Bioshock:Harmony

Once upon a time, there was an idea. Imagine a world where petty tradition and bureaucracy didn't get in the way of friendship. where Ponies, Zebra, and griffins lived side by side in the pursuit of their Element. A Utopia of harmony and progress for every sentient race, free from the false governments that controlled them.

Once upon a time, this idea became a reality. A particularly enterprising young pegasus started to work on a city, under the sea. With the majesty of Canterlot, the ingenuity of Manehattan, and the community of Ponyville, it quickly became a hotbed for new exciting magical discoveries, avant garde art, and revolutionary social reform.

Once upon a time, the future looked so bright. It started with Plasmids, magic in a needle, they called it. With a injection, you could change your genetic code. Suddenly every Earth pony, Pegasus, and Unicorn could have whatever magic they wanted, as long as you had the money to splice your genes. Adam quickly became more precious than gold as more and more citizens of the city used the plasmids in everything from work, to play, to home life.

Once upon a time, Everything came crashing down. But Adam comes with a nasty price. The more one uses, the more one needs. It starts to change you and doesn't stop, making those who overuse it deformed and slowly insane. the Authorities and print dubbed them Splicers.

Once upon a time, The city started to Die. The Number of splicers steadily increased, just as the number of Little Fillies started to dwindle. As more citizens used Adam, Adam supplies started to run out, and more and more Splicers popped up around the city. Eventually, everything started to shut down, and the City fell into decay.
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Vassago watched from the vent he was hiding in as a swarm of robots peppered a enterprising splicer full of machine gun rounds. Security Bullseye ("Light em up! Splice today!) was a useful Plasmid, but Vas was careful with his scarce Adam. One of the reasons why he wasn't a horrible melting insane abomination of a pony. He held a small revolver loosely in his hoof as he snuck out and checked the dead Splicer, other than some ammunition and a empty hypo needle, he didn't have anything.

Vas stretched and looked about. He was in Arcadia Gardens, a furtive artificial forest, and a source of air in the underwater city. The colt grabbed an apple off a nearby tree and bit into it. Before he could finish, he heard steps coming towards him, and jumped into a bush to see who was coming around the corner.

[Hope you don't mind, but this seemed rather lonely.]

He was going cold turkey.

And it hurt.

It was bad for him, yet the yearning was beyond measure. He knew it, by the Sun's Flank, he knew it. The ache of that-That-That thing, it left him so empty. But it had done so much harm...

He had trouble breathing, had trouble remembering things, and it was becoming difficult to differentiate what was real and what wasn't.

He walked a slow gait with a limp, one of his back legs had cancerous welts that made it impossible to use correctly. His eyes were unnaturally sullen, the right one permanently swollen shut and it bled every now and then. It could have been worse, possessively, could have been-could have been.

He hadn't realized where he had wandered, and ended up tripping on an overgrown tree root.

Gritt Artist felt it could be a good idea just to lay and rest for a while. A good idea. Good idea.

For a while...

Of all the Spliced creatures in this strange place, this one must have been the prettiest. Other than just being a little roughed up, the poor thing appeared to have some thing wrong with his legs. Naturally, Vas reminded himself that this didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t a total loon. Caution was (as it always was) necessary.

He tip toed out of the bush, and focused on the stallion. Now, if he was anywhere (or when) that wasn’t Rapture, and he didn’t have that horrible Adam in his system, he would be able to get the stallions name, birth date, likes and dislikes, significant others, eveything he could possible want.

But he couldn’t, and he hAt3d it.

Never the less, he knew that he had seen this pony somewhere before and that he wasn’t too far gone.

Never the less.

“You okay there, friend?” He cautioned, aiming for the stallion’s head with both hooves wrapped around the grip of his gun. “You look like you’ve been through a bad way.”

Someone was speaking. His ears twitched at the sound of someone calm, he couldn't remember the last time he heard it. Not exactly... Not exactly.

Screams, Twitches, Stutters and the chantings of some sort of madness mantra, how long since peace had reigned?

...Why did he come here in the first place...?

Gritt lifted his head. With his good eye, he looked upon a Unicorn Stallion. With a gun pointed to his head no less.

"You gonna shoot me?" Gritt's voice was raspy.

The colt sniffed and frowned, glanced up at the ceiling and scratched the side of his head with the revolver, feigning boredom.

"I dunno." He shrugged.

He retrieved his apple and munched it, popping a squat to get closer to the stallion on the floor.

This was a good sign, however, this one sounded mostly coherent. Other than the deformity on his leg, he wasn't all that gone. Whether he was going to be gone soon was yet to be seen.

He finished off his apple and threw the core off into a bush, and looked down at Gritt.

"Are you going to try and bite my face off? Burn me alive? Do you like to drown ponies and feed them to a bunch of half crazy chihuahuas?"

"You're a nut you are..." Gritt attempted, and succeeded, to stand.

He started to walk, tripped again, and landed. He landed hard... Landed hard, hitting his bad eye and making it bleed again. He may have given a whimper, may have.

"I'm... I'm looking for, some ponies," Gritt started when he got back up, "I don't know where they're at... I can't find them, I don't know where they're at."

He sat on his haunches, trying to think and not even sure where to go or where he had been. Things were so blurry, and his focus was choppy.

"A nut?" Vas scrunched up his face, tasting the word in his mouth. "Noooo~ you're refering to that fine upstanding pony lying over in yon dirt." He motioned towards the dead monstrosity a few meters away with his revolver. "I thought being crazy was cool, but now everypony is doing it. So it seemed like the ironic thing to do was to act like a civilized pony. Sort of hard when your neighbors are missing half a face and three quarters of their brain."

At ease from the mystery stallion's apparent grasp on sanity, The younger colt watched with great amusement at the struggle that took place. "Have a lickle' truble there mate?" He said, mocking the trottingham accent of the stallion.

"I'm... I'm looking for, some ponies," Gritt started when he got back up, "I don't know where they're at... I can't find them, I don't know where they're at."

Vas considered. Whoever this stallion was, the colt had seen his face before.

"Well, as much as I jest and poke fun..." Vassago exhaled as he stood up. "...you look a little lost there, friend." Vas set his hooves on his hips, akimbo. "Who are these friends of yours?"

Gritt's ear twitched at the false accent. Other than that, he gave no physical indications of acknowledgement. No physical indications. No indications.

"My friends."

Then his ears twitched, as his attention grew far away, "I hear... Metal."

Vas didn’t appear to hear the last bit. “Oh come on. Don’t be like that, buddy!” He playfully chucked Gritt’s shoulder. “How can I get to know you if you don’t talk?”

He squinted at the stallion. “Hey, do I know you?”

His eyes widened with recognition. “Oh yeaaaaah, you look just like that one singer! You know… the… the Butt-Bigs. Something like that. You certainly have had a time, haven’t you!”

He blinked a bit, there was the sound of metal on metal.

“Do you hear something?”

For Gritt, the sound had grown louder. If it was really just a soft sound in the distance, and that reality may just be slipping away for a moment, he couldn't tell. Couldn't tell.

He was putting his hooves over his ears and he still heard it.

St!Ll H3@rD !t.

Vassago listened intently. After a while he relaxed, the noise was just the mechanical hum of the slowly breaking city.

"Whew. You almost had me worried..." Vas double taked on Gritt. "Are... you okay?"

If Vas could recognize anything with incredible ease, its insanity. The Adam that flowed through the citizens of rapture had a nasty tendency to cause all manners of nasty hallucinations. It was pretty clear that this stallion had the misfortune of experiencing one of the auditory variety.

"No. No you're not okay." Luckily, his magic worked only with the mind. "Listen to me, you have to let me in. Just let me in, and I can make the bad noise go away."

Vassago touched his horn to the stallion's head, and a subtle eldritch light wrapped itself around the horn, and slithered into Gritt's mind.

Quiet.

Quiet.

Quiet.

The manic mind is a difficult one to influence, especially when one's own magic is wavering. But eventually, Vas forced the sound of sweet silence into Gritt's ears.

"Mr.Artist. Are you going to be okay?" He said, his horn still on Gritt's head. Vas' head was pounding, and he was feeling a little dizzy.

Gritt felt them.

The noise drowned away to artificial silence. While the metal sound was gone, he felt something worse. Like slimy black tentacles and or teeth in his mind and on his brain.

He knew words were spoken, but he half wasn't sure if he spoke them or thought them.

GET OUT

The words were most certainly there, Vas winced as the bloodcurdling scream left Gritt's mouth.

He looked this way and that, was it him that was causing the sensation? or something else? He pulled out, and the magic vanished, leaving only the imprint of mental silence to keep whatever else at bay.

"Mr. Artist?" the colt said, hesitantly. All this talk and he was really still that, just a colt. He shakily cocked the hammer of the gun. "Can you hear me?"

Nothing. Nothing...

For a moment, blackness and spots of color. For a moment. For just a moment...

He was on the ground then, with shallow breaths and a rapidly beating heart. He felt weak. Felt Weak. What he wouldn't give for some power right about now.

His eyes managed to open, just to see that blasted gun again. Again.

"Thought you weren't going to shoot me..."

Vassago's lip curled into a strained smile. "I still might not." He didn't uncock the gun.

"It's hard not to get jumpy when a pony starts to break down and scream, wouldn't you say?" He took a few steps back, keeping the gun trained on Artist. "I don't have any Adam, so don't get any ideas." He warned.

He stared at the stallion for a moment, unsure of what to do with him. "Do you..."

"Do you think you're going to be okay?" He asked almost hopefully. Sure Adam was a cancerous, mind altering substance that with repeated use could turn the most intelligent, stable pony into a slobbering murderer, but there were plenty of ponies who could survive its use indefinitely. Besides, how did the Little Fillies do it?

"Don't know..." Gritt blinked, and attempted to get himself up, "Don't want Adam, don't need it..."

Don't need it. Don't need it. Don't need it. Don'tneeditdon'tneeditdon'tneedit-

"I have to find them, losing me mind..." Gritt's weakness showed, he looked desperate, "I need to find me friends..."