AN: Welcome back to another chapter y'all. Did this one take forever? Yep. Was it because I may or may not have rewritten it 4-5 times, trying to get the right feeling for it? Also yep. Anywho, hope you guys enjoy, and please feel free to leave a review or comment letting me know your thoughts. Feedback is always appreciated :D With that, read on!
Sleeping didn't completely eliminate the ache in her bones, but it made it a little less noticeable. Everything throbbed with a dull ache, gently reminding her that she'd been battered within an inch of her life, in case she'd somehow forgotten in the last few hours. The tough-looking woman running the med bay—Emma—had patched Chell up as best she could, but there was no curing exhaustion.
And she'd been running for a long, long time.
She was lying on the floor, cushioned by something that was soft and pliable beneath her fingers. Her eyelids slowly slotted open, about as smoothly as a giant vault door swinging on rusted hinges, and she fully woke up. Cold, sterile walls met her gaze. It was enough to invoke the startled sense of flight instilled deep within every fiber of her body, and she rocketed upright, breathing hard. Her eyes darted to every corner of the small, low-ceilinged room, roving over the crates and other pallets, and her breathing slowed. The foreign sound of human breathing, rising and falling in tandem, was curiously soothing, and her previously taut muscles eased.
Only to immediately tense again when she came face to face with a creature unlike anything she'd ever seen before. Years of strictly enforced silence was the only thing that kept her from shrieking, completely unashamed, at the creature in front of her. As it was, she still jumped in shock, and the creature reared back as well, clearly not expecting her violent reaction. She grappled for the portal gun, but her fingers met cold, empty space. The same for her waistband, where the handgun now no longer rested. Looking back, perhaps she should have gone for the handgun first, as it was designed more for actual damage, but old habits of survival die hard, and it hardly mattered anyway.
Yet the creature hadn't attacked her. Only stood, staring, with placid crimson eyes.
"The traveler must not be alarmed. We are allies to your species, as you are allies to ours."
The lower jaw of the creature moved as she supposed she would expect it to; problem was, she hadn't really noticed its existence in the first place, being so set under a row of curiously long, rounded white teeth. Beyond it, her eyes slowly traveled up, finding several crimson eyes: one large eyeball set in the middle of a long face, with a series of three smaller eyes set in a curved band across the upper forehead of the creature's head. Each eye seemingly stared in a different direction from the other, with the largest focused solely on her like a gentle cyclops…or a defective turret. When she backed away and the creature shifted, she realized she had been wrong in her mythological comparison; a faun might have been more accurate from the look of the creature's hoof-like feet.
She should have been alarmed—she was alarmed, really, with her hands still twitching for a gun not there in a way that was beyond her control—but something kept the wave of panic back. The creature before her tilted its head so gently, blinked at her so calmly, she felt her hands easing out of their tight-fisted shapes.
"The traveler is right to be wary. Allies and enemies wear strange faces, but the same cause calls us."
She nodded. Even if she'd been the chatty type, she doubted there was a good response to something like that.
"Come—you bore the weapon of our survival in your hands when you traveled here; now it lies with the Magnusson and Eli Vance. But the Teiger asked that it not be used by any but you. Now that you are awake, I will take you to them."
The creature gestured that she follow, then it turned and began picking its way through the crowds of fellow resistance members sleeping on the ground. There seemed nothing else to do but start walking after it, so Chell did, pausing to hurriedly tuck in her new trousers into her long-fall boots. They'd been a bit loose around the waist, but Emma had just handed Chell a belt with a mildly apologetic smile and that was that. Her undergarments and test-issued tank top remained, sticking to her body like a bad memory, but Emma had nothing else to offer her except the possibility of finding an old coat of some kind in one of the other supply rooms to cover the logo. It was a pittance, but it was one Chell would gladly accept if it meant getting her out of that hateful orange jumpsuit that had been the basis for so many—
Stop it. Just…stop.
She comforted herself with the visual of Emma burning the jumpsuit and took off after the creature. She threaded through the various pallets, accompanied by the steady—almost comforting—click of her long-fall boots against the concrete floor. A few people shifted restlessly at the sound, bleary eyes fluttering open and staring at her sightlessly before falling back asleep. She felt a strange sense of déjà vu as she passed them, as if she'd done it before without memory.
She struggled to banish the new spiral of thoughts that sprung from that observation, trying to shove down the memories half-buried in her mind. She didn't have time. It was too serious, too difficult a thing to untangle in the world she was now living in. The creature, meanwhile, was traversing the hallways at such a pace that she could barely keep up. The fact that her legs still ached from the impacts of yesterday didn't exactly help either.
As it turned out, the long-fall boots didn't have much of a falling limit as far as height went. Her calf muscles, on the other hand, very much did have a limit, which she'd shot right past yesterday for the first time.
No…no that wasn't right. She had learned that lesson of limits before, in another long fall. She had forgotten.
"Ah, I forget. Your kind appreciate introductions. You may name me Uriah. What may I name you?"
Chell kept walking, though her mind churned. The lanky man with W—that horrible voice had called her Michelle. That name had sounded familiar, in a vague sort of way. "Chell", meanwhile, had been the name listed on her testing sheet when she'd first woken up all that time ago. No one but Caroline and Doug had seen fit to use it, but then again, they'd been the only ones to show her kindness. She wanted the name they used for her with a sort of desperation for certainty that she knew wasn't quite true.
How to communicate that to an alien creature—one who seemingly expected something from her as the seconds and minutes ticked by—but she hadn't the slightest idea. She hesitated to even try opening her mouth. She wasn't sure what would come out, if anything at all.
"Ah. I neglect what the Smythe told me. You are like the Free Man; your acts speak louder than your speeches. Already we have heard of your successes."
Relief over not having to speak was just as quickly washed away by no small measure of embarrassment. It was becoming clear that surviving with any kind of audience—spiteful or supportive—was a universal discomfort that she might never avoid. The thought alone sent exhaustion rippling through her bones. She'd almost rather take the backhanded compliments again.
"Look at you, soaring through the air like an eagle…piloting a blimp."
She shivered unconsciously.
They arrived at the lab far too soon. Uriah—whatever creature he might be—gestured generously to the door, but Chell hesitated at the entrance with a shaky sort of uncertainty. This wasn't a test. At least, not in the sense that she knew it. A test meant survival. This…this was something else.
She'd almost rather take a precarious waltz over a pit of toxic goo. Almost.
"We all shall greet and speak of our joined cause." Uriah offered helpfully, his tone encouraging. "I hear from the Smythe you have much to give in the telling of your tale."
She nodded tentatively. It was all she could offer the creature before the door was flung open and she was suddenly drawn into the room. It was brightly lit, with a mixture of coldly fluorescent bulbs and warmer, more golden lights, and she flushed uncomfortably under the shining gazes of half a dozen people.
The room itself was a character in and unto itself. It was as if an Aperture scientist had pillaged every remaining office for equipment—from every era of the offices she'd ever seen. Computer screens and clunky black boxes of electronics, strange machines and spinning objects of mysterious purpose—all of them cluttered every possible surface and spilled out on the floor as well. None of it matched, either in color or construction, and various wires and tubes spanned the gaps like bent and rusting catwalks in case—heaven forbid—any space was left free.
That didn't even touch on the people themselves.
"There she is!" The man who'd fought with her earlier—Barney, she thought his name was—clapped her on the shoulder like they'd been friends forever.
She did her best not to flinch, and managed to succeed, but her concentration on that task meant she didn't realize how awkwardly long she stared at the man until the older man in the room cleared his throat. Chell's head snapped around to look at him, then over—inevitably—to Stephen. He met her gaze, his expression turning sheepish at her stare.
"Glad to see you're awake." He offered awkwardly.
"As am I." The older man in the room added, and Chell felt a strange sense of calm at his voice. It was smooth and rich and human in a way that she hadn't realized she craved until this minute. Now she needed him to speak again, longer and louder so that the fact that she was here—she was out and there were other humans around her became solid in her mind.
As if he'd read her mind, the older man swayed gently on a curved prosthetic leg and continued:
"Chell, I'm Dr. Eli Vance, but you can call me Eli if you like." He gave her a small grin, though there seemed to be a tightness to it. "I've heard quite a bit about you and your skill with this thing."
He patted the portal gun with some affection, and something deep within her growled with a jealous snarl. If there hadn't been so many witnesses, she might have snatched it away from him then and there. As it was, she was forced to stand there, nearly vibrating with unease at not having the device safely in her grip. The ghost of the well-worn handle, grooved to fit her calloused hands after so much use, was a weak sense of comfort in the meantime. On second thought, maybe she ought to grab the thing anyways.
Of course, there was the small and inconsequential fact that it was lying quite open, with panels peeled back in a way that struck her as quite horribly wrong. As if this was a part of her old, reliable friend she was never meant to see and never wanted to. Wires, a glowing sphere that looked anything but safe, and various chips were all stuffed inside the gun's main barrel, and Chell realized with a start that her hatred flowed from how, well, naked it looked. The fact that St—that man was sitting there with his hands deep in the portal gun's guts with a prodding, poking tool didn't help the morbid tableau. She gave him a look that slowly, painfully turned from coldly indifferent to sour, and Stephen cringed beneath her gaze, wincing from the acidic sting. Eli, apparently, noticed this.
"You'll have to forgive him, Chell. I'm afraid I'm the one who asked him to start poking around. Without…without Caroline back in action, we haven't got anybody else who would dare touch that thing after, well, certain features were brought to our attention—"
Barney, who she realized had been sitting rather quietly in a corner since his initial burst of enthusiasm, chose this moment to blow his top and splutter a few colorful words.
"It's a black hole, Eli! Black. Hole. Kind that sucks in everything including light. Now I'm no scientist, but I'd wager to say that's bad."
"Now hang on a minute—it's understandable, perfectly understandable that you'd hate it—but now you've got to understand that this thing, it-it needs a massive amount of energy to run for even a few minutes! Can't exactly get that from some double A's, even if you had several million of them—" Stephen suddenly cut off his ramble as Chell swiftly moved to the table.
Ignoring his protests, she picked up the gun and allowed herself the smallest of reassuring stokes against the scuffed white casing. Stephen winced, every line of his face screaming that he wanted to contest her action, but for whatever reason, he refrained. He didn't, however, refrain from talking in his jittery, rambling way, making awkward commentary.
"I mean—well—it's not as if it doesn't have a black hole powering its guts or anything—I mean it does, but it's not unstable, at least, anymore. I'm not exactly the expert on it per se, but I did enough repairs in a pinch that I can stabilize that—that blasted core that always seemed to hate that old commercial liner like it was poison." He trailed away into nervous chuckles, watching her every movement. "Point is…point is that, ah, she's 'raring' to go, if I remember the phrase right. I need to close that one panel, is all, but, ah, she's done mostly."
Barney snorted in the corner, but Chell turned her eyes to Stephen. The man awkwardly met her eyes, and though she hated those bright blue—nearly electronic—eyes, she had to admit there was something else in his expression that she couldn't quite read. She'd prided herself, if only subconsciously, on her ability to read a certain blue-eyed robot's facial features, communicated through a scant eyeball and two rusting handles. And yet…if this short time on the surface had taught her anything so far, it was that she was woefully short of experience when it came to reading human expressions. There was a complexity to this man's face that she didn't understand, and the pettiest part of her mind suggested that it wasn't worth the effort to even try.
But he had fixed her gun.
The one thing she trusted with her life had been fixed by the one thing she didn't.
And so the growling, grudging part of her mind slowly lifted her head as she stared him straight in the eyes and slowly, painstakingly gave him a nod. The effect was immediate in his expression. He didn't smile, exactly—certainly not the enormous grin he'd given her thus far—but there was a sense of relief in every feature that echoed in the relaxed sag of his body that followed. To her relief and more to her surprise, he nodded back, utterly silent.
Eli gently cleared his throat, but in the sudden silence, a gunshot would have been tamer for the reactions it elicited. Chell jumped purely on reflex, making Stephen cringe as the open panel on the portal gun flapped wildly on its hinge with the movement. While he'd refrained from interfering with her actions earlier, he hastened forward to take the gun from her hands.
"Well," Eli began as Chell reluctantly let the portal gun pass into Stephen's hands, "ah, thank you, Stephen, for the repairs. We're all overreaching our areas of expertise here a bit, but given the circumstances, it's all we can do."
He turned to Chell. "I realize this is moving a bit fast, but we simply don't have all that much time. My—" he cut off for a second, his eyes twitching and blinking "—our very good friend was recently lost. If we have any hope of recovering her, it lies with you—"
He pointed a bit emphatically at Stephen.
"—and you." He pointed at Chell. His gesture softened a little by the time his finger swung around to her, but there was no mistaking the cold, polished steel glinting in his gaze.
"We need you—your help. Dr. Teiger and Dr. Smythe and even Dr. Rattmann are all here because they've agreed to help with the Borealis project and help us reproduce Aperture's teleportation technology. But you…"
He sighed, reaching back to drag a rusting office chair towards him, and sat. Chell smothered a flinch at the sudden seriousness that overtook his face, but she did take a step back. Eli glanced up from his shoes to her face and met her eyes.
"If everything Dr. Smythe has said about you is even half true—then you're the best with that thing that we've got. We don't have the time to even prepare for what we need to do, let alone train someone else to use this thing. We need someone like you."
Eli's gaze returned to his shoes, and he sighed. "I realize that I'm asking you to walk into danger for someone you don't know all that well, but we're simply out of options. Dr. Smythe told us about some of the security measures on the Borealis; we need someone to help us navigate those test chambers."
The phrase made every hair stand on end on the back of her neck, even as Chell deflated. All that effort, that blood-in-her-teeth desperation to get out, and she was on the edge, going right back down. Her heart was hammering in her throat, numb and yet so invested in the sharp dread puncturing her stomach that she felt nauseous.
That whining, desperate part of her brain was screaming at her, begging with streaming eyes that surely, surely she couldn't go back down there. It gnawed at her resolve, chewing away at her already threadbare sense of compassion for these strangers. She didn't owe them anything, and as the practical, cold part of her pointed out, she'd gotten lucky. She'd beaten the test chambers and their creator once before on sheer will and more than a little luck. Then a second time, but that was only because she had w—a new player on the board. Surprise and tenacity had gotten her through two times before, but as they say, third time's the charm, and she highly doubted she would let it slide a third time.
The instructions had been clear.
It's been fun. Don't come back.
She darted her gaze over to Stephen, and she tamped down on her anger long enough to gesture to him.
"What are you—oh…oh. Do you need a spoon? A pen? Pen! Pen and paper?" He whirled around and scrabbled for paper and writing instrument. A small scrap of blueprint paper lay on the workbench, and he snatched it up, along with a pencil stub so small she didn't know how it was still in use.
He handed it to her, and she didn't even try to avoid touching his fingers as grabbed the writing instruments and began painstakingly scrawling. She struggled to find the right words, crossing out several and wasting precious paper space. Chell grunted in frustration, pausing to formulate her thoughts. Words wouldn't come from her brain, only recent memories that flooded in, scattering everywhere those mental images of ridiculous signs and posters—
She began writing furiously, not caring for neatness or spelling in her haste. Stephen sounded like he might have wanted to comment, but to his small credit, he let her finish. Chell handed the paper to him, giving him her grand speech of three words.
She could see when it clicked, and the blood drained from his face.
He did his best to cover. "Ah—right. That would be an, er, important concern." He spoke slowly, the gears turning. "The, ah, logic processor that ran the security protocols on the Borealis would have been able to make changes to the test chambers—which would be bad, um…very bad…but, ah, good thing! Good thing is that it would have gone offline when the ship ah, made a bit of an unplanned maiden voyage. It'll be turned off to save power, so, er, long as we don't reactivate it, it shouldn't be a concern."
She wasn't nearly lucky enough to hope there was one area of Aperture free of her control. But she also wasn't picky, and as long as there wasn't some murderous AI running the test chambers—as long as she was free to get the rest of this mad group through in one piece without being toyed with like a cat's ragdoll—then she would play guide to purgatory.
Slowly, gently, she gave Eli a nod, taken aback with the man suddenly gave her an enthusiastic hug, thumping her on the back with nearly the same gusto Barney had showed earlier. Eli pulled away, and she could see nothing short of relief echoed in his face and Barney's face and even the faces of the other scientists in the room as they paused in their work.
She could only hope it was worth it.
"Thank you, I—we can't tell you what a help you'll be." Eli grinned—this time with a sort of sunshine to his smile—and his eyes shone ever so slightly from some of the harsh fluorescent lights.
"Now let's see what this thing can do."
He opened his eyes on a world smeared like wet paint. The mat underneath his hands was thin but padded, and it bent under his hands as he awkwardly pushed himself up from the floor. He jerked with surprise, as he felt the gaze of several hazy figures on him.
"Hey, you're finally awake."
He flinched at the voice, feeling the unheard reverberations of electronic warping shiver through his bones. His vision refused to clear as he stared at the nearest face, hovering over him like some kind of ghostly afterimage.
"Hey whoa, whoa, calm down—you're safe here." The voice was meant to be reassuring—a sweetly told lie to placate him. It went down about as well as a buttered hairball, and he choked as he scrambled to his feet. The voice blurred as he ran.
Hands grasped but could not stop him as he ran through the nearest door and down the ensuing hallway. These hallways were not familiar; no splattered hands guided him to former havens, no cracked office tiles pulled at his eyes to gaze down on ghostly corpses, and nothing signaled to him as safe or fraught, private or under watch.
He didn't know how long he ran until he was physically stopped by a wall. He stumbled, skinning his nose and whacking his shin on one of the boxes stacked against the wall. He turned, another wall. And another. And another, but this one was broken by a single door. The only door. He began to run again, but the door was blocked by enormous turrets covered in leopard print that stalked closer to him in every second.
"Hello!"
"Hello-o…"
He crouched down, hiding his eyes from the end. This couldn't be real but it was so real. He was dead, or dying, or going to die, or already dead, dead, dead, dead, dying, dead—
"The Doug Rattmann must calm himself."
He felt a current jolt through his body, running through his nerves and veins more like water than electricity, and he inadvertently felt every muscle relax. The world jumped into focus—not perfectly, as you'd expect it to with a pair of glasses, but it was just enough to allow him to see. The creatures that he'd mistaken for a turret had gentle voices, patting his shoulders with alien hands as they spoke in soothing baritones. If he hadn't been hallucinating only seconds ago, he could have sworn they were even glowing.
"What…what did…" he couldn't find the words to speak as the creatures gently guided him to his feet.
"Your mind is troubled, for many of the same reasons we see recur in your other kin, and…for many reasons we do not see."
"How did you find me?" He dragged a hand over his face, wincing as his skin smarted from the action. Hunger had long ago drawn his flesh tight over the bones in his face, but that hadn't stopped his nervous tics from continuing.
"The Rattmann, like all living things, is connected to the Vortessence. You, like the Eli Vance, come closer to it than most. When you cried out in distress, we felt your pain." The creature ducked its head. "Also, the Eli Vance asked us to check you condition along with that of the Teiger's."
"I…" he sighed, "…I guess I missed that meeting."
"Do not trouble yourself. There is still much work to be done, though your assistance was not needed for the repairs the Smythe performed on the portal device—"
"They already repaired it?" Doug could feel every drop of blood left in his face flee it in a mass exodus. "Then that means they opened it, maybe they even triggered the—" he broke off, flinging himself free from the creatures' grasp as he ran, feet pounding, down the hallway.
He didn't know where he was going or even if Stephen was still in the building, but he had to warn them. Knowing his luck, it was already too late.
Three hours earlier
The faint ping of a signal—largely underused until this point—softly caught her attention.
"Now what could that be? Another unidentified aircraft warning? We get it, you figured out how to reinvent the blimp. Again. Sad, but hardly a worth a threat warning…"
She paused, as the data from the alert filtered to the top of her consciousness. A unique priority signal she hadn't seen used in years.
[WARNING: Test subject T-1498 has attempted to tamper with their testing apparatus.]
[Test subject T-1498 has been issued command to cease.]
"Well, I suppose that takes care of that then doesn't it."
Another ping.
[WARNING: Test subject T-1498 has committed serious tampering with their testing apparatus. Suggested action: remove from testing pool.]
"Yes, I've tried that one, and as coincidence would have it, it's been rather successful at reducing damage to the facility and me. Both are down by 98%."
[WARNING: Test subject T-1498 is out of assigned testing area bounds. Suggested action: recover testing apparatus.]
She sighed, and the gentle fizzing hum echoed throughout the chamber.
"Well, I suppose I might as well see what new trouble you've gotten up to."
The coordinates came through. Surprise rippled through her system at the familiar location of so many outgoing broadcasts she'd heard over the years. wht_fst.003.
"Now what would you be doing there?"