The Things We Do For Science Chapter 56: Running The Joint, a Portal + Don't Starve Crossover fanfic

Chapter 56, everyone! Yes, I LIVE! It's a Christmas miracle! And what's more, I FINALLY HAVE MY DOCTORATE! :D

Yes! So hopefully I can get the creative juices flowing again on this story and finish it after so long without updates—we shall see….

This was so not good.

He wasn't sure what was worse—that he had been flung away like yesterday's garbage, or that of all people, the facility had picked the stupid yutz to take his place!

They had said when the facility had declared him corrupt that they were tired of him not playing ball—what, they thought the kid could do better? He was an idiot! Look, couldn't even summon an…elevator….

Okay. Okay, that was all right. Now go with the girl. Come on, leave—leave, and they'd have to take him back….

Except….

He saw it in the kid's eyes, right before the facility started pumping nanites into him without his knowing—the kid had access to unlimited knowledge, and the greedy little bugger wanted it.

This was so not good.

Especially considering the beautiful lies the facility must be telling him—they must be doozies, if the way the kid was laughing manically was any indication.

And then wonder of wonders, he wanted to keep her as a test subject. Come on, didn't he know that she was more trouble than she was worth?

Except she was begging and pleading and trying to convince him that no, this was a very bad idea—and he was hoping that she could get through—

"Wilson, you're starting to sound like Maxwell—"

"Oh, is that your problem?" he asked, accompanying it with a careless wave of his hand.

Maxwell had been trying to crawl away, but when that happened, a panel opened beneath his legs and he fell into it with barely a sound—he hadn't even had time to process what had happened before he was falling, falling to his doom—

He had been thrown away like yesterday's garbage. It wasn't his facility anymore. And wherever this led, he'd probably be lying there slowly rotting—

The impact drove all thought from his mind—

He tried breathing, tried railing against the injustice of it all, of how someone else was running his show….

Of how he'd die down here, forgotten and alone.

And then he collapsed into unconsciousness….

"…Max…"

"Max, honey, wake up…."

This was wonderful. This couldn't be more wonderful. He'd have to invent a new word to describe this, and then ensure that that word was included in the dictionary and human language from that point on.

And Wilson was absolutely certain he could achieve this. He had the world at his fingertips, had so much more knowledge—more than he had ever dreamed of! It was as though someone had cracked his head open and poured it direct into his brain—which was…rather accurate….

He felt a minor twinge of guilt at that—he had lied to Willow about how he had been hooked up, yes….But she would have tried to end it right away! She wouldn't be able to see the beauty of it then, of him being in charge rather than Maxwell—after all, look at how smoothly everything was running now! It was all going at a beautiful pace, absolutely smooth, everything right on the ball (fact: 'right on the ball' stems from the synchronizing of train timetables by a man named Ball—see? He had even fixed that broken old Fact Core!)…and she wanted to end it right before it got started!

And he most certainly did not want to end it. He had been low man on the totem pole long enough, eking by while more inane personas tried and failed to do great things—Maxwell running this place, for example. He had seen, via instantaneous download, how Maxwell had run the place before—it made his little scientist heart weep; letting scientific opportunities pass him by, and then when he did bother with test subjects, he spent the whole time haranguing them and insulting them! And while that may have added to research into how people reacted to being maligned, it didn't further research in other, more pressing areas. And then letting all those test subjects just rot! All those skeletons he had found during his frenetic search for Willow—all wasted opportunities, the whole lot of them.

The human vault.

Yes, at least there was that—but it was sealed off at the moment, due to the facility falling apart and Maxwell not bothering with fixing it. Just focusing on Wilson and Willow and making their lives miserable—

Wilson had never hated a person like he hated Maxwell. Even his college professors couldn't compare—they had made him feel small and worthless, yes, but at least he was able to escape them at the end of the day. Maxwell had been caustic and bitter and mean and a lot of other unfavorable adjectives that quickly streamed through his mind, and Wilson had been completely unable to escape him.

Until Willow.

The facility wasn't sold on keeping Willow around. That was all right—he was more than willing to patiently explain the beauty of it, of her, to explain just why having her around was a good thing. She was the most brilliant test subject to run the gamut, aside from himself, of course (here he insisted on reviewing all the past test subjects to provide unequivocal empirical evidence to this fact, and then added the fact to the Fact Core's database). Her attitude regarding hatred towards the facility stemmed from her treatment by Maxwell—Maxwell was no longer in charge, Wilson was. She liked Wilson. And once Maxwell was permanently out of the picture, things would be moving much more swimmingly.

Now if only she hadn't developed this unhealthy fixation on Maxwell.

Wilson knew what it was, of course—Stockholm Syndrome. She had spent so long being berated and tortured by Maxwell that she couldn't imagine her life without him. Well, Wilson was going to change that. Wean her off of him, and then when she inevitably accepted Wilson's new job position with open arms….

Ah, there were a lot of options. The incinerator, yes, but that was a quick, clean, and done option—and he wanted Maxwell to linger. Acid was another option, but again, it was too quick. Ooh, there was the room where all the robots screamed at you—and the mashy spike plates! Which really needed a better name….But still too fast for his tastes….

Wait….

He watched carefully as Willow solved the test, then fired a portal over to where Maxwell was hunched against the wall; he had initially hoped it was because the louse was too terrified to move, but no—he could see from the way he moved and scowled…he was in pain and could barely see.

The dead nanites in his system. It'd be like having glass in his veins and fog in his eyes.

And just like that, Wilson had a clandestine moment.

He now knew the best way to make Maxwell pay for everything he had done.

And that would be to force him through his own testing tracks. No one to help him, and if he died, it was his fault. And better yet, Wilson could recharge the nanites whenever that happened, meaning he could force Maxwell to run the gamut again and again and again and again!

It was just too perfect! And what beautiful irony! What just desserts!

Now to separate him from Willow without her complaining about it.

But Wilson was assured that he could do it. He could definitely wean her off of that maggot (and quickly searched countermeasures to Stockholm Syndrome while he was at it—and maybe get one of those cakes baking too). Then it'd just be him and her.

And that was just how he liked it.

She'd have nothing to worry about—he'd take much better care of her than Maxwell ever hoped. He wouldn't run her into the ground and then try to kill her. She'd actually get cake and see deer and plenty of other lovely things. And before the facility could warm up an argument, he reminded them that there was a vault full of test subjects just waiting to be swapped out, now why wasn't any work being done on digging them out? Get to work.

Because he wasn't lying to her when she had shown herself again (where had she gone? Vague memory of her…falling?...running off?...maybe she had run away out of old habit…).

But that was in the past. She was here now.

And everything was going to be just fine now.