Hours had passed before Rick finally awoke. His eyes flickered open and he raised himself up off the ground, sitting up and peering around his new environment. He rubbed his eyes which were still adjusting and he clutched his head in agony. "I've had hangover's that felt better than this," he thought to himself as he rubbed his temples to try and relieve the pain. His eyes finally adjusted and noticed he was sitting in a claustrophobically small glass cell, with a toilet in the corner, and an odd looking table next to it. On top of the table was with an even odder looking semi-circular radio playing strange elevator music, and an Aperture Science Waiver waiting to be signed.
"W-W-What the fuck is this? A-Am I on hold or something?" Rick asked himself, taking the paper without reading it and folding it up numerous times until it formed a strong point. He stared up and flinched at the piercing florescent light in the cell, and noticed that the room outside the cell was nearly entirely pitch black, safe for the light which protruded from their prison. He then checked his wrist and found his watch was still there, which came as no surprise to him since the week before he had nano-fused it to his wrist and DNA. Using the pointed paper, he fiddled with the watch head until it flicked open revealing two tiny clear aerosol capsules each containing a strange blue gas. He took one and sprayed himself in the face and inhaled the blue cloud around him, suddenly feeling invigorated and ready for action. Annoyed at the music repeating on loop for what felt like the hundredth time, Rick grabbed the radio, ripped off the back panel, and started tugging at some components and making it silence its incessant jolly tune, then started mauling with the rest of the components to make some sort of make-shift device. The newfound silence was then broken by snoring and grumbling, as Rick noticed he shared his confinement with a sleeping Morty lying next to him.
Morty lay curled up with a slight smile on his face, occasionally making some incomprehensible noises and strange gestures. Eventually, he started to roll around with an even bigger smile and began to talk in his sleep.
"Jes…Jessi…..Jessica. Hey…Hey Jessica….want to be….my….lab partner," he mumbled to himself as he tossed and turned onto his side to face Rick. Rick rolled his eyes, tossed the radio aside and put his new device in his coat pocket.
"Morty!" he yelled taking the other capsule in hand and leaning over towards his grandson. As he was about to spray the capsule, Morty rolled over again onto his back, angering Rick, and extended his arms upwards and squeezing his hand in the air and drooling.
"D-Don't Worry…Jessica…we're all…..in our…..underwear…..in this class."
"Morty!" bellowed Rick, trying to swat Morty's arms away so he could get a decent angle to spray him with. Morty eventually rolled away from Rick again too engrossed by his dream.
"R-Really?...S-Sure I'd love to…touch them…..Jessica," said Morty, squeezing the air once more. Rick then gritted his teeth in irritation and pulled Morty up by his shirt, and gave him a solid slap across the face with his other hand.
"W-Wake up Morty! Y-Y-You little…. piece of shit!" Screamed Rick has he watched Morty's eyes spring open in horror, then dropped him back on the floor before standing up to stretch.
"Ow! W-What was that for Rick! Aww geez my head hurts really bad now." Grumbled Morty squeezing and rubbing his head in pain. He tried to stand up but couldn't keep his balance and stumbled over towards the table to sit down.
"That'll be the sleeping gas in your system Morty." Answered Rick, interrupting his stretch to crouch down near Morty. He sprayed Morty with the blue gas before continuing his stretch, a slight smile across his face as he listened to Morty cough and splutter.
"What the hell Rick! What was that for!?" Yelled Morty, before suddenly straightening up as his head and vision became clearer. "Oh…hey th-th-that stuff really did the trick, Rick. Now I feel great. What's in that stuff anyway?"
"I'm not going to try and explain it to you, Morty," answered Rick. "Y-y-you'll probably find some way of being disgusted or something. All you need to know is that it nullifies most disorienting toxins in your body, Morty. So you're welcome." He sneered.
Rick then closed his watch head and tried to peer through the dark room to find any sort of exit, when the light above them suddenly turned off, filling their cell with the darkness too. Morty trembled in the pitch black, stuttering and trying to form a sentence.
"Morty! Follow my voice, I've got a plan." Snapped Rick, gesturing to Morty to come to his position, before realising that neither of them could see anything. Morty sidled over to Rick, his knees shaking like branches in the wind.
"A-Alright Rick. W-W-W-W-What's the plan?"
"This." Explained Rick, as he grabbed Morty by the back, and cracked it ever so slightly, followed by cracking the back of his neck in the same manner. Morty let out one of his classic screams, but was unable to ask why, as Rick began to shake him up and down like a can of whipped cream. When he stopped, Morty was still stuttering and trying to form the question, but had become dizzier and unable to stand still. The question in Morty's mind quickly changed from just why to why, what the hell, what's going on and how, as his skin began to glow in dark (the classic colour) and fill their cell with light again. He clutched at his skin and his head in silence, unable to audibly vent all the things that were racing through his mind. "I-I-I forgot to tell you Morty, last week when we were camping on that Forest Planet, a parasitic alien glow worm got inside your mouth, a-a-and attached itself to you Morty." Said Rick, fumbling inside of his pocket for his flask but was unable to find it. Morty turned to him in astonishment, slightly calmer but still annoyed.
"What!?" he yelled.
"It's true Morty. It lays a Qu-Qu-Queen in the centre of your brain, and then spreads the remainder of its eggs around your Epidermis, Morty! Th-Then it just dies in your intestines. Pretty sad actually." He concluded Rick, placing his hands in his pockets and leaning on the glass panel, staring at the now blank bulb on the ceiling of the cell.
"A-Am I gonna die Rick!?"
"Relax Morty, You're going to be fine. The parasite laying its eggs is a mostly harmless process. All you'll get is a few headaches and some nausea from time to time." Morty's body relaxed as he let out a sigh of relief, wiping the sweat from his glowing forehead and breathing steadily. "Until the Queen hatches, and erodes the brain tissue surrounding it, so it can attach itself to your brain stem." He belched before continuing in the same dull tone as before. "Then it'll parade around in your body like a meat suit, hoping to find a secure place for its children to hatch. Then they'll burst out of your skin tissue leaving behind a shrivelled up human sized mess. After that the queen devours what she can before dying herself." Rick then started tinkering with his new device once more, with an almost bored and emotionless expression on his face. By this time, Morty's body had tensed up worse than before, and he turned to face Rick again stuck with an expression of pure terror. Rick looked up at Morty from his tinkering, and then quickly returned, with his eyebrows dropped in irritation. "Don't give me that look Morty! What, Y-y-you think I'd let that happen to you? Oh ye of little faith?" Said Rick in a disgruntled tone. "The Queen can take months to hatch! As soon as we're done here, a-and we get back home, I-I-I'll clone you a new body and transfer your consciousness, then we can get on with our lives. Happy?" Morty's expression subsided into relief once again for a brief few moments, before his eyes shot open as he realised what his treatment would be.
"Wait a minute! What do you mean by cloning me a-a-a-a new body Rick. What's wrong with this one? Can't you just take the queen out?" He asked gesturing to Rick that they somehow suck the queen out through his ear.
"The Queen is in the middle o-o-of your goddamn brain Morty! A-A-And your skin is laced with millions of th-those tiny little glowing fucks!" He screamed, tapping his own head to make Morty understand. "Your mind is basically a fresh banana i-i-in an already bruised and decomposing peel, Morty! Trust me; you're better off with a new body." Rick concluded, before quickly shifting his attention to the far edge of the pitch black room. Morty's face contorted and his hand gestured every time he was about to ask another question, before realising that it was pointless to argue with Rick, so instead just sat back down with his glowing arms folded.
"Fine, Rick! But part of me k-kinda thinks you forgot about this whole, y'know, parasite thing until just now. You should really tell me these things sooner, Rick." He said, sulking on his little table and kicking the hollow shell of the radio. Rick waved his hand to Morty to silence him while still facing outwards to the dark room, until a faint sound of hydraulics could be heard in the distance.
"Shhh! Shut your mouth Morty! I think I heard something." He whispered, now signalling him to move over so they could both look at what was approaching them. More of the room lit up as Morty moved over to Rick in curiosity and the sound that Rick heard earlier grew louder and closer. Both Rick and Morty squinted trying to catch a glimpse of what they presumed was their captor, and they found what they were looking for when an immensely bright orange light sliced its way through the darkness. The orange light hung there in the middle of the black room, cutting through the edges of Morty's glow, getting closer as the hydraulics grew louder.
"Oh good, you're awake," echoed the multi-toned robotic voice of GLaDOS. Her voice sent another sort of shiver through the panels surrounding the room, only heard by Rick and Morty as a stereophonic thudding, which sent a chill down Morty's spine. "I'm so glad I used the sleeping gas," she continued. Her orange eye soon moved close enough to reveal her full metallic head, as the orange light dimmed slightly before pulsating at different brightness levels. Her head became an eerily luminescent green colour thanks to being in the range of Morty's glow, and she stooped down to the cell and slowly revealed the rest of her hanging body. Rick and Morty's eyes widened, surprised to see GLaDOS in all of her majestic glory, before squinting again and flinching as her light shone on their faces. She then tilted her head and her lids slightly closed to convey a squint of her own, before she finished her introduction to her new friends. "I was beginning to think I'd used the deadly Neurotoxin by mistake again. That would've been…..embarrassing."