Chapter 3, everybody! In which we finally get to see who plays Wheatley! He'll kill me for this….

And by the by, keeping things non-interactable also saves rendering time.

Don't Starve © 2013 Klei Entertainment

Portal © 2007 Valve

"Willow!"

She knew that voice. That insistent voice, that begged and pleaded for the door to be open, please, he had tried every other door, she had to be in here, she had to—

Wilson!

She leapt up—well, staggered—and went as fast as she was able to the door, flattening her hands against it, scrabbling against the simple lock, swinging it open—

"AAA!"

"YAAH!"

She wasn't sure who said what, but his tall gangly skinny form had been frightening in its first appearance. Spiky hair that he obviously hadn't bothered to tame recently, shadowed eyes, severe cheekbones, thin wrist raised up….Wow, he looked…starved. Worse than he had.

"Oh wow," he said finally, when he had recovered slightly. "You look dreadfu—you look good," he corrected quickly. "You look really good."

She gave him a deadpan glare, shifted her weight slightly to lend it extra exasperation, and nearly crumpled.

"Woah," he said, instantly there to support her. "Come on, let's get you set down. There you go. Hold on, I have something here…."

He fished in his deep pockets, pulling out a water bottle with maybe a swallow of water, handing it to her as he sat down. His grayish KVAS testing tracksuit was smudged and dirty, and she was certain, without looking, that she didn't look any better.

She drank the swallow of water, swirling it around for a full minute to return moisture to her mouth before very carefully and slowly swallowing one tiny trickle at a time.

"Is that better?" he asked when she finished. She nodded. "Okay, great. Now follow my finger with your eyes….Okay, say 'apple.'"

To be fair, she did say something that started with "a" and ended with "e."

"Now, now, that's no way for a lady to speak," he chided.

She waved him off before holding the bottle out.

"I can't," he said, interpreting the gesture. "There isn't any more."

She pointed at the hall, barely managing to croak out a sentence. "But there's a bathroom," she choked out hoarsely, remembering the side door.

When she looked back to him, it was to see that his mouth was quirked slightly in an apologetic and sorrowful smirk. "No there isn't—yours wasn't the first room I checked. Nothing in this room is real, and nothing can be interacted with. That television is just a box, the cabinets don't open, and the bathroom door is just like those blinds—a very clever optical illusion. It saves money, you see."

She struck him in the shoulder, an action she had often done when they had encountered obstacles previously that he had known about, had known why they had been stubborn obstacles. Her hit had no weight in it—she doubted she could kill a gnat right now—but he still rubbed his shoulder, and it occurred to her that even with the shoulder pads on the suit, he couldn't absorb any sort of impact right now.

He opened his mouth—probably to ask if she had gotten it out of her system; it was his favorite question after such an action—but a rumbling and a quaking cut him off.

"What was that?" she asked. Oh goody, her saliva glands were working again—she needed the extra moisture.

"Prepare for emergency evacuation," the flat male voice announced.

"Um," Wilson noised, hand up, one finger half-pointing, suddenly very, very nervous. "Ah, see, that's the announcement that normally precedes—"

"All reactor cores are now non-functional. Please prepare for emergency shutdown."

"What does that mean?" Willow asked.

"It means we need to get out of here," Wilson said, standing on the bed and reaching for the panel the management rail disappeared into. "There's a control panel up here that maintenance cores use—if I can reach it…."

Willow stood and—with the last of the meager strength she had stored up in the past few minutes—grabbed his legs and heaved him up.

"AAA!" he yelped, scrabbling to get the rest of the way into the management cubby. "You shouldn't be exerting yourself!" he hollered down over the alarm that had begun to sound.

"I don't want to be around here when it explodes!" Willow shot back.

"Nothing is going to explode—"

"Wilson!"

"All right, all right….You might want to hold onto something, by the way."

Why quickly became evident when the room began moving. She fell backwards into the open closet (no doors, she noted inanely), and shrieked when the far wall was stripped away, revealing a horrible, horrible drop.

"Are you all right down there?" Wilson hollered, concern evident in his voice.

"Whatever you're doing, do it better!" she called.

"Okay, I just—I have to concentrate—"

More bumps, more scrapes—there really wasn't anywhere safe in the room—

"There! Up ahead!" he called after an eternity of weightless jostling and stomach-churning swaying over bottomless pits and ragged metal. "It's an old testing track, but it's relatively safe and solid—just—just give me a minute—"

The room crashed into the old site, sending her flying forward, nearly into the abyss.

Silence. Stillness and silence.

"…Are you okay?" he asked finally.

"Yeah," she said shakily, pushing herself into a sitting position. Wow—she had narrowly avoided being impaled—

That made her check the rest of her body. A few bumps, scrapes and bruises, but otherwise…."I'm fine," she called.

Wilson carefully levered himself down, a trickle of blood from a cut on his forehead impeding his vision slightly. "Not one of my more gossamer landings, I'll admit…." He said, sitting down on the bed.

"Wait, you've done this before?"

He bit his lip and wiped away some of the blood. "Well….No, actually…just simulations…but under the circumstances…."

She sighed and waved him off. "So how do we get out of here?"

Escape—that sweet, sweet word. Now if only they could act upon it.

He took a deep breath, stood, and offered his hand to her.

"We go forward, I would imagine."