"—and then they told me if I ever used the camera option, I would die! They told me that about so many things! The flashlight, the radio—actually, no, that one might be true. I tried turning it on once and there was this awful screeching sound! Thought I'd tuned it to android hell to be honest, caught the signal from all the way down below...or above. Might be above at this point. This place goes down for bloody miles..."
Chell took in her surroundings, stoic and silent as ever. This place had started decaying since she last ran these halls, dodging turret bullets as their cheerful little voices ringing after her, jumping and hopping from one portal to the next for Her amusement. She may be dead now, but this place was anything but safe. From the crumbling supports to the creeping vines, collapsing floors opening into bottomless pits beneath her feet, waiting to swallow her up...
She had been less than thrilled when she woke in a daze to an unfamiliar voice—not Her at least, that was certainly a blessing—demanding a little too eagerly for her to open the door and brace herself. This little sphere was growing on her despite her better judgment, but he had certainly sold himself as a lot more knowledgeable than he seemed to be. Still, he wasn't trying to kill her yet, which made him a rarity despite his occasional anti-human slip-of-the-vocal-processor.
And the worst part was, Chell could have sworn she'd made it out before. She had killed Her, she had gotten away clean, if a bit bloody, bruised and slightly crispy around the edges. She remembered a light...
But somehow, she was back in this nightmare. Back to shaky elevators bringing her to blindingly white rooms with wall panels, big red buttons and—
Potatoes. Giant, mutant, potatoes.
Chell eyed them suspiciously as they passed by, half expecting—in typical Aperture Science fashion—for them to spring to life or produce twin machine guns full of some synthetic, probably explosive substitute for butter.
"Man alive, how many of those things are there? Bring Your Daughter to Work Day must've been quite the party eh? Even if all those kids could think to make were potato batteries. Bit disappointing, really, considering they're the kids of the scientists who built me, but I guess not everyone can - hey, are you even listening?"
Chell had mostly tuned out the little core, letting his ramblings manifest as background noise while she stayed alert for danger. She vaguely recognized he asked her a question and gave the same slight nod that seemed to appease him more often than not when he felt it appropriate to include her in his one-sided conversations.
"Right, good, take that as a 'yes' then. Anyway, I thiiiiiiiiink there should be some stairs around here. Emergency sort for fire drills and the like. There were fire drills all the time, come to think of it—humans were always running up and down those stairs one minute or another. Sometimes with alarms going off too, just for the odd bit of pizazz. Whatever it takes to spice up your life I suppose."
Following his directions...after glancing around to make sure he wasn't lost again and just guessing to make her feel better...she spotted the staircase and headed toward it, portal gun in hand. Looking at all the scuff marks, scratches and dents in the steps and rails, she had a feeling these 'drills' Wheatley recalled weren't necessarily just drills. It would surprise her far more if the long-dead Aperture staff didn't have some sort of accidental fire every other day at the very least.
As she climbed the stairs, glad to have something firm to grip onto and solid, stationary metal beneath her feet, Chell just barely caught sight of something on the wall to her left, high above her head. The large windows had been busted out, hinting at an office inside, peering down apon the walkways. But there was something else about it, something just barely peeking out from behind the glass...
"So after this it should be a—hey, where are you going?"
Holding out a hand to reassure the nervous robot, Chell shot two portals, the orange on the floor at the top of the staircase, and the blue through the window. It was a tight squeeze, but she heard it land on the white wall inside and link with its partner.
Taking a moment to look through the portal for danger, Chell stepped through with a rush of vertigo, finding herself emerging from the other side to an absolute mess...but a familiar mess. Cans of food, both empty, full and half eaten, littered the floor up to her ankles and some spilled through the portal behind her just to be tossed down the stairs and clatter down the hallway. There were other things as well, aside from your average office supplies: white lab coats tied together to form a sort of giant nest, jars of blue and orange goop—the former labeled 'Pudding', not that you could pay Chell to ever put that in her mouth—and the broken remains of a radio that seemed to have had a very unfortunate meeting with something round and hard. Repeatedly.
But what really caught Chell's attention was the mural painted on the wall.
Sprawling and busy, yet breathtaking as the last. It depicted a female figure in an orange jumpsuit, unconscious and beautiful, far more beautiful then Chell knew herself to be, but there was no mistaking that she was the subject yet again. Portrait-Chell was being dragged across the white floor by several pairs of mechanical hands, back into a dark hallway littered with scraps.
So, they pulled me back. Chell thought, not too surprised but still glad to have a confirmation from her mysterious artist friend. As per his style, the edges of the painting were marred with a scratchy, urgent lettering. Anything from "Tenacity" to "The Queen Has Fallen" were scrawled, framing the artwork...along with about a dozen pictures of a what looked like a Weighted Companion Cube with a halo and angelic wings...but something else was there as well, a new figure among the familiar.
Just there, among the wording, in a patch of wall she would have overlooked before, was a very abstract rendition of a scrawny, scraggly man. He wore a lab coat—probably a scientist—though his hair and beard were matted and his eyes somehow both tired and bugged out at once, with a half-crazed look about him. Chell couldn't exactly fault him for that, being in this place could do that to a person, she imagined. Most odd, though, was that he seemed to be turning back towards the facility instead of away.
Chell realized with a jolt that perhaps this was her silent, invisible friend himself. The one who built little nooks out of the camera's view, the one who wrote warnings and song lyrics on the walls in a jumble of frantic words and unblinking eyes. Maybe her secret artist decided to show his own face for once.
Looking at it, she got the sense of a frightened, jittery man on the brink of collapse, and wondered how he had survived so long. Despite all logic, she hoped he had made it back out and lived a good life in whatever existed beyond the facility walls.
"Hey! Are you coming back anytime soon? We do have a sort of plan, if you recall, and I don't remember it involving stealing staplers...Unless you think that would be somehow useful to our escape, in which case, grab all the staplers you need, yeah? Just nab the lot, doubt they'll be missed."
Chell put a hand on the painting, long-since dried. Thank you, my friend, whoever you are, for helping me this long.
With that, she turned and left the office, shooting Wheatley a tight-lipped smile and nodding for him to lead on.