Chell stared.
Around her, the blank, soulless eyes of the dead stared at her. She was surrounded by bodies – the past failures of old Test Subjects. She didn't know how, but every corpse in the room was looking at her, every head turned towards her position, and was she imagining it? Or, as she moved, did she really see them moving, turning their faces towards her so that she couldn't escape their gaze?
Shuddering, she turned away, even as she did feeling their eyes on her back. There was no way that she could escape them, but she could at least ignore them for a while. Until she got the job done.
She closed her eyes, organising her thoughts. The air was eerily silent. All she could hear was her own footsteps, and the gentle hum of the Emancipation Grill from across the room. Yet, every time she moved, she could swear that she heard something else. Another answering footstep. A small breath behind her ear. She whipped around, but there was nobody there. Nobody living, anyway. Just those blank, dead eyes, mocking her, reminding her of what was at stake.
Orange portal. Blue portal. One more Test Chamber solved, and not for the first time. As she left the room, she stumbled over the arm of another corpse. It was coming from a small window – an Aperture, she thought, smiling wryly – beneath the floor. The woman had died trapped in a small room, clamouring to get out; a horrible way to go. She had been testing, but she'd placed the portals wrong and found herself unable to get out. Stuck, with no way to turn, she had been in there for a long time. Chell recoiled backwards, leaving the arm where it lay, and steadied herself, making her way down the narrow passage.
It took steel to get through the Testing Facility now. Everywhere she looked, there was somebody looking back at her. Their faces unnerved her; she could see their last thoughts etched across them, their mouths open in a final cry, their various wounds screaming the ways that they had died.
Bullet wounds. Toxic liquid. Toxic gas. Crushers. Portal accidents. Getting trapped. Cubes to the head. Turrets to the head. Lasers. Falling awkwardly and losing a Long Fall Boot. Even vaporisation, but that didn't leave remains. So many ways for a person to die. It was funny, she had never realised how insane this place was before.
She had long ago lost track of how long she had spent in the facility. Days, definitely. Weeks, probably. Months? Years, even? She didn't know, and had no way to. But she was beginning to realise that she didn't care. Why did it matter? All that mattered were the tests, and getting through them. That was all she could focus on.
But it was so hard.
Many times, she had failed in her testing. Each time, she just crawled to her feet, started over again. She carried on because she must, but every day the pressure was bearing down on her, and she had no way to escape from it but to throw everything she had back into testing. It was driving her insane.
Of course, every time she crawled back up, it became worse. The bodies. The blood. The omnipresent smell of death. With every new start it became harder to bear.
She had to carry on. There was no other way.
Marching into the next test chamber, she was hit (as always) by the stench of decay. This room was the worst. She hadn't really seen beyond it before, and it was almost completely full of bodies. The worst deaths. A row of crushers stared at her from across the room, its sharp teeth gleaming under the artificial lights. Beneath it, a mess of red, one that she was refusing to look at for fear of vomiting. She couldn't waste any time now.
Chell surveyed the room with a keen eye, although it was increasingly familiar to her. There was a button, which when pressed would dispense a Discouragement Redirection Cube. Lasers down a small path, stretching down from the ceiling, and a receiver on the wall near the button. And opposite that receiver were the crushers.
She walked over to the button, slamming her hand down on it with an increasing frustration. A Cube dropped down next to her, and she targeted it with the Portal Gun, lifting it into the air. It hovered in front of her portal gun as if waiting for her to react. She closed her eyes, exhaling slightly. This was going to be hard.
Instead of moving, she took a moment to absorb her surroundings – after all, she was in no hurry, and she needed to get her timing exactly right. Looking down at her feet, she noted that the floor around the button and in the area where she was standing was spotless, if a little scorched, but if she took three steps backwards it was a different story. She didn't want to take any steps backwards, towards that mangled mess. She didn't really want to move at all. But she had to. So she did.
Glancing up at the ceiling, she located the next available laser and redirected it into the receiver, moving backwards as it made its progress across the ceiling. Behind her, she heard the sound of the crushers slamming into the ceiling. The hallway was clear. She had to stay with this. She had only one shot.
Step. Step. Chell moved backwards, her eyes rigidly focused forwards. With three steps, she heard something other than the reassuring clink of the Long Fall Boots on the metal floor; something much more unsavoury. It was the crunching sound of boot on bone. She was walking on the remains of the dead.
As long as she kept still and kept up with the moving laser, the crushers would stay up. But the receiver was small, and the hallway was long. It was entirely possible that she would wobble, or be too slow, and the crushers would bear down on her. Everything had to be done carefully with a determined focus. The price for failure was too high, too high by far.
At the last count, it would take her one and a half minutes and fifty three careful steps to clear the hallway of crushers. The timing needed to be exactly right, of course. If not, the consequences would be dire.
Her foot caught on…something, she didn't want to look down and see what. She stumbled forwards, eyes wild with fear. The portal gun dipped. The cube lurched downwards. In that split second, she was almost sure that she was going to die. Terrified, Chell quickly brought up her arm to right it, crawling backwards to stay in line with the laser. There was no way she could stand up quickly enough, and without disturbing the laser. So she balanced, one arm holding up the portal gun, the other on the floor, steadying her. She still couldn't look down.
Seconds stretched into hours. She spent a lifetime crawling down that hall.
She could feel her heart thudding in her chest. One more slip, and it would be over. Her hand was slippery from god-knows-what on the floor beneath her. She would sort that out later.
Fifty agonising seconds later, the hallway was cleared. She dropped her arm to her side, and watched the crushers smash into the ground, once again covering the blood and bones that littered the pathway. She sat back, inspecting her left hand. It was red with blood, a few bloody handprints marking the floor where she had been crawling.
Her hand was grimy anyway, but the blood made it worse. Dark red, a colour not seen anywhere else in the labs. A stark contrast to the whites, blues and oranges that dominated her life.
Scrambling to her feet, Chell placed the Redirection Cube on a button in the corner of the room. The exit door opened softly, and she stepped through. One test chamber down, but her trial was far from over.
The next one had turrets. Test Chamber – ten? eleven? The numbers had long ago been scratched from the sign. And, honestly, she didn't care.
There were less dead in this room.
Most of them lay face down on the floor, their abandoned bodies riddled with bullet holes. If she had looked, she would have counted four of them, their orange Aperture jumpsuits shredded, exposing decomposing flesh. But she wasn't looking at them. She was looking at the turrets.
Three of them. One facing the left wall from the right side of the room, one
facing the right from the left, the last at an angle, pointing almost directly at her. The turrets were on platforms with a small section of portal surface above each – the trick was finding another stretch where she could get a Cube on them. Said Cube was in the other corner of the room, but the nearest portal surfaces to that still quite a way away. She would have to run to get the Cube without getting hit, and then find out a way to take out the turrets. Quickly. Basically, she was in trouble.
Gut instincts. Don't think, just run. Get the cube. Go forwards. That was her plan. She could portal quite easily to the Cube; her only problem would be what to do when she had it. She had to think fast.
Taking a deep breath, she ran into the room. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the nearest turret turn, facing her. Beneath her was a normal floor, but the wall was made of portal surfaces, as was the wall next to the Cube. Quickly, she fired two portals and launched herself through them, grabbing the Cube as she flew past. Behind her, the sound of bullets echoed. Wiping her brow, she got to her feet. Okay. Stage one complete. Now for the hard part.
Above the left turret, a portal surface gleamed at her, invitingly. She could drop the Cube there, but there was no way she could retrieve it – apart from a madcap dash across the room, but she knew for a fact that it would not end well. Basically, she was stuck.
The sound of bullets was closer and closer. She closed her eyes, crouching down next to a wall that she knew wouldn't cover her for long. Think. Fast. She had a portal surface, and a good way of taking out one turret. It was the other two that would kill her. How could she survive that? It looked like certain death.
A bullet flew over her head, cutting off her train of thought. She needed to move, as quickly as possible. Biting her lip, she shot a portal above the turret on the left, dropping the Cube through. Watching, she saw it fall, displacing the turret with a small clink.
Success!
But her problems were far from over. Bullets from the remaining turrets were still flying over her head, and getting closer. She had seconds to make a choice.
With a deep breath, she followed the Cube through her portal.
Time seemed to slow down. She reached for the Cube, retrieving it, looking around for where she should go. The red lines that marked the turrets' vision turned, bathing her body in a red light. She made to jump to the floor, to dodge, to do something! But it was too late.
"There you are."
Her eyes widened as the bullets sped towards her. She had no time to duck. Pain erupted in her lower body. Blood, dark and red, spread across her glaringly orange jumpsuit. Her body fell to the floor with a clatter.
Alone in the Testing Chamber, Chell died.
But that was not the end.
"Hello and, again, welcome to the Aperture Science Computer-Aided Enrichment Center."
Pain. A white light. The world looks fuzzy. She sits up, rubbing her head, checking her jumpsuit for bloodstains, bullet holes. As usual, there is nothing there. The pain fades, as if healing; a forgotten wound from a long-lost dream. She sits up slowly, not even listening to GLaDOS' usual rant. Why should she? It never changes; same old spiel about how she is helping all of humanity in her epic plight, blah blah blah shut up already.
It didn't change the fact that she was alive. Still. Forever.
Chell had no idea how her particular brand of immortality even worked. All she knew was that whenever she died, she woke up again in her Relaxation Vault, unharmed and at the start of her trial, ready to fight until she won. Leaving behind one crucial thing – the body.
Every time she died, she returned to the start, and she would honestly believe it was time travel if it weren't for that crucial fact. The bodies that littered the Test Chambers were her own. She glanced at the wall outside the Vault, where a blue portal had just opened up. Emblazoned on the wall were thirty three long scratch marks, methodically carved into the panels with a fragment of tile that she had found after her third death. Kneeling in front of it, she began to etch another notch into the wall.
Thirty four deaths. To think, she was almost getting blasé about dying. She remembered the first time she had died (Test Chamber Two, crushed by a spike plate). Her life had almost flashed before her eyes; she may have even cried out in terror. And then? She woke up.
At first, she hadn't accepted it – why was she still here? Was she back in time? Had she been dreaming? She was almost convinced that it had all been a dream, and that now she had awoken she was testing for real.
But if it was a dream, why did she know what was coming?
It was only when she saw her own remains lying under that crusher that she realised the truth. She had died, and returned from the grave. Somehow, she had managed it.
She hadn't believed it, despite the evidence lying right there in front of her. That couldn't be her body. That was just a dream, it hadn't really happened – it couldn't have happened.
Death two, Test Chamber Four. Turrets. Again, she came back. Again, she woke up in the Relaxation Vault, hearing GLaDOS talk about the exact same things.
After the third death (Test Chamber Four, Aperture Science High Energy Pellet.) she had learned to accept it. Not just accept it, but catalogue it; a sharp piece of tile led to three long scratches outside the Relaxation Vault. Three deaths.
Her next life was spent trying to escape. Climbing for windows or launching herself towards vents. GLaDOS had told her not to, of course, but she wasn't going to listen. In her mind, it was clear. The only way she was going to survive was if she got out.
Death number four. Unexpected rocket turret to the head. She died listening to GLaDOS' taunts. As soon as she woke up, she realised that escape wasn't going to work. Too many variables. Inside her head, something changed. The only way to escape was to win – to get through all of the tests towards the promised cake.
As soon as the portal opened, she made sure to mark the new death on the wall. Four times she had died, and she remembered every one.
Gradually, the number grew. She learned from her mistakes. Suddenly, she wasn't dying in the earlier chambers, and the mere fact that she had once was a great embarrassment. She was getting so used to this. Almost as if she was destined to stay inside the labs forever.
But, of course, that was impossible. She was going to escape. She had to.
And here she was, facing a new session. Aperture Science, try number thirty five. Maybe this time it would be the last.
It had to be the last.
Chell would make it the last.
She had been in these labs for too long. Maybe this time she would get to the end, and face whatever waited there. Maybe this time she would escape for good, get out of the labs and never look back. Maybe. She told herself that it was a definite, and she had certain escape in front of her. She had gotten so far last time! If only she could get further, just a little bit further...
Portal gun in hand, Chell strode out through the portal, towards Test Chamber One.
Author's Note:This came about as a vague musing one day - what if, every time Chell died, she did come back to life, a la the respawning in a game? With a few tweaks to make it a bit more fanfic worthy, well, here it is. I hope you enjoyed it! Please leave as much criticism as you feel necessary.
Disclaimer: I don't own Portal, Chell or anything connected with it. That belongs to Valve. I'm just a nerd on the internet.