Hello there! I'm a writer and a geek. I post fanfics occasionally!
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Follow Josephine Pt. 1 (Another Bioshock Fanfic)
Follow Josephine Pt. 1 (Another Bioshock Fanfic)
The boat creaked with every gentle wave, and the wind howled around them, though it wasn’t even storming. At least, Angelina didn’t hear rain, but she couldn’t see over the side to check, anyway. It was so cold out here, even with her best coat buttoned all the way up to her neck. She looked up at Mama.
Mama sat on the floor of the boat, her fingers working over her stitching, her mouth moving in a nearly-silent song. Last year for her birthday, she had made Angelina a white hat that had made her the envy of all the girls in the neighborhood; she felt lucky that she could wear it now. They had had to leave so much behind. Angelina hadn’t even thought that they’d had very much to begin with, but still.
Papa and the boatman were talking up by the stern (she knew that word from a book). With the wind in his hair and the moonlight on his face, Papa looked more excited than she had ever seen him—like a little boy.
She remembered the day when he’d come home, his smile nearly shining through the grease on his face, and how he’d ruffled her hair, hugged her tight against him, and said, “Gellie, Gellie, everything is gonna be okay.” The words he’d said after that didn’t make a whole lot of sense: a new place underwater, being free to make his art, Andrew Ryan, Rapture.
“The Andrew Ryan?” Mama had said, eyes bugging. “What’re ya talkin, about, Abe? He’s a business man!”
“It’s real, I tell ya. It’s real. I know it. We can make new lives there, get out of this city. Fran, I could make art again.” Something happened to this voice then, like it got high and tight. He was looking at Mama like one word from her would make him fall apart. But she didn’t say a word; she just stared. He kept talking, “I-I could sell, again. There’ll be new materials to work with… You could work if you wanted, selling your knitting, doing almost anything! We’ve got savings. It’s enough, I checked, if I just…”
“Abraham.” She was using her stern voice, the one you don’t argue with. Papa swallowed hard, fiddling with his hands. “You’re not making sense.”
After that they talked, and talked. Mama got quiet and worried, while Papa got louder and happier. They kept talking, then Papa stopped leaving for work, then Mama told Angelina to stop selling flowers on the corner, and then they were all packing. When Angelina had asked questions, they said, “We’re moving someplace with more money.” And now they were here.
Papa had his hands on his hips as he turned to look at the fog ahead. “There it is,” said the boatman, his voice low and somehow, scary. “In the fog.”
Angelina ran up to them and grabbed Papa’s hand. She couldn’t see anything, but his warm hand around hers helped slow her breathing. Then his grip tightened a little. “You’re right. I see it! Francine, we’re here!”
“Papa, what is it? What is it? Are we gonna crash?” Angelina hopped up and down, unsure whether to run or climb up the side of the boat. But Papa grabbed her around the middle and hoisted her up, and she did see, then.
A building—the strangest one she had ever seen—was rising out of the water like the horn of some giant sea creature. At its very tip was a flashing light, and a little figure like a bird, or a woman. Water crashed around the stones at its base. “This is the lighthouse, Angelina,” Papa whispered. “We’re home.”
More Posts from Amusementlark
I can believe it
Piggy.
Haaaay, absolutely gonna jump on this. @winkells
Is okay to base a story off of your art? I’ve recently been very inspired by your art, and it’s really pushing me out of my writers block
Yes absolutely! I’ve been asked this a few times and I’m sorry I keep forgetting to respond–you’re more than welcome to write stories/anything you’d like based off of my work. If you do write something, feel free to message me a link/tag me in it; I’d love to read it ♥
Rapture (A Bioshock Fanfic)
All around her, Rapture oozed and groaned. Its bubbly tunnels and bolt-locked, sunken bowls of districts were like soup ladles filled with giblets. To the average fish in the deep of the Atlantic, the city appeared as a great, dying beast, or an already-festering corpse of monstrous proportions. All around her, Rapture pulsed, slow and unexpectedly alive. The Splicers were like termites in old wood, wearing down the once glorious structures, eating it up with a mindless determination.
She waited for a moment in her hidey-hole, and she tried not to breathe too loudly. Behind her were the bumps and rustles of the others, oblivious and delusional—not to say that she wasn’t, to an extent. Before her lay deceitful silence, punctuated only by dripping pipes and the occasional creak of the old, dying city.
She had never known it before it was like this. Rapture had held no vivacity for the duration of her short little life. Yet it was not home; the closest thing to home was the box she slept in, tucked into one of the Nests. It was just the right size for her, lined thinly with rags that were actually old dresses, much like the faded and bloodstained one she wore from day to day. She’d drawn along the side of it, clumsily scrawled a name she almost knew, one that might have been hers in another life: --silia. Half-buried inside her bed lay a damp, wrung-out doll. Of what type, it is uncertain, but it was something she hugged sometimes, when she had the mind to. Dream time.
Real home—like the mother’s womb, or a cradle—was somewhere here under the water with her: a place with plenty of Adam, angels abounding in delirious sanctity, chalk and toys and bricks and dolls. Real home was now a hazy dream—a quark of insanity that came to her with no particular warning and left just as suddenly, like a Houdini splicer, dying everything rosy before being enveloped in spectral ash.
She thought she saw those roses for a moment before she crawled back inside the vent. She’d heard the others talk about being wrenched out of the vents, tossed to the floor, beaten and robbed and left bruised and broken against the vent wall like a sacrifice at altar, empty of Adam or anything girl-like anymore. She didn’t want that for herself: it was scary. She tensed every muscle in her body, holding her breath even harder, her eyes wide and blank.
A low moan like a sob swept through the silence, tremulous and dangerous. For a moment, she thought that a whale had passed too close to Rapture, and its life was shaking the bones of this old one. No, but a whale could not make her heart feel at once tight and overflowing like this. The sound, which was long and longing and loving, at once filled her up with fear and something like relief. For a moment, she thought she saw the real home.
Still, she hesitated. It was not uncommon for the others to preemptively climb down from the vent and be snatched up and consumed right before a Daddy’s eyes. She had to wait; there was a way these things were done.
She closed her eyes. She wanted to feel him first, not just see the heartless yellow eyes—though she did not know that they were much like her own. Each footstep was heavy, heavier than anything imaginable, than all of the seawater’s weight upon Rapture. They were heavy because they were frighteningly slow, and uncannily steady.
She waited; there was a way these things were done.
When it knocked, the entire vent shuddered beneath her. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Breathing hard—whether out of terror or excitement, it is not known—she opened her eyes and looked out of the hidey-hole into the face of her protector. It was round and blank and bright with attention, the eight eyes shining in different directions, scattering the shadows.
She smiled, backing up so she could turn around and drop out of the vent feet-first. With a little umph! she landed on her bare feet, barely able to feel the cold grooves of the vent from the numbness. When she turned, it was holding its hand out to her, giant, gloved, Daddy’s hand.
Beaming in her ghostly way, she took the index finger into the entirety of her hand, and she allowed the Big Daddy to hoist her up with its other hand, so that she could perch comfortably on its shoulder. The rivet gun slung on its back made for a relatively steady backrest for the moment, still a little warm from its last use.
As she settled onto its back, it sighed: the sound was a comforting rumble, like thunder—though she wouldn’t know what thunder sounded like—and caused the frenzy in her heart to sink into equilibrium with his.
Truth be told, she knew nothing of its heart, or any of its other organs for that matter. Big Daddies had no faces and were therefore not so threatening as Splicers. Every single one was a copy of another; all of them were the same father to every Little Sister. It had been planned that way. This would be the neatest way to teach them not to fear death; if a Big Daddy died, if a Little Sister died, it would be as if one ant in a colony had deceased and lost its purpose, and was therefore no more than food or curiosity to the other ants. Remove the heart out of Little Sisters, and teach them all things as daydream or nightmare; there was a way in which these things were done.
So, she had no way of knowing who the man was—had been—inside the suit. She had no way of knowing that he had a story, a life, that each time he called out into the abyss, he was calling out for his purpose.
Big Daddies did not receive the same instruction as their wards. They were too old. They were sacrifices; not ants, but loyal dogs retrained by leash and kennel. Their prisons were worn around them at all times, simultaneously serving as reward, as safety.
The fear that had wracked through his body, the electrifyingly exhausting sense of defeat, of loss, was now being reversed, as soon as she’d touched him. It was okay. He could try again. She would be his girl, his baby girl. His Little Sister. He could try again, not to let his family down, to be everything to one girl, to do something right. He had another chance.
This was Rapture; this was symbiosis; this was love; this was purpose. Strangers sinking into each other, imprinting on each other, likely to forget each other in the case of death, but willing to do everything inhumanly possible to stay alive, to stay together. Humanity, dangling. Compassion, programmed. This was Rapture; there was a way ‘humanity’ was done.
I like the idea of a logo like this. There's a horror element to my writing, but a fun one as well, so this seems like a good combination.
Smiles Ink is a concept I've had for years. When I was a kid, I always wanted to have some sort of brand or group associated with myself called "Smiles Inc," but I'm not incorporated with anyone. More and more, I liked Ink as an alternative, given a love of writing (and ink pens).