AN: Hello all, and welcome to another chapter. Hope you enjoy, and if you do, please feel free to leave a review/comment letting me know what you think! It really does mean a lot to hear what you think of the story. With that, read on!

Stephen was struggling to snap himself out of a daze. That wasn't to say that he wasn't paying attention exactly; it was awfully hard not to pay attention when you were getting out of a fragile excuse for a vehicle and butchering little turkey-like creatures every few minutes. He couldn't deny that they were making good time, all things considered, but all the same, he couldn't help agreeing with Mr. Calhoun's attitude towards the situation. The man had the kind of hardened lines in his face that suggested he didn't spook easily, and yet he yelped more than once with a frustrated sort of fright when lumbering figures swung into view. Of course, that wasn't always the case—sometimes they leapt into view with full-force instead, scrabbling around on all-fours like some sort of demented cat. Scratch that, actually, his aunt's cat hadn't needed to be a demented zombie cat to try scratching his eyes out every time he came to Hartlepool to visit.

Which was to say, he thought shakily as he awkwardly aimed the alien weapon and messily took down another zombie creature, of everything that had happened so far, he liked these things the least. He shivered as they all clambered back into the buggy and took off again. Beside him, squished between himself and Dr. Teiger, Doug sat with his hands over his ears, trying to block out the residual sounds of gunshots ringing the cramped tunnel.

They took off again easily over the open road, the armored fellow—Dr. Freeman, he was pretty sure—having used that fascinating gun of his to clear their path through the piles of abandoned cars. Stephen didn't want to think about those cars too much. About who might have owned them, or where they were now. Maybe they were lying on the floor in front of them, recently—no. He couldn't think about it. He had to think about anything else: cats. Sudoku. The existential dread of realizing they weren't alone in the universe but that aliens rather didn't like them at all—

"Stephen, buddy, you look like you're about to have a stroke."

Rats. Stephen swallowed and plastered on a nervous smile, as he was wont to do, according to everyone he'd ever talked to for more than two minutes. The smile, however, seemed to meet whatever requirement Mr. Calhoun was looking for, and the man turned away with a look that smelled a bit too much like pity. He could hardly blame the man, honestly, but pity never really stopped stinging, in his experience.

It was the same look Rovetta had offered him when he'd rolled up, rather sticky and caked with dust from walking, and asked, bewildered, what on earth was going on, because the sky had turned a rather alarming color and he wasn't quite sure what that was about, eh? She had taken pity on him, on his woeful lack of knowledge and his utter confusion, and she'd patiently explained the state of the world to him. It was, in a word, bad. The climate had taken a nosedive, she'd explained, but that was mostly due to the piddly little problem of losing fifty percent of the world's oceans. Before he'd even recovered from his reeling over that small issue, Rovetta hit him with another blow to the stomach: 95% of the earth's population was dead. Not in stasis, not stuffed into corners somewhere, not transformed into hideous creatures—just plain dead.

Speaking of—and he shuddered again—another one of those things lunged out from the side of the road as they zoomed along, lumbering into their path up ahead. Dr. Freeman—bless him—did his best to swerve out of the way, but with the limited space they had on the road already, it was clear they were going to hit it like a golf ball hitting a sloppy joe sandwich at eighty kilometers-per-hour. The metaphor worked, but he shuddered for the second time in as many minutes. How his colleagues could disparage mushed peas when that thoroughly American monstrosity existed was beyond him.

But he was getting distracted, per usual, and he scrambled to raise his pilfered gun up and aimed at the creature while they still had a distance on it. Of course, as he was finding out, doing such a thing with your knees squashed against the backseat of a buggy sized for three people—but actually carrying six—was bloody difficult. Meanwhile, the shambling figure grew bigger. Mr. Calhoun drew his pistol now, checking the clip.

"I'm out, so I hope one of you geniuses can do us all a favor and take care of that."

Stephen wanted to protest, wanted to explain that he was getting it, he had this, if he could just get his gun to—

The kickback of a pistol rang out far too close next to his ears. Amidst the ringing in his ears, he caught the barest glimpse of the side of her head, stoic and unmoving, even as she shot again. She didn't look at him, and he slowly turned his gaze back to the road. He glanced, and he could have sworn he saw the last fluttering hint of a lumpy object tumbling from the cliffside off the right shoulder. But then the second had passed, and it was nothing more than an absent-minded thought, dreamy and distant and, perhaps, not even real in the first place. They drove on, but he couldn't help continuing to think.

He was beginning to wonder the same of their friendship at this point: he and Michelle Kekoa—now Chell—a relationship now utterly unfamiliar to him. All at once he was reminded of the sort of strangely lit moment when they'd first met, or rather, when he'd become aware of her ferociously tenacious existence and she had been, perhaps blissfully, unaware of his. In quiet moments, when his thoughts didn't even reach the self-aware upper regions of his consciousness, he liked to imagine that they'd shared some sort of glance or two as she twirled with expert grace on the stage. That she'd seen him, at the exact moment he'd seen her, and perhaps they'd seen a sort of kindred spirit in each other. Well alright, perhaps kindred spirit was too strong a term, since they were about as different as a clumsy giraffe and a keenly-focused kestrel. She'd always had a kind of sharpness about her, he realized, but he'd never really minded. Sometimes, when his thoughts got too muddled, or he retreated too far inside his own head—his thoughts multiplying like rabbits and spiraling into a tangled mess—when any of it was just too much, she came through like a razor blade, cutting through the fog like a ruthlessly practical Valkyrie.

It'd taken him several months to realize that beneath all that sharpness, there lay a woman with a heart big enough to fit an ocean, if she were so inclined. It was this tranquil sea that he'd found himself blissfully sailing along as they'd grown closer, only startled out of it when they'd gone places together. It was then that he could see the sharpness jut back into view with a vehemence that surprised him. A rude comment, a trailing, hateful gaze—they drew the hardness of her eyes out faster than anything he'd ever seen. Michelle was a tough woman—he knew that with every fiber of his being—but part of that persona meant hiding her hurts so far below the surface that you would never be allowed to see them.

Now, with her glaring at him without even looking in his direction, he could sense her hurt more keenly than he ever had in his life. It rode so close to the surface—curling the edges of her lips down, cooling her eyes to the freezing point—he was surprised that no one else seemed to notice. That was, he got the whole "battle-hardened warrior" schtick, but surely someone had to have noticed that this woman—this brilliant, magnificent woman—was absolutely livid and it was all his fault.

That, perhaps, was the worst part aside from being unable to do anything about it. He seemed to be the cause of it, of all things.

And he still hadn't the slightest idea why.

"Alright folks," Mr. Calhoun rotated to the best of his ability in the front seat, taking a tone that sounded ominously close to an American tour guide as he brightly informed them: "just to the front, you'll see what looks like an ordinary cliffside, but if you'll look just to our right, you'll notice our trademarked brand of marker."

Sure enough, right where he pointed, Stephen could spot the barest sign of something that looked vaguely like a Greek lambda. Of course, his glasses were cracked slightly after all the fuss, and his backup pair—borrowed turtle shells—were in even worse shape, so he couldn't exactly be expected to give a good description of what was right in front of them. Dr. Teiger—the Dr. Teiger, he was still getting over that one, what with her being previously declared dead and all—didn't seem all that concerned with the appearance of the hidden base.

"Tremendous, Mr. Calhoun…but dare I ask if you have some sort of lab setup?" She sounded pained, as if the draw to get back into the lab setting again was too much to bear. Of course, that didn't quite make sense to him in the slightest—if he remembered correctly, something had gone terribly wrong to put her in stasis, declared deceased, for so many years. Some lab accident or other. At least, that's what he'd been told, and if he'd learned anything about Aperture's practices in telling the truth in the last few days, it was that they hadn't any practices to speak of. If there was any reigning principle that stuck around at all, it was this: say whatever made the shareholders and investors happy at the next meeting and scrounge up some deliverables to keep them from looking a little too closely at what their money was funding.

Mr. Calhoun turned again, his face faintly regretful this time, though for what reason Stephen couldn't imagine. "Sure, Dr. Teiger. Oh—you'll love this. They've wrangled an electron microscope from somewhere and managed to get it up and running. Thought Dr. Kleiner was gonna pee his pants from excitement when he heard." He chuckled at that, and the other fellow, Dr. Freeman, joined him with soft shaking laughter.

"Tremendous…" Dr. Teiger trailed off, wincing. "It's rather important that we get the ASHPD stable as soon as possible. It's a rather hardy thing—we learned early on that it had to be, in order to function without causing another artificial black hole every other second—"

"A what?" Mr. Calhoun squawked in the front seat, making Dr. Freeman jump at the same time Stephen did. "Are you telling me we've been traveling with an unstable magic gun that might, maybe cause a black hole?"

Dr. Teiger appeared disturbingly unperturbed by Mr. Calhoun's outburst.

"Why yes, dear, the internal black hole is what allows it to open the wormholes used to teleport in the first place—where else did you think we'd put it?"

"Where else—don't use a black hole in the first place! I think that'd be a pretty common sensical approach!"

Stephen flinched at how loudly Mr. Calhoun was making his sentiments heard. Thankfully, their driver had the sense (and the bravery) to place a calm hand on Mr. Calhoun's shoulder, and Mr. Calhoun slowly calmed himself.

"Yeah, yeah, you're right. Black Mesa wasn't exactly a picnic either." He gave a long sigh, extracting himself from the buggy with some reluctance. "Well, here we are, folks."

It wasn't much to look at. Perhaps once upon a time, it could have been a park reserve—not the bit that would inevitably end up on the park brochure or a giant billboard, horribly oversaturated—but the part hidden away in the back of the park for only bears and stray, drunken campers to enjoy. All of which was to say: once upon a time, it might have been a very natural and very plain park. Now, however, there was a very distinct sort of radioactive glow to everything in the area. Trees surrounded the base on every side; a natural pocket in the landscape that hid neatly under a rocky overhang, swathed with vines and crusted with lichen. It might have even given him a sense of calm, to be surrounded by so much chlorophyll, if not for the odd orange color that was far too bright to be natural…

Mr. Calhoun had caught him staring. Stephen flushed a little, then quickly tried to cover the motion with a clumsy attempt to adjust his gun, dangling from its strap over his shoulder. The other man gave a wry chuckle.

"Suppose it does look really weird, when you stop to think about it."

Behind them, the mundane sounds of Dr. Teiger and Chell and Doug offloading themselves from the buggy creaked and shuffled. He twitched, fighting the urge to turn around and stare at them. Even if Chell needed help, he doubted she would want it from him. Not to mention, with how protective she'd been of Dr. Teiger, he doubted that Chell would have liked him anywhere near her if Chell could help it. So he stood, awkwardly, twitching a little, as every single one of these thoughts screamed through his head like rockets, pelting his sleepy subconscious with unhappy feelings of uncertainty.

All of which was not helped by Mr. Calhoun suddenly slapping a hand on Stephen's shoulder, nearly—almost nearly—making him jump. Stephen returned Mr. Calhoun's laughter with a shaky, nervous chuckle.

And as he tended to do when he became nervous, he started to ramble.

"Oh—oh no. No of course not—I mean it's fine, really. Not that my thoughts on the sort of, um, aesthetics, really matter in the grand scheme of things. Think it might be better to focus on the whole 'hiding' bit of the thing—which you've done! You have, and you've done marvelously, couldn't even tell it was here, ha ha…" He trailed off into jittery laughter, well aware by this point that Mr. Calhoun was staring unabashedly at Stephen's mindless ramblings. Oh, stupid.

"You alright, buddy?"

Stephen paused, opened his mouth, then paused again. Meanwhile, behind them, there was a sudden, short scream. He and Mr. Calhoun whirled around to see Dr. Teiger on the ground, breathing hard and trembling. The left leg of her jumpsuit was bloody and torn—so easily hidden in the dark tunnels where they'd been travelling—now out in the sunlight and easily visible. Stomach roiling, Stephen ran back to the buggy, while Mr. Calhoun ran towards the base. He was yelling at someone who'd just exited the base—presumably from a niche in the rock—but Stephen didn't stick around to watch their shouting match.

"Oh—oh G—what happened? Do we need a stretcher—can you walk?"

Dr. Teiger puffed in and out, her face blanched of color as she struggled to pull herself upright with Chell's aid.

"Turkey—nasty burnt turkey-looking creature bit me—bit me right—" She huffed, frustrated by her own inability to stay upright, even as her words began to slur together, and her eyes drooped.

"Whoa—hey, hey, hey!" Mr. Calhoun scrambled closer, another resistance member in two, as Dr. Teiger stumbled and slumped. "Gordon! Run inside and get a medic. And tell Eli we've got a bit of a situation on our hands."

Eli came running when Gordon ran into the room, blood splashed onto his undamaged suit. The younger man didn't say a word—somewhat typical of him—but hastily gestured that Eli should come, and Eli didn't hesitate. He'd seen Gordon in such a state several times before, and in Eli's limited experience, the younger man appreciated action more than questions when things came down the wire. Most of their group would, he imagined.

Though he would have liked to ask whose blood covered Gordon's suit.

Barney met him at the door. "Looks like a poison head-humper got her."

"Head…humper?" The man in the ragged lab coat asked, and his tone was so morbidly embarrassed that Eli found himself forced to answer:

"It's ah, Barney's nickname for the headcrabs. But is Dr. Teiger—"

"…fine, s'just asbestos, I'll be fine…" Dr. Teiger muttered from the entrance, and Eli realized with a start that the reason he couldn't see her was because she was lying down on a stretcher. The front was being carried by Gordon, while the lanky man Eli had seen on the monitor earlier bolstered up the back end. The lanky man was gently chastising Dr. Teiger when what she'd said finally registered in Eli's mind.

"You're not fine, Dr. Teiger—you've been poisoned, well, not quite poisoned exactly, see, it's a sort of neurotoxin if I understand what this Dr. Freeman fellow said correctly…" The lanky man was rambling nervously, trying to fill the space with chatter in some sort of attempt to distract from the distressing sight of his acquaintance lying prostrate on a makeshift stretcher. The two others who'd been with her were quick to follow the procession: a man in a ragged lab coat hovered anxiously while a battered-looking woman in a rolled-down jumpsuit walked briskly to keep pace with the injured woman.

Of course, the rambling wasn't entirely successful, since Eli clearly noticed the serious headcrab bite on Dr. Teiger's left calf, already swollen from the neurotoxin. Of course; he probably should have expected something like this, all things considered. Dr. Teiger hadn't mentioned much, but what little she had said during their last communication gave him the strongest impression that she hadn't seen much of the world outside in a while. Seconds later, what she'd actually said finally clicked in his mind.

"Asbestos?"

The lanky man waved him off as Dr. Teiger struggled to breathe.

"Kept rats out of the facility—say, d'ya happen to have any sort of medical equipment? It's, erm, a bit urgent."

Eli answered, though his thoughts were whirling. "Of course, follow me."

He could hear the steady thud of Gordon's suited footsteps behind him as he led the awkward procession to the medical bay with all due speed. Of course, considering his own physical limitations, that speed didn't amount to much, but he doubted that Gordon or the lanky fellow were complaining, what with balancing the weight of a fully-grown woman in the narrow corridors. Every odd light that flickered in the base sent strange shadows cascading across Dr. Teiger's face, making her look even worse than she already did; pale and panting, trying to manage the pain between each breath.

Of course, if she seemed to think it perfectly healthy to be in constant contact with asbestos, of all things, then perhaps she was more injured than they initially thought. Black Mesa had hardly been a cakewalk in terms of relative safety—their current problems were a clear indication of that. Even so, the employees were at least required to get tested for radiation poisoning every so often just to be safe—something he looked back on with, at the very least, mild appreciation. They'd heard rumors, of course, about Aperture: rumors of missing astronauts and bioengineering horrors, teleporting ships and kidnapped human test subjects. Every single one that he'd heard in the last thirty years took this as their cue to swell to the forefront of his mind, racing by in a horrifying slideshow. Because if he was being perfectly honest with himself, he was both eager and reluctant to hear the truth.

When they at last arrived, Emma, their primary medic, struggled to hide an exasperated look.

"Another one? Good G—I thought we had a meeting just last month about adequate tactics and clothing when leaving the base? Did you folks miss the memo or were you born yesterday?"

Eli winced a little on Dr. Teiger's behalf. Emma was a good woman—more than strong enough to handle the horrors she saw on an everyday basis—but she wasn't exactly made of sunshine and daisies. And considering how painful the swelling could be from headcrab neurotoxin (he knew from hard experience), insult to injury was insufficient to describe the experience of getting berated by Emma on top of getting injured.

So, delirium had to be the only reason why Dr. Teiger began chuckling.

"Well," Dr, Teiger coughed, her eyes bleary, "fool me once and all that. Seeing as this is my…my first time, I think I've just used my only pass."

Emma paused in her ruthlessly efficient motions, peeling away Dr. Teiger's shredded pantleg. For a second, she glanced at Eli, then she burst into laughter.

"Can't argue with that. You got a name, lady?"

"It's—ah." Dr. Teiger paused, her breath coming short as Emma disturbed the wound and cleared the area of dirt, then injected a vibrant green syringe directly into the muscle tissue. Dr. Teiger's breathing eased. "It's Dr. Teiger, but if you just saved my life like I think you did, feel perfectly free to call me Caroline."

Emma laughed again, and Eli nearly startled, the sound so foreign to him. Emma didn't laugh. Dark chuckles were par the course, but genuine laughter was an oddity from the woman who'd only ever struck him as being hard and cold as nails.

"You won't die. Headcrab poison's no joke, but you'll be fine."

"Ah. Caroline it is, then." Dr. Teiger gave a weak grin, then slowly tried to rise before Emma abruptly stopped her.

"Uh-uh. You're under nap orders till this stuff gets out of your system properly."

"What?" Supposedly, it was a question, though wouldn't have known it from the way Dr. Teiger said it. Her tone held a warning, but Emma did not take well to intimidation—least of all from uncooperative patients. And yet, a sudden urgency pulsed through him, forcing him to add:

"Emma, I hate to disagree with you, but we really do need to speak with Dr. Teiger, and soon."

Emma liked this even less, if the way her pursed lips curled downwards was any indication. "Absolutely not—in fact," she paused to look at the woman in the rolled-down jumpsuit and the gaunt man in the labcoat, "you two look dead on your feet too. The rest of you look beat, but you in particular look like you haven't slept in a week." She glanced over to the man the ragged lab coat. "And you look like you haven't eaten in one."

Dr. Teiger mumbled a garbled excuse for a response from her cot, but Eli couldn't hope to have made it out for human speech.

"What was that, Caroline?"

"Hundred an' forty-four hours—adrenal vapor'll be the future of science. Keeps you awake for hours…"

The lanky fellow whirled on the woman, seemingly aghast, though from the way the woman flinched, Eli would have hazarded a guess that she'd been expecting something worse.

"You've been awake for how long? G—you deserve better than—they should have—"

"Did you say adrenal vapor? As in aerosolized adrenaline given to her around the clock?"

"And would you look at that! Another reason for me to check her over along with her friend—so how 'bout in the meantime you just…get out." Without further ado, Emma managed to shove them all out and shut the door.

Eli would have protested being bundled out of the room in such a frustrated heap along with the rest of their current group, but he had to grudgingly admit that Emma had a point. If something as heart-killing as constant adrenal vapor was any indication of Aperture's health standards, he wouldn't be surprised if Dr. Teiger—all of them, actually—turned up with lead and radiation poisoning.

And that didn't even touch the whole issue of what Dr. Teiger had talked about earlier, concerning the Asbestos. Eli was both anxious and reluctant to ask, but if they wanted any chance at all of being able to replicate Aperture's seemingly successful local teleportation technology, they needed Dr. Teiger to be alive and relatively well. Something virtually impossible if he interfered with Emma's current treatments.

"Well…" the lanky fellow righted himself, having been shoved unsteadily against the hallway wall in the scuffle, and he awkwardly offered Eli a hand. "Dr. Stephen Smythe."

"Right…right." Eli offered distractedly, though for the sake of civility he struggled to corral his thoughts running every which way. He began striding down the hall back to the lab at a brisk pace. "And you would be?"

The man stuttered a little in his movements, keeping up with Eli easily with long strides. "I-I just said. Er, Dr. Stephen Smythe." He retracted his hand with the awkward, failed nonchalance of a high schooler who'd asked a girl to prom and gotten rejected, hard. Eli felt a pang of pity and slowed a little.

"I…I'm sorry, Dr. Smythe. We've been under a bit of duress, as you can see." Eli waved a weary hand towards the busy garage area as they passed through. The sight of dozens of people—smeared with grime and machine oil and sweat, working tirelessly to keep machinery up and running and weapons well-oiled and clean—never failed to make pride swell in his chest.

He kept walking. He offered the occasional weak smile or wave to people who recognized him—a growing number these days—but he didn't stop. No time today to stop and chat. Not when so much was at stake and even after all their effort, they still weren't able to talk to Dr. Teiger because of one idiotic headcrab—

"Pardon my French, Eli, but you look like hot—"

"Yes, thank you Magnusson, I think we could do without your commentary today, if you don't mind." Kleiner, as usual, did his best to keep the peace in the lab, even if something like that was impossible with the utterly bull-headed Magnusson. Eli offered his old coworker a strained smile, then announced the bad news.

"Dr. Teiger's in the med bay. Looks like we won't get any input from her on everything Aperture had their hands in, at least for the next couple of hours."

Eli happened to glance over at Barney when he said it, and he couldn't help but notice that Barney looked rather like he wanted to punch something. Feeling Eli's stare, Barney glanced up to meet it and offered a frustrated chuckle, far too tense to be anything approaching actual laughter.

Meanwhile, in the lull of conversation, Kleiner spoke at the same as Dr. Smythe, making for a rather garbled mess.

"Oh dear—oh, pardon me."

"Oh, no, no, no, no you're fine—you're fine!"

"Oh yes, sure, just waste our time acting like a pair of absolute ninnies, why don't you?" Magnusson called from the other side of the lab, where he'd returned to his work, completely uninvested in the arrival of the Aperture group.

Eli resisted the childish urge to roll his eyes and waved a hand to the lanky man. "Go ahead and introduce yourself, Dr. Smythe."

"Oh, oh of course! Yes, right, well…my name is Dr. Stephen Smythe, but of course you already knew that. Specialty in electrical engineering, some quantum space-time physics—still," and he chuckled at this, "you probably wouldn't know it from the number of faulty cars I've ended up fixing in the past four days."

"Well, we can always use more mechanics and engineers around here. As you might guess, they're a bit hard to come by these days."

"Yeah I—oh…oh." Eli could spot the precise moment when the realization truly hit the man square in the face like a wet blanket. That the world was a strange one, unfamiliar and odd and so very wrong. He could feel it every time he breathed in the tainted air or sipped cautiously at sterilized water or chewed thoughtfully, wondering which swallow might be too much poison for a frail, mortal body.

Dr. Smythe gave a chuckle, but it was weak and hollow. "It's been," he swallowed, "it's been nearly four days since I…I made it outside. It still doesn't feel real. Used to be that going down to the labs was all a sort of dream and I'd wake up when I went back up, you know, like you do from a nightmare or something—except all of a sudden you're not just in your own bed in your own house or anything—no! It's like the nightmare's still going, and it never seems like it'll…"

Eli smothered his pity too late. Dr. Smythe seemed to suck his grievances back in the same you would with a long string of spaghetti: it was a little too slow and a little too awkward to be a convincing performance. Dr. Smythe shook himself, as if wanting to rid himself of the wobbly feeling of uncertainty, and he cleared his throat, clearly wanting to move on from the topic to something more productive.

Barney offered a wry chuckle, hiding his pity much more effectively, if he'd had any at the moment. Eli knew very few people came out of Civil Protection at all, and of those who did successfully defect, none escaped without having every last drop of spare mercy wrung from them like water squeezed from a sponge by a pitiless hand. He knew Barney was far from cruel—the man had taken his job as a protector seriously at Black Mesa, for all he'd joked and quipped—but Eli knew all too well that he had been severely blunted in his ability to empathize. After all, when you saw a thousand sob stories a week—each crueler and more desperate than the last—anyone would be numbed by it.

But this…this business with Barney's family was something that Eli hadn't seen in the man for a long time. It was a spark threatening to blaze at any moment and engulf this poor beanpole of a man, who surely couldn't know much about the employee roster. Eli would have to stand on guard this time, waiting with a fire extinguisher and a cautious trigger finger.

"Wish I could say it was a weird feeling, but you'll get used to it."

Dr. Smythe relaxed a little, finding a shaky grin. "Yeah well, I suppose after the mantis incident of '95, should be a piece of cake, right? Not a literal piece of cake of course, see, not exactly fond memories of cake…something about it's just…shady, I suppose. Couldn't possibly tell you why, but I suppose it's one of those sort of gut things, you know…"

"'Mantis men'? I'm afraid to ask, after the nonsense Black Mesa managed to pull off."

"Oh well, that's a bit of a complicated story, let me tell you, 'fraid I won't be much help in the ASHPD department of things. I wish I could say I knew the employee roster better, but I don't think I could tell you much about your sister, ah, Mr. Calhoun." Dr. Smythe's shoulders rounded a little in apology. "In any case, couldn't tell you a thing about the whole tangle-ball of time and space they've got going on there—but I did modify the design a bit to suit the project I was on. Course—" and he genuinely laughed at this "—I don't suppose Black Mesa would have heard about that one—wasn't exactly advertised to the general public, you understand—heck, don't think they even circulated the news around the company. Less chance of nasty Black Mesa spies getting—ah, er," Dr. Smythe stuttered, becoming well aware of who exactly he was talking to.

"Not to say that you aren't all lovely people—no, not at all! I'm sure you're just—just marvelous people, terribly nice and all that…what I mean to say is that, well, you see Aperture had a nasty case of paranoia, and they had a habit of making sure nothing got out to the public—no matter how trivial."

Eli nodded. "We got leaked information on something called the GLaDOS project, but it seemed to be something having to do with a coolant system—nothing particularly groundbreaking."

Dr. Smythe visibly flinched as if Eli had slapped him full across the face, and the lanky man's face went pale under his freckles.

"R-right, the…the GLaDOS project. Coolant system."

"Was that…was that not what the project was about?"

"What?" Dr. Smythe snapped out his preoccupied thoughts, whatever they might have been, to stare at Eli. "No—no of course not. It was a coolant system, meant to…take some of the burden off our computer systems. "But it…it failed. It failed miserably and Aperture, ah, ditched the project."

"Shame. Certainly sounds safer than whatever a 'mantis man' is."

Dr. Smythe muttered under his breath; Eli barely caught the words, but even so they didn't lend much clarity.

"I wish that were true."

"Right, since none of you seem interested in cutting to the chase, I suppose I'll have to do it. As usual." Magnusson, per his usual style, barged right into the conversation with all the grace and tact of a bull in a china shop. Magnusson straightened his faded tie with a heavy sense of magnanimous pomp, turned to Dr. Smythe, and shot his question.

"Since all you've told us so far is what you haven't worked on—how about you offer something useful and tell us what projects you did have a hand in—if you truly were employed at a science company with the level of intelligence you're currently displaying."

"Easy," Dr. Smythe returned with a little heat himself, "I suppose you'd be doing much better after being in stasis for the last thirty years without proper brain stimulation, yeah?" He shuffled a little on the spot. "But it's a fair question. I worked on one of Aperture's later projects: sticking an ASHPD on a boat, to put it simplest. Wasn't easy, can tell you that—who knew theoretical physicists could be so touchy about bending the laws of space-time to teleport a freighter?"

Eli's hair stood on end. He didn't even have to look at Barney and Kleiner to know that they could feel the electric charge running through the room. It was too much of a coincidence, too perfect…that precisely the perfect person they needed would be the only one able to talk to them at this moment in time…

Eli had learned to fear coincidences. Ever since that…ever since Alyx had disappeared. Been taken by a man too close to too many coincidences, too perfectly lined up like dominos waiting to fall.

And yet he found himself asking the question.

"What was the boat called?"

Dr. Smythe looked confused that they chose that particular detail to fixate upon, but he answered, nonetheless.

"The Borealis, why?"