Lock Box Gnomes

* See also Contraband
* See also Object
* See also Splicers
* See also BioShock_Game_Elements
* See also Corpses_Everywhere
* See also Vita-Chamber
==AKA Corpse Gnomes==
Lootboxes and Strange phenomenon seen (or not seen) in the Solo/DLC game(s) :
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Those 'Lockbox' Thingees :
Are there some mysterious little gnomes that drag corpses away, yet leave the useful possessions behind in these small matal boxes ?? And then once you take all the goodies from the Lockbox, they take those boxes away as well ?? Maybe the bodies get hauled away to Vita-Chambers to be reconstituted ??? That would explain why there seems to be an endless supply of Splicers when you hang around a level long enough. It is as if the bodies are pulled into the ground ( I'm sure some kind of ADAM/Plasmid related explanation can be made ). Even Big Daddies and Big_Sisters get this treatment. 
Might 'those scientists' have actually found a use for the 'Little Brothers', and this is their fate (do they look like those little goons in the movie "Phantasm") ???? Makes you think ...
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Stuff Just Thrown Away :
It was amazing how much Booze and Tobacco items were left laying around in the various Solo games. In such a disrupted ( and likely well pick-over ) place/setting, shouldn't such things all be long gone ??? Maybe they had a sufficiently adverse affect on Splicers for them to not want them -- Though it barely has any negative effect on you. But then, that might be recklessly comparing YOU to the Splicers, who all had to live there 'a whole lot longer' than the short time YOU were around. ( A Genetic-distortion maimed throat, lungs, stomach and bowels might make all those goodies poisonous/uncomfortable to the average Splicer. )
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For Infinite BS it was noticed. There are so many comments by Player-Reviewers about the seemingly odd 'bin-diving' activity ( What I call "Manic_Magpie" - That constant 'grabbing of stuff' which you do to find Ammo, Money, and such ). Money apparently is just thrown away into Garbage Cans for some reason in Columbia which is not yet chaotic death-filled ruins, or having near-worthless money ( AND there you don't have insane Splicers to blame it on ).
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Lock Box Loot Boxes and Corpses  ( WHAT FUN !!! )  :
The mysterious reason that Loot Boxes from dissolved Splicer Corpses eventually disappear :
If you stick around long enough on a level, killing repeated spawns of Splicers, you eventually hit some limit where the corpses shift into a Loot Box ( a item with simpler rendering geometry ). Eventually you hit another limit of total Objects, which then causes those Loot Boxes to also disappear. Corpses also disappear when the Re-Spawning Splicers they come from cycle again.   In that situation, I've seen Corpses almost immediately shift into a Loot Box.
Who or What drags the Corpses off and leaves a Lock Box/Loot Box ? ( and the Splicer is soon seen alive again ... )
Who also takes a Loot Box away after its laid around long enough ?
There MUST thus be some Loot Box Gnomes who carry out this activity. ( Or should they also be called "Corpse Gnomes" ?? )
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Consider the Corpses Disappear as Well :
Well, that would be the Corpse Gnomes at work. Someone has to haul them all back to those Vita-Chambers to keep the Splicer supply constant.
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I have (as King Jack, or Baron Delta, or even Sir Sigma) while occupying and flourishing on harvested loot from continuing waves of respawned Splicers, built huge piles of Loot Boxes to celebrate MY Ruling that Level ( Another Choice they don't tell you about : is Never Finishing the Game ... ).
The Loot Boxes generally don't disappear when empty. That would have been smart (for the game program) to have happen to free-up Object memory/rendering resources sooner. They seem to have figured that they needed these 'graphically simpler' (low load) boxes to be recycled, but then maybe never tested any Player staying around on one level as long as I did ( I did that when I surveyed the game Levels for details for my Maps ).
BONUS - If you don't take everything out of a Corpse ( when you are at a limit for Cash/Ammo or Spider Splicer Hearts, etc ... ), it often, when transitioning to its 'Loot Box' object, will have the loot renewed (full reload) for the Loot Box's contents.
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The Lock-Box Gnomes ( possibly the mysterious "Little Brothers" ? )  were likely an offshoot of an Experimental Project which had Splicer bodies delivered to 'reclamation points' ( so Little Sisters did not have to go out on the 'Mean Streets' ).  
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Hmmmm - Splicers are insane, so do you expect sane stories/rumors from them ??   Well, it sounds a little more plausible than a body 'Quantum Teleporting' on 'Traumatic Death' ( It might have been more believable if there ever was a remote monitoring device you had to carry with you -- Maybe there was an affiliated Plasmid required ... ?? ).   
The Corpse Gnomes (besides being furtive by nature) could have a variation of the Teleport Plasmid  -- a 'Psi' type Mind-Clouder, which protects them AND explains why only mere glimpses are ever seen of them at work -- Like when they leave those Lock Boxes behind where there once was a Corpse you recently killed -  Nice of them to leave the stuff, when they could be trading the stuff to Splicers or Big Daddies, or whomever ... (( Or they have a terrible Stink noone wants to get close to as a defensive measure ??? Besides they get people "Resurrected", so are seen as a good thing to leave alone ... ))
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Little Brothers - Ideas :
Having these 'in the game' would need some different mechanism, else it is just recombining/lumping more of the same Little Sister game stuff/elements/effects. Perhaps 'recycled' into Big Daddies ?? ( Jack's fast grow wasn't created JUST for Fontaine's "Ace In The Hole" gambit. )
Time period would be likely when Fontaine's Orphanages, trying to NOT sound 'weird', had to take children of both sexes ( also what about females OUTSIDE the normal Little Sister age grouping ??? )   It would look very suspicious if so narrow an acceptance criteria existed, and Ryan or others would have 'No Problem' denouncing them as 'Shady' in Rapture's Press ... (( Never quite explained ... ))
And NOW what to do with the children who don't qualify/'workout' as a Slug-Host ?  If they have to be warehoused at Fontaine's expense, he probably wouldn't want to pay for that.   Child Prostitutes is getting a bit dodgy for the game to mention ( Sander Cohen involvement in BaSx might hint such ... ).  Experimentation ( talk versus in-game representation ) ??  Other uses ?  Workhouse farm labor ? Use them as Biological Chemical factories of other kinds ? ( Tonics that make a human body produce serums and medicines ??? )  That mystery ingredient in Beef-E ??  
 "Why children take so long to grow ? They eat and drink like pig and give nothing back. Must find way to accelerate process." - Yi Suchong  ?? 
So Suchong found his 'way' ( He did with Jack, didn't he ?? )
People would notice their disappearance/misuse, and Reporters would eventually find out and spread the word - Fontaine would be lynched.  The initial Little Sisters, before their use in 'gathering', could demonstratively be shown to be : 'Being Taken Care Of' ( maybe their eyes didn't glow much in normal lighting ).
Later the truth was known. But when the need for ADAM became an Emergency ( required to stabilize some significant proportion of the population ), there was better acceptance for 'Little Sisterhood' to "Save the City".
In any case, so many Little Sisters already existed to fall into Ryan's and the City's hands. It is not clear if Ryan actually ever authorized Fontaine Futuristics to take/use any more 'Orphans', OR whether the kidnappings were the work of criminals who set up their own operations OR shady ex-employees of Fontaine's making their Production Numbers look good to get that yearly bonus, OR Atlas running his own ADAM generators. 
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Back to 'Little Brothers -- Sounds Like Potential for a Nice Splicer Roleplay Scenario :
"Leave it to Little Brother""Leave it to Beaver" a late-50s TV show
Unwanted "Little Brothers" running around as a Gang, and you Roleplaying 'The Fagin'Child crime manipulating character in Charles Dickens' novel "Oliver Twist". and coordinate their movements and tactics  -- And more varied Missions of Mugging Splicers, Bribing Big Daddies, Stealing stuff, simple maze-solving ( with 'In the Dark' Mode through tight passages, vents, gratings, sewers and such ), Running away with crafty diversions when things get 'too hot' ...  Cannibalism might be hinted at  - All things 'feral' kids would have to do to have survived in what Fontaine/Atlas turned Rapture into.
Some nice potential as a Mini-Game, with a bit of Player ingenuity and creativity ...  Heck nobody makes any money making Apps these days, so they might as well make them for this MMORPG ... 
As the Loot Box Gnomes]] mentioned above ...
Players in the MMORPG might run into more than a few of them, and would have a mandate from the City to capture them for 'Curing'.
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!! Idea !! : About How Your Body Gets Back To That Vita-Chamber ... ( You wonder what ever happened to the 'Little Brothers' ... )
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In the MMORPG, There Wont Be Bodies 'Turning Into Lock Boxes' : 
For one thing, Splicers will be harder to kill ( and fights will be a bit more involved, plus they will likely run away more ), as well as you will be interested in keeping them alive to be 'Cured' ( though you can still loot their stuff ).
The Game Engine ( and target hardware, whenever this MMORPG eventually happens ) will allow for many more human figures ( generally the most complicated rendered Assets in the game ) to be shown simultaneously ( look at Infinite that promises you a dozen enemies attacking you at once ... ). In the MMORPG, there won't be the endless respawns that might cause piles of bodies.
"But I'm not quite dead ! " - Incapacitated Splicers can be resuscitated ( preferably after immobilizing and restraining them securely ), and even dead Splicers have some research/medical/ADAM-recovery value ( It may not be a cakewalk carrying them all the way back to civilization though ). Splicers may often drag off their comrades for some 'healing' and 'resuscitation'.
'Dead' Players will similarly continue to exist, as there is no Perma-DeathWhen a player is killed that is - they are done - Game Over and need to start a new character -- Just some difficult 'splaining' to do by the game maker/designer to justify 'en-livening' dead Player characters. We don't have those convenient BS1/BS2 Vita-Chamber machines everywhere to fix 'dead' Players.
Perma-death might be an interesting idea, but for a character advancement/resource developmental game (particularly MMORPGs) they just don't make sense ( and you rarely see a workable solution even in Solo games ).
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Lockboxes -- In the MMORPG, That'll Be Gone :
Bodies/corpses are Objects, and we are going for more realism here.  Maybe Splicers still don't significantly deteriorate (as corpses) because of ADAM side-effects ( some catalytic regeneration ? ).   Smaller 'body counts' in the MMORPG game ... fewer to pile up ( Previous games, they had to make the bodies disappear to not overload their scene Rendering Object counts. )
You can happen upon the scene of some other Player's or NPC's 'adventuring', but *Look !* they forgot to haul the corpse back to the recycling center for ADAM repatriation.  " 'Lucky You' can gets the 50 clams - Just need to go get the wheelbarrow ... "
Half the fun will be : Going through a dead Splicers/Corpses pockets to see what goodies they might have ( after dragging the body back to a 'safe place' where you can do that at your leisure. )   The Vita-Chambers mostly stopped working years previous, so those rectangular 'corpse' markers just don't get placed any more.
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