AN: Welcome back to chapter two! If you enjoy the chapter or have a suggestion of how it could be better, please feel free to leave a comment/review! With that, read on!
Waking up the second time was easier, but no less unpleasant. Caroline had a headache when her eyes fluttered open, not helped much by the smell of singed hair. But she was alive—she could be thankful for that much.
She nearly panicked when her eyes met the darkness of close-set walls. No gel slicked her skin this time, but she shook at the anxious memories too recent and horrible for comfort. Nevertheless, she did her best to wrangle the wild beast in her brain and wrestle it to the ground—not today, we've got work to do. Knowing that the tightly confined space held enough oxygen to keep her keep her alive but barely enough to keep her conscious, she slowed her breathing to a shallow, even pace. Caroline then wormed her hands and fingers along the cold edges of her metal cell—looking for anything that would give her even the barest hint of an advantage.
Her fingers found no purchase amongst the seams of the metal—in fact, the metal appeared to have no seams at all, and Caroline was suddenly put in mind of a rigid, alien cocoon. She shivered at the thought and struggled to shake off the dim memories of alien horror flicks; she could do this—she could get out of this soon enough. If she could survive the meat-grinder of a mainframe that was the GLaDOS system, if she could take down half a dozen mantis men, she could figure out how to wiggle her way out of a simple cell. The how of it was the only question left in the equation brewing in her brain.
Then, suddenly, her searching fingers happened upon something so small and unobtrusive that it could have been a mere nick or scratch in the metal. But Caroline rubbed the spot carefully over and over, smiling bigger and bigger as she did. A keyhole of some kind, ludicrously small, but a keyhole, nonetheless.
Caroline groped for her pocket, searching for anything that might be useful, anything long and thin that she could possibly use as a—ah-ha. Her fingers closed on a thin, folded metal wire, and her grin turned positively wolfish. Imagine what dear old dad would say to that—breaking out of jail with a hairpin. Grasping the pin tight—it simply wouldn't do to drop it in a space so confined that she couldn't possibly hope to bend over and pick it up—she began the tedious process of re-finding the hole and carefully fitting the pin to the lock.
It slid in with a squeak of resistance that she felt with her fingers rather than heard with her ears. She screwed her face up tightly in concentration. The slightest mistake might mean a major setback or worse, getting caught somehow in the process. She hadn't the slightest idea if she was currently being observed in her small cell, but given that her air supply was limited and she'd been put in unconscious, her captors weren't all that keen on having conscious prisoners. Less escape attempts, she supposed.
The pin slid gently to the left, nothing. To the right, nothing. Up, down, nothing again. Caroline was tempted to huff in anger, but that took extra amounts of air, and her heavy concentration was already costing her enough. She tried diagonal combinations, hitting success somewhere on the up-left direction. Ten more minutes of fiddling, and she heard the satisfying click of a lock releasing. Caroline resisted the strong urge to laugh and pushed out against the walls giddily.
Nothing happened.
Caroline frowned and pushed harder—perhaps the walls were clicked in place and just needed a good shove? She couldn't imagine why else the walls weren't moving…unless. Unless…the walls were doubly restrained with a secondary lock that she couldn't access. Caroline bit back a cry of frustration. Close, but no cigar. At least she wasn't the type to give up, something she could have sworn she'd picked up from Chell over the last few years.
Without warning, her cell opened, and she nearly toppled over and out onto a catwalk a good twenty feet below her. She swallowed, darting her eyes around the space, now free to observe it with still-adjusting eyes.
She was in some sort of hall chamber—long and thin like an oval in its general layout, with walls crowded thickly with pods like the one she'd just been freed from. The whole space was dimly lit with a bluish-green light, like a tamer version of that awful disco ball Cave had hung up in the office once. Her eyes, still bleary with light, glanced around the chamber, catching on something dark and sharp in the corner of her vision. The shape was too fleeting to make sense of, but all the same, her mind supplied the word briefcase, of all things, at the sight. In the next second, she had delicately rubbed her eyes, and the shape was gone. But now she had another word for the shape: businessman. A businessman with a briefcase. How odd, to think of such a thing in such a place.
Caroline tucked the errant thoughts away and carefully craned her neck to get a better view of her situation. Her earlier assessment was correct—she was indeed a good twenty or so feet above the ground, which normally was enough to make her swallow hard, even with the benefit of long-fall boots. But she no longer had that benefit; her boots had been confiscated, leaving her sock-footed and nervous.
Doing her best to keep her balance, she quickly peeled off her socks to give her feet the best possibility of grip, stuffing the grimy, grey, logo-plastered things into her jumpsuit pocket. With a hard intake of breath, Caroline carefully crouched on the edge of her pod, easing herself to a sitting position with her legs dangling. Now or never Caroline, better get it over with. She slowly turned, reaching her legs down into the abyss, searching for purchase that didn't seem to be available. She suppressed a shriek as she dropped about a foot onto the restraining arm of the pod beneath her and just managed to grab hold before she fell.
She took in a shaky breath. She could do this. Chell and Doug were counting on her if they were awake, that is. Even if they weren't, she knew they would be depending on her to use her escape to free them. First, she had to get down though. Second, she had to find them in a sea of metal pods. But if these things had restraining arms keeping the pods locked…then it might just be reasonable to suggest that there would be a universal control for all of the pods. Somewhere near the catwalk—there! Caroline clambered down tediously, steadily finding purchase with feet still sticky from hours-old suspension goop. Her feet held as natural a suction to the metal pods as a garden slug clinging to a wall. She shuddered. Disgusting and ideally never to be repeated. She wouldn't hold her breath though—the strong possibility of aliens didn't bode well in that respect.
Her feet tingled at the cold, strangely textured metal of the catwalk, but she strode easily to the control panel she'd spotted. …And realized that she might be wildly in over her head.
Monitors, dull and lifeless, rose before her in a strange collection: a single rectangle bounded by two sets of additional screens. The whole arrangement was so ludicrous that she could have laughed. The button array was similarly complex, and the labels were denoted in a language unfamiliar to her, but strangely enough, a power button was a power button no matter where you were from. For these were surely aliens, now that she really dwelled on it. She couldn't imagine even Cave "responsible-for-the-disappearance-of-twenty-seven-astronauts" Johnson indulging in guerilla kidnapping of random people with a full military outfit. Wheedle his way out of certain contract stipulations? Sure. But outright kidnapping? Wait—she remembered the later incidents with homeless individuals and cringed. Perhaps she actually could imagine Cave doing that.
But even if she could, the alien script was a dead giveaway.
She pressed the button. For a frightening moment, nothing happened. Caroline was left with nothing but the rows and rows of sleepy pods and the dim greenish glow and the distant humming of unseen machines.
A great hiss of steam, like the wheezing breath of a dragon, sounded from a thousand small pods. Metal arms retracted, unwrapping metal digits and pulling back to reveal unlocked doors. Popping open with much less fanfare, the doors themselves snapped back on their hinges like plastic Tupperware lids, revealing human faces cocooned in metal. The faces didn't twitch for a long minute. Then…Caroline could have whooped for joy.
The bodies began to move and the faces to blink and shift. There was a dull murmur as people began to come alive, and, as they began to panic. For all her own dull sleepiness, Caroline grasped rather quickly that she needed to stop the rising panic in the room before it blew out of control. Scrambling for the panel again, she found another button, resting in the shadow of a thin, delicately bent rod. A microphone, she would hope. A quiet whine of feedback rewarded her press, and Caroline quickly began talking.
"Alright, alright, yes hello good morning." Quiet swelled, but Caroline fought off panic. What was she supposed to say now? What would she have wanted to hear, waking up in a strange and quite literally alien environment? More importantly, how on earth could she talk to them on a very alien PA system, knowing that any number of adversaries were listening in right at that very moment?
The sudden memory of Italian lessons burst like a bubble in her mind.
"Now, say 'non ho peli sulla lingua', Carolina."
"Non…non ho peli sulla lingua. But what does that mean, 'I've got no hair on my tongue'?"
"It's a saying, bella, it sounds like nonsense if you think of it too seriously. It isn't really talking about hair or tongues at all."
Caroline grinned and cleared her throat to speak.
"Right, my name is Caroline, and I'm assuming none of you want to kick the bucket yet. Well, neither do I, so I've got a silver lining for you. I'm the big cheese here for the moment, but I figure that our little chat may have a peeping tom or two, so I won't beat around the bush. We've got a hot minute before they catch our drift, so shut your pie holes, grab a buddy, and we'll find some peashooters so we can blow this popsicle stand. Got it?"
There was a murmur, though if it was one of understanding or assent, she couldn't tell. But there wasn't time; she had to find Chell and Doug before—
Chell dropped to her feet, unaided, just a few pods down, her eyes locking with Caroline's gaze briefly. Weaving around the crowd of human prisoners already building, Chell made her way toward Caroline. The younger woman reached out a hand to touch Caroline, hesitated, so Caroline made up the distance. She squeezed Chell's shoulder.
"There, dear. Now I need your help."
Chell nodded, needing no more insisting. Her gait was awkward for a few stunted steps—lacking the height of springy heels that she was used to, Caroline would guess—but Chell recovered quickly. In a few steps her stride was long and smooth and purposeful. Her steely blue eyes scanned the pods with a cold efficiency, then softened by the barest fraction as she spotted Doug. Caroline followed, holding her arms out as Doug awkwardly lowered himself to the catwalk with trembling arms.
Together again, Caroline allowed herself a second to sigh in relief. Then it was time to get moving again. She scanned the crowd quickly gathering on the catwalk, analyzing people, reading them—doing what she was always good at, what had made her good at PR—and she came to a quick conclusion. A sturdy-looking woman and two burly men stood tall amongst the group, already helping the others to get down from their pods and climbing as easily as monkeys. Caroline whistled sharply.
"Who here knows the most about this prison?"
Uneasy silence, then a short man piped up, pushing his way to the front, "If it's Combine tech you need, then Bart Gallegos is at your service." He offered up a grin. "Suppose you're not too familiar with these guys, eh?"
Caroline gave a wry smile. "Aliens? No. Dictators, however, I have enough experience with those to know one when I see one."
"True enough. What's the plan?"
Caroline took a minute to gather her thoughts. "You madam, and you sirs," she pointed quickly to the woman and the burly men to get their attention, "what are your names?"
"Charlotte, Frederick, and Matthias, lady."
"Would you continue to retrieve prisoners from the cells? Meanwhile, Chell, Doug, and Bart will attempt to locate our confiscated weapons. With any luck, we'll find enough to arm most of our group—those familiar with weapons and the best shots will be priority if we're short."
"Will do, lady. But hurry."
"Good. We'll move fast then." Caroline set her mouth in a hard line and the four of them moved as a unit towards the panel, following Bart.
"These b—" Bart began, paused, then caught sight of Caroline, "—fellows aren't really ones for signage. Lucky for us, human weapons are the only ones that really smell, or at least, smell like—"
"Like gun oil and wood." Caroline finished with a softness that suggested some distant memory rested behind her eyes. Chell flicked her gaze away and around the hallways, ever searching for the masks that had flashed in her fitful dreams. She had no time for memories, not with the new threats they'd only just encountered. Some dim, dreamy part of her razor-sharp mind still whispered that it was just too bad that they should escape one hellscape, only to find themselves smack-dab in the middle of a new one. Crushing the thought, she kept walking.
The hall was cold and unfamiliar in shape, with hard edges and geometric shapes that possessed neither a computerized uniformness nor a human aesthetic. Even so, they were efficient shapes, and the starkness of them sent a shiver down Chell's spine. The further they went along, the alien shapes bled dry, giving way to utterly familiar checked tiles and harsh but human concrete slab. Chell felt the chill of the flooring creep through her socks, worn-thin from constant wear and stiff with filth. She fought off another uneasy shudder, for once missing the tense pull of the long-fall boots on her tendons. For all that they were from that place, they gave her no small sense of security—like whatever might try to kill her next, at least it wouldn't be a deadly drop she had no power over.
They turned a corner, coming face-to-face with a horrifically large stain blotted out on the checked tiles. Chell froze, barely aware of Caroline swallowing back a noisy heaving sound behind her, as she stared transfixed at the sight. A creature with long, long-boned fingers was sprawled across the floor, its face a mass of pulpy red squished down into the cracked tiles. A few feet away, a creature about the size of a large chicken was sprawled out, as undignified as you please, at the end of a crimson streak across the floor, as if it'd gone sliding away. The little chicken-sized thing had two holes in it: the first lay on its belly—face-up to the ceiling—and was circled with a wide beak hanging slackly open. The second hole was the cause of death.
Bart seemed to regain his sense of urgency first.
"Those d—" Chell glanced back to see him awkwardly smear the back of a hand over his face, "—I don't care where you're from—I hope I never have to tangle with one of those things. Getting stabbed to death with a butter knife would be a nicer way to go. But there's nothing we can do for 'em now." He prodded the body with one tentative foor.
Caroline sucked in a shaky breath.
"You—you're right, Mr. Bart." Caroline's expression hardened. "We've got work to do."
Some minutes later, they came to another hallway. Not quite Aperture-white, with paint chipping badly and the posters clinging weakly to rusted thumbtacks, but still bland enough. It was dimly lit, with sparsely placed fluorescent lights flickering weakly from above. Chell scowled at the reduced visibility. Say what you wanted about Aperture, but even in the deepest, most flooded reaches of the labs, they still managed to be lit up brighter than the moon with giant stadium lights. She dared not ask what kind of black hole-esque thing powered those lights, or maybe they ran on the enthusiasm of pre-recorded Cave Johnson alone.
Bart spotted something and skipped ahead, running his fingers with a practiced skill around a door to their left—a single door amongst a hundred others, indistinguishable any practical way. Yet Bart seemed to know his way around, and his posture was bent in a confident, concentrated arc as his fingers fiddled with something. Smooth interlocking metal panels wove together so tightly that Chell could barely see the seams from her position behind the man,
"They've got this nasty little habit of changing the door codes regularly, so the old ones I know probably won't work anymore, but if you wiggle it just a bit, the panels are easy enough to get off—" The panel creaked and loosed its hold on the surrounding metal, revealing a swath of thin wires and complex electrical components resting behind it. "—there we are."
Bart suddenly scowled. "What I wouldn't give for wire clippers right now." He touched the floor quickly, wiped his hands on his patched-up pants, and reached for the panel again. "But we'll make do. It won't be clean, but if I can just pull out the—"
There was a startling pop of electricity, and Bart flinched back. He checked the panel again and grinned. He shot Chell a quick thumbs up before the door shot open so hard that it lodged permanently in the side of the sliding frame and sparked. Bart winced, but waved their group on through the door.
To her first glance, the room was a veritable treasure trove. Reclaimed and confiscated weapons decorated every wall in a swath of metal and wood and a host of other materials that she could not identify. Not that she needed to. The portal gun hung dead center, the familiar gleam of white easy to find against brooding greys and blacks. She snatched it up, stripping it of the plastic identifier tag and fitting the familiar grip—worn smooth by her own calloused fingers—into her hand. Bart, Caroline and Doug were quick to follow, though Doug looked a bit uneasy at the many weapons before them. Bart, meanwhile, looked like a kid in a candy store as he quickly snapped up a small pistol. He reached for another, hesitated, then let it be.
At Chell's look of surprise he offered sheepishly, "Not the greatest aim."
Caroline, meanwhile, had taken an interest to what Chell could only assume was a shotgun-type weapon. She grinned, and it was a fierce grin that made Chell want to smile back and maybe even watch her head. "My father had a Remington 12-gauge—he left it to me when he died. You wouldn't know it, but I got an astonishing amount of use out of it during the, ahem, mantis incident."
Memory flashed—a greenish door marked contaminated while a boisterous voice suggested to pick up a rifle and start shooting—and Chell contented herself with a nod. If Caroline was capable enough of aiming decently, then that was all Chell needed to know. Nothing else about their time in that place was relevant. And the sooner she filed those memories away back into their steel trap, the better.
Bart eagerly snatched up a line of small explosives, belted to a single canvas strap. "Say, we've got quite a few grenades here, and from what I've heard about this place—ol' Ternbeck Penitentiary it was called back in the day—there'll be a big wall surrounding the place." He turned to Caroline with an impish smile, lifting the grenades for inspection. "D'ya think we could put these to good use?"
"My dear Mr. Bert, I believe that is an excellent idea."
Chell ducked her head, pulling on her scratched-up long-fall boots. Whatever was cooking in Bert and Caroline's collective minds, Chell wanted at least to ensure it wouldn't involve a broken leg. Doug seemed to have the same idea, as he hastily began pulling on his own pair.
Chell was not one for drama, nor one who chose her course of action purely for aesthetic reasons. Still, even in her stone-cold, no-nonsense heart, she felt an inexplicable twinge of pleasure as approximately eighty-three humans burst through a brick wall with the wonders of human explosives. A few guards still standing after the blast were efficiently shot down—one taken out with a mercifully quick shot to the head, the others flung into each other with a violence that made Doug flinch. The man trembled, but Caroline kept a tight grasp on his arm to keep him close; they couldn't afford to go back if they got separated.
They kept moving as one unit—the kind of concentrated mass of determination you get when humanity has nothing left to lose. The remaining guards didn't stand a chance. For her part, Caroline was, oddly enough, a crack shot. Chell doubted that extended to being able to fire while in a freefall, but that was why she had the portal gun and Caroline stuck to her shotgun.
Chell caught the sound of something small soaring through the air, beeping like an irritated testing bot. Her eyes snagged on the grenade and her hands moved before her mind once again. A portal on the floor, its twin on the wall behind the combine troop that threw it. There wasn't enough time to throw the explosive back a second time, and the world flashed a cold fiery light. She didn't stop to look at the results but kept moving. She didn't hear the gasps or the screams, just kept moving, sprinting, leaping forward—
They were in the outer courtyard of the prison building, with massive walls rising on all sides. Elegant coils of wire adorned the tops of the walls, most likely some kind of electrified fencing that they'd need to disable if they wanted to climb over. With her boots returned to her, Caroline, and Doug, it would be a simple matter of double-flinging themselves over the walls. Except that she already knew Caroline wouldn't come with them if Chell did that; she was sensing Caroline was already attached to the group of people following close behind them. She wouldn't be easily persuaded to leave them, which meant it was up to Chell to figure out how to get them through the gate or the walls. Probably with a plan significantly messier and more complicated than the ones she typically liked to employ, if Bert's giddy use of grenades was any indication.
The softness of falling dust and crumbling, clinking stone rubble didn't last for long. Already she could hear the loud, constant blare of radios gone inactive as their users; it was a sound she'd been introduced to only seconds ago, yet already she hated it. It meant temporary relief—death to one threat, followed by the promise of more. Light began to choke through the dust, showering their faces with weak sunshine and catching on the tops of the main walls, gathering a golden, undeserved halo around their new obstacle.
More soldiers swarmed the courtyard like ants, holding together in unified positions as radio commands fuzzed over the whole messy thing. Chell twitched at the sound of the radio, resisting the urge to glance at Doug, and began firing. One solider falling through a portal, slamming into two others, throwing any number of other nearby soldiers into chaos—she was good at causing chaos. She was a lunatic, after all, and she suppressed a thin smile.
The portals, she couldn't help but notice, were sparking disturbingly. She shot out a lone portal and hesitated on the second, scanning her surroundings. Chell found her opening and fired. Her face actually slackened in dumbfounded disbelief as the blue portal appeared, quietly opaque, just below a solider who was thanking every lucky star in the sky. Chell reacted with shaky hands, cutting off the enemy's approach by the skin of her teeth. It disturbed her to think of how much trust she put in a gun that failed her. But she had to put her trust in something down there, and of the limited roster of things to choose from, the portal gun was one that couldn't talk back. She squared her shoulders and dove back into the fray. Just another puzzle to adapt to. It wasn't as if she hadn't had to deal with time constraints before.
"Lady!" The man, Frederick—built like a bear with a scowl to match—was running towards several barrels with flames emblazoned on the sides stacked near the—
Chell felt the puzzle click into place in her mind and moved. The soldiers were nothing more than turrets, their plasticky armor glossy and shining as they flew through the air, knocking into one another. She placed the portals quickly, using them for only a second before releasing both; she couldn't afford to leave them lingering when they'd only fizzle out on their own. Soldiers barreled into one another in clumsy heaps as she cleared a path. Frederick was close behind, working with two other men to roll the barrels in a deadly arc towards the main gate.
"Incoming!"
Chell ducked and rolled away from the gate. Not a second too soon. A gun fired out and light flashed against her eyes, heat rolling over her back in a wave. When Caroline was able to lift Chell to her feet, all that was left of the main gate was a rubble-littered heap set aflame. Caroline gave her a somewhat gruesome grin, her teeth bloodied from a split lip and several cuts trickling blood down her face. Chell couldn't bring herself to return the gesture, but she gripped the older woman's shoulder tightly and squeezed. It would have to be enough.
"Hold your fire! I said hold!" Bert was suddenly crying out. "It's the resistance—it's them!"
A group of people stood in the settling dust of the gate. What little Chell could see of their faces were a variety of smiles and grins—downright proud smirks to grim little upturns of the mouth. The supposed resistance group was much smaller than theirs, standing in mismatched clusters of scavenged, washed-out clothing and clutching various weapons to rival their own sorry band. Despite Bert's happy cries, Chell felt her hackles rise and she quickly took a defensive position in front of Caroline. The older woman touched her shoulder—probably in a placating gesture—but Chell didn't budge. She didn't know these people, and she didn't know this Bert fellow nearly well enough to trust his judgement.
"Bert—you son of a—well, it's good to see you. How on earth did'ya manage this? This ain't no Nova Prospekt, but it isn't too shabby either."
Bert was practically beaming, and the absurd impulse to shade her eyes crossed Chell's mind.
"Rovetta!" Bert ran up to give the woman in front of the resistance group a hasty hug. "Man it's good to see you! As for the whole escape thing, I can't take all the credit. This lady's the brains of the operation." Bert skidded back to throw a free arm around Caroline, caught Chell's expression, then clearly thought better of it.
Caroline, ever the diplomat, held out a quick hand. "Caroline Teiger, Miss, ah, Rovetta. I suppose you plan to use the vehicles here to make our getaway?"
The woman—Rovetta—seemed mildly impressed. "You're quick on the uptake. Useful in times like these." She turned over her shoulder and shouted back to someone in the group.
"Stephen! You've got some experience with cars, get over here and make yourself useful." Rovetta turned back to Caroline. "Get everyone on those vehicles unless they want to be left behind. With the amount of noise you made, I'm guessing we have about fifteen minutes, tops, before the Combine get their act back together and bring in reinforcements. Let's move, people!"
As if the power in a test chamber had flickered on, every little thing came to life at once at Rovetta's words. Their shabby band of escaped prisoners quickly filed themselves into the adjacent garage building and began loading themselves into vehicles. A tall, gangly sort of man approached, his hands ready with tools to prepare the vehicles for getaway, but he stopped dead when his gaze met Chell's.
She had to look up to meet his eyes, shading her gaze from the light with her hands, but when she did, she could have sworn they looked familiar.
The man stared openly, his mouth hanging like a dead fish's.
"Michelle?" He asked, in Wheatley's voice.
AN cont'd: Dun, dun, dun...don't you just love/hate a cliffhanger? Next up, we check in with Wheatley...