Up until that moment, Wheatley had thought that the strangest things he'd experienced had included, but were not limited to, being thrown out into space, having his story start over, experiencing a disorienting case of Groundhog Day, finding out he was a fictional character, finding a room full of creepy zombie clones, traveling back in time, being blown up by a megalomaniacal narrator, coming back to life, dying multiple times in multiple ways and coming back to life each time, and breaking his story. But what he had just experienced - the alternate stories - took the cake, the whole cake, nothing but the cake, so help him God, or whatever other mystical omniscient beings might be out there listening.
He blinked, sitting up on his rail, and took in his surroundings. Everything seemed to be in order - the darkness of the unwritten territory was gone, and all the rails, catwalks, and pipes were back, along with the rest of the facility. He never thought that this place would be a sight for sore eyes - or, well, eye, in his case - but right then, he felt like he could lean down on his rail and kiss whatever part of the facility he could reach. It may not be the best of places - way far down on his list, if he was honest - but it was his. Not that the facility itself was his - like hell he would ever go through thinking that again - it's just that it was much better than being vivisected; concussing himself on a hardwood floor; having a birthday song sung to him by the Narrator; being a test subject; the moving platforms, fire, spike-pits, buttons; and, worst of all, the crowd of crazy coffee-loving humans, although he did have to admit that he was really going to miss coffee and toast himself after having been granted the opportunity to try them. And arms and legs - he did find those be quite convenient things to have, although it was inconvenient that they were attached to such clumsily-built squishy, fleshy bodies.
All that aside, he couldn't help but wonder if he was really back in his own story now. A simple glance around did nothing to confirm this for him, and out of habit he found himself asking aloud for an answer,
"Umm... Okay... So, are we actually back in the correct story, then?"
There came no reply, neither from that mysterious computer monitor person nor the Narrator. He moved forward on his rail and looked around, searching to see if one of those monitors might appear or if the Narrator would say something. Neither of those things happened.
"Hellooooo? Anyone there? Narrator?" he called out. "Is the- Is the story back on now?"
Still no response, save for the faint echo of his own voice, softly serving his own question back to him.
"You know what? I'm gonna wait here for just a moment and, and see if you can still hear me. It is possible that you can't, for some reason. Or, I suppose, it's possible that I can't hear you. So, just, you know, if you're there... if you can hear me, could you maybe just, give me some kind of sign that you're still there? Like- maybe cough or something? Well, no, if I can't hear you then coughing won't do any good. Okay, you could- oh! You could throw up another brick wall! You love those - brick walls - so just, go on, if you can hear me, put up a brick wall around this corner, all right?"
Wheatley followed his rail around a corner up ahead and halted just on the other side, fully expecting to see a brick wall waiting there for him. He was shocked to find that there was nothing, not one hint of a brick wall, not even so much as a single stray brick.
"Okay, no brick walls, then," he said, quickly coming up with another idea, "but how about this? You could drop another steel beam down on me! Just drop it right down, straight down, right on my head. I'll even hold still so you don't miss, if that'll help. I know you'd never want to miss an opportunity like this, ha ha, if you-.. if you caught my little pun there. Anyway, let's just do this, all right? Okay, annnnnd- GO!"
And so he did hold still, eye shutters pressed together tight in anticipation...
...of a blow that never came.
He blinked his eye back open. "Nothing? Really? Now that's certainly unexpected."
More silence, except for the ever-present droning of the facility as it went on functioning and churning out science of its own accord.
"All right, Narrator, you can stop fooling around now. This isn't funny. Where did you go? Are you really-..." His voice died for a moment as he began to feel small, lost, and alone. "Is he really gone?" he said again, this time to himself.
It seemed he really was gone. And oddly enough, Wheatley wasn't sure how to feel about that. Had he really defeated the Narrator? Had he actually killed him? He had never killed anybody before - not unless he counted those few times he accidentally got the lady killed in some of the previous runs through the story, and the 9,999 test subjects whose deaths he had somehow been responsible for despite never actually having any control over their life monitoring systems. He decided that those did not count and dismissed the thought immediately thereafter. What did count, at least in his mind, was the fact that the Narrator now seemed to be gone as a direct result of his, Wheatley's, little rebellion there at the end, right before everything had gone haywire.
And now he didn't really know what to do. What would he do without that voice always telling him what to do, where to go, warning him of danger? Not that he had ever listened to that voice before, but he had grown accustomed to it, however grudgingly so. Another thing that was unclear to him - with the Narrator gone, was there still a story? Everything seemed to still exist, but was the story as he knew it still really happening? Without someone there to tell him so, how would he know for sure-
Oh-
"Oh God, the lady!" he gasped and got moving, Narrator or no Narrator.
Last he remembered the lady was still in testing. The crazy boss lady had just deployed a bogus surprise on her - some lie about the lady's birth parents coming to meet her. After that, Wheatley remembered talking to her while she was in one of the elevator shafts that was still under construction and- Ah, that's right, Jerry was there and everything. Now he remembered! That meant that she was close to making it to the test chamber where he would need to break her out - at least, that's what he hoped, if he wasn't too late. He had no way of knowing how long he had been gone, of how much time had lapsed while he was in each alternate story and how much that time would stack up and transpire in his own story. About all he knew in that moment was that he had to hurry.
By this point, he noticed along the way, most of the mounds of trash had been collected and disposed of by the Pneumatic Diversity Vents. Wheatley could say a lot of things about the crazy boss lady - a lot of unkind and profane things among the most of them - but even he could admit to himself that She was efficient at running the place, keeping it nice and tidy, free from falling apart and blowing up as it were.
And that was fine by him. She could stay in charge as long as She wanted, so long as he and the lady were able to make it out. He just had to either figure out a way of talking Her into letting them go - which, he had a feeling, would not go over well for he and the lady - or they would have to replace Her with another core at some point, so long as it wasn't him. There was no way he was going to risk that again. Simply no way.
And then there was the issue of everything that had happened - everything he had done, all the story restarts, the multiple deaths, and everything in between. What all should he tell the lady once he had the chance? Should he risk telling her that she was a fictional character too, or was there some way for him to avoid all that? He didn't have a fancy educational video to show her, and he wasn't sure he, for all his verbosity, could fully convey the reality of it all to her either. What if she freaked out the way he had and ran off screaming and got hurt or something? Would she even believe him? Or worse - what if she did believe him, didn't forgive him, went off on her own, and something happened to her that could have been avoided had he been there with her?
"First things first - escape," he muttered, his speed along the rails matching the speed of this thoughts. "Escape first, then I'll tell her everything. At least then she'll be safe."
Immense relief washed over Wheatley when he made it to Test Chamber #21 and found that the lady had not started the test yet. It seemed she had only just arrived, because he could hear Her going on on the other side of the wall.
"I've got a surprise for you after this next test," She was saying. "Not a fake, tragic surprise like last time. A real surprise, with tragic... consequences. And real confetti this time. The good stuff. Our last bag. Part of me's going to miss it, I guess - but at the end of the day it was just taking up space."
Wheatley heard the door open, signaling the lady had entered the test chamber. That was his cue. He plugged into the manual control panel for the test chamber, waited a beat, and then cut the power to it.
The crazy boss lady's voice rang out in a rare display of surprise, "What's going on? Who turned off the lights?"
Seconds later, he popped the panels open and watched as the lady was looking around in the darkness, clearly confused by what was going on.
"Pssst!" he called over to her in as much of a whisper as he could produce, "Lady! Over here!"
Her eyes snapped in his direction and popped wide in astonishment.
"I, I don't think she can hear us if we're whispering, and maybe she won't notice either if you walk over here slowly!"
The lady nodded at him and began moving in his direction. Unfortunately, despite whispering, he gathered more than the lady's attention.
"Look, metal ball, I can hear you," said the crazy boss lady, her tone arid as an incinerator and twice as deadly.
"Oh, sh- RUN!" he cried and forced the rest of the panels open, enough so that the lady could make it through. They wouldn't hold for long, but thankfully the lady was agile and quick - she squeezed through the opening without any issues and Wheatley followed immediately after her. He easily pulled ahead of her, being a machine and not having so many obstacles in his way, keeping a close eye on her as they went. "Come on, luv, run, run! Keep moving! Faster than that! Don't stop!"
He made sure to keep his location to her as clear as possible, so she wouldn't get lost - last time he had pushed ahead a little too quickly in some areas, costing her precious seconds that quite possibly could have cost her life. Thankfully she had made it out, but still, this time he didn't want to be taking any unnecessary risks, no matter how small.
He could hear her huffing and puffing as she pushed her body, which had already been pushed to its limits, far past the limits of any human he had ever seen. Her movements were truly impressive, even in desperate times. He could only hope that like last time, her maneuvering was precise and quick and that she would make it through this.
"Just to clue you in real quick," he shouted to her over the noise of the facility, "I've got a plan to get out us out of here, okay? A plan that will work this time! I'll tell you all about it up ahead, but for now - RUN!"
Suddenly a large wall to their left opened up and Her voice chilled the already cold air again.
"The irony is that you were almost at the last test," She said as She unveiled what was supposedly the last test - a test that was already very clearly solved and also very clearly a trap. It was every bit as stupid as the last time Wheatley had seen it and he almost laughed.
"Here it is," She went on. "Why don't you just do it? Trust me, it's an easier way out than whatever asinine plan your friend came up with."
Wheatley barked back at Her, "Oh now come off it! Our plan is brilliant, absolutely brilliant, you'll see! Nowhere near as- as asinine as your silly little test chamber or whatever it is you have going on there! Your obvious little trap that we obviously aren't going to fall for!" He then turned his attention back to the lady. "Come on, come on, across this light bridge! You're doing great, keep going!"
Halfway across, the light bridge flickered off, the lady fell, and Wheatley let out a wail. He had forgotten that that would happen and hurried to find her, relieved to see that she was still there and in one piece and not lying broken at the bottom of a pit somewhere.
"You okay?" he called in spite of himself. She gave a single nod and kept running, her footfalls on the catwalk banging loudly around them. "Good idea - keep running! Come on, come on!"
The lady bolted across the catwalk and into a rectangular opening, Wheatley following closely off to the side, as close as he rail would allow. The passage then closed up around her, panels lifting into place and boxing her in. And then Wheatley remembered the-
"TURRETS! Oh God, I can't believe I forgot- Lady, careful, there are turrets in there!" he cried. "Lady! Lady, I heard gunfire! Are you okay?! Please be okay!"
He received a reply in the form of more gunfire, which only made him more nervous.
Oh God, oh no, oh nononono- If she died now, with the Narrator being gone... would she be able to come back? Wheatley couldn't bear to think of such a thing, and yet the possibility of it was right there staring him in the face with closed panels and gunfire and the sweet little voices of the turrets indicating they had located their target.
He waited around on tenterhooks, shifting anxiously back and forth on his rail, while several more spurts of gunfire erupted from within the room, along with childlike wails as something presumably was upsetting the turrets. As good of a sign as that was, Wheatley was unable to relax...
...until the lady finally emerged from the trap, without any holes in her as far as he could tell.
"Oh, thank God, you're okay!" he exclaimed, though he was still shaking. He got moving again and the lady followed. "Come on, let's keep moving! AGH, there's another turret!"
The lady shot a well-aimed portal at it and kept moving as if it was no big deal.
"Hurry, hurry, She's trying to bring the whole place down on our heads! Run! Over there, to the lift! You see it? Hurry, hurry!"
He moved quickly, dodging his own obstacles as they came barrelling down on both him and the lady. Steel beams, pushed out of place by the walls that were literally closing in on them as the crazy boss lady moved them, came crashing down, taking out sections of his rail and the catwalk. Wheatley's core leapt into his voice box as the lady dodged near miss after near miss - or barely misses, in his opinion, as she was nearly hit multiple times by falling debris.
She reached the lift and made it in with hardly a second to spare. From his position, Wheatley watched in horror as the room she had just gladiatored her way through was scraped off into oblivion. As the catwalks and beams and pipes were all reduced to shrapnel and left to disappear into the abyss below, the thought that That could have been her, that could have been her, that could have been her played itself on repeat in his mind. That could have been her, that could have been her, she could have been-
The sound of the lift doors closing shook him out of it. He called to her - "I'll meet you on the other side, all right?" - and then went through one of the core transport tunnels that led through to the other side of the wall and into the next room. Once there, he found her already there waiting for him.
"We made it! I can't believe we made it! That was mad, wasn't it? The way She just-" he beamed at her and then gave a start when a series loud KA-CHUNKs sounded off somewhere nearby, rapidly approaching, until they were suddenly plunged into darkness. "Oh! Oh, right, there go the lights... It's all right, luv, don't panic, it's all right. I've got this, just hang on a sec."
He clicked his flashlight on and shined it in her direction. She squinted and held up a hand to block out the light. It was this gesture that reminded him of when the flashlight had been shined into his eyes in that alternate story where he and the lady lived in a house. Upon remembering that, he put it a bit off to the side instead of right in her face.
"Sorry, sorry about that. You all right then? Any damages? Anything at all? Any cuts, scrapes, bumps, contusions, lacerations-" He moved closer to her, she took a step back, and then that reminded him of the whole personal space thing from that other alternate story where he was a test subject and she was a core and he stopped, allowing her her space. "Er, just, tell me if you're hurt, please?"
The lady went about checking over herself, pointing out the tears in her clothing and some injuries here and there, Wheatley holding his flashlight steady on them while she checked their severity. Other than a few bruises and cuts - one on her forearm being slightly deeper than the rest, the result of being grazed by a stray bullet, Wheatley surmised - she appeared to be in good shape.
"Well, thank goodness for that," he sighed. "When I heard all the gunfire, you know, for a second there I really thought that, um-... well, you know," he said, looking away.
He gave a small start when he felt something warm touching the side of his hull and was surprised to find that she was actually touching him. And there was deep concern etched into her crystalline eyes. "Oh... Oh, what's the matter? Is there some damage on me, then? Oh God, where? What's damaged? I mean, I don't feel anything, but-"
She removed her hand and pointed at him.
"Me? I'm broken? Well, I don't-"
She shook her head and pointed again, this time at one of her own eyes first and then back at him.
"Oh, you mean my optic?"
She nodded.
"That- Yeah, that- that all happened when She crushed me, you know-... back when we woke Her up. It's okay, though, really, I promise it's not as bad as it looks. Doesn't even hurt." It did actually hurt - a dull ache at this point - but he wasn't about to tell her that. "In fact, you might even say it's a good thing - helps me see more of the room at once, right? Provides a different, um, perspective on things, as it were." And then, right on cue, that annoying involuntary twitch jolted through him, a few obligatory sparks falling out of him as well and causing the lady to move back. "That, though, that I'll admit is quite annoying. Tolerable, but annoying. Just watch out for the sparks, okay, don't need you getting burned or set on fire or something. Actually, how flammable would you say you are? Just so, uh, so we're on the same page and all."
She didn't answer his question, but instead gave him another pat and tipped her head forward at him. An almost overwhelming sense of warmth and affection swelled up within him, filling him the way the warmth of the sun had in that first alternate story, when they had made it out to the surface. Oh how he hoped they could make it there again, and that that was really what the world looked like up there in his story as well.
"Oh... Um... Well..." he said awkwardly, fidgeting on his rail and looking away. "...You're welcome. I mean... I made you a promise to get you out, and-and-and... I fully intend to see that through."
He was admittedly confused when she shook her head at him before tipping it forward again.
"Sorry, I-I.. I don't understand what you're getting at there."
She pointed at him again and then, again, her chin dipped down, like she was giving him precisely one half of nod and leaving it at that.
He narrowed his optic plates at her. "I'm sorry, I still don't understand." And truly, he didn't. Was she not actually thanking him for helping her escape? He was sure that that was what she was doing, but she kept indicating otherwise. Maybe it was the brain damage.
"I wish you could talk like you did in-... Er, I mean, I just wish you could talk, is all. Would make everything a lot easier, wouldn't it?"
Now it was her turn to give him a confused look. There was something else there, though, that he couldn't grasp onto, like trying to catch fog. It piqued his curiosity for about half a second before his mind automatically steered him back to the original unanswered question of what the heck she was trying to get at. He decided to throw a wild guess into the wind and hope that was the appropriate response.
"Ah, well, you know how it goes-..." And then decided to change the subject back to the situation at hand. "So! About that plan. Let me lay it all out for you, okay?"
She sighed, gave him a curious little half-smile, and then nodded - correctly that time, he noted.
"It's brilliant, trust me, bloody brilliant! But um, just laying all the cards down on the table - figuratively, you know, since I don't actually have any cards, still haven't had a chance to learn, and also we don't have a table, but- Yes, just wanted to be up front and honest that this plan is not without its risks. So, let me lay it all out for you, and you tell me if you're in, all right?"
She nodded at him.
"Wait, no, stay with me here, I haven't laid it all out yet, so don't go agreeing to it without even hearing me out first."
This time she shrugged.
"All right! So, here's the plan."
Ubscurler - I saw your question and I would be happy to answer this for you, however I don't want to post it here so as not to spoil anything for other Readers! Do you have a Tumblr? If so, please reach out to me through my Tumblr page - my username is ThursdaysDove. If you do not have Tumblr, you should still be able to send me an anonymous Ask and I'll be able to respond. nn;