Authors Note: Hello! This is my little alternate universe fanfiction drabble that spiralled out of control and is now getting quite long. It centres primarily around two original characters taking on a co-operative testing role, with their own stories entirely separated from the original Portal/Portal2 canon, but with cameos from some familiar faces and voices, all set in the very familiar Aperture Laboratories.

It has previously been available on its tumblrblog, lets-continue-testing, and I thought it might be nice to share it here as well. It can be followed there, and there's more information as well as some other related material. I promise to keep my authors notes to the bare minimum, but I will admit in this introduction that the first few chapters are a little bit slow, as I had never intended to get so wrapped up in the characters and story they had to tell. Every chapter has a musical title, because I'm overly fond of such things, but knowing or listening to the songs isn't pivotal to enjoyment of the story.

Thank you very much for stopping by, and welcome to the story!

-1-

track one

Recycled Air The Postal Service

I watch the patchwork farms' slow fade into the ocean's arms
And from here they can't see me stare / Calm down, release your cares
The stale taste of recycled air

Time was something of an abstract construct now-a-days. Or now-a-whenever, as it were, being that days had become too hard to keep track of somewhere long ago. She'd been informed as much, of course, how hours and weeks passed confusingly dragging themselves reluctantly through simulated unrelenting daylight and synthetic vapours and a vague, distant memory of a sun that was warm and would set every now and then to give your eyes a rest.

As if in some sympathy for the concept, her third eye blinked slowly, scrapingly, giving every impression of lethargy despite the fact that it had never known sleep. It was just another one of those odd notions, falling by the wayside, seeming more archaic and more useless as time crawled ever on at whatever imperceptible and unmeasurable rate it chose in the halogen.

Continue testing.

Cube, button, velocity, faith plate, thermal discouragement beam; that ever sought after golden glowing tick by the doorway, friendly, bright, the colour of-of-of- and the hiss of air as the huge metal drew away from a job well done.

Sometimes, if she played it right, she could stand by the doorway as it slid away. If she was really lucky, in that brief moment where two rooms collided and their atmospheres merged in the space where the door had been, she'd be caught in the draft, that brief rush of cool air on her cheeks and in her hair, and something that was almost, nearly, a decent parody of fresh.

Continue testing.

She still liked the windows. They were few, and far between of course, and probably put there intentionally. Nothing was unintentional down here; everything neat and nicely controlled by Her and an overgrown room couldn't have snuck through the cracks just because it was beyond the frosted glass. Could it?

It was a certain flight of fancy, but the areas looked so untamed and so wild and true that a small, confused part of her liked to think of them as free. Then again, freedom was like sleep, another one of those archaic and useless terms that was starting to give way to leave more processing room for the puzzles, for buttons, for testing.

"Do you like it?" came the voice, sudden and abrupt and all-enveloping, but not so unfamiliar that it required any physical response anymore. [once she might have flinched]. Her palm on the textured glass was relaying messages up to her central nervous system nicely as she stood patiently; rough, cool, that ever allusive and nagging sensation of something crisp, fresh, something more.

"That one is called a 'tree'. Do you know what that is? Just in case you don't remember, it's the big, close-by one with all the leaves at the top."

Something more. Did she remember? No, not quite, not quite a memory. Something lost a long, long time ago. But the tree was familiar none the less, with its long brown leg that would have taken several good steps to get all the way around, and its tiny moving parts at the top. Leaves.

Yes, leaves. All three of her visual inputs moved to focus on the ground, the large blue one in the middle of her torso giving a small click of resistance as it rolled within its metal casing and viewed the cracked tiles at the base of the tree. Leaves. They fell off periodically, for some reason, and piled on the floor; brown and rotting and, somehow, just as she'd expected to see them.

Continue testing.

This chamber was wrong. Echoingly, eerily, wrong.

There was no foreseeable solution. She had tried everything. She had jumped, fallen, carried, flown right to the top on the velocity of a twenty foot drop and still no solution.

No matter what she tried, how she placed portals, threw cubes in vain at a second distant button or spent what seemed like quite long periods of that elusive concept of time in stasis, consulting her problem solving applications for all she was worth, no answer had presented itself.

But there was something. A memory of the answer.

Something taller than herself, quick moving, feet side by side and four four! of them, all tff-tff-tff along grated catwalks. Another voice, a voice that wasn't the Voice, full of theories and physics and problem solving together, and a laugh somewhere between a lilt and a synthesized skip as the clap of their hands meeting echoed along behind them, down the growing string of their successfully completed chambers.

Friendly, and bright; something the familiar colour of the Tick of Success.

And there was something more that she remembered now, standing here by the red switch she'd pushed hundreds of times in the hopes of finding a cube that would make it onto the distant floor button without her needing to manually take it there, as that was the resounding great problem of this chamber.

Red; searing and bright and hot, an echo of pain and the clatter of bullets. Fear, and agony, searing through whatever awful receptors controlled such a sensation. And worse still, a scream, somewhere between a lilt and a synthesized screech.

She backed slowly from the switch, staring at the unrelenting doorway on the other side of the room with its offending blue crosses, and longed for ticks the colour of eyes, eyes that were golden and friendly and bright before they were shattered and grey.

Vaguely aware of the Voice communicating with her, probably chastising, she let her legs sink from underneath her until she had slid down the wall of the small, high alcove, and tuned out of her external audio processors to listen instead to the sudden yell of realization that had been hidden inside, hidden somewhere down past the gasping respiratory system installed in her chest that dragged desperately at the dry, recycled air of the facility. Hidden somewhere behind the blue mechanical eye that whirled and blinked rapidly, panic-stricken with memory, with realization, conveying an emotion missing from her gritted jaw and frozen face.

Some chambers weren't supposed to be solved alone.