A flame from the lighter built into the thumb of your right hand illuminates your features from the end of the alley for a brief half second as it lights your cigarette. Your expression is carved from stone. “Or just an answer, that’d do me just fine.”
You’re suspicious as hell.
Half of this island’s citizens are constructs. Not interdimensional travelers like you, but living decor. No extraordinary abilities, none of the confusion and tension that runs rampant in actual abductees, not much else in their holds other than clockwork and a mass produced emotional blueprint— no one’s told you outright, you didn’t read it in a book anywhere or anything, but it’s an educated guess.
The other half? It consists of those abductees. And the vast majority of them are marked with strange abilities, physiologies or personalities that make them prime subjects for observation.
Both those factions are easy to suss out and pick apart from each other with enough experience, leaving mundane and powerless human citizens… the surprising minority. Ten dust out of your booze money would say this guy’s more than the plain John Doe he seems to be.
Your confidence only doubles when you catch the familiar scent of death on the breeze.
“Heard a guy scream bloody murder. Followed it, and only found one guy standing when I got here— you.” Your voice is low. Even. “I’m not in a mood to muck up my boots tonight if I don’t have to, so I’m gonna give you a shot to explain yourself since I’m such a good goddamn sport.”
In Rapture, people—or splicers, which could arguably be excluded from that group—generally started screaming bloody murder whenever they saw him, then tried killing him in any number of ways. Being glared at... it’s refreshing, but not exactly welcome. It would be better if this person hadn’t showed up at all.
But now that she’s here, Jack has no recourse but to size up the potential threat.
The stranger stands at Jack’s height, with a solid build and a posture that betrays her wary confidence, a confidence echoed by her voice. When Jack sees the light flicker into life, casting dim light across the stranger’s face, he thinks that they too had Incinerate or some other Plasmid—how terrible that would be—but no, it’s something else entirely.
Mysteries within mysteries.
“He started it. Pulled a knife on me.” Jack jerks his head to where the knife fell, among some crumpled wrappers. There’s a moment of silence before he continues. “He’s alive.” As if the world itself sought to condemn him, what little light that filters into the alleyway only serves to cast Jack’s face in a sullen gloom. “I was looking for his wallet.”
There’s a bluntness to his tone that could easily be seen as impatience—what else would I be doing, it seems to say.