electrobolt. Zap the door control and you are back in the pool room, finding that Electrobolt makes deposing of splicers — especially the two near the door — so much easier. You zap the generator; it provides power to the bulkhead. It also provides some sort of waveguide for your radio, because someone is finally getting a signal to you: Brigid Tenenbaum.
Ah! At last, a signal! You who are bringing this dead city to life, listen. My name, it is Tenenbaum. I know who you are, and I am in need of your help. Please — find me at the Atlantic Express.
Now that the bulkhead is open, you enter the hallway. In the window at the end you see a Big Daddy working outside in the water, punching rivets into a support beam. There are restrooms on either side of you; but as the men's room is blocked by debris, you explore the ladies' room, where you will find lots of money. You will have to unlock a stall for R$5 to get most of it. You will also have to zap a thug in water to keep her from shooting you. In the locker room is a tape from this Lamb, first name Sofia, expecting great things from her yet-to-be-born daughter, even if her expectations seem a bit odd.
A climb up some stairs, another bulkhead, and look! Two splicers in water! Zap them before they notice you. As in the original game, you can kill splicers in water just by zapping them. The Bridge Room has another pool, this one of the decorative kind, with a bridge spanning it. At one end of the bridge is another Lamb shrine, complete with blue butterflies and a book titled Unity and Metamorphosis. Come to think of it, the two splicers were wearing blue butterfly badges.
After the splicers' demise comes a message over the public address system from Sofia Lamb: You are not alone. Think of me not as leader, but as mother of the Rapture Family.
Umm, getting more and more odd. Advertisements are on the walls: One for Animal Magnetism tonic (guess what it's for) from Fontaine Futuristics; one for Brain Booster tonic from Ryan Industries; one, not for tonics, but for a carnival ride called Journey to the Surface. Posters in a nearby hall boost better living through genetics and plasmids.
On a couch under another Best/Brightest picture is another diary, this time from Tenenbaum.
I am back in Rapture after so many years. The Little Ones I rescued are grown up, and think of me no more. After what I once did to them, it is a joy to be forgotten.
But now, all around the world — children vanished by the sea. Kidnapped. And so, I return … in fear of what I already know: Someone is making more Little Ones, continuing my work, my sins. Even if I am to die for it — I must stop them.
There are two sets of stairs converging into the single hallway with the better living poster. In the middle of this is a dead Big Daddy. Its rivet gun is jamming the bulkhead. Take the gun for your own. Test it on the foolish splicers up ahead.
This corridor has a wellness station, complete with ads for Plasmi-Quik™, Vitastat first-aid kits (one of which you can pick up), Eve, oral surgery from Dandy Dental (Fontaine's outfit) and plastic surgery by Dr. Steinman. On the opposite side from the station is the entrance to a Rapture Metro station.
The station is a total ruin, with its bathysphere busted open like a melon and funced off. There are lots of suitcases you can scrounge for stuff, plus another diary. This one is from Mark Meltzer of the Something In The Sea marketing Web site. The end of that site had Mark escaping the tramp steamer Nellie Bly near the lighthouse, just in time for the ship to be attacked by splicers. Mr. Meltzer evidently made it.
Barely made it down alive, but it's here — and it's real: Rapture!
This is where that thing took my … my poor baby girl. From what I saw in the sub, most of the city is in ruins. But there were lights here and there … and shapes, moving … I'm rambling. Scared, I guess. But maybe — if I can find this Doctor Lamb I keep hearing over the PA, I'll find Cindy, too.
Nail the Grossman splicer rummaging in the debris near the entrance, and then it's a straight climb to the Grand Foyer.
Before you ascend, watch on the right-hand screen the video titled Do Not Disturb The Little Sisters.
angel.
The next bulkhead opens to a cutscene. Just in front of the door is a Little Sister working on a corpse. She turns around and expects you to pick her up. Suddenly there is a loud scream. Mr. B! Big Sister doesn't want you playing with me!
says the worried Little Sister. On a balcony in a far corner, the tall thin creature with the ball-like helmet — the Big Sister — appears. She jumps high into the air, lands on top of you, stabs you with its needle-knife and drains some Adam out of you, and jumps away.
When the Big Sister lands, you regain movement. Notice the Big Sister standing in water? Zap her! Then shoot her with rivets. If she gets too close, give her the drill. Run left or right to keep her from ramming you or getting a plasmid shot at you. Keep zapping, shooting and drilling her to wear down her health. At worse, run away and keep as much distance from her as you can. After awhile, she will scream at you and run away.
Rummage through the big room for first aid kits, Eve hypos, food (for health) and water and coffee (for Eve), money, rivets and drill fuel. There is also a diary entry from Andrew Ryan himself. Evidently he is getting tired of his mistress Diane's yakking about his working all the time (but that's why I'm here!), but does concede the need for children to ensure his legacy. Um, maybe after New Year's Day.
The tape was made in 1958.
A winding, broken and rubble-strown corridor leads you through familiar territory to those who watched the first Bioshock II trailers, with the Big Sister running away from you and the message she left behind: We will be reborn in the cold womb of the ocean. The corridor leads to the Demeter Banquet Hall, with its big window looking into the city seascape. Most of its tables are gone, and its has a thin layer of water, as you can see from the balcony. You know what will happen next: You drop to the floor; the Big Sister opens
the window; and in comes the ocean.
As you are a Big Daddy, you have your own self-contained oxygen supply. You walk outside the banquet hall onto the seafloor. There is a bathysphere, broken open, revealing its lost couple. The guy bears a tape of the couple's final moments, thinking they have escaped Rapture at last — before Lamb fells them with a torpedo.
On your radio Tenenbaum speaks.
In that suit, even the ocean cannot harm you. This is good. But Rapture is the death of may great men. Alone, you will not last long. You can still reach the train station — find me there.
In the ocean nobody attacks you. In a wall of windows you see a strange kind of Big Daddy protecting its Little Sister from three attacking splicers … with rockets … and some kind of tiny gun turret. Near the windows is a fuel station, inactive now, with which you can refuel your drill for free.
The landscape is awe-inspiring: Pink and rainbow-colored corals, all glowing. More light-bulb barnacles. Strange blue sponges. Seaweed as tall as trees. And scattered among the strange flora and glowing blue jellyfish are the wrecks of ships foolish enough to stray too close. There is even the rear fusillage of the airplane that brought Jack to the City. And, around the corner, a panaramic view of the City itself, in front of which is a giant billboard: welcome to rapture, your beautiful city.
You are at the edge of a clift, from which you must jump and drop. Don't worry, the water will cushion your fall. As you approach your goal, the Atlantic Express airlock with its big statues of men with giant wrenches, a Big Sister appears and jumps away over the building. Walk into the airlock and pull the lever.
Enemies List: Splicers (thugs and leadheads), Big Sister.
Weapon/Ammo: Drill/Drill Fuel, Rivet Gun/Rivets.
Eleanor Gift: Electrobolt.
First Use: First Aid kit, Eve, and other consumables; Eve dispensor.
The passage the graffiti is quoting is from the Relevation of Jesus Christ, 18:2 (NIV): Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great! She has become a home for demons and a haunt for every unclean spirit, a haunt for every unclean and detestable bird.
If you are watchful, you can see all three types of Big Daddy on this level.
The grand foyer has more posters. One of them is an advertisement for both the Rapture Reminder
and Jim and Mary
radio messages from the original Bioshock, titled Slow down, Mary! Mary, in this case, is shown as a ditzy blonde with blank eyes, a falling slip and a broken heel of her shoe, walking straight for an open manhole and pointing at herself (you mean me?
). The well-dressed man walking next her is, no doubt, Jim. The poster is a Rapture Reminder™ admonishing us to Take care of yourself! It's the Rapture Way of Life.