If you haven't played Portal yet, the ending's about to be totally spoiled for you. Consider this your last warning...
"Once again, the Enrichment Center offers its most sincere apologies on the occasion of this unsolvable test environment."
"Oh, shut up," the Riddler muttered peevishly, instinctively ducking backward as a chittering head-sized ball of light zipped past him. He raised the gun and aimed it carefully at the walls. Thump. Thump. Two glimmering portals exploded out of the end of the portal device, intercepting the energy ball and redirecting it into the nearby holding chamber.
When no further balls of death came hurtling out of nowhere, he sighed and seated himself on the edge of his platform, feet dangling over the massive drop to the floor.
Edward Nygma was by no means a sheltered person. In the years that he'd operated as the Riddler, he'd run across things that were totally outside a normal person's field of experience. Once, he'd stolen a machine that could reduce an entire city block to finely ground sand with the touch of a button. He'd spent the next two weeks on a desperate quest to get away before the government caught up with him - and if most people couldn't fathom being him, they certainly couldn't understand that feeling of total horror when the SWAT team, bristling with weaponry, exploded through the wall of his hideout with enough pyrotechnics to supply an average KISS concert. Needless to say, Eddie was familiar with danger in a way that ordinary people weren't.
Normally, though, he wasn't the one picking his way through a building full of deathtraps. He still had no idea how he'd come to be trapped in Aperture Science's Enrichment Center, but he was seriously wishing that he could go back in time and do whatever it took to avoid coming here.
The tests had been easy enough at first. When the only things in the room were a heavy cube and a button helpfully labeled with a picture of the cube, it was blindingly obvious what had to be done to open the door. Likewise, when portals had come into play, it was simple to maneuver through them and solve whatever trivial little puzzle there was to solve.
The puzzles were still easy - intellectually, that is. The test-givers had obviously grown bored with traditional testing. No, they wanted to make it interesting...which was why Eddie was currently staring down at a floor that swirled with nauseating patterns of oily red, green, and yellow sludge.
The computer had warned him not to touch it. Well, actually, she had warned him that any contact with the floor would result in an unsatisfactory mark on his testing record, followed by death, but hopefully that was just exaggeration. In the spirit of scientific inquiry, Eddie gnawed a fingernail loose and flicked it to the floor below. It instantly disappeared as it made contact with the oily sludge - not sinking below the surface, but rather, dissolving with an audible hiss in a froth of bubbles.
"No one will blame you for giving up. In fact, quitting at this point is a perfectly reasonable response," the computer said smoothly.
"Didn't I say to shut up?" Eddie snapped. "You may as well stop telling me that this is impossible, because it's not. All I have to do is jump down to that platform there to get enough momentum to fling myself through the portals across the room and land at the door." He paused, glancing at the target platform far below him. The disgusting slop on the floor rippled gently as it made contact with the platform's edges. "It's possible," he said, trying to convince himself as much as the computer.
He set his portals up carefully, doing his best to sight flight-lines across the room so that he wouldn't end up flying into a bit of blank wall. The time had come. He balanced carefully, bare toes gripping the edge of the cold metal platform, and prepared to leap into the blue portal far below.
"Quit now, and cake will be served immediately," the computer purred.
With a startled twitch, Eddie lost his balance and hurtled toward the floor. "No, no, no," he wailed, kicking wildly as he fell. At the very last moment, he managed to catch one hand on the end of the portal and yank himself through. He sailed, kicking and screaming, through the air of the chamber. As he spun, the doorway swung in and out of his line of vision. Oh please oh please oh please...His back screamed at him as it impacted on the floor in the little open hallway leading to the elevator. He tumbled wildly for a few feet and came to a shuddering, gasping halt halfway through the blue particle field that stretched over the exit.
The speakers clicked into life. "Fantastic. You remained resolute and resourceful in an atmosphere of extreme pessimism."
Eddie pushed himself into a sitting position. "When this test is over," he growled softly, "I'm going to find your CPU and break it into a million tiny pieces. Then I'm going to light all the pieces on fire and throw the ashes into a vat of hydrofluoric acid. Do you hear me, you miserable heap of scrap metal?"
The computer didn't respond. It stayed silent as he slowly lurched to his feet, muttering about his future plans for the computer's demise and contemplating aloud what sort of ham-fisted amateurs had designed a computer that was so blazingly stupid that the word had yet to be invented to accurately describe it.
He limped into the elevator and leaned back against the soft white padding on the walls. As always, the elevator rumbled into motion and stopped shortly afterward, opening its doors to reveal nothing but a featureless grey hallway. Eddie adjusted his grip on the portal device and stepped inside, ducking through the prickly particle field with a grimace of distaste.
The computer started speaking with an oddly smug overtone to her synthesized voice. "Due to mandatory scheduled maintenence, the appropriate chamber for this testing sequence is currently unavailable. It has been replaced with a live-fire course designed for military androids. The Enrichment Center apologizes for the inconvenience, and wishes you the best of luck." The door at the end of the hallway clanked open.
Live-fire? Well, in theory, the pellets were sort of live-fire, weren't they? Eddie gingerly stepped into the chamber beyond the door. A large, squid-like robot, propped up on three spindly legs, intently watched the hallway leading out of the little glass-walled room.
A sweet little voice chirped "I see you!" The glass in front of him cracked as another robot beyond it sprayed bullets determinedly in his direction. He scrambled backward with a massive kangaroo bounce into the safety of the hallway.
The gunfire cut off abruptly. "Are you still there?" the robot asked wistfully.
Eddie looked into the lens of the nearest camera. "Look, if this is because I called you an Aibo with delusions of grandeur, I'm sorry." He poked his head into the room again. Rattatattatattatatta. "I'm really sorry," he said, with his best sorrowful expression, the one that never failed to convince parole boards.
The computer pointedly stayed silent. With one long, steadying breath, Eddie crept into the chamber.
The Riddler was used to being shot at. Gotham cops, fellow rogues - even occasional armed bystanders had taken the occasional potshot at him as he liberated their valuables.
He wasn't used to people aiming, though. Nearly everyone who had ever raised a gun to him had intended to scare him, or to wing him so that he couldn't run away. In his entire life, no one had once threatened to actually kill him when they shot at him. The little white gun-turrets with the adorable voices and the damnably accurate aim were the first.
He had managed to take out twelve of them so far. Lucky number thirteen stood quietly in front of the exit, its red targeting laser drawing a straight line across the door like a finishing tape. He'd learned from the first that they had to be upright in order to shoot. When you knocked them over on their sides, they automatically shut down to prevent misfiring.
Not that it was particularly easy to knock them down, particularly when they were stationed in a square, each looking at another. That little arrangement had almost done him in, particularly since the fourth was craftily hidden in a corner. He'd managed to duck behind a stack of weighted storage cubes just in time, with nothing but a bullet-dented heelspring to mark his near-death.
The last turret lurked quietly in its spot. Eddie deftly slipped a portal behind it and laid the gun on the ground behind the turret. With a grunt of effort, he snatched the turret around the middle, locking the guns in the closed position, and hoisted it into the air. "Gotcha," he snarled in a rough mockery of its voice.
"Who are you?" it bleated back to him.
He didn't bother with an answer. Instead, he shoved the thing as hard as he could toward the particle field. The little robot whimpered as it disintegrated into powdery black ash.
"Well done, android," the computer congratulated coldly. "The Enrichment Center once again reminds you that Android Hell is a real place where you will be sent at the first sign of defiance."
Hell. Oh, god, that was it. He was in hell! He'd fallen off of a rooftop or gotten ripped apart by mutant lemurs or something, and now he was in hell, going through this maze of deathtraps until the end of time. It made sense. He was in hell to be tormented forever because he'd never beaten the Batman -
Stop it, he snarled at himself. You're not in hell, you're in a testing center, so just stop it and focus on the next test or you're not getting out of here alive! He snatched the portal gun up and trudged into the elevator. He'd never been particularly religious - in fact, he'd never really questioned the existence or absence of any god - but it was hard not to wish for the security of a watchful deity when everything around him seemed designed specifically to destroy him.
The elevator doors hummed open. The walls of the new hallway were steel-plated. He swallowed hard. Steel plating wouldn't accept portals, which generally meant that something even deadlier than usual lurked around the next corner. "You did hear me apologize earlier, right?" he said tentatively into the dim hallway.
He trod carefully down the hallway, heelsprings clicking gently on the steel plates that covered the floor. The tiny room at the end of the hall held...nothing. No turrets, no deadly floors, no high-energy pellets threatening to vaporize him.
He reflexively twitched backward as the computer spoke. "The Vital Apparatus Vent will deliver a Weighted Companion Cube in three, two, one." As promised, a grey cube tumbled out of a vent in the ceiling and thudded into the ground. Unlike the other cubes he'd encountered so far, this one had pale pink hearts stenciled onto each side of it. "This Weighted Companion Cube will accompany you through the test chamber. Please take care of it."
"Okay," he agreed. The computer said to take care of the cube, and the computer presumably had a large supply of turrets and energy pellets. If the computer said take care of a cube, then he damn well was going to take care of a cube. Provided that the cube didn't split apart to reveal a center made of radioactive scorpions, he was already inclined to like it.
He tucked the portal gun under one arm and hoisted the cube into the air. It was lighter than the storage cubes, that was certain. With the cube in front of him, he trotted into the nearest hallway.
Wham. A high-energy pellet rebounded off of the cube and headed back the way it came. Eddie yelped and skittered after it, trying to duck beneath the emitter before the pellet came his way again. Wham. Wham. Wham-wham-wham! He ducked to the ground, panting, as the pellet zipped back down the hallway.
There was a black scorch mark marring one of the pink hearts on the cube. Guiltily, under the eye of the camera, Eddie unrolled a bit of his sleeve and carefully polished it off.
The computer's flat mechanical voice echoed off of the bare walls. "The symptoms most commonly produced by Enrichment Center testing are superstition, perceiving inanimate objects as alive, and hallucinations. The Enrichment Center reminds you that the Weighted Companion Cube will never threaten to stab you and, in fact, cannot speak."
Eddie threw himself backward, frantically scooting away as he waited for the cube to bristle with knives. Nothing happened. But no, she'd said it would never threaten to stab him, which meant that it was probably still fully capable of opening him up like a fish about to be cleaned.
The small pink hearts twinkled as a pair of energy pellets shot by overhead. He eased a heelspring close to the cube and gave it a hearty kick.
The heavy cube rocked gently on its bottom. Eddie's spring-loaded leg, however, catapulted back, and his kneecap connected firmly with his chest. "Molten tidal hall," he swore anagrammatically as both his patella and sternum reminded him that they didn't appreciate being banged into one another.
The camera lens whirred softly as it zoomed in on him. Dammit! He was supposed to take care of the cube, not kick it! He hurriedly scooted back to its side and dusted it off. Oh, please don't let her break out the turrets because of this..."I'm sorry," he said to the camera. "Really. I didn't mean to..."
He paused. Perceiving inanimate objects as alive...
There were times to act normal, and then there were times to act crazy. Generally, Eddie didn't need a crazy act, since what he did was perfectly rational. Granted, he got a bit...excited at times, but that was just high spirits. When you were facing down a squadron of cops, or a fellow rogue, though, sometimes it paid to augment your personality with a little wild unpredictability.
And, if he got lucky, maybe they wouldn't continue testing someone who was clearly insane. With that in mind, he flung his arms around the cube and embraced it with all the tearful self-recrimination of an actress on the set of All My Tragedies. "I'm so sorry," he gushed, managing to squeeze a tear or two out. (The throbbing pain in his chest helped on that score.) "It was an accident! I'd never hurt you..."
And so, with the Weighted Companion Cube lovingly snuggled in his arms, the Riddler set out to win his way through the next round of puzzles. When high-energy pellets ricocheted off of the cube, he wailed apologies and remorsefully wiped the soot from the face of his dear little friend. When he had to use the cube as a stepstool, he made sure to thank it profusely and give it hugs underneath the watchful eye of the camera. And, when he discovered a secret room lurking in the camera's blind spot, he made certain to pull the cube in after him.
The secret room was grim and gloomy. A single lightbulb in the ceiling sent dirty beige light over the walls and the broken cameras littering the floor. Eddie, cradling the cube, kicked a few aside to clear some space and reverently set the cube down on the cold metal floor. A pyramid of empty bean cans clattered to the floor as he poked at them with a heelspring.
Who had been here last? Whoever it was had had a lot of spare time and art supplies. He ran idle fingers over the wall, tracing words hastily scrawled with a fat black marker. "Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me...the cube had food, and maybe ammo, and immortality." The mysterious wall-scrawling Dickenson-altering bean-eater had also taken the time to carefully replace each face in the wall posters with that of a gleaming Companion Cube, torn out from pieces of glossy paper that littered the floor in balls and scraps.
Eddie picked up a few of them and flattened them out. "In response to this news, Aperture began developing the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System (GLaDOS), an artificially intelligent research assistant and disk oper-" So, the computer's name was GLaDOS, hmm? Good to know. He examined another scrap, this time printed on a page bearing an Aperture Science letterhead. "...continued success of Aperture Science far into the fast-approaching distant past. Tier 1: The Heimlich Counter-Manuever - A reliable technique for interrupting the life-saving Heimlich Maneuver. Tier 2: The Take-A-Wish Founda-"
Madness. If acting crazy didn't get him out of the test procedure, it just might land him a job in management. He hefted the cube again and turned to leave, running his eyes one last time over a poem written in the glaring red of an open wound. "Not in cruelty, not in wrath, the reaper came today...An angel visited this gray path, and took the cube away." Eddie turned and ducked through the portal, leaving the tiny painting of a winged, haloed Companion Cube alone on its dull grey wall.
The only task that remained was to leap onto a series of high platforms, and anyone who had ever been chased by Batman over Gotham's rooftops would find that challenge to be refreshingly familiar. Eddie hopped his way into the exit hall, congratulating himself on his skills and audibly murmuring thanks to the cube as he passed a camera.
"You did it!" GLaDOS said as he rested the cube on a large red button. A door clanked open at the end of the hall. "The Weighted Companion Cube certainly brought you good luck. However, it cannot accompany you for the rest of the test and, unfortunately, must be euthanized. Please escort your Companion Cube to the Aperture Science Emergency Intelligence Incinerator."
Method actors will tell you that if you pretend to be something for long enough, you can become that something. Psychiatrists, in their turn, will tell you that emotions are heightened in dangerous situations, sparking unlikely love affairs and long-term infatuations. In this particular case, Eddie had pretended to love the cube for so long that he'd begun to believe it himself, and the mortal danger around every corner had twisted his emotions accordingly.
"You told me to take care of it!" he protested, placing a protective hand on it. "I'm not going to incinerate it!"
"Testing cannot continue until your companion cube has been incinerated."
This had to be some kind of a trick. The cube had stood up to at least ten hits from the high-energy pellets. Why would fire have any effect on it? He left the cube on the button and examined what lay behind the newly-opened door. A small button rested on top of a waist-high pillar. When he pressed it, he could see a round hatchway open up in a small alcove. Heat distorted the air above it. He crept out and examined the bulbous hatchway. The fire inside was so hot that he felt his eyebrows crisp when he glanced inside. After a few seconds, the hatchway slammed shut.
"Although the euthanizing process is remarkably painful, 8 out of 10 Aperture Science engineers believe that the companion cube is most likely incapable of feeling much pain."
But it wasn't alive! She'd said that perceiving it as alive was a side effect of...unless she meant that after he spent enough time with it, he would realize that it really was alive! How else could it feel pain? "I won't do it," he said firmly.
"The companion cube cannot continue through the testing. State and local statutory regulations prohibit it from simply remaining here, alone and companionless. You must euthanize it."
Eddie glared impotently at the floor, where a helpful sign told him in pictures that fire was inside - and that the Companion Cube's heart was breaking.
GLaDOS wasn't going to let him out until the cube was dead. If he refused, if he sat in this little room with the cube and waited for her to break, he'd starve to death. She wasn't going to be persuaded by anything other than the death of the cube. Computers couldn't be manipulated unless you had a hand on the keyboard, and that wasn't really an option here.
And, in the end, whose life was more important? His own, or that of a cube which may or may not be alive in some weird, unexplained fashion? He was a damn sight more important than any cube!
So, regretfully, Eddie re-opened the hatchway and retrieved the cube, hurrying backward down the hallway until he felt the heat of the fire baking his back. "Goodbye," he whispered, letting the cube drop silently into the midst of the raging flames.
The hatchway shut as the exit door jerked open. "You euthanised your faithful companion cube more quickly than any test subject on record," GLaDOS informed him coldly. "Congratulations."
With his head down, and his arms feeling strangely empty, Eddie slouched into the elevator and slumped against the padded walls. There were two more test chambers to go - at least, that's what the wall-signs had told him. What could she possibly do that would be worse than what he'd already lived through?
Eddie staggered into the elevator at the end of the eighteenth chamber. A variety of new bruises decorated the exposed skin on his arms and legs. Tiny holes in the orange fabric of his coverall indicated that a splash of something corrosive had come dangerously close to drenching him.
Test chamber 18 had been an ordeal that Eddie would forever relive in his nightmares - that is, if he survived long enough to have any. If something had been dangerous in the previous tests, it was there in room 18, along with twelve of its buddies. Not only that, but he'd been expected to throw himself through midair not once, not twice, but again and again as that reddish-green slop bubbled menacingly below him.
The elevator doors slammed open on Chamber 19. "Welcome to the final test. When you are done, you will drop the device in the Equipment Recovery Annex. Enrichment Center regulations require both hands to be empty before any cake..." The lights dimmed and flickered as GLaDOS chittered "cakecakecakecaaaake-" The lights returned to normal.
Screw the cake. He was keeping the portal gun. Eddie limped out of the elevator and into the test chamber.
The challenges were easy. Too easy. Suspiciously easy. He stood tensed on a moving platform, ready for turrets to pop out of the walls. Maybe the platform would start tilting. Maybe the ceiling would start to collapse.
Instead, as he wove through the last portal, nothing happened. The wall ahead bore a regular exit sign paired with a drawing of a slice of cake. Eddie tightened his grip on the portal gun, wondering if it was possible to shoot portals into people.
"Congratulations. The test is now over," GLaDOS said triumphantly. The reason for her triumph became all too clear as the platform rounded a corner and began to descend into an enormous, blisteringly hot firepit. "All Aperture technologies remain safely operational up to 4000 degrees Kelvin. Rest assured that there is absolutely no chance of a dangerous equipment malfunction prior to your victory candescence. Thank you for participating in this Aperture Science computer-aided enrichment activity. Goodbye."
"Very funny," he called to the computer. "Really. Clever." He'd just come from a room where he had to hurl himself off of a fifty-foot tall platform toward a pool of liquid death while insufferably adorable gun turrets did their best to turn him into something resembling a motheaten sweater. Was a little fire really supposed to scare him? It was the work of a moment to hop through a portal in the wall and reappear, unharmed, just past the fire in a recessed alcove.
"What are you doing? Stop it! I-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-..."
GLaDOS sounded...upset. She hadn't sounded like that before - in fact, she had congratulated him nearly every time that he'd narrowly evaded becoming a little red splat on the floor. All he'd done was bypass the fire...
She'd actually meant to kill him that time. No, that was stupid, you didn't kill your test subjects when the experiment was over! He walked to the very edge of his ledge, squinting down into the firepit. Just outside the reach of the fire was the scorched remains of a heelspring.
She'd tried to kill him.
The computer's voice whirred back into his hearing. "Weee are pleased that you made it through the final challenge where we pretended we were going to murder you. We are very very happy for your success. We are throwing a party in honor of your tremendous success. Place the device on the ground, then lie on your stomach with your arms at your sides. A party associate will arrive shortly to collect you for your party. Make no further attempt to leave the testing area. Assume the 'Party Escort Submission Position' or you will miss the party."
Right, because he loved partying with murderers. Well, actually, he'd had a great time on the last Fourth of July, when Harley Quinn had invited all the rogues to come and have fun with things that went boom...no! Focus! He had to get out of here before GLaDOS sent her minions to collect him.
A small, open-walled room full of machinery was barely visible in the gloom far above him. With a sigh of one resigned to his fate, Eddie popped a pair of portals into the wall and floor and prepared to fling himself deep into the heart of the building.
There were no cobwebs in the depths of the building. It was odd, because in every other respect, the place looked like it had been deserted decades ago. The catwalks and stairs that the employees must have used to get around had long ago rusted through and fallen apart. Even the ladders screwed into the filthy walls came apart in his hands.
Fortunately, he still had the portal gun. When he was faced with a challenge - for example, the pair of rapidly hammering pistons that filled the hallway in front of him - he merely shot a portal behind them and strolled safely through.
GLaDOS's voice rang out blindly into the dimly lit corridor. "Maybe you think you're helping yourself, but you're not. This isn't helping anyone. Someone is going to get badly hurt."
Eddie ignored her, focusing instead on the little trapdoor in front of him. Well, it was the trapdoor or nothing...he slid down and stood on it.
It gave way beneath his feet, spilling him onto the floor of one of the early test chambers. "Okay, the test is over now. You win! Go back to the recovery annex for your cake," GLaDOS urged.
He sauntered through the puzzle and peered into the empty elevator shaft. Well, she certainly wouldn't be sending him an elevator now...he shrugged and portaled himself down to the floor far below.
"Uh oh. Somebody cut the cake. I told them to wait for you, but they cut it anyway. There is still some left, if you hurry back."
If he ever made it back home, Eddie vowed, he would never eat another piece of cake ever again. Ever. He might even have to blow up a cake factory or two, just to get the point across. No. More. Cake! Or no, better yet, he'd take a video of himself eating an entire cake and mail it to GLaDOS. Revenge, as they said, would indeed be sweet.
He trotted through the twisting halls of Aperture Science's basement, avoiding pistons and the occasional misplaced turret as he searched for an exit. A door, a window...he'd be willing to wiggle through a ventilation shaft, if that's what it took to get out of this place.
As if someone had been listening, a door (helpfully labeled Main Floor Access) appeared at the end of the dim hallway. He scampered toward it, beaming, only to discover that it had a lock. Normally, locks wouldn't pose a problem for him - locks were, after all, only a kind of puzzle - but this particular lock was fundamentally Riddler-proof. It was electronic, which meant he needed a key-code to get through (and this, again, normally wouldn't pose a problem for him, since he knew a few handy tips to rewire the things). The main factor standing in his way was the electricity.
Rather, the lack of electricity. A powerless lock in a metal door meant that he wasn't getting through. He swore and slammed the side of his fist into the door before turning away and finding an alternate route.
GLaDOS spoke again, trying to find him in the camera-free warren of hallways. "Didn't we have some fun, though?" she asked wistfully. "Remember when the platform was sliding into the firepit and I said 'Goodbye!' and you were like 'NO WAY', and then I was all 'We pretended we were going to murder you'." She paused, as if expecting Eddie to chime in and agree that yeah, her almost killing him had been a super fun time and he wanted to do it again. When he didn't answer, the happiness ebbed from her voice. "That was great."
Ah! A door without a lock! Eddie let himself through into an office. Huge monitors scrolled gibberish (and, he was totally unsurprised to note, cake recipes) on the walls. Clipboards filled with information about various test subjects were stacked haphazardly on desks.
There was a large red button on a pillar by the observation window at the far end of the room. Eddie squinted into the darkness. The window led to an empty room, and beyond that was another office. Why had they needed to observe other office workers? He tapped the button.
A bit of the floor clanked open. A machine like a snake made out of spheres lurched out of the hole. And then, with a cheerful beep-beep-beep, the thing shot a rocket directly at Eddie. He flung an arm protectively over his face and skittered backward.
The window exploded in a spray of glass. Eddie ducked around the corner, stopping only when his shoulderblades connected with the door. He was okay. He was okay. He shook his head, sending little shards of broken glass flying like dandelion fluff. He was okay.
This was a dead end, though. He had to get to the other office. He gingerly stuck one hand around the corner. The machine's light blue laser glided softly over it. Beep-beep-beep! He jerked his hand backward as a rocket sailed past and exploded on the wall.
So, it shot where he had been, not where he was. He was going to have to run barefoot over broken glass into a room with a rocket-launching snake, get it to break the other window, run barefoot over that glass and hope there was a door on the other side before the snake-thing shot another rocket at him.
Well, he'd set Batman up with harder tasks in his time. And if Batman could do it...so could he. With his best Rambo expression tightening his lips, Eddie strode into the office to confront the rocket turret.
Rambo-Riddler's stoic bravery had lasted approximately three seconds when faced with the rocket turret. Eddie had managed to twitch out of the way of the rockets each time, once with a stunning hip-jerk that made him resemble a parenthesis for a brief moment accompanied with an embarrassingly falsetto yelp of horror.
Now he sprawled on the cold tile of the hallway beyond the turret, safely tucked behind two concrete walls. He had to be almost out of here. Office workers liked windows. There had to be a window somewhere...
"I'm not kidding now. Turn back or I will kill you."
I'm really scared, Eddie thought derisively. If she could have killed him, she would have done it by now. In defiance of all overbearing Disk Operating Systems with Genetic Lifeform components, he struggled to his feet and padded down the corridor.
GLaDOS didn't take it well. "I'm going to kill you, and all the cake is gone." He didn't dignify that with a response as he plodded along.
All the doors were locked and powered down. He grimaced as he tried the handles anyway. The only door left led to a glowing catwalk that connected this office with a large room suspended from the ceiling over an enormous drop.
He didn't want to go in there - he had a feeling he knew what was inside - but it was the only way out. With suddenly sweaty fingers wrapped around the portal device, he climbed the tiny staircase and clicked across the catwalk.
A particle field stretched over the end of the door. He darted through into a little anteroom that held a desk with a red phone, the cord of which had been roughly hacked in two, and another desk with a few disassembled computer parts. Beyond the anteroom, dangling from the ceiling in the middle of the room, was the roughly comma-shaped mass of metal that housed GLaDOS. She swayed gently inside the loop of monitors that circled her like the rings of Saturn.
"Well, you found me," she barked unpleasantly. "Was it worth it? Because, despite your violent behavior, the only thing you've managed to break so far is my heart."
And a few windows, and a cube tube, and a half-dozen ladders, Eddie added silently.
"Maybe you could settle for that, and we'll just call it a day," she continued flatly. "I guess we both know that isn't going to happen. You chose this path, now I have a surprise for you. Deploying surprise in five... four..."
Metal clicked and rattled as a basketball-sized sphere fell onto the ground. Eddie, not moving, examined it from where he stood. It had a glowing purple lens on the front of it in the middle of a pair of conveniently curved handles.
"Time out for a second. That wasn't supposed to happen. Do you see that thing that fell out of me? What is that? It's not the surprise... I've never seen it before."
Eddie shrugged silently.
"Never mind, it's a mystery I'll solve later, by myself, because you'll be dead."
Ah. Threats. He knew how to deal with threats - they were generally only used when people wouldn't (or couldn't) really hurt you. He approached the sphere, kicking it lightly with the tip of his heelspring. It obediently rolled away, coming to a halt after a few seconds.
"I wouldn't bother with that thing. My guess is that touching it will just make your life even worse somehow."
He'd begun this little adventure with listening to the computer. He'd tried not listening to it - that hadn't been a good idea - and he'd tried really listening to it - and that also hadn't been a good idea. The only logical way to deal with her was to ignore her.
"Do you think I'm trying to trick you with reverse psychology? I mean, seriously now. Have I lied to you? I mean, in this room? Trust me. Leave that thing alone."
"In that case," he said, "I'll take a closer look at it." He lifted the surprisingly light sphere in one hand, checking it over for pop-out weaponry or acid nozzles.
GLaDOS sounded irritated now. "Okay, fine, DO touch it. Pick it up, and just stuff it back into me." Eddie rotated the device, checking its back side. Again, nothing unusual - it looked like a harmless little metal sphere. "That thing is probably some kind of raw sewage container. Go ahead and rub your face all over it," GLaDOS snapped.
He wandered around, inspecting GLaDOS from his vantage point on the floor. "You're smaller than I thought you'd be," he remarked, idly tossing the sphere in one hand. His fingers didn't quite close on the handle and the sphere fell to the floor, rolling to a halt beside a very familiar-looking hatchway - a hatchway he'd last seen when she'd ordered him to burn his Companion Cube...
GLaDOS sounded a little panicked now. "Maybe you should marry that thing since you love it so much! Do you want to marry it? Well, I won't let you! How does that feel?"
Oh, yes. He was definitely on the right track if she was starting to get anxious. Now, where was the button to open the hatch...maybe in that little blast-shielded room over there? He trotted up the small, curving staircase. Here it was, the same little button-on-a-pillar that had operated the last incinerator...
"Are you even listening to me? I'll tell you what that thing isn't. It isn't yours, so leave it alone," GLaDOS ordered.
With a smirk on his face, he pressed the button. With a portal to his left, and a portal near the hatchway, he had just enough time to hop through and drop the sphere into the fiery embrace of the incinerator.
The room shook as an explosion cracked loudly underneath the floor. Sparks flew as the lights flickered. "You are kidding me!" GLaDOS gasped. "Did you just stuff that Aperture Science Thing We Don't Know What It Does into an Aperture Science Emergency Intelligence Incinerator? That has got to be the dumbest thing that- Whoa, Whoa, WHOAAA..." Her voice slowed and blurred as the massive assemblage of metal swung in alarmingly wide arcs.
Maybe he'd killed her. That would be fantastic.
A disturbingly psychotic chipmunk chuckle hissed out of the speakers. GLaDOS's voice, without a trace of panic or anxiety, purred "Good news. I figured out what that thing you just incinerated did. It was a Morality Core they installed after I flooded the enrichment center with a deadly neurotoxin to make me stop flooding the enrichment center with a deadly neurotoxin...so get comfortable while I warm up the neurotoxin emitters."
Sickly green toxin began to spray out of the walls as a turret-snake uncoiled itself from the floor directly below GLaDOS. Damndamndamn! Eddie thought, skipping sideways as the blue laser light trailed over him. Beep-beep-beep! Another explosion cracked noisily behind him as he scampered away.
"Huh. That core may have had some ancillary responsibilities. I can't shut off the turret defenses. Oh well. If you want my advice, you should just lie down in front of a rocket. Trust me. It will be a lot less painful than the neurotoxin."
He was probably going to die at this point. And if he was going to die...why not take GLaDOS with him? Surely he could get the turret to shoot at her...
The portals! He turned and zapped two portals into the wall, one at his height, one at hers. The turret beeped happily as it locked in on him. He threw himself to the side, ducking out of the way as the rocket zipped directly toward GLaDOS.
Crack. A second sphere, knocked loose with the force of the explosion, bounced free from a tangle of wires and came to rest on a series of pipes. "All right," GLaDOS sighed. "Keep doing whatever it is you think you're doing. Killing you and giving you good advice aren't mutually exclusive. The rocket really is the way to go."
"After you," he snarled, snatching the sphere and darting toward the button, setting up new portals as he ran.
"That thing you burnt up isn't important to me," GLaDOS drawled. "It's the fluid catalytic cracking unit. It made shoes for orphans. Nice job breaking it, hero."
The sphere in his arms, its yellow lens shining at his face, vibrated as he ran. "Where are we going?" it chirped brightly. "Oooh, what's wrong with your legs?"
"Shut up," he snapped.
"Oooh, that thing has numbers on it!" the sphere said delightedly. "Is that a gun?" He hit the button and skidded through the portals. "Do you smell something burning - AAAAAAAAAAAH!" the sphere screamed as he hurled it into the fire. The lights blinked out for a moment as another explosion shook the suspended room.
"OW! You think you're doing some damage?" GLaDOS snarled furiously. "Two plus two is t...t...t...ten. In base four, I'm fine!" she howled.
He could see at least two more spheres clinging to her like baby possums. The rocket launcher snaked its way upward out of the floor. A portal here, a portal here, and -
(to be continued)
Author's Note: What a perfect way to end the story. No? You want more? All right, fine. You wanted endings - I'll give you six of them, because if there's one thing I've learned from gaming, it's that alternate endings are always fun.
The information on the paper scraps was taken from Aperture Science dot com.