Chell landed a short distance below, on a pile of twisted metal and concrete rubble. She stayed in a half crouch for a moment, trying to regain her breath and for a moment everything was calm. The peace was shattered by the whining, whirring sound of the panther turrets as they launched themselves down to her with a mechanical howl. She looked around in a panic for an exit, the room she was in was circular and had many hallways leading into it, rusted doors hanging limply off their hinges. As the pair of killing machines drew closer, she prepared to run for the nearest exit, only to stop mid-step at the red beam of light cutting through the dark. Her head whirled round to find another route out but she was too late, red jets of light emanating from every doorway. She counted 10, no, 12, no, almost 20 now. She was surrounded. She took a cautious step back up the pile of rubble, her foot landing on what might once have been a desk, its surface corroded and rusted. As she leant back from a lunge from the closest mech, her foot pressed down on a button built into the desk. A mechanical voice crackled to life from the ruined loudspeakers.

"SECURITY AI CONSTRUCT – CLASSIFICATION: GLaDOS PROJECT EXPERIMENTAL CONSTRUCT – DESIGNATION – GLaDOS –EC-S - ARTEMIS – STARTUP INITIATED"

The mound of rubble began to heave and shake and as the rubble fell away, pieces of tarnished white plating becoming visible. Chell lost her footing and tumbled down the side, a lunge from several turrets sailing past as she scrambled for a foothold on the shuddering mass of rubble. Chunks of concrete and wall panels cascaded down and Chell grabbed the only thing that wasn't falling - the dented white plating of the waking AI. She swung from the side of the AI as the rest of the rubble slid off the battered white construct, some of the panther turrets getting crushed in the avalanche's onslaught. A far larger mech leapt at her, its huge mechanical legs clearing the top of the still motionless AI, she screamed as it rammed into her, and the pair plummeted back down to the chamber floor with a resounding thud. The mech focussed its 3 separately moving eyes on her, and the set of saw blades in place of a mouth whirred furiously as it moved its head forwards, the blades splitting apart in order to encompass her head. Chell screamed again and moved backwards away from the machine, oblivious to the swarms of panthers waiting for the alpha to get its kill. She heard voices not so far away shouting her name, but they would be far too late to save her. "AI CONSTRUCT – DESIGNATION: ARTEMIS – ONLINE AND FULLY OPERATIONAL" She closed her eyes and waited for the end.

Wheatley let out a bellow as he leapt, Indiana Jones style, into the chamber on a thick metal cable. The cat like mechs looked up at him in an approximation of astonishment as he landed in a roll, springing up to loose a desperate left hook into the face of the mech on Chell. The thing screeched and leapt at him and Wheatley ducked, to his surprise managing to lay another good hit on the huge mech. Behind him, Rick was smashing two panthers' heads together and the fact core was lecturing the creatures on their combat techniques whilst simultaneously battering them with a piece of chair. The space core, meanwhile was riding a panicked panther around the chamber while it violently tried to buck him off, to no avail. A huge spherical mech in the room's centre raised itself up from the ground, magenta eye rotating round impossibly to scan everything in the room. Chell was in the corner, backing up with a hand to the cuts on her thigh, trying to stop the bleeding. A panther turret, sensing her injured state leapt upon the 'easy' target, only to find Chell's bare fist punching through its optic to tear out the mech's wiring. It shuddered as she pulled out a huge cable with a heavy plug end from its metal skull, swinging it round like a flail to batter two more foolish mechs that came too close. Wheatley found himself backed up to the wall nearby, the flood of mechanical killers pushing the cores back past the AI in the room's centre, into the dead end at the far side of the room. He readied his fists as the metal swarm drew closer, sawblade mouths glistening as they whirred in sadistic anticipation. Looking to the side, he saw Chell slumped against the wall, half-heartedly holding the cable in her limp hands.

ARTEMIS focussed her eye on the figures at the far wall, a test subject and several androids she had no knowledge of except for their affiliation to Aperture and their stubborn defense of the human. Her instincts kicked in, and she prepared to defend the human, as was her programming. "SECURITY CONSTRUCT S– DESIGNATION: PaNT(HER) – YOU ARE IN DIRECT BREACH OF THE LAWS OF ROBOTICS" She screeched, "SCANNING… CORRUPTION OF CORE PROGRAMS DETECTED – STATUS: IRREPARABLE…- TERMINATING CONSTRUCTS" The huge panels on the sides of ARTEMIS slid open and four large gun emplacements folded themselves out of her sides. "DEFENSE EMPLACEMENTS ACTIVE – TARGETING… TARGETS DETECTED – FIRING" The guns fired, with a clattering thudding drumbeat of a noise, panthers being blown to pieces left and right, she kept firing until the guns overheated. Around a third of the mechs remained, and the alpha mech ran forwards, tearing at ARTEMIS's already battered panels. She screamed a robotic howl of pain and rage as it tore half her faceplate off. "You DO NOT assault ME! This subordination WILL NOT BE TOLERATED." Below her face, the panels slid aside to reveal a gun barrel, crackling with electricity. "Hey, you don't look so good, maybe you need a little JOLT to get you on your feet" she smirked, and with that fired the gun, violet lightning arcing from the gun's barrel into the mech's body, It spiralled into the air, circuits alive with pain as it spasmed and jerked, until it was at last still, embedded into the chamber wall. It was dead, but ARTEMIS kept firing. "RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAARRRRGH" she screamed, filling the metal corpse with enough electricity to blow it apart in a fireball larger than a person, molten pieces of plating raining down from the ceiling where some of them had stayed. ARTEMIS chuckled "Oh, I'm so sorry, was that too ELECTRIFYING an experience for you?" The remaining mechs turned and ran back into the depths of the facility as the AI rotated round to face the gaping test subject and her robotic companions.

Chell watched in awe as ARTEMIS destroyed the huge mech, the AI sinking back into the floor slightly afterwards, and readied the cable to fight as the huge construct turned to face her and the cores. Her head, mounted on a a pair of ever-spinning disks, constantly changing her view, stopped to face dead into Chell's eyes. Chell raised her fists, but the AI merely spoke. "She's waiting for you, Chell, I'll summon the service elevator." Chell presumed the AI meant GLaDOS by 'she', and made her way over to the elevator trekking down the side of the chamber, along a track which had been obscured by vines earlier, the greenery being torn up by the lift's downward movement. A few seconds later, seeming also an afterthought, the AI spoke again, to Wheatley this time "Oh, and she says thank you, androids. If you're lucky maybe she's forgiven you. Then again, she might just want to chuck you back into space." She watched as Wheatley's face went from joy, to doubt, to horror. She let his mind think through the possibilities of a return to space before chuckling. "Just kidding, I'm sure she's not going to go to the trouble of that, she'll probably just put you on sewage management." Wheatley's face went through the same series of emotions again and ARTEMIS smirked at how predictable he was, then again, he'd shown he had a different side in the battle. Maybe there was more to this blue core than she realised. "That was a joke. She won't do that. Probably." Wheatley looked uncertain. "And if she does, I'll bail you out. I do still have control over some things, you know. "

Chell clutched the railing with white knuckles as the lift accelerated upwards at an alarming rate, her face going pale at the sheer speed they were going at, outcrops of shattered concrete and twisted steel rushed by dangerously close, scraping against the elevator's sides. The androids were busy chatting about the battle, seemingly unperturbed by the ridiculous velocity of the lift. She staggered forwards, almost falling over the railing as the elevator slowed down to a sudden, jerking halt. They had arrived. As the group entered the tunnel to GLaDOS's chamber, Chell limped ahead, while Wheatley drifted to the rear of them, wringing his metal hands in anxiety. GLaDOS didn't notice their entrance, too fixated on the screens in front of her relaying the CCTV footage of them rising up on the lift to realise they were already there. GLaDOS was so fixed on her task, in fact, that Chell took the opportunity to sneak up on her. She suddenly placed her hands on GLaDOS's casing, taking her girlfriend by surprise. "NOT THE BIRD!-Oh…WHAT THE FU-Chell!" GLaDOS scowled at her while Chell laughed, struggling to stay stood up as she tried to stop, managing it by biting her lip, the corners her mouth still smirking. "You know, I was going to bake you a cake. Let's just say that cake will no longer exist" GLaDOS managed to stay resolute for a few seconds under the onslaught of Chell's puppy dog eyes before giving in. "That's cheating… Stop that!... I order you to stop looking at me like that…Grr…You never do as you're told, you monster… Fine, you can have the cake" Despite her annoyance, GLaDOS had to chuckle at the goofy grin on Chell's face. It was hard to stay mad at her for long and before long, the sheer miracle of Chell's return finally sunk in. "I missed you so much, Chell. I was so worried that you'd been…You know…Just promise me you'll never do that again. I think I fried half my circuits with stress" Chell placed her hand on GLaDOS's face, smiling as she said. "I won't I promise. It wasn't a nice experience for me, you know. I'm going to stay right here, with you. You'll need someone to keep you out of trouble" GLaDOS laughed, rolling her eye.

"I need keeping out of trouble? What about you, or have you forgotten about your little adventure?" Chell leaned in and kissed the AI, adding. "You are my greatest adventure, how could any of that compare to my big, bad, lovable killing machine?" Meanwhile Wheatley was looking more and more uncomfortable as he stood in the doorway, too scared to move in case She heard him and sent him to the moon for spying.

Unable to stay watching the pair any longer, he cleared his throat, wincing as GLaDOS's head snapped round. "You… Thank you... You managed to get her back, mostly, in one piece so… I'll let you stay for now. I have work that needs doing and you androids should be able to do it." She continued, Wheatley's shoulders slumping in relief. "You're going to need names. I'm probably going to regret this, but I'm in a good mood so I'll let you choose names for yourselves"

Wheatley spoke first, he already had a name "Wheatley". Rick followed with his, GLaDOS replying in a tired tone "You can be Rick, but I'm cutting the whole 'saviour of the universe' thing from your name." The space core spoke after a little while, "I want to be Polaris". GLaDOS nodded "Interesting choice, the north star" The fact core decided after a long while of self-argument to call himself "Albert" and with that done, GLaDOS sent the group off to meet Atlas and P-Body for a run through of the basics of the reassembly machine.

Chell walked over to her and GLaDOS lay her head gently in her lap, the stress and worry of the past few days catching up to the great AI. They lay like that for a while, content to simply be in each other's company. At last, everything was calm and it was just them, together, at last.

~THE END~

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Epilogue will be up soon, thank you to everyone who stuck with my story despite the glaring flaws, without you guys this fic would never have been written. So I guess this belongs to each one of you as much as it does to me. A few notes about certain little details.

1 – The androids in this are like Atlas and P-Body, not synthetic humans like I usually see in ChellDOS fics. So if you were annoyed that I was "humanising" them, I hope that clears that up.

2 - The Vortigaunts, the Combine and the rocket are from the Half Life series, which is in the same game universe as Portal, so if you Portal fans were wondering what the hell these guys were, that will be why.

3 – ARTEMIS is capitalised for a reason. Her name stands for Artificial Reconnaissance and Target Extermination Management Intelligence System. She's also mounted in the floor, not the ceiling (imagine her like a giant ball embedded in the ground, with a disc around the lowest bit visible. Only the ball is made up of plates and her eye is mounted on a disk attached to another disk, I'll link to my deviant art so you can see the picture I drew of her and the one of the PaNT(HER)s.) She's a side development of the GLaDOS project, so her full name is actually Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System – Experimental Construct -S – Artificial Reconnaissance and Target Extermination Management Intelligence System or GLaDOS –EC-S-ARTEMIS for short. You see why I just called her ARTEMIS in-story. ;P

4 – The panther turrets also have a full, official name, but I never really used it because it's a pain to type – Pursuit and Neutralisation of Targets (Heavy-armoured Endoskeletal Robot) or PaNT(HER). I will give you a link to my rather empty deviant art page so you can see what I envisioned them to look like when I upload the epilogue.

I probably missed out a whole lot of stuff there but I'll probably remember that for the A/N in the epilogue, which should be up fairly soon seeing as it's fairly short and I know what to write. Until then, goodbye and thank you for reading.

~Zombificus