Dysmey Post > Projects & Stuff > Bioshock 2 > Bosses and Other Characters
Dr. Sofia Lamb is a psychiatrist brought to Rapture by Andrew Ryan in order to mollify a Rapture citizenry made restless by the fact that they are trapped for good inside a sunless, leaky fishbowl. Ryan brought in Lamb without knowing her true beliefs. Lamb became very popular, especially in Pauper's Drop, during which time she bore a daughter, Eleanor.
Evidently, Ryan discovered Lamb to be an altruistic collectivist, and had her locked away in Persephone. In the choas of the Civil War, she escaped and fled to Paupers Drop until the Civil War was over, and until both Ryan and Fontaine were dead.
To separate your avatar from his Little Sister, Sofia Lamb plied him with Hypnotize and make him shoot himself. By the time your avatar is reawakened ten years later, Dr. Lamb had become the master of Rapture, running the city like Mao ran China. Dr. Lamb is your avatar's main enemy.
Sofia Lamb's daughter was a very precocious and mechanically gifted little girl, who would not put up with her mother's restrictions on her. Eleanor was left in Grace Holloway's care after Lamb was imprisoned. Eleanor, in turn, was sold behind Grace's back to a Little Sister Orphanage and turned into a Little Sister. She became the very first Little Sister to have been bonded exclusively to an Alpha Series Big Daddy, who is your avatar.
After her mother seized Eleanor back, she was a prisoner of her mother for the ten years since. Unknown to her mother, Eleanor had bonded with the new Little Sisters such that she and they had formed a collective, with Eleanor percepting through them and controlling their movements. In this way Eleanor contacted Dr. Tenenbaum, with whose help she revived your avatar and gave him his will and his wits back. Finding Eleanor is your avatar's personal goal.
It is Eleanor who provides your avatar with gifts (and, if you have been saving Little Sisters, lets you know when they give gifts to you). It is Eleanor who communicates with you both telepathically and through Little Sisters, who serve as her eyes and her hands. And it is Eleanor whom Dr. Lamb and her followers treat as if she were the Virgin Mary.
Holloway was a torch singer in Rapture's early days, in the city proper — until Ryan had her blacklisted for singing against him. (It was fortunate for her, as such dissent can get you killed, as did Anna Culpepper.) After that, Holloway sang in the Limbo Room lounge in Pauper's Drop until the War and the Bank Collapse forced it to close. Holloway served as Eleanor's foster mother after Dr. Lamb was jailed by Ryan; and as 'governor' of Paupers Drop after the fall of Ryan.
Holloway is hostile to Big Daddies, mistakenly convinced that Subject Delta was responsible for Eleanor becoming a Little Sister. It is up to you to spare or (at Sinclair's urging) kill her. It is better that she lives, because she can provide you with security bots to watch your back.
One of the architects of Rapture (his brother Daniel was the other) in its founding days, Simon Wales visited Dr. Lamb after being overwhelmed with guilt from the leaks appearing throughout the city. He emerged as her lieutenant, Father Simon Wales. When Lamb took control of Rapture, Wales became the 'governor' of Siren Alley and set up shop in a pumping station.
Simon Wales created and led the Rapture Family, a Gnostic-based cult of personality, simplified to make it palatable to the splicers, symbolized by the Blue Butterfly of rebirth, whose chief 'deity' is Eleanor Lamb herself. The center of this cult is between you and the controls to the pumping station, which means you must fight Wales to the death.
Simon Wales' brother, the other architect of Rapture, has no stomach for religion, either the Roman Catholic faith of their native Eire or the Lambist faith his brother now preaches. As the War caused contracts to dry up, Daniel converted a swanky hotel into an increasingly run-down brothel called the Pink Pearl. Your avatar must pay it a visit to get from Daniel the code to the lock on the door to the plaza in front of the pumping station. Daniel, thinking you are sent from Simon to do him in, will resist.
A total sleazebag hired by Ryan (via Sinclair) to play a frustrated novelist in order to spy on Sofia Lamb in her private preserve, Dionysus Park. It was he who had Sofia Lamb turned over to Ryan; sold Eleanor Lamb to the Little Sisters program; and told tales to Ryan that had a certain undersea visitor to Rapture turned into Subject Delta. When Sofia Lamb broke out of jail, Poole flooded Dionysus Park to kill any witnesses.
There he sat in the safety of the security booth, the de facto governor of a drowned Dionysus Park until your avatar drained it out, causing splicers and Little Sisters to return. You have to deal with Poole — and decide whether to spare him when the truth becomes known to you.
The co-creator of the Big Daddies with Yi Suchong, and the exclusive creator both of the Alpha Series and of the Rumblers. Taking over Fontaine Futuristics after the fall of Ryan and Fontaine, Dr. Alexander was impressed by Dr. Lamb's moral vision and volunteered to become the first 'Utopian', the bearer of all the genetic heritage of Rapture. Submitting to massive doses of Adam, Dr. Alexander mutated into a humongous and insane monster that, in time, had to be confined in a tank for deep-sea life.
By the time your avatar visits Fontaine Futuristics, Dr. Alexander has become so insane that he insists on being called Alex the Great. Alex runs Fontaine Futuristics as if it were still a functioning corporation, with him the head suit. Alex does this via a undamagable security bot fitted with a monitor and a Tesla coil powerful enough to kill. The bot is guided by four signal relays, each wired into a bot shutdown panel. He also controls security through an army of failed Alpha series Protectors.
Guided by taped instructions left by Gil Alexander in his last moments of sanity, you must destroy the signal relays, gain access to Fontaine's secret labs, and get a tissue sample off of Alex the Great in order to make a genetic key that will let you into Persephone. Once you acquire the key, it is up to you to kill Alex the Great (requested by a sane Gil) or spare his life (as Alex begs, promising to start a new life in the sea).
The creator of the Little Sisters, who saved as many as she could as the War progressed, left Rapture with her charges. Now that they have grown up and no longer need her care, Tenenbaum returns to Rapture to save the new crop of little girls kidnapped from the surface. Tenenbaum helps your avatar during the first two levels of the game; then, she leaves to continue her own mission.
The archetypal huckster of Rapture, Augustus Sinclair got rich off of other people's failures — Sinclair Deluxe, a tenement in Pauper's Drop; Sinclair Toys, cheap and of poor quality, made by Pauper's Drop labor; Sinclair Spirits, a booze joint in Fort Frolic; and finally Sinclair Solutions, a Persephone-based think tank that Ryan used as a front to test new plasmids during the War. The very existence of Persephone — a prison for the rejects of Rapture, including Sofia Lamb — was Sinclair banking on the failure of Ryan's vision of utopia-via-competition. Ryan, in turn, did not think much of Sinclair.
Augustus Sinclair is what happens when spineless moral relativism is spun into a business ethic. The man has a dirty finger in each and every pie.
Sinclair helped finance the project that created the Vita-Chambers. And he helped Austen Bathysphere in buying out the Atlantic Express.
The good times did not last: Kicked out of Persephone by Dr. Lamb, kicked out of his own hotel by Grace Holloway, Sinclair was forced to leave Rapture.
Years later, Sinclair returns to loot the city of its 'scientific wonderments', only to be trapped in the Ryan Amusements train station. Tenenbaum finds Sinclair a useful if untrustworthy ally, and she passes you on to him. After your avatar frees him, Sinclair joins you (in voice, at least) on your journey to free Eleanor.
In the end Sinclair is captured by Sofia Lamb and turned into Subject Omega, an Alpha Series Protector, with no motor control but with his voice and wits intact. He is forced to flee you, bearing the key to the prison control booth. You will have to kill Sinclair for the key — which he insists you do, not wanting to live as a monster.
Having found Rapture at last after over a year of searching (chronicled in the Something In The Sea site), Mark Meltzer continues to search for his daughter Cindy. Your avatar follows Meltzer's path from the Adonis Resort to Dionysus Park, where he did find her — as a Little Sister — but what happens after that is an exercise for the reader.
Andrew Ryan has been dead for ten years. Yet, his memory lives on in what he has left behind: audio diaries, pre-recorded public messages, and Ryan Amusements. Nobody surviving thinks well of him.
The death of Ryan is the death of the self, she proclaims.
Andrew Ryan … reckoned the free market was some kinda holy spirit gonna lead us all over the rainbow,whereas Sinclair thought the free market is too stupid to notice a rainbow in front of its face. Sinclair also bet against Ryan's idea of harmony through competition in the building of Persephone.
Also dead these ten years, the pull of Frank Fontaine can still be felt in all the sleazy enterprises, from bootleg hooch and cod plasmids to Fontaine Futuristics itself, that the Rapture Family had taken over after his demise. Audio diaries he left behind reveal his view of Dr. Lamb's altruism as high-grade bunko
and his conversion to Altas.
The builder of the Atlantic Express, the undersea train system that your avatar uses to travel from level to level. Playing by Ryan's rules rather than by good economic sense, Mill saw his ridership fall off when personal bathyspheres became popular, as his trains only serviced the older sections of town. Mill lost everything when the banks collapsed in the Civil War, and killed himself in Pauper's Drop.
The builder of Ryan Amusements. He did not think much of the 'freaks' (Cohen, Lamb) with whom Ryan had him consult when he developed the Journey to the Surface
ride. He thought even less of the ride once it came to pass: It was less than what he could have come up for the kids if left to himself. And he thought least of the kids themselves once Ryan Amusements was cut off from the rest of Rapture by the War. Fiddle tried to escape in a maintenance bathysphere, but was killed by a splicer.
A patent medicine salesman in Pauper's Drop, working out of an abandoned pharmacy, made and sold Dr. Hollcroft's Cure-All and Pick-Me-Up for symptoms of plasmid abuse. In fact, the tonic had the most minimal amount of Adam in it, the rest being water and scrappings from Fontaine Fisheries. Hollcroft relied on the placebo effect on his customers to prove its efficacy. But even that was not enough, and Hollcroft was killed in the back room of his pharmacy, probably by an angry customer.
Bookstore owner Harold Parson, his wife Gloria and his son Billy were a Rapture family. Then Harold was seized, and his bookstore looted, in the night by Ryan's goons. Harold was taken to Persephone, where he soon committed suicide. His wife and son were forced to find shelter in the Sinclair Deluxe — probably due to which they were soon spending their time in Dionysus Park through the generosity of Dr. Lamb.
There, Billy saw a Little Sister and her Big Daddy. Billy developed a crush on the Little Sister and admiration for her Big Daddy, and left her a rose as a gift. Regrettably Billy, his mother, and the Little Sister were soon drowned — and her Big Daddy crushed in a rockfall — when Stan Poole flooded Dionysus Park.
The warden of Persephone tormented his prisoners under Sinclair, and did worse to them under Sofia Lamb by handing them over to transmogrified torture sessions as therapy
. Weir began losing control over the prison as Lamb transferred almost all Adam to her experiment on Eleanor. He was killed in the resulting riot, as the prisoners stormed the control tower after working out the combination to the door and after finding a back way inside.
There appears to be two persons under that name: An older physician, bald with a mustache, who was responsible for the health of the Little Sisters, and who was having serious trouble keeping them from injuring themselves; and a young man who seemed to be getting a kick out of torturing inmates with electric shocks. It is likely the older man is the real Dr. Grimes.