Chapter 7, everybody! In which portal-related antics ensue….

Don't Starve © 2013 Klei Entertainment

Portal © 2007 Valve

She plummeted down, thirty, twenty, ten—

And landed in ankle-deep water.

"Yuck," she muttered, shaking the pond scum off her long-fall boots. She glanced up to see Wilson clutching his chest, as though she had given him a heart attack. She didn't see why—she had taken longer falls than that. The long-fall boots had always absorbed the impact.

"Are you coming?" she asked, waving him down. He squinched his eyes shut and jumped, not landing quite as gracefully as she did.

"You do realize," he said testily, standing up. "That the floor could have been compromised and you could have ended up falling much farther than you were prepared for?"

"Don't be such a pessimist," she chided, already heading for the open door.

It was the more physical tests that she preferred—not the ones that required careful puzzling. Send her flying through the air any hour of the day—she'd test till the cows came home.

Look at you—sailing through the air with the gracefulness of a slug.

Ugh—there always had to be something to ruin it.

It had been three test chambers after she had resolved not to speak to the voice, and apparently, it was beginning to wear on him. He had tried wheedling, then insults, before finally just giving up and making running commentary on her performance. It was fifty-percent insult, forty-percent sarcasm, and ten-percent actual useful information.

That was, when he felt like dispensing useful information. At one point, he had been reading off a list of potential hazards involved with the handheld portal device—a device she was expected to use for the remainder of the testing—got halfway through, started mumbling, then finally said nope, forget it—I'm not reading any more.

That had ticked her off. The thing could blow up in her hands and she'd have no idea how to prevent it.

But she found it was better to ignore him completely—the test chambers were laid out in such a way that one could figure it out if they stood there staring at it long enough, and many had taken her upwards of an hour to figure out.

To her delight, she found that the longer she took, the angrier the voice became. It got to the point that whenever she got stuck on a test, she'd set up two portals—one on the floor, one directly above it on the ceiling—and fall through it, enjoying the abject feeling of weightless acceleration that she'd normally only get on a roller coaster, until the voice would bellow NOW CUT THAT OUT!

Thank goodness she eventually bumped into Wilson—despite being an insufferable know-it-all on top of being one of them, he at least had the intelligence to get through the harder tests.

That didn't stop her from having fun at both men's expense—shooting a fresh portal right before Wilson was about to step into one, fooling around with falling through portals, shooting the cameras off the walls, and trying to see if she couldn't shoot a portal through a portal.

And if she couldn't see the voice's expressions at her antics, she at least had the benefit of seeing Wilson's. If she tried anything remotely stupid, he'd fly into a panic. He'd become irritated at her fooling about, and full-blown angry when the voice would once again question his intelligence. He was sensitive about his obvious intelligence, and she didn't know why.

They were arguing again, about what, she didn't know, but she had to get her frustrations out. He was angry because she had dropped him several feet thanks to a quickly altered portal, so instead of his calm step through, he had plummeted forty feet, screaming his head off the entire way.

The voice, meanwhile, was laughing his head off. Ooh, yes, this was a good idea! Like he had come up with putting them together.

"SHUT! UP!" they both bellowed, before returning to their arguing.

A touch to her shoulder told her she had drifted off again. No. She couldn't afford to fall asleep now—wasn't that what he had said? She'd fall asleep and die of starvation….

"Willow, wake up," Wilson said again, insistent. "I found something you might like."

"What?" she muttered.

He was smiling broadly. "How does a nice meal on the town sound?"

Okay—now he was dreaming.