personalapocalypse | Narcosis [Bioshock, Explicit]

Title: Narcosis
Author: Wallwalker
Fandom: Bioshock
Rating: Explicit
Characters: Andrew Ryan, Augustus Sinclair, and others.
Word Count: 1712
Warnings: Some dubious consent. Also tentacles and orgiastic scenes.
Notes: Written for

kink_bingo, as part of a simultaneous double line. Prompts were Tentacles and my free space (which would either go to Anonymity, Orgies/Decadence, or Voyeurism - really, any of those would work.)
For some reason, the first thing I thought of was a secret club in Rapture; it seemed to fit right in. Uses information from both of the first two games.

---

Today a reporter somehow managed to find and accost me as I was enjoying an otherwise lovely dinner with Diane, and demanded that I share with all of Rapture my opinions about the new Narcosis Clubs that are sprouting in dark, hidden places like tumors in my city.

I said nothing, of course. I have no desire to speak of such sordid things. I find them utterly distasteful, and I say that it is a horrid display of all of the worst qualities of mankind that in the face of complete regulatory freedom they see fit to esbablish dens of hedonism that make Eve's Garden look like a child's playground. I know nothing about what is within them, and I have no desire to know.

I said as much to the reporter, who of course reacted with surprise and suspicion. I of course had to have her taken away; Diane was beside herself. It was... necessary that I save face.

- Andrew Ryan's personal journal, May 1955

---

Business was good tonight, Sinclair noted as he sat at the television sets. No surprise - business was always good when the Narcosis Club was open for business, especially this particular incarnation. It was the first, the one that most people had heard about. And boy, did they ever come out when they heard that it was open - the place was packed with people, all masked, all drinking wine and other cheap spirits from one of his other ventures, all engaged in any and every depraved sex act you could imagine.

Running an underground club for the bored and the adventurous might seem a step backwards for a mostly-honest entrepreneur, but Sinclair didn't see it that way at all. No, he had started the Narcosis Clubs for the same reason that he'd started Sinclair Spirits - because if anything could be said to be good business, it was sin. And this was just another aspect of the sin, all of these masked men and women enjoying his facilities and his promise of absolute anonymity, for a very reasonable price. No advertising, of course - word spread on its own like wildfire, attracting the the cooped-up people of Rapture, the otherwise ordinary citizens driven to absolutely anything that they could find to ease the cabin fever, the literal and figurative pressure of living so far below the surface of the ocean. Not under his own name, of course - he might as well have put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger - but it was his money, after all of the scrubbing, and once he'd finished putting it through the cleaners it would be his money again, but a dozen times over.

Augustus Sinclair considered himself the perfect person to run such an establishment, because it was easy for him to stay objective about it. He'd never taken a wife, or anything else for that matter. Always joked that he wouldn't have known what to do with a lover if he'd had one. An old joke, but there was a grain of truth in it; he'd never had any particular desire for the company, and didn't care to waste his hard-earned money on courtship or sex. He'd be spending it on himself, thank you very much.

Still. He had to admit, he was enjoying watching these little displays. Not for the usual reasons, but because it made him laugh at how naïve people could be. Even the best and brightest minds in the world, if Ryan was to be believed, thought that they could put on a mask and be invisible, that no one would ever know who they were. Had they even been paying attention to the scientific news that Alexander and Suchong had been printing, or all of those new advances in DNA tech that Fontaine Futuristics had been crowing about? Unlocking the human DNA, learning to read it like a book and then write their own paragraphs, that sort of thing?

Had they stopped to think about how much of themselves they were leaving behind in these wild orgies of theirs? And had they stopped to consider that maybe, just maybe, somebody with enough knowhow could make determine that they had been there? Yes, there was a lot of margin for error, and they might just end up not finding one particular person once. But nobody went to Narcosis just once. Sooner or later they'd show up.

What then? Nobody wanted to admit that they went to the Narcosis Club - it was funny, really, how conservative a city that claimed to be free of God's "backwards" morality could be in the face of something like this. A printout and a few photographs, and he'd have them by the balls, or closest equivalent thereof. Now, Sinclair didn't usually go for blackmail. It was too labor-intensive for him, and too unreliable. But there were times when having the better bargaining chip made all the difference.

No, there was only one person who could really be called anonymous in the Narcosis Club, and that was him - the man behind the curtain. And yes, he loved it. He loved just sitting there and flipping through the cameras, watching, guessing at who was behind this mask or that, chuckling at some of the odder displays of hedonism.

Like... like that one, for instance. He flipped back to a display he'd just passed, took a closer look. The woman... was that who he thought she was? He squinted at the screen, tried to get a clear look at her mask - and really, why didn't people think to wear different masks if they were trying to stay completely anonymous? It was just another detail that simply didn't seem to occur to them.

But no, her back was to him; he couldn't see clearly enough to tell if it was the mask that he remembered, the green and purple one with the odd little appendages on the sides. But he got a clear enough look at the man - a middle-aged businessman with a full golden mask, decorated with chains along the sides, already stripped to his undershirt and shorts. Sinclair didn't know who he was, of course, but he had a very good guess - something to look into at a later date, he promised himself, if certain ventures began to go sour.

The woman sat down beside the man, and... why, yes, Sinclair thought, amused. Yes, it was her. This mysterious businessman was in for a real surprise, he thought, laughing. He had to see this.

It started all at once, of course. With her, it usually did. He wondered which of the companies had brewed the particular gene cocktail that had inspired her transformations, or what possible use they had thought it would have. Or maybe it was a custom job, for the no-longer-young lady. Maybe it wasn't meant to have any use at all, besides this - besides the sudden, strange lengthening of her arms, or the growths that began to erupt from her body, long and muscular and lined with suckers -

Oh, what he wouldn't have given for audio at that moment, to go with the video! But no, there would have been far too much background noise for that anyway, he thought as the man began to recoil. Not that it did him any good - she had already caught him with her tentacle-arms, was beginning to caress him, all up and down his body, the tentacles growing longer by the second and starting to invade places where such things had little right to be.

And the man was enjoying it, too. They always did, after the initial horror wore off. This wasn't the first time he'd watched her work her magic. He didn't bother to watch from beginning to end, since it was always the same, anyway. Struggling against her would turn into squirming as she started to caress his manhood, and then back to struggling again for a bit as one of the other tentacles wormed its way behind... but never for long, and he'd start flushing and moving with her and enjoying it, screaming bloody murder until the two were finally finished... it was so dull. Or at least, it was to him - he had no doubt that if he could have posted advertisements for the club, an image of the tentacle lady coupling with one of the uninitiated would have made a perfect poster. But that wasn't a possibility, and most likely never would be, so he would let the cameras deal with the minutiae. He'd worry about them later, if it became necessary.

He had already flipped away, surveying his works with the magnanimous ease of a presiding god. There was a great deal of debauchery to see, after all - a great deal of business having been done, people trading away hard money for fleeting pleasures. So much of his business was built on fleeting pleasures. He might not understand most of them himself, but he was smart enough to take advantage of them when he could.

Half the surface world would've thought Rapture was going to Hell anyway, if they'd ever heard about the place. Might as well make it official.

---

They continue to hound me about Narcosis.

I have never answered them, of course. Instead I challenge them with a question of my own. Why, I ask, do people wish to know about these dens of sin? Why are they the talk of the town, instead of the dozens of other enterprizes that exist and thrive here, free of the demands of the surface? But no - these people would rather wallow in filth than be enlightened. And to think that I was the one that asked them here!

Sleeping has become... difficult, of late. Diane has began clamoring for a vacation. No, I tell her - there is no rest for me in rest. I must... rededicate myself to my cause. I must not be distracted by these... these... damned displays. I must... I must...

[Crashing sounds, as if some metallic objects were hurled against a wall, followed closely by the sounds of shouting from a distance.]

Damn those decadent fantasies and filthy pleasures! Damn them! Damn them all!

- Andrew Ryan's personal journals, July 1955.