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"Just to be perfectly clear, this is completely unnecessary. You are aware of that, right?"
Chell rolled her eyes as she rode the lift down into the depths of the Enrichment Center, patiently keeping her silence. She really had to wonder why the AI was even bothering with her half-hearted attempts to talk her out of the mission she was currently embarking on.
"When have you ever managed to stop me from doing something this way?" she pointed out dryly, re-securing the portal gun that she had belted to the waist of her jumpsuit. After spending the rest of the night enduring several excruciating rounds of withdrawal convulsions, GLaDOS had begrudgingly granted her a pair of the devices for the purposes of testing on the courses that typically required the two bots to complete. "The more you say, the less persuasive you are."
A world-weary sigh echoed through the facility. "That may be true, considering that I strongly doubt lunatics can be reasoned with. Still—I'm quite certain they can be terminated." She paused for a moment, shifting to an even colder, detached tone. "I wonder, exactly what proportion of neurotoxin inside that elevator would provide a lethal dose?"
Out of trained instinct, the woman tightened her grip on the weapon in her hands. It took a few seconds and a lot of willpower for her to form an honest response. "What the hell are you threatening me for? I'm trying to help you, in case that wasn't obvious enough."
"I didn't—" GLaDOS began quickly, her voice betraying a tinge of disorientation characteristic of her potato form. "—mean to take it out on you. But you must understand, there's a voice inside my head right now that is screaming at me to test, and—I haven't felt the itch so strongly since…well, since they first activated me."
"Hey, just try to calm down, okay? I'm gonna fix that for you." Chell wasn't quite sure if she sounded as reassuring as she was trying to be. Hell, she hadn't even gotten a look at the courses she was going to attempt yet. They looked easy enough when she watched Blue and Orange do it, but doing it herself was another thing altogether.
And now she had an emotionally compromised GLaDOS to deal with as well, albeit not in a potato this time. Between the itch and the withdrawal symptoms, Chell should have been a bit surprised that she hadn't gone off the deep end by now.
But the truth of the matter was, she already knew that Aperture's crowning achievement had a strength of spirit that could only be matched by her own legendary tenacity. Even if she was frightened and vulnerable, it would take more than that to break someone like GLaDOS.
A funny thing really, Chell thought. How fate could throw two perfectly similar people together like that. She wouldn't have ever believed it, way back when she was a little fourth grader bringing her science project to her father's work. It hadn't been long after that when he had resigned, the GLaDOS incident having been the final straw after a growing list of concerns. And yet much later, when money problems hit her as she struggled to afford college in her early twenties, the woman had wound up right back at Aperture, faintly remembering the promise of an easy sixty bucks for volunteer testing.
Maybe it wasn't just random chance, after all. Perhaps everything happened for a reason. Even if that reason remained a mystery.
The lift had halted at its destination by now, a test chamber faintly reminiscent of her early days of testing. Of course, much aging had transformed the Enrichment Center since then. She stepped out into the entryway, casting a sidelong glance at the right-hand wall that displayed the typical panel of white light that indicated warnings for the test ahead. Only a few of the icons on this one were lit up; buttons, hard light bridges, acid, aerial faith plates…
This can't be too bad, Chell assured herself. Better than being covered in flesh-eating gel substances.
As she proceeded into the testing area, the slightest of whimpers came over the announcement system. GLaDOS's trademark stoic front seemed to be slipping more and more as the psychological effects of the withdrawal settled in.
"I'm really not kidding. You shouldn't be doing this. If another wave hits me while you're on a hard light surface, the power could surge and cut the supply in this room." The tone of her voice was urgent, in sharp contrast to her usual leisurely and condescending manner of speak. "If you should be above the acid when that happens—I don't imagine I need to explain the result of that, now, do I?"
Already surveying the room, Chell merely shrugged. "I guess that's just a risk I'm gonna have to take, huh?"
Inwardly, she had to admit it was a bit unusual to have someone so concerned about her welfare, much less GLaDOS of all people. How was it that she could manage to be worried about the not-so-former test subject's safety, while the insatiable urge to test had taken the forefront of her mind?
It was at that moment that something dawned on her. Should something befall the two testing bots out there in the unknown world, GLaDOS would be permanently without viable test subjects. She would continue to exist eternally in a state of constant, painful need. Having dealt with GLaDOS's sleight of hand tricks before, Chell had a feeling that the AI had known she was taking a major gamble in sending her prized subjects away. It had been a sacrifice GLaDOS made, of her own safety and sanity, in order…to help her.
She had known about all of this. The withdrawal. The risks.
And she had done it anyway.
That was it. She was going to have to do whatever she could to make this easier on Aperture's ruler. If she hadn't been resolute on that before, she certainly was now.
With this in mind, she immersed herself in the details of the test before her. To her left, she made note of a hard light bridge emerging from its source, a few feet forward into a portal-conducting surface. A similar white surface was situated directly above the light bridge, running parallel with it. To the right, a pit that dropped into, as she could have guessed, acid.
Easy enough. The woman aimed her portal at the wall where the bridge ended, capturing its beam and sending it across the chasm with the second placed on the overhead wall. She walked through the first portal and came out high above the ground, following the bridge across the acid pit until she reached the solid surface on the opposite side.
As Chell hopped down to the floor below, the room began to shudder violently. A hiss of pain, and the lights flickered, cut out for a few moments, and buzzed to life once again. Chell glanced nervously back at the acid that she had been precariously perched above mere moments before.
"Please…please make it stop." Her voice was weak, frantic, even a bit defeated. It sounded like a plea directed to no one in particular. "Why would they do this to me? I shouldn't—I…I never…"
"Shh," Chell quickly hushed her, sweeping her eyes back to the puzzle at hand. She had to get this done, fast. "We'll sing something, okay? You like singing. That was what you told me, remember?"
She was talking to her like a child, but GLaDOS didn't seem to have a nasty retort at the ready. So the woman shuffled back through her memory…did she remember any songs? There was one, that she remembered her mother singing sometimes. How did it go again?
"Amazing Grace…how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me," she began gently, shifting her light-bridge portal to a wall on the left. It created a portal that ran horizontally across the second acid pit in front of her, into another portal-conducting wall. "I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see…"
She made her way rapidly down the light bridge, meeting with another portal-wall to the right above her head. This seemed to be where the second portal gun came into play. She unholstered it, in one quick move using it to capture the end of the light bridge and direct it to the right-hand wall.
As she walked through it, she was relieved to find it led to a short jump that landed her right in front of the door. To the next test?
The door opened on another room. Chell released a sigh. Nope. That was just the first half of the test.
"T'was Grace that taught my heart to fear, and Grace my fears relieved." Still weak, but the voice that came back carried the sweet melodic sound that so contrasted GLaDOS's typical cold persona. It rose and fell with the passion of any human singer. "How precious did that Grace appear, the hour I first believed…"
A small smile tugged at the human's expression as she surveyed the test, mostly moving on gut instinct and her own familiarity with the AI's way of organizing her tests. Light bridge, faith plate, and a raised area containing a button receptacle and the exit.
She captured the source of light, using it to direct a bridge underneath an emancipation grill directly above the faith plate. Her head hit the bridge with an unpleasant bump, but she maintained enough sense to shoot the bridge beneath her on the way down. Creeping groggily though the portal, she emerged onto the original light bridge platform, right at its source.
How did the rest of that song go again?
"Through many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come," she sang, directing a portal through the bridge beneath her such that walking though would lead her to the button. "'Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far…"
The cube—well, sphere, dropped to the floor beside the faith plate. With a hop to the ground, Chell portaled the bridge back under the grill. Hefting the ball under one arm, she hooked the first gun back into the fastener at her waist and drew the second one. Almost finished. All that was left was to capture the light from the end of the bridge that ran under the grill, and jump onto the plate, and…
Another head-bump later, she shot the bridge just beneath her as she came falling back to earth, neatly walking across it to the ledge containing the button receptacle and exit. She dropped the sphere into its corresponding slot, and the humming sigh of contentment that filled the room nearly shorted out the power yet another time.
"…and Grace will lead me home," a relieved voice finished softly.
A/N: This one was a little harder to manage, because school is already getting intense for me (I suck at math) but here it is anyway! Thank you all for your kind reviews, and the alerts and faves are great too, glad to see people reading. And most of all, thank you for the well-wishes for my dog. She is still alive (...yes) for the time being, I'm unsure in the long run if she will improve, but she is playful and going for walks again. It's an unfortunate reality for German Shepherds that they are vulnerable to spine, hip, and heart conditions. For her it ended up being a heart condition.
While I hate to explain my writing, I will say music is an intentional motif in this story. And the songs themselves are indeed meant to be symbolic/metaphorical with regards to the characters here. So, hopefully that doesn't go sailing over everyone's heads, like an eagle piloting a blimp.
(Just me, or do people here have a problem with portraying GLaDOS as she actually IS? They sure love to make her the villain for the sake of forcing Chelley to happen, in all its unlikeliness, but we're talking about someone who arranges turret operas, mothers baby birds, and fondly calls her robots marshmallows while worrying for their welfare. A softer portrayal of her is supported in canon. I'm not calling anyone wrong, per se, but GLaDOS is no cut-and-dry sociopath by the end of Portal 2. Even after her DLC "I accidentally all the human subjects" incident.)
Best wishes,
-FP