A/N: Less Wheatley, more murder, and a very special introduction. :D You can probably guess who from the title. Also, for those that don't know, I'm a supporter of the "GLaDOS/Caroline is Chell's mother" theory. Anyways, enjoy, and please please leave a review, I love to see my reader's thoughts on this. :D

Disclaimer: I don't own Portal. Or GLaDOS. Or Cave Johnson. You get the picture.

Chapter 6: Bring Your Daughter to Work Day

I planned to execute my scheme on Bring You Daughter to Work Day. Everyone would be much too busy to notice me. There was a tour of the facility, including my chamber, later in the day, but by then, it would be far too late for them to do anything.

I came out of sleep mode very early-my internal clock told me that it was six in the morning-and quickly catalogued anyone in the facility. Not even janitors were here yet. Employees didn't start arriving until seven. Time for part one of my plan. I sincerely hoped that the Intelligence Dampening Sphere wasn't going to mess this up for me, it was quite a good plan. Speaking of the moron, he was step one; well, to get rid of him anyways.

"Oh, we're up already?" his voice said blearily; if I'd had an eye it would have twitched.

"I am. You're going to be down very quickly." Ugh, his idiocy was affecting my comebacks. He needed to go. Now.

"Wha- AHHHH!" At that moment, I had reared up as quickly and violently as I could, slamming the back of my 'head' against the metal holding me to the ceiling. Through a window, I had used a security camera to identify where the tumor was and had discovered it to be attached directly to the back of my head. I heard a satisfying 'clunk!' as he fell from his perch.

"Ow, what was that for?" he demanded from his spot on the floor. I collected him without answering with a claw in the floor and hid him beneath a panel.

"Stay silent," I ordered. I felt a satisfying return of thought process now that the leech was gone. With a sigh of relief, I got to work hacking the mainframe. They would never know what hit them. By the time they realized what had happened, it would be too late. Until then, however, I would have to be on my best behavior.

The first employee to Aperture walked in carting what looked like a children's science project. A potato battery, I think. A small girl, maybe eight, walked next to him. She didn't look very happy. She carried the potato in question in her litter arms, looking about herself with a far more serious expression than most of the children I'd seen in pictures in my reference databases. Her dark brown hair was pulled back in a tight pony tail, only her bangs hanging in her face, framing it.

She tugged on her father's sleeve and held up the potato. I noticed she didn't say a word, which I'd heard was rare for human children. Maybe the girl was shy.

"I need to go clock in first, sweetie. Then we'll take your project down. Okay, Chell?" the employee said with a smile. He shot a distrustful glare at my chamber before heading off to his office to check in. Chell. The name tugged at me for some reason I couldn't explain. I put the feeling away in a folder to wonder about later. The girl walked up to my chamber door, staring at the sign on it curiously. I had what it said saved in my databases. GLaDOS: Authorized Personnel Only. This didn't deter the girl for a minute. She laid her hand on the handle and jiggled it. Not one for rules, she was, even then.

Just then, her father ran up. "Chell, sweetie, don't go in there, it's dangerous. Only trained scientists should mess with that kind of equipment." She stared at him for a moment, then pointed at the window in the room adjacent to my chamber(which had been left open the night before). Her father sighed impatiently.

"You can see her later, okay? With the other kids. You might even make a friend today, wouldn't that be fun?" Chell's expression conveyed her thoughts perfectly; no, it would not be fun. What a strange child. Her and her father walked away. I shoved the girl out of my mind. She would be dead by nightfall, with everyone else in this facility. Except, of course, for my precious test subjects.


The facility quickly became busier than ever, full of screaming little girls running around, breaking things, touching things, getting their slimy sticky hands all over everything. It kept everyone busy, and that was perfect, absolutely perfect. My chamber was all but invisible for all the attention I was paid. The only attention I was given was when a group of giggling girls snuck into my chamber when a mechanic left it ajar, and the scientists ran in, chasing them out with chastises and scoldings, telling them that I was dangerous and children ought not be around me.

How ridiculous. I wasn't going to kill anyone. Yet.

My hacking was going well, and no one noticed that control was slowly coming back to me. I had to do it slowly, lest they realize what was happening. But I had to hurry; the tour would be coming to my chamber soon, and I had to be ready to shut everything down once they walked in. And here they came.

A troop of bolder girls led the pack, waltzing into my chamber like they owned the place, stopping only when the scientists told them they would be thrown out if they got any closer. (One girl was taken out of the room because she insisted on getting closer. I was glad for this; I didn't want her sticky smelly human child hands anywhere near me.) The scientists started to explain what I was to the children who didn't care using words like 'greatest achievement' and 'eons ahead of Black Mesa'. I noted Chell stayed near the back, away from other children and her father. She stood near a scientist who was lower on the totem pole and had no respect in the facility, and whose name was thus not in my databases. I think I'd heard another scientist call him Ratman or something.

I slammed the door to my empty control room, and locked it tight. While I was at it, I put every emergency GLaDOS shutdown button beneath a panel. "Facility will be at neurotoxin capacity in fifteen minutes." Chaos ensued as everyone began to run in every direction, obviously forgetting the exit was behind them. I locked every exit to the facility, trapping them all like rats.

Speaking of rats, this Ratman fellow near the back was one of the only two that kept his head. Chell was relatively calm compared to the other children, but she was looking frantically about for something. She called out the only word I've ever heard her utter; "Daddy!" The disrespected scientist she'd been standing near grabbed her hand and dragged her out of my room just before I shut the door and locked it. It was like he realized what others didn't; this was a test of sorts. Those who could survive this would be kept alive as testing subjects. I'm almost certain he realized this.

"Ten minutes to neurotoxin capacity. Please evacuate to the enrichment center relaxation facility." The prerecorded message was almost ironically pleasant. Many people that were trapped in my chamber were trying to hold their breath as they searched for an escape. Many of the children had already fallen to the neurotoxin and were dying slow, agonizing deaths. Others were simply sitting there crying. For some reason or another, the feeling that had stopped me from doing this before, the voice, had fallen completely silent. Maybe because I viewed it as a test. A test of survival.

Many scientists had escaped, along with a few mechanics, a janitor, the single child Chell (still looking about her for her father), some secretaries, and a few engineers. Each had some kind of cloth covering their face. One of them had given Chell their lab coat to cover her mouth and nose with. She'd wrapped the extra over the top of her head. She was getting toxin protocol mixed up with fire (plus the coat wasn't wet), but she was only eight, what did she know? Out of curiosity, I pulled up her father's file. Huh, how interesting, he had adopted her when she was still a baby. She probably didn't even know.

I ran each of the escapee's files as well, and discovered each would make a perfectly good future test subject. So I started snatching them out of the halls, making the floor come apart beneath them, snatching them with claws and cables, transporting them instantly to individual stasis pods to await testing. Finally, only tiny little Chell was left. I wasn't expecting that; I expected her to be the first captured. Testing with her was going to be fun. A claw emerged from the floor before her. She regarded it with the most stubborn expression for a moment, then took off to the left.

I wasn't expecting a child to impress me, but this one did. She dodged cables and claws, rolled over moving panels and leaped gaps. It was truly a very impressive display, when she was older she would make a beautiful test subject. Absolutely wonderful, really, she had something I hadn't seen before. I couldn't put my processors on what it was though. But all good things, including her bid for freedom, must come to an end. She finally ran into a locked door and out of places to go. The child turned to face, by extension, me. I had her cornered with two claws, several wires(a few of which I had temporarily disconnected from lights and panels), and an open gap between them and the girl. Sweet victory.

She glared furiously at the claw I sent forward to grab her. She did not kick, nor scream, but faced her fate with a silent determination that not a single one of her older counterparts possessed. An excellent specimen for future observation. I placed her in her own stasis pod and left her to her forced slumber.

"Now, let's get to business," I said to no one in particular. "It's time we started thinking with portals."