Port-Ed 2 Chapter 4: Core Transfers and Deadly Lasers
A/N: Need to tell ya something before I start. My internship just ended the other day, and I'm still waiting for the tutoring schedule, so this may be the last chapter for a while. Don't worry, I won't go into a year-long hiatus like before. Two, three weeks max. So until then, unless I find time to write, don't expect any new stuff from me. Except one thing. I won't go into much detail on what it is, but let's just say it envolves a TV show that became a meme. Fans of it – the male ones, at most – will know what I'm talking about.
"Brace yourself, Ed!"
Ed and Edd fell down the square metal chute, the latter frantically looking for something to slow their descent and the former simply laughing in glee. The fall went on for quite some time, but the chute suddenly began to slope forward and back, and the two boys found themselves dodging large crushers that nearly flattened them on their way down.
At last, the tunnel ended and the boys fell through open air. A ways below them was a metal platform, and they landed on it with a hard crash. Edd could feel his legs trembling like mad from beneath him, but as he straightened his body out, he sighed in relief to find that nothing was broken. Ed wasn't any worse for the wear either, happily shouting "Do it again! Do it again!" as he bounced in glee.
"Here it is," GLaDOS's voice rang from above, "the incinerator room. Be careful not to trip over any parts of me that didn't get completely burned when you threw them down here."
Edd looked around at the enormous room the two boys stood in. It was rectangular like a hallway, stretching up hundreds of feet. On either wall were rows and rows of chutes that dipped downward, guiding trash and debris toward a glowing, fiery pit below. Edd gasped. This was the very room GLaDOS had tried to kill him in, until Ed and Eddy saved his life.
Wait. Eddy...
"Where's Eddy?" he gasped. Ed looked around, and a panicked expression formed on his face when he realized his short friend was missing. Edd suddenly looked up. "Oh dear, don't tell me he's still up there with that monster!"
Suddenly, Ed and Edd heard a voice coming from above. Way above. To their surprise, it wasn't GLaDOS's voice.
"Relax, sockhead. We're just fine up here." Eddy's voice rang through an intercom, echoing through the incinerator room.
"Eddy!" Edd exclaimed. "Where are you?"
"That crazy computer lady's no match for my elite dodging skills. Me and Wheatley are doing just fine. Well, I'm OK. Not Wheatley. I tell ya, sockhead, this guy's a mess right now."
"Where are you, Eddy? And how can you see and hear me?"
"I'm in one of these old viewing areas. Ya know, to watch the testers and stuff."
"Oh yes, I see."
"Well it turns out, one of these old computers is still running. So I tried to see what I could see, and I found a camera running on that incinerator room you're in."
Edd looked up and saw an operational camera on the wall. It was pointing straight at him with its glaring, red lens, but picturing Eddy behind it made Edd feel less unnerved.
"And, lucky for me, this thing has a working microphone and speaker thingy."
"Well, I'm just relieved to hear you're fine."
"I'm okay, but this guy isn't. She really laid a number on him, you know."
"Do you think you can fix him?"
"Me? I dunno. I'm not a tech wiz like you, Double D." His voice seemed to lower in regret.
"Don't give up on him, Eddy! He's our only friend in this place!"
"I'll see what I can -"
Suddenly, static blared from the speakers. Eddy's voice came in bits and pieces through it, but Edd was able to make out, "I think she's trying to cut me down, Double D. She knows what I'm doin' here!"
"Get out of there, Eddy! Take Wheatley with you and run!"
More static started to come out until eventually, the sound ceased altogether.
"I had forgotten about that boy. He was so tiny and insignificant that the thought of grabbing him slipped my mind." GLaDOS's voice resumed dominance over the place, and she spoke with a bitter tone. "If I wasn't just waking up and focusing on diagnosing all of the damage that you boys did to this place, I wouldn't have let him leave that little room alive. But then again, he's too little of a problem to worry myself about."
In the distance, Edd could've sworn he heard a faint voice scream, "Little?"
Eddy fumed in anger until he began to cough. He hadn't raised his voice that high or loud in quite some time, and he still felt like he had just woken up. He looked at the once-intact glass window of the observation room to find it shattered, and suddenly felt quite vulnerable. Deciding it was time to keep moving, he picked up Wheatley and left to explore. Constantly looking back to make sure he wasn't being followed, Eddy traversed the employee hallways of the building as he heard machines whir to life around him. Something caught his eye, and he found a door labeled CORE TRANSFER. He looked at the label, and then at Wheatley.
A core, huh? Eddy thought to himself. This could be just the thing. He opened the door and peered inside. Seeing nothing but blackness, he groped around the inner wall to find a lightswitch. His hand hit a button, and the room begrudgingly lit up. Inside, there were eye-shaped metal orbs all over rows of shelves, shaped just like Wheatley was. In the center of the room were two receptacles, and a small control panel between them.
Eddy looked at the cores on the shelf, then to the receptacles, and then to Wheatley. A smile grew on his face, and he said to himself, "Looks like I don't need to be as smart as Double-D after all."
He carefully placed the damaged Wheatley on one receptacle and grabbed a spare core from one of the shelves. He noticed that each one had a different color for its iris, so he took care to try and find a blue-eyed core before putting it on the other receptacle. He analyized the control panel, which contained a few buttons, and eagerly pressed one marked Transfer Memory.
"Core transfer initiated," the announcer spoke up.
"Sure hope this works..." Eddy said to himself.
Edd felt a smile grow on his face as he looked at the ground before him. Two portal guns, dusty but otherwise fully operational, lay patiently on the floor. His smile faded, though; lifting rubble and debris off of said portal guns were two panels on hydraulic arms, fully controlled by GLaDOS. Ed quickly bent down and grabbed one of the guns, but Edd hesitated.
"Go on. I assure you it's safe," GLaDOS said, lifting the debris a little higher. Edd bent down, and slowly reached for the device. The panels suddenly dipped down, but stopped just before they hit his outstretched arm. Edd grabbed the gun and recoiled in panic, and the panels slammed to the floor. "Oops. My bad," the AI spat sarcastically.
Edd clutched the device, his anger and fear toward his predicament matched by his excitement. Looking around, he found a place where he could shoot a portal at. He wasted no time in holding the device properly and using it, but he gasped as he noticed that instead of a blue and orange portal, his gun shot an orange and a red pair. Marveling at the new color, Ed readied his device, and place a pair of portals of his own. His were blue and purple.
"As part of an old cooperative testing initiative we ran a while back - a long while, that is - many of our test subjects would get confused with identically-colored portals, resulting in many accidents. Unfortunately, I wasn't around back then, so instead of embracing this new challenge, our old, soft employees gave them new colors to work with."
"How fascinating! I -"
"Keep in mind that due to this convenience on your part, your tests shall be much, much more difficult to compensate."
"Drat."
The two Eds made their way through a long, square trench as GLaDOS continued talking.
"Do you know the biggest lesson I learned from what you did?" she asked.
"Well, no actually. Do tell." Edd responded.
"I discovered I have a black-box quick-save feature. In the event of a catastrophic failure, the last two minutes of my life are preserved for analysis. I was able – well, forced, really – to relieve you killing me. Again. And again. Forever."
No wonder she's upset, Edd thought to himself.
"You know," GLaDOS continued, "if you done that to somebody else, they might devote their existences to exacting revenge. Luckily I'm a bigger person than that. I'm happy to get this all behind us and get back to testing. After all, there is a lot to do, and only sixty more years to do it. More or less. I don't have the actuarial tables in front of me."
Edd tried not to show fear, but he found himself instinctively clutching his device as he and Ed made their way through the beginning of Testchamber 19. They went through the entrance to the chamber to the elevator room, where their ride was waiting for them. They got in, and headed deeper down.
"Core transfer complete," the announcer said.
The eye on the new core lit up a bright, pale blue. The core was aged, and the iris had a few cracks on it, but it sprang to life nonetheless.
"Are ya OK, Wheatley?" Eddy asked.
"Oh, what happened?" he asked drunkenly. He looked around for a bit, and then exclaimed, "Oh, Eddy! Did you...wait, it's coming back to me now. AUGH! Where are we? Where is She?"
"Calm down, I just saved your metal butt. Ed and Double-D though... they're in her clutches."
"Oh, no," the core lamented. "That is not good at all." His face suddenly brightened up, and he said, "Well, let us not waste their sacrifice and get the hell out of here while she's focused on – OW!"
Eddy slapped the core, and screamed in pain himself as the metal hit his hand harder than he'd expected. "We're not leaving them behind, got it?"
"Okay okay! Sorry, I just thought you wanted to get out of here."
"'Course I do, but not without my friends." Eddy plucked Wheatley from the receptacle and put him under his shoulder. "Now, where do you think we oughta go?"
"Sorry about the mess," GLaDOS stated, "I really let the place go since you killed me. By the way, thanks for that."
"Sarcasm self-test complete," the announcer spoke up.
"Oh good, that's back online," GLaDOS continued, "I'll start getting everything else working while you perform this first, simple test. Which involves deadly lasers, and how test subjects react when locked in a room with deadly lasers."
Edd recognized the chamber he and Ed were in. It was an early chamber where he was introduced to Energy Pellets. However, he noticed that instead of the dome-shaped emitter sprouting from the ceiling, a different apparatus was placed into the room in lieu of it. It suddenly emitted a thin, red laser that cut through the air and formed a perfectly straight line to the ground below. Ed moved toward it, hypnotized, but Edd quickly pulled him back.
"Remember, Ed, she said deadly lasers," he reminded. Ed let out a small "Aw," but he admired the spectacle from a safe distance.
Noticing that the place the laser was firing at was a white panel, Edd fired a portal onto it. He saw the Energy Pellet receptacle sink into the nearby wall and be replaced with what could only be a receiver for the laser. Across from it was another portal-accepting piece of wall, and Edd fired the other portal on it. A row of dotted lights next to the receiver lit up as the laser hit it, redirected through the portals, and a lift rose up to the exit to the room above. Ed ran toward the lift and jumped as high as he could, but it was out of reach.
"Clever," Edd mused as he placed a portal away from the laser. The lift deactivated and sank back to the floor. Edd led his friend on to it, and the two boys stood on the platform as he reactivated the lift, taking them to the exit.
"Not bad," GLaDOS spoke up. "I forgot how good you are at this. You should pace yourself, though. We have a lot of tests to do."
Edd did not doubt that in the slightest.
A/N: Another chapter over for now. So without further ado, let's read some reviews.
"Very, very good. =) I love the none-game dialogue that you sneak in there from time to time. Keep up the great work!" -NonSequiturs-R-Us
Actually, some of the additional dialogue was Yoshermon's doing, not me. This is most of GLaDOS's non-game dialogue. Wheatley's additional lines though, were made by me and improved by Yoshermon.
"what about the other kids and GLados is nazz's aunt make more or i'll burn your house down with the lemon's!GLados: burn his house down!" -jake
Most of this review is nonsensical garbage, but the beginning is what brought my attention. I do have something else in mind with the other kids. Let's just say, if you finished Portal 2 co-op, you know what I'm talking about.
