Here I am, once again, after months of general hiatus on my account. Didn't think I had forgotten about this story, did you? Now that I am back, I am planning to give another attempt at getting my fics rolling again, though I admittedly couldn't resist starting work on a Mass Effect fic, too. Hopefully I can get everything running once more.

Regardless, here's the next chapter. Batteries not included. As per usual, I don't own TF2, Portal or any of that other "stuff" which is not my own property. You get the point.

Chapter 14: Blackout

When the smoke cleared, the infirmary was practically annihilated, Scout was on the floor outside of the combined kitchen/mess hall, passed out from a sudden lack of breathing courtesy of Medic, and more than half of the team had no idea what had just happened.

Then, of course, if only just to spite them, the power went out, shutting down every electrically powered device in the entire complex. As if the medigun's explosion hadn't been enough, it had to go and blow the fuses.

The sorry state of the fuses were discovered rather swiftly by the Engineer; he'd been sitting in his workshop, doing calculations for his latest project when an explosion, swiftly followed by the lights cutting out, had interrupted him. Fortunately, he had a flashlight within his arms' reach, which allowed him to find his way to the fuse box in the darkness, as that was the place which was usually broken during this type of power outage (the generator itself was, wisely, sealed off from the more irresponsible mercenaries' reach), and upon opening it he'd found it... well, let's just say it was a bit more broken than he'd expected.

By 'a bit', he meant that practically every fuse (minus the one to Pyro's room, for some inexplicable reason) was completely burnt out, and there was no way that they had enough fuses to replace all of them; there were more than a hundred, they probably didn't have more than thirty spare ones on-base, and getting new ones would take quite some time. If that little Teufort town even had any fuses they could buy in the first place, that is. For cryin' out loud, there had been an article about inventing the wheel in Teufort Daily yesterday.

Of course, he could probably just build some kind of replacements out of the materials he had and thus reach an alternative solution to the fuse issue, but as long as he had not found -and fixed, or at the very least disconnected- the original cause for the fuses' current state, trying such a remedy, even only temporarily until they could buy some real fuses, was by no means a safe alternative.

Knowing fully well now that this particular outage wasn't something which he could just fix in a matter of minutes, as evident from the sheer number of blown fuses, Engineer set off, planning to find whoever -or whatever- caused this mess and talk some sense into them.

After but a minute, he ran into a confused Sniper, who seemed to have absolutely no idea what had happened; apparently, he was trying to find out the very same thing, though he was stumbling around in the darkness. The two proceeded, and soon Pyro joined up with the pair; the trio was heading out to find the source of the problem, for various reasons. Engineer's, of course, had already been explained, Sniper was certain that this was the RED Spy's doing, which would mean that the origin of the mess was equivalent to said spy, and Pyro? Well, that question never quite came up; who knew what was going on in the Arsonist's head?

Together, they moved forwards, Engineer's flashlight and the pilot light on Pyro's flamethrower (which had apparently been brought) showing the way. Whose idea was it to have absolutely no windows in here, anyways?

It barely took them a minute to find another mercenary. Well, technically two mercenaries, though whether an unconscious Scout was worth counting was debatable. Regardless, the other mercenary, who was fully conscious and absolutely fuming, was Medic. The German had been pacing around the dining table, in the darkness, muttering angrily to himself in his native language without paying a single thought to his fellow mercenary (who was, fortunately, not directly in the path of the other's stride), when the three had shown up. How the Doc had managed to avoid stumbling on something in the darkness was a mystery, but not one that anybody really put much thought into.

When the trio entered, they were given no more attention than their unconscious teammate; Medic was completely and utterly lost in his own, angry thoughts. Of course, Pyro was immediately distracted by the unconscious Bostonian, and proceeded to crouch down next to him, prodding in various, seemingly random areas mainly centered around the face of the 'victim', flamethrower lying forgotten to the side. Meanwhile, the two others threw each other a quick look, and proceeded to try to catch the Doctor's attention; Engineer acted mostly as a lamp post, whilst Sniper simply placed himself right in the path of the older man's strides.

Upon noticing the being now blocking his path, Medic spat out a highly irritated "Vhat is it, Herr Sniper?"

Of course, that is the moment that Pyro's efforts (accidentally?) woke up the Scout. The change couldn't be missed – the Bostonian's head suddenly flew up and collided with the Arsonist's mask, who shrieked in surprise at the unexpected event and fell backwards. Suddenly, all eyes were on the runner as he, before anyone could react, scrambled up into a standing position and ran off into the darkness. A muffled chorus of "ow"s resounded a moment later, as said Runner found out first-hand that there was, in fact, a staircase down that corridor.

An uncertain glance was thrown towards the direction in question, but it was soon shrugged off; right now, there were other, more pressing concerns.

"So, Doc, any idea what happened t' tha power? Ah took a look at the fuses, an' they're all goners." Engineer carefully phrased himself, knowing how the receiver was when in a bad mood.

Considering his mood, Medic did not disappoint, though he fortunately had no sharp objects within arms' range. "Zhe Scout happened. Zhat, zhat dummkopf detonated zhe infirmary medigun, again, und overloaded zhe entire system in zhe process!" the man spat out, still furious, and the whole thing was followed by several german curses which luckily flew over the head of the profanity-sensitive other man. The news weren't exactly pleasant for the one who had asked, either.

"That li'l… he'd better be able to explain this!" were Engineers parting words as he set off after the culprit, running into the darkness and leaving his fellow team members staring after him.

"Now you come back here this instant an' expla-" was as much as he managed to shout out, before he suddenly fell. A chorus of crash, clang, snap, and a multitude of other sounds ensued as he repeatedly collided with floors, walls and at one point his head rammed into what appeared to be a glass vase. A few seconds later, he was lying on the floor, head spinning and his entire body in varying amounts of pain. What had…?

Oh, right. Stairs.

From his new position at the foot of the stairs, the Texan let out a tired sigh. This was going to be a long day.

Meanwhile, in an undisclosed location…

The Teufort base had gone silent. Well, at least its BLU side had. Of course, knowing that it was manned by gun-toting, idiotic lunatics, regular communications going down really wasn't all that surprising – it wouldn't have been the first time that someone talked the resident Engineer, this 'someone' being the Spy more often than not, into hijacking the announcement system in order to use it for their own purposes. The fact that every single hidden microphone and camera had also stopped sending was a surprise, however.

Being essentially deaf and blind was not good for keeping an eye on their investments. This oversight could not be allowed to persist, the Administrator reasoned, and so she pressed a button. There were many like it on the extensive control-board in front of her expensive swivel-chair, but only that one did what she currently wished to do. Her assistant, wearing the usual purple dress just as her contract dictated, thus popped up on one of the side-screens amongst the almost two dozen surrounding Helen herself. The other woman was currently busy burying the corpses of a pair of news reporters, in their thirties, who may have looked just slightly too deep into the Badwater incident. From her records, they had been a married couple, with their oldest child just starting school, and neither had possessed particularly bad outlooks for the future… well, until they started shoving their grubby little fingers where they weren't supposed to. Some people never learn.

Pulling up her own portable phone from its usual place beneath the desk, the older woman's voice resounded through the younger's equivalent piece of technology.

"Miss Pauling. I have a task for you. BLU Teufort base has gone silent. Drive there and ensure that it is operating as intended. We can't have the assets going rogue, can we?"

"Of course. Just let me finish burying these corpses, and I'll be on my way", she responded, giving a quick nod towards the closest camera. As per usual, the recording function was off when she was disposing of the 'evidence', but that didn't mean that the Administrator couldn't, nor that she wouldn't use it.

Using the shovel in her hands (Mann Co. Certified to not burst into flames nine out of ten times) she quickly shoveled the last bits of dirt onto the shallow graves, grabbed her somewhat bloodied hacksaw from the ground and walked off towards her car, wiping off the aforementioned hacksaw with a piece of cloth as she went.

Dropping her tools in the trunk together with all the other stuff that a woman in her profession would need, she took her seat in the car, put in the key and turned it, being rewarded with the noise of a running engine soon after. She pressed the accelerator, driving off in a cloud of rust-red dust, heading towards her next destination.

The entire car ride could be explained in one word: dull. Aside from a brief traffic jam following from someone's car crash, nothing noteworthy took place. At least not until the last few minutes of the car ride.

Teufort was in sight, the sun was blazing overhead and within the metallic frame of her vehicle, Pauling was suffering from an extensive case of "it's too hot in here", sweating profusely. Right there and then, she was deeply regretting not stopping to fix the broken air conditioner.

Pulling up another water bottle from the glove compartment, she gulped down a considerable portion of its contents in an attempt to satiate her thirst. It didn't feel like it helped very much. She still had a headache, though that was to be expected – the drink wouldn't instantaneously go through her metabolism. Just to be on the safe side, she sipped a bit more from the plastic bottle.

A boom resounded in the distance; no doubt the mercenaries were blowing each other up again. It was about that time of day. Only that… had she heard that wrong, or did it come from behind her?

Ignoring it, she kept on driving. Well, for a few seconds, before a second boom resounded, and that one was definitely coming from behind her. Stepping on the brake, she pulled the car to a halt and put her head straight out the window, looking backwards. Empty fields of dust met her gaze; there was nothing behind her that could possibly have made that noise, unless the car itself was having its death throes. There was also a constant roaring of noise in the distance, steadily increasing.

Shrugging, she put her foot back on the accelerator and drove off, the car's noise drowning out the mysterious ones. At least for a while, until the formerly quite quiet roar managed to steadily grow into something that even drowned out the car engine. The driver stepped on the brake, pulling to a stop once more, now realizing the quite obvious fact that she had forgotten to look up. As such, that was exactly what she did, just in time to see a burning, flaming object flying towards her at high speed straight from the sky.

The accelerator was immediately pressed down through sheer instinct, though by then it was already too late. The falling object slammed straight into the hood of the car with the force of three and a half Saxton Hales, crushing and deforming it beyond all use. Then everything went black.

Fortunately, it wasn't the kind of blackness that one would associate with unconsciousness, but rather a case of a dark cloth falling on top of one's eyes. The woman on which it laid let out a huff of air, blowing the annoying material out of the way, and came face to faceplate with something round, yellow-eyed, white and loud.

"Spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…!" flowed out of it like a never-ending waterfall of noise. She stared, shocked, as a small ball of white metal, melting the entire front of the car, screamed, twitched and rolled around in a chaotic jumble of movements. All the while, Pauling simply stared at the chaotic thing, confused.

Of course, she wasn't the only one who was confused. In a different reality altogether, the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System was staring at the video feed, wearing a look which would best translate to shock. For, staring back at her from the data stream was the face of none other than Miss Caroline Pauling.

Ooooh man, I've wanted to drop that plot twist ever since I started this fic. Now, after quite the substantial hiatus, it has finally happened. Of course, technically GLaDOS' voice actor would match the Administrator, but Helen's far too old, and it was simply too convenient with Caroline's lack of a set last name and Pauling's lack of a set first one. Besides, they're about the right age.

Regardless, any sort of feedback is much appreciated.