Buried at the bottom of the sea wouldn't be anyone's first expectations if they had woken up from a massive hangover. Being drunk and hungover seemed a fitting touch for certain ponies - but like life itself - it can get tedious and become more of a chore rather than a simple pleasure to end the night off.
Good thing he took the job when he did - otherwise he would have killed himself hours ago.
If the contractor who hired him hadn't already done it for him, that is.
That was when Tatano Ocvro awoke to the slight ring circling around his throbbing head. A pony who came from the depths of poverty and destruction in Equestria. He barely could acknowledge what was around him, the blow to the head had been crushing enough to make his brain feel bruised of the effects. He really needed sleep, and keeping down on the ground felt more perfect than getting up to face his opponent.
He continued to take deep breaths while establishing his next line of attack, as he presumed that his contractor was above him and waiting for him to make a move. He placed his hooves on his forehead and rubbed it softly while keeping his eyes away from the glaring light above him. To make his situation all the less stressful, he turned over to face the side of the floor and let the light shine on the side of his head instead: Until he noticed something suspicious about this scenario. Why was he on a floor? When he was struck down by his assailant he was on the dirt ground. Not a wooden floor, but a dirty ground filled with dirt, and nothing but dirt. He could feel his presence slightly provoked by an object that was obviously in front of him. From what it looked like, without opening his eyes he assumed it must have been a dresser, or a large bag, or maybe something out of the ordinary like a cache of weapons. Now he was just being greedy with himself. He was afraid to open his eyes just in-case it didn't appear to be what he wanted. But what did he want he wondered? There wasn't anything he would like more than to have another night of whiskey spliced up with other drinks like scotch, black tooth, JD, something to take the force of the punch that was currently making his head blister with intense pain.
He took a long, but slow deep breath, his lung exhaling the oxygen from his body felt thinner than air. He opened his eyes to find a dead body sitting beside him.
He screamed and backed away, rolling over before stopping beside an opened chest filled with dollar bills and cigarettes. His throat nearly chocked him out when he made that scream, as he suddenly coughed loudly and tried restraining himself by beating on his chest with his hoof. His breathing settled, and he felt okay for now. He looked and the body was still there with a meat-hook lodged into the ponies brain. It was a female; her dress torn; ripped; and mangled by the mutation of her body most notably around her knee and foot. It looked deformed, like a birth defect magnified by several counts of C.A.T scans. It was grotesque.
He wrestled himself up, clearly delirious. He must be, right? How could he not? There's no one there, there shouldn't be anyone there; but there is. And right now he needs to know on how to get out of here.
The situation from the start hasn't sit well with his stomach. The deal felt raunchy from the beginning, and not only it smelled danger, but it spelled trouble. And trouble was the one thing he wouldn't have not wanted anymore than right now..
He took a step back, then a step forward, then another step back before taking another forward. He was trying to feel grounded, and the light above him was still not helping. Finding his ground, he looked at this astonishing blueness to the room he was in. When he looked back, his jaw slowly dropped to the floor. The images he was seeing almost clouded the pain in his head entirely. He felt...small, that's for sure. Considering there was no way to explain this, but only hours previously he was on land and making some shady deal outside with a man who clearly rubbed him the wrong way. Now he was here - in the ocean - underwater. And something in his gut made him suddenly realize that he was long ways from home. From Equestria.
The windows were cut off by about an inch and a half before beginning again another foot and a quarter. Rinse and repeat it did for over half the room, but he couldn't care less as he looked into the deep blue. Suddenly a goblin shark appeared behind the glass and soon enough, Tatano was walking backwards as this beast gained range within his scope. Another fish moseyed along across the window and within mili-seconds it was snatched up by the demonic beast as it's jaw literally snapped out and dug it's razor sharp teeth into the poor helpless fish before it was swallowed whole. Only drips of blood rippled through the ocean blue and dissipated into the cold darkness. The shark soon swam off and never returned.
Tatano's face expression hardly broke a centimeter from it's current complexion. It was stone-cold frightened of what he just witnessed - not just the fish getting eaten alive without realizing it did - but how the shark looked in general was going to be a constant image stuck in his mind on repeat, forever.
He sighed and began to walk around the room to look around some more. While there was a dead pony in the room, he still had to find a way out of this place. Because he wasn't going to be charged for murdering a mare he never knew.. And he didn't know what polices this place abided under. Was it a communist? A libertarian nation? A democratic society? A rebellious cult? All these things he had to consider, otherwise he would just be walking through landmine after landmine. He glanced at these posters around the room, all sporting ads and what-not. One thing that did catch his eye was a banner hanging above the windowsills that said: "Rise, Rapture, Rise" and under it: "Free from all parasites!" Okay, now he felt like he was dealing with a loony-bin bunch, or at least egotistical ponies bent on making sure their fortunes were always in constant check.
He began to scavenge the room for potential supplies just in case he would be here on a longer-term basis; he found a bottle of meterolt, an alcoholic beverage, and he shoved that puppy down into an empty brown bag coated with dry blood on the sides. Then, he proceeded throughout the room and found a chocolate bar, which he chucked also before finding a box of ammunition, there were only two shotgun shells, but it was better than nothing. He found a pipe bent upwards on the bottom, but it didn't matter since he needed a weapon. Beside it was a dead dog with it's arm snapped and entrails leaking out of his sliced open stomach. He was mortified by what he saw, but it was definitely less significant than what he has been witnessing in the past fifteen minutes. Across the dog, just up ahead at the furthest corner of the room there was a chamber of some kind emitting this teal-colored light: A sign embedded on it said: "Vital-Chamber", he was puzzled by what that meant but chose not to question his own logic with technology clearly out of his domain. He retracted from it and continued on outside the room, the door was busted open with the bottom somewhat still hanging to it's hinges. He walked and began to take a look throughout the place, noticing more and more ads up on the walls mentioning many things he had no knowledge of: Plasmids, Fontaine Futuristics, Sinclair Solutions, Adonis Luxury Resort, Neptunes Bounty. All laced together in this Art-Deco fashion that seemed so 'in' with the folks in this place. He still wondered what Rapture meant to him, the word seemed to roll off his tongue faster than scotch tickling his throat.
Tatano seemed intrigued at all what was happening, even if he could shove this down to the bottom of his heart, he still found all this quite amusing.
He could see that some ruckus must have happened in this hallway before leading to the room he was just in. The wall along the right side of the room was chipped with some parts that made it past the wooden layer and you could see the valve pipes exposed. He looked above and saw the ceiling broken through right in the middle, the wooden floor facing downwards like something fell through; and the floor above it looked even more damaged than the one he was in. He ventured further and that was when he turned right and saw a bathysphere across at the end of the long hallway leading into another open room. That's when he read words scrawled across the painted walls written in a violent fashion: "The plague is among us, we have not been saved, but sentenced to death..." and below he looked at another dead pony, this time a man. His tux ripped open and two bolts pierced his chest, pinning him to the wall. A note was stuck on him, the first words Tatano could decipher were his own name, and so he trotted to the dead man and pulled the bolt that stabbed his right nipple and took the letter quickly as he could.
He fumbled to read it, making sure any wear or tear wasn't going to damage the letter. It read: "You wanted a place, Tatano, you wanted to get out and make sure you came out as a fortunate man. I just gave you it. This place is now yours because I am sure no one will miss it, since no one even knows about it. It's what I could do for you since you will complete the assignment as promised. Whether or not you get out of there alive is up to your hooves now. Because I won't be there when you get the contract done. I know the ponies are here, they were trapped here also, an informant informed me about these events so I decided to kill two birds with one stone. Get it? This place, Rapture I think it's called is yours now. It has been up for a while now I believe, and I wouldn't know more than what you probably know right now. I made sure you found this before anyone else did because I locked the bathysphere to that exact location and there is no way anyone would be able to get out without the code currently written on your wrist. You, however, aren't exactly in a stable place right now. There was some major damage done when the civil war started and by a mishap, I accidentally sent you down to one of the worsened parts of town. I don't know what's been happening down there, but it's something far more demented I wouldn't even give to my worst enemy. If this troubles you, I am only going to say that there are a lot of bodies, and a lot of weapons. That should leave you to decide your own fate. Goodbye now, and kill those ponies for me would you?"
He continued to read the letter over and over again, his chest started to hurt and he could feel his head starting to come down with an enormous headache. Was he truly stuck down here? In Rapture? A place that's sounded more like a bad itch than a simple rub could fix?
He opened the buttoned clips on his bag that he kept draped over his shoulder and put the letter in quickly before taking a final look around the area he was in. He peeled his sleeves back and looked on his wrist to see the numbers; 0-9-5-3. And from there he began to walk straight.
