Chapter 26, everybody! In which we recount Willow's first experience with turrets….
Don't Starve © 2013 Klei Entertainment
Portal © 2007 Valve
Willow followed Wilson in silence, trying to figure out the turret's ramblings.
She was fairly certain that was what it was—ramblings.
But she had seen a throne before….
He stood up, the throne he was sitting on melting into individual cables that writhed around them—
"Hello?"
She looked up in horror—grabbed Wilson's arm—
But he didn't seem perturbed.
"Oh good," he noised. "We're there."
Oh hey—bad news on your next test: it had to be shut down for maintenance purposes.
Maintenance purposes? What maintenance purposes?
But good news! We have a different test chamber that'll work—oh wait. Papers shuffling. Ah, these legal disclosure forms say I have to tell you that….More shuffling. The test chambers you'll be going through are used as live-fire tests for androids.
What on earth did that mean?
She'd find out soon enough, she reflected, giving the information panel a cursory glance before rounding the corner—
"Hello?"
"Huh?" she gasped, freezing—there was someone else here!
But the only thing she saw was a white egg on a tripod with a single red eye—
And a red laser pointed right at her.
"Target acquired," chimed the same cute little voice.
She recovered enough of her faculties to dodge back to cover before the thing open-fired.
She cringed in her cover, hands clapped over her ears as the sound of gunfire filled her world.
She cracked an eye open when it all finally stopped, uncovered her ears in time to catch the tail-end of a dark, dark chuckle….
And looked back to the information panel, to that little square that showed the same egg-shaped machine firing at a stick-figure.
A stick figure that looked very much like it was collapsing, dead.
And now she was seeing where the little soft-voiced nightmares were made.
"The turret assembly line," Wilson whispered, as they watched the turrets zip by on a conveyor belt, pausing only to test-fire on a dummy that jinked and writhed much too realistically for Willow's taste. "There's a control booth up ahead—if we get there, we can shut these little monsters down for good."
"Why are we whispering?" she asked, voice low.
"I…I don't know," Wilson admitted, returning to his normal volume. "It's not like these things are programmed to track sound…uh…."
He flinched, anticipating the customary hit she delivered whenever he reminded her that he worked at KVAS.
She opted for patting him on the shoulder instead.
"Come on," she declared, hefting her portal gun. "Let's do it."