Sitting upon her snowy perch underneath the stars, the settled-in ex-Vagabond of the greater Detroit metro area mused upon the last few months, living with the man who was happily gazing up at the sky from his hand-built security dome.
"Can you see the outlines of Capricorn from here?" He shouted up to her. "The snow's throwing me off, but it's pretty amazing! And Aquarius is slowly coming in; aren't you excited?"
She let him get excited; it was one of the few times in the last month that he had been roaming about in her peripheral, and despite her apprehensions about having any attachment to him, he was friendly and amusing. Well, this personality was.
The man, whose name was Nathan, had a lot of voices in his head that would occasionally pilot him about like a ship; this particular one enjoyed stargazing, and had even outlined a rough calendar for them based on their positions. Today was supposedly a day in early January, in fact. Not knowing the year was throwing him off a bit.
This particular personality was named 'Girard', and his gift for being able to explain things she couldn't understand was amazing; it seemed like it was his job or something. He was the one who told her about the other little voices in Nathan's head; their names, their personas, everything. However, each one had to be experienced, and in the first few months since Nathan had arrived, Vagabond was certain she had met them all.
One of the other voices that lived in that head of Nathan's was a shy little individual who went by the nickname of 'Curi'. Both Girard and Nathan had spoken about the apparently feminine persona as being rather fluent in sign language, but until the day she actually came face to face with the jumpy persona, Vagabond didn't realize how fluent she was.
It was often that whenever Curi was about, the two would spend the duration of the persona's stay setting up a system of signs for easier communication. It was incredibly useful, and oftentimes very calming to be around.
Curi's nature was shy and frail, like an animate porcelain doll. Preferring to simply sip tea and talk about her best friend 'Spacey' (that Vagabond came to find out was Curi's somewhat appropriate nickname for Girard), Curi's bubbly and polite mannerisms seemed almost out of place as they were acted out by Nathan's tall and gangly frame and vocals. Curi, however, was much more appreciated than the…other female.
It was a grim autumn morning, the rain pouring down heavily, when vagabond first met the persona known only as 'Morality'.
Sitting with Nathan's arms crossed, a stern look painted on his face, Vagabond had nearly taken this persona to be a rather cranky Nathan, but it was only when Mortality began to speak that Vagabond knew it wasn't him.
Speaking barely above a whisper, the persona began to question her motives and actions in such an unnerving fashion that she simply couldn't stand to reply.
"Why do you push Nathan away? 'If you know something about him that we do not, why don't you tell him? Do you know how heavily it weighs on his mind, the fact that a large chunk of his memory is missing and that you may know something he doesn't? Not that he isn't perfect, either. What I know of what he's done makes him a morally deprived and dangerously unlucky person, at best. But that doesn't forgive you from not coming clean. Even if you have a pile of damning evidence against him, you should come clean. It will only make the tension you exude towards him dissipate…or is it something so horrifying that you fear it would kill him to know?"
She had had enough of the impromptu breakfast trial. She had simply picked up her bowl of oatmeal and walked out.
"So it's what I thought. I won't tell him we had this talk…"
Vagabond was happy that one hadn't bothered her more than that one time.
Two of the personalities seemed to be conjoined at the hip, interestingly enough. "Craig" and "Intel" both loved to hog up the library; the former spent time keeping the library in order, with the occasional bout of stacking up books (mostly baking books and novels) in the center of the library, while the latter sat for their duration, simply sitting and reading everything that had been set out for them.
She hadn't noticed at first that they were different personalities altogether until she queried Girard about them; apparently their main duty, when not living in the library, was to assist Nathan in repairing the massive damage in Nathan's head that had occurred during his last trip through Aperture Laboratories' interior.
She shuddered to think what had happened, but it was clear that it was a doozy. She hadn't asked, but she had slowly pieced a few facts together.
She began distracting herself with the more adventurous personas.
One of the more frequent personas was named "Rick"; it seemed to be his life's passion to engage with the noisy little action-packed digital test initiatives, explore unknown territory, and to make her feel uncomfortable to be around him using every inappropriate innuendo one could make. He'd been fairly useful in clearing out some of the nearby hazard areas, using little more than hand-built baited traps, trusty ingenuity, and a heavy chain link and wrench when things got too close for comfort.
She appreciated 'Rick's help with the additional stockpile of headhopper corpses for various uses, but she really didn't like him, so much.
She had tried out one of his testing initiatives, "Pitfall", while he was away. It was pretty tough, but she finally beat it a week ago. He seemed rather impressed with her.
She still didn't like him hitting on her. She could do without.
The most wily of all the alternate personas...he was quite the interesting one.
He was known only by the nickname 'Red Eye', evoking a natural thought of a creature filled with rage. Spending a good portion of his time in the boiler room, staring at the fire and tending to it, he embarked only to engage in incredibly dangerous activities.
Working at an almost primal level of operation, communicating in growls and hisses, Vagabond had initially assessed that Nathan had completely broken down on a mental level, and kept her distance.
Unlike the others, who seemed to pilot Nathan for short bursts of time, Red Eye stuck around for days on end, lurking around, hissing at the headhoppers in the vitrified areas. Once he realized he could merely pry the safety boards off and lunge headlong into the rooms to slaughter them barehandedly, the nightmare began.
He had numerous close calls as he charged in, howling and grabbing the nearest one to pummel it until it no longer moved. He had even gotten dangerously close to being bitten by the terrifying, black hissing ones, dodging it with a quick sidestep and bludgeoning it with its compatriot that he was already holding.
She kept finding him in rooms filled with dead headhoppers, torn apart by bites and claw marks, panting for air in a worn-down manner, and she kept having to patch him up and try to keep him pinned down.
He didn't quite like it.
When he wasn't getting Nathan's body torn up, he tended to raid the kitchen, swinging open fridge and cabinet doors, uttering tiny growls and whimpers, seemingly unable to comprehend packages and their functions. She was worried about this one; although not the sweetest, he was certainly the top contender for most child-like.
He became overly emotional quite often; screaming and kicking his feet when he was logically stumped quickly shifted to soul-crushing depression and sob fests and back to frustration and the decision to completely destroy whatever it was that was stumping him.
...He wasn't allowed in the kitchen without her being there. In fact, the boiler room was the only place he was allowed to be in. She had certainly taught him this after the dozenth time he had done something wildly illogical.
Most nights these days, Red Eye kept to himself, having cleared out all the vitrified rooms on the first floor was solace enough for him, she supposed. The mangled headhopper corpses he left behind were barely useful, but the overall safety of the fort was much better since he had emerged.
She couldn't complain, she just wished he'd be more careful about it. Although Red Eye had a keen knowledge of how Nathan's body moved, and what was the most efficient way to turn it into a sleek killing machine, he seemed to have forgotten that Nathan was not an actual machine, and was still slowly recovering from the laundry list of injuries sustained in his trip through Aperture.
...Nathan...
Nathan himself seemed to be the rarest of all the personas; whenever he was conscious, he sealed himself away in the electronics wing, keeping much to himself.
At least, that's how it was now.
The first two months, he was somewhat sociable, much to her chagrin, gaining information about how he compiled sudden injuries (which all happened to be from Red Eye's purge of the headhoppers) and how everything was going.
After all his...incidents, he had become a bit of a recluse, spending all his spare time when he was piloting himself just building more and more things to help with everyday events.
Baited death traps with radio relays to announce they had caught something, probe-bots to inspect and maintain buildings that were red-marked, and even a mini-vacuum-cleaner on wheels to keep the floors from being cluttered with debris.
The incidents had become less and less frequent lately; the moments she would find him standing, staring out into space with those lost eyes, or having fallen in a frigid position and collapsed to the floor in a heap, or even curled up in a sleeping position, eyes wide open, yet completely unresponsive.
She was scared of them at first; he had been like this when she first found him, and the Auto Doc didn't seem to think there was anything wrong with him, but she had seen him sleeping normally, and not spaced out as he was...she hadn't a clue what was wrong with him.
She looked through a medical book, a dictionary at the ready to help with any tough words, and tried to see what was wrong with him. The closest thing she could find at first was a thing called 'stupor', where people would just become completely unresponsive and sometimes would act like they were asleep, even if they weren't. It had to do with another thing called 'catatonia', which was related to...something she had trouble pronouncing that had a lot to do with a person hallucinating, being anti-social, and rambling incoherently.
Sounded about right.
Looking to see if there was anything she could do, a medicine she could give him of some sort, or that she could get the Auto Doc to give him, all the options sounded worse as she went down the line. Any and all hopes of a permanent cure had terrible side effects, up to and including outright death.
Nothing sounded good.
The best she could think of was just remaining on guard near him, to assure he didn't croak during one of these...'stupor' incidents.
He had a tendency to have one of the weirder of the symptoms, "waxy flexibility". She could sit him in any position, provided that it was a position he could realistically stay in, and he would merely do so.
She could think of some utterly childish ways to exploit it, but she usually maintained the standard of closing his eyelids shut and moving him into a more comfortable sleeping position.
As much as she didn't want to take care of him like she was, she knew if he died, she'd be all alone again. Given her options being to let him live or let him die, she couldn't bring herself to the level of letting him die, especially letting him die uncomfortably.
Despite what Morality said, Nathan wasn't a terribly horrific person...towards her, anyways. Everybody made mistakes; it wasn't her job to hold anything against him that he hadn't done to her.
...Not that there weren't things he hadn't done to her, if he could remember any of it...
No, nothing would be held against him...for now. The job was to make sure he got back to good health. Then she could hate him all she wanted.
Health was clearly not a priority to him like it was to her, however. Lately, Nathan had barricaded himself in that Electronics wing, building himself a little workaholic's paradise, forgetting the key essentials of keeping oneself healthy and in decent shape.
Foregoing food and hygiene in lieu of assembling little robots to do every little task seemed...completely unlike the person she had observed on the little memory disks he had brought with him; little plastic squares she could stick into the computer, filled with videos containing the memories of a single person, backed up onto a machine for some sinister and terrifying purpose, most likely. His memories were on one of those disks, up to a certain point. Considering how gruesomely they had ended, she was rather glad they stopped when they did.
Aperture was truly a place of devilish scientists, doing anything they could to get ahead. She couldn't blame him for falling into the same habits as the others in the end, nor could she hold it completely against him that they fell into it against him either.
She couldn't force herself to try and think of any more of that nonsense. Today was a nice, snow-filled day. All the headhoppers had retreated into the still-vitrified buildings now, allowing them to safely observe the stars.
Speaking of which...
She hadn't heard much from him during her musings; not that she hadn't been blocking him out.
She looked down, and noticed that he was curled up in a ball on the floor of the dome. She began climbing down her secure perch and walked over, taking a good look at him.
He appeared to be asleep; 'Girard' enjoyed sleeping outside, and with the bulletproof glass dome Nathan had haphazardly reconstructed from scraps in one of the industrial buildings Rick had reclaimed, it was one of the safest areas in the whole city to sleep in. With its circulating air system and breech-proof entryway, it was the perfect spot for a last stand against headhoppers, should a swarm of them successfully attempt to claim the building. All it needed was a more secure source of food, and one could theoretically live in it permanently.
She knocked on the glass to confirm her assessment, and he shot up, disoriented.
"Ah! What's going...oh, hi. Are you okay?"
She stifled a laugh. Girard was quite the amusing and innocent fellow, unlike many of the other male personas.
[Are you going to sleep?] She signed. The delay in a response told her that Curi was busy translating to him.
"Yeah, I'm tired."
[Are you coming inside?]
"No, I'm gonna sleep out here, if that's okay. Not a lot of people get to look at snowflakes and stars in a dome like this, you know." He gave a warm smile.
[Okay. I'm going to bed. Goodnight.]
"Goodnight to you too, Vagabond!" With a big smile and a wave goodbye to each other, the two ended their joint observation of the snowy night sky, and Vagabond retreated to her room for the night.
Upon the many items in her room, the one thing that bothered her the most was the Aperture Science device known as a 'Personality Core'; the bright blue one she possessed had been reduced to scrap metal by some unknown party (she could tell from the signs of severe damage that appeared to have been buffed up and welded shoddily), remade into a floodlight by Nathan she presumed, and then hastily smashed and turned into an axe holder by herself. Her prized axe's head sat cradled in the massive hole she had cleaved into it in a fit of rage.
It sat to remind her of the horrors she had gone through previously. Tonight it faced the wall, turned a full 180 degrees from its normal position.
She didn't want to have it staring at her tonight.