Note: For one thing, this story contains OCs. It follows the storyline of Portal and contains official characters, but the thus far undefined number of protagonists are mostly going to be OCs. I'll probably also use Chell. If you don't like OC fanfics, this isn't for you. Also, Jonny Rhodesman does in fact belong to me, and anyone with the name Jonny Rhodesman has it by coincidence. "That one horror movie with the evil cows" also belongs to me. It doesn't exist, just so you know. Unless there really is a horror movie about evil cows, in which case never mind.
Still Alive – Just Keep On Trying
A Portal fanfiction by InvaderKap
(Portal and all related materials belong to the Valve corporation)
A great, mournful shadow loomed over the city. Dwayne stared up into the shadow, but nothing seemed to be creating it. Suddenly, as though chasing the shadow across the city and sky, a great mechanical monstrosity rose from over a nearby hill, crushing buildings and mangling roads in its wake, emitting metallic screams of agony. The shadow disappeared, and the machine stopped before Dwayne. "I'm sorry," it said quietly before inexplicably disintegrating. Dwayne's relieved but confused heart began to beat more slowly, but inconstantly, as though his blood cells were fighting against one another, and suddenly he was surrounded by hills. The hills grew faces and began to collapse upon him, smothering him with their looks of horrid agony and poor taste in music.
Wait... Music?
Dwayne awoke to the sound of music of what he thought to be poor taste. It sounded like some sort of ridiculous cheesy dance, like salsa or something. The young man ruffled his long, blond, messy hair and reached for his pocket to get out his iPod so that he could drown out the music. Interestingly, he couldn't find his pocket, and his jeans felt like rubber. A bit frightened, he opened his eyes to assess the situation, only to find that the source of the music, whatever it was, was in fact on his face, and apparently turned on its side. Surprised, he let out a small yelp and sat up, and the source fell into his lap. Upon examining it, he found that it was a deep-blue-colored semicircle-shaped radio-alarm rather like his own, but he could tell that it wasn't his own; his own was black and square-shaped. And he could tell that he wasn't in his room; the floor was tiled and metal, and most unusual of all, it was clean.
Thoroughly intrigued, Dwayne looked around the room and found that everything about it designated it was barely a room, and if it was, it was certainly an odd one. The first thing that he noticed was that the walls were made of glass. He saw a metal table and a futuristic-looking bed, both turned on their sides. He felt somewhat stupid as he recalled his tendency to roll about violently in his sleep, but his fear urged him to ignore the feeling of inadequacy and continue his investigation. He found a toilet with the seat up. "Yeah, go privacy," he muttered to himself, chuckling as the warm, confident nature that he had always known himself to have slowly returned to him. Nothing like a bit of sarcastic comedy to cheer you up. There was a lamp hanging from the ceiling and a giant metal door with a clock above it. It disturbed Dwayne, naturally, that the time seemed to be decreasing. Was there a bomb underneath the room, ready to go off at any moment? Was the room some sort of torture chamber, ready to activate at any moment and turn his life into a horrible mistake? What if he'd been preserved for centuries and now he was in a time machine because someone thought he was a time travel passenger waiting in line, and now the machine was malfunctioning and sending him continuously back in time? The presence of a zero in what would be the "hours" counter, however, reassured him that this was not the case. Phew, that's good, he thought.
Having finished looking around the inside of the room, another question plagued Dwayne: what's on the outside? Dwayne considered breaking the glass like Jonny Rhodesman from that one ridiculous horror movie about the evil cows, but he didn't want to get in trouble with... whoever got him here. What if he's a lab rat for some kind of mad scientist? And what if that mad scientist was an evil cow? Or Jonny Rhodesman?
Dwayne continued to revel internally in his irrelevant musings when suddenly he heard something that sounded like dense flesh being slapped against a glass window. As Dwayne looked outside, he found a long row of glass rooms just like the one he was in. The lamps hanging from the ceilings stared back at him like giant yellow eyes, like each room was a hungry robotic cyclops, ready to pounce on him. He heard the sound again, but this time it was coming from a different source than the source that he thought he had heard it from the first time. He turned around, looked into the glass room behind him, and saw a familiar humanoid shape; brown, scraggly hair, a short stature, pale skin, and a black baseball cap stood before him, nondescript for lack of a visible face. The small young man's hand knocked calmly against the glass wall, producing what Dwayne was sure was the noise he had heard.
For what seemed like hours, Dwayne stood before his glass wall, looking out at the young man. Suddenly, the boy grasped his baseball cap and began to lift. This is just like one of those horror movies, thought Dwayne, where there's some guy with something over his eyes, and you come up to him, he lifts up his eye thingy and it's like BANG! And then you're like dead and the guy is all MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Dwayne stood dead still, waiting for something to happen. "Dwaaaayne…" came a voice somewhat muffled through the glass. Dwayne froze, if possible, even more, breathing heavily. "Dwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayne…" Suddenly, the boy lifted his hat straight off, with no tension or anything, to reveal an ever-familiar face somewhat inconceivably darkened by its glasses and an angry, yet sincere, expression. The expression slowly faded into a sincerer smile, and the darkness dissipated to reveal a pair of sea-green eyes that Dwayne knew all too well. "For crying out loud, Dwayne! It's me, Eric!" The boy leaned against the glass, pressing his hands and making funny faces, when suddenly the glass broke. Clearly it wasn't very strong glass. "Oops," said the boy, innocently but uncaringly.