"JOOOOOOOE! MY BEAUTIFUL JOOOOOOOOE!"
That was the scream from Doctor Mofuni that alerted me and Shephard to spring into action, hearing it coming from somewhere in the survey team's supply depot. Before all of that, we hadn't yet found the entryway into the teleporter chamber and had inadvertently branched off from each other to explore different areas of the supply depot. It was certainly a staging area of some kind; the walls were lined with large metal cabinets filled with canisters, stacked supply crates, and a whole suboffice filled with terminals with monitors that ominously still projected the lone circular Aperture logo on their flickering screens.
It was very quiet in this area of the facility as well, so it was quite a frightening thing that scream. Shephard and I rejoined seconds after and rushed to Mofuni's end of the depot, and we found him in another room on his hands and knees. Shephard and I were primed and ready for a fight, but we found no enemies in the room―automatic sentries or otherwise.
I wasn't accurately able to telepathically register Mofuni's state of mind in my flurry to reach him under the assumption that he was being attacked. So, it came as quite a surprise to find out that not only was Mofuni not in immediate danger, but that his emotional state was surging with a level of rejoice and rapture the likes I had not felt him project since I first led him to the Cloud Runner. It ensued an empathetic whiplash in me equivalent to the force of driving a hoverbike and getting flipped over from behind.
"Shit, what's wrong, doc?!" Shephard demanded, drawing his pistol with two hands.
"Coffee!" Doctor Mofuni exclaimed, raising his arms at the counter he was bowing to―specifically at the open cabinet beneath it. "Genuine bonified coffee grounds! Columbian roast! Even decaf! Oooooh by Jove, I would've chosen you over Postum any day in the last fifteen years~…"
Mofuni began to literally cry with happiness as he crawled into the open cabinet, where there were about eight red containers of the presumed grounds he was referring to. He began coddling them like they were stuffed bedtime companions. He would have fully crawled inside amongst them all if the cabinet wasn't too small to fit his whole body.
We were left stumped at the sight of a middle-aged man bawling his eyes out over the sight of twenty-year-old coffee grounds. Shephard began scratching his head in second-hand embarrassment while looking behind himself, impulsively checking to see if anyone was spectating. Even though I was just as muddled, I still couldn't help but grin with happiness as I took in Mofuni's highly potent emotions.
It was well known that his mental impediments could only be managed by procuring Postum: a cheap, caffeine-free grain alternative to earthly coffee since he had run out of it some years back. Caffeine was a rare delicacy in the Combine-controlled Earth, so stumbling across so much at once made this a momentous day for him.
"Oh yes… Gather around my caffeinating babies. Yes~…" Mofuni cooed as he delicately gathered the red cans in his arms, holding them close to his person. "This is officially the greatest breakroom on the planet Earth. I'm the real lottery winner here. It wouldn't even matter if we found the teleporter in disrepair; this still will end a joyous day for me…"
Amid his coffee can cuddling, Mofuni briefly acknowledged us watching him have an emotional breakdown, though that did nothing to dampen his stellar mood. "You two go forward without me, I'll catch up momentarily. A troubled man like me needs to make a cup of joe really quick. One that's been years in the making…"
While Doctor Mofuni started up the coffee machine on the counter, Shephard and I reluctantly followed his command to carry on while he did his business.
Not far away from the breakroom we left him in, we passed through an airlock of some kind, bearing signs indicative that the teleporter chamber was very close beyond that point. The sliding doors behind us shut tightly as jets of cleansing and detoxing sprays coated us from head to tail for a moment before the second set of doors in front of us opened up, revealing a lengthy corridor with a large metal door on the end. Shephard and I uneasily proceeded forward, mutually worried about our troubled friend, so we both vowed to go back and get him if he didn't meet up with us in ten minutes.
Concern for Mofuni's well-being was temporarily suspended from our minds once we finally entered the main teleporter chamber after passing several safety and warning signs relating to "phasing" hazards. The large metal door somehow detected our presence and opened up accordingly with our approach. The size and girth of the teleport chamber were breathtaking.
The chamber was an enormous cavernous domed environment held up by metal hexagonal frames, where dim white lights could be seen hanging from fixtures, just lighting the chamber enough for us to see our surroundings. In the centre of the room were four giant hydraulic arms with large cannon-looking devices fixed to each of them on an adjustable axle, surrounding and bending towards a meshed circular platform suspended over a pit in the floor. Aside from several terminals along the walls or a few consoles with seats behind them spaced around, the chamber was nearly entirely open, making us feel quite puny in the presence of this incredible machine.
Yet, despite its giant, silent grandeur, it would be dishonest to say I had never seen a construct like this before. Or, to be more precise, what Shephard had seen before. I merely skimmed the memory of it a long while back.
"Wow…" Shephard gawked in the presence of the revealed teleporter. "Déjà vu…"
"It does look uncanny," I said, studiously examining the teleporter's giant conducting from our distance. "Much like the teleporter you saw that man in the orange suit jump through in Black Mesa."
Shephard pressed his lips and nodded silently in agreement. I could tell he was recounting the memory. When I briefly witnessed many key memories in Shephard's recent past through the Vortessence, I remembered him emerging into a large chamber identical to the one we were standing in right now, where he witnessed a man in an armoured orange suit jumping through a portal moments after he stepped into the chamber, consequently collapsing the portal before Shephard could get a good look at him.
"Do you still believe that it was Doctor Freeman you saw?" I wondered, holding my elbows as I crossed my arms.
"It had to be," Shephard insisted, still rather mystified by that brief encounter. "No other confirmed hostiles were wearing one of those suits, and I swear I heard that old guy say his name…"
Hurry up, Freeman! I can't keep it open forever! That was what Shephard believed he heard amongst the droning electric roar of the active teleporter in Black Mesa. It was a haunting thing to recall in its own way.
"He was right there, too," Shephard added, "I had my deagle's red dot dead on him. If I didn't hesitate…"
He didn't sound regretful that he didn't kill him like his fellow soldiers wanted to, but he nonetheless felt heavy-laden with an emotion that wasn't specific. One thing was for certain, however. Had he killed Gordon Freeman in that chamber if that was indeed him, the future would have been changed forever, and there was no way of telling if that was a good or bad thing. Perhaps that's what Shephard was hung up about. It was certainly some hearty food for thought.
Before I could comment on all the things that could have been, a familiar, synthesised voice rang out somewhere above. "Ayy! Glad to see that you chumps could make it!"
The boisterous heckle made me and Shephard turn our heads upward to the left, where we could see would looked to be an external control room of sorts that could be accessed by a flight of metal steps. It had long rectangular windows, similar-looking to the top of an air-traffic control tower, and Rod the personality core was up there just outside the entrance, waving his handlebars in a fluttering motion at us. The spotting of our spherical friend consequently led me to see that there was a network of management rails running around the whole chamber, but the place was dim enough for me to overlook them.
"Ah jeez…" Shephard muttered with dread at the sight of our lovable but modestly taxing AI companion.
"You've arrived just in time!" Rod called. "I was about to start warming up the joint. Hop on up and you can see where the magic happens!"
Doctor Mofuni finally arrived just as Rod finished switching on all of the ceiling spotlights in the teleporter chamber, with a freshly brewed paper cup of hot coffee in his hand.
Just even by how he was walking up the steps to the control room I could tell he was in an especially pungent state of mind. He looked so clear-minded and determined, perhaps the most I had ever seen or felt, and he was very happy about it. It was so refreshing to see him appear in this state of being; a remarkable thing that twenty-year-old coffee was; Mofuni even proudly stated that he didn't care it tasted like soggy cardboard. He was just happy to have a clearer head, and so was I.
With a newly-found sense of vigour and drive, Doctor Mofuni began to help Rod in the reactivation of the teleport chamber, which was a bit more of an arduous process being that there were only two of them when a whole crew was meant to work in unison. For the next twenty minutes or so, the two of them coordinated intensely in getting all the systems up and running again; Rod frequently dashed off down the rails to various points of the chambers to manually start up or manage systems crucial to the teleporter's integrity. There were many ports for personality cores all around the chamber for him to do this, so for Rod, this was a doable task. A part of me considered the possibility that even this place had plans to fully automate the procedures given all of the abundant signs I had seen throughout Arbeit of phasing out human oversight, which was an assumption Mofuni did not refute.
While I tried keeping up, I couldn't understand much of the technical lingo Rod and Mofuni were spatting at each other while Mofuni was running around the main control panel in the control room and while Rod was speeding around the chamber. Mofuni even used the scratchy megaphone to communicate a slew of urgent commands to his assistant from across the chamber, indirectly discouraging any involvement from my end as well as hurting my ears.
Shephard also lacked savviness when it came to engineering and science, so he, too, found little to engage with up there, so we naturally gravitated towards the back area of the control room. There wasn't much to do back there being filled with empty (but reactivated) consoles and just took a couple of seats. While the two science wizards managed all of the waking machinery, Shephard and I just made light conversation with what we were provided with: some forgotten notebooks and scientific papers regarding the technology operated in the chamber outside.
I leafed through one of the papers held together by a couple of staples while Shephard leaned over me to look. There were diagrams explaining relay waves, string-based particle accelerators, and a whole myriad of more systematic gobbledygook that both of us could barely understand. However, there was one thing in these papers that did snag my attention though―several things, in actuality.
There was a whole chapter devoted to the effects radio waves from space could have on orbital satellite relays, which were apparently crucial to the process of projecting teleportation points on Earth. All bodies in the Solar System were reported to slightly affect the satellite's calculations in some minute way. With this being established, detailed coloured images of the Solar System's planets were presented alongside graphs showcasing the intensity of their signal outputs. This was the first time I had seen images of Earth's planetary neighbours, which Shephard explained to me had been taken by unmanned probes humanity launched into space.
There were the inner planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. Beyond the region known as the "Asteroid Belt" were the outer planets, and they consisted of gas giants: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. I found the unique composition of any planet I come across to look beautiful in its own way, and the planets of Earth's system were no different.
"More than eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit?" I raised my eyebrows after hearing that titbit from Shephard as I looked at an image of the cloudy world of Venus. "How hot is that exactly?" I wondered as I looked at him.
"Uhm…I wouldn't know the equivalent of your worlds' measurements," Shephard admitted, "but I know it's hot enough to boil your blood. Its dense clouds keep heat inside; making the planet an uninhabitable oven. The clouds are poisonous too and rain acid. You know, just in case the heat wasn't enough."
"Intriguing," I mused. "Venom is a lot like that, but nowhere close to being as hot to boil blood. Its atmosphere is highly toxic, but still manageable with respirators."
"Venom," Shephard began to recall after a second. "Right. The mad monkey man's world. Would you say Venus is your Venom equivalent? I mean, they've both got Vs in their names for one, and they're both toxic hellholes."
"I suppose so in some sense," I considered, abiding by his earthly way of spelling things. I flipped back and forth between the pages to review the different worlds. Mercury was admittedly unremarkable aesthetically, and while Mars looked like a dry arid world, I found its rusty warm colour endearing, the same as Venus. The dense cloud layer encompassing the whole planet made it look much more welcoming than it truly was according to my friend.
The gas giants were incredible as well. Jupiter and its bands were fascinating to look at, and I was also able to see its famed red spot which was apparently an enormous storm that had been raging for centuries. Uranus and Neptune had beautiful solid aqua colours, but they paled in comparison to perhaps my favourite world out of the whole lineup.
"My word…those are gorgeous rings," I said wistfully, getting a good eyeful of an image of Saturn.
"Yeah. I always thought they looked neat," Shephard admitted.
"I have never seen a world with such a massive ringlet system. It almost looks like one could walk on it it's so dense! This is an incredibly rare phenomenon with planetary rings if I understand correctly."
"No kidding," Shephard mused with surprise. "The other ones have rings too, but they're very thin."
"That appears to be the norm from what I can tell," I said. "You have an especially unique planet in your system, Adrian."
"Hmm. Fancy that."
Of course, while Saturn might have been my favourite world in the roster from an aesthetic sense, the image of Earth held my attention a little longer than all the other planets. It didn't look all that different to Corneria or many other hospitable worlds in Lylat and beyond. Its bright blue oceans, aura, green continents and white clouds were a tranquil sight up against the black of space. It was a beautiful world by every account, so lush and alive, which made its present circumstances all the more heart-wrenching for the people and the ecosystems here. It was difficult not to bring it back up, especially when this image was taken before the Combine's reign.
"I hope it isn't too far gone," I spoke up, lowering the paper. "You earthlings are the only things alive in your system. Your planet is completely isolated with no other neighbouring worlds or systems to come and aid you."
"Heh. When you put it that way, you make it sound pretty hopeless," Shephard chuffed a bit, which made me a little glum. I didn't mean to make it sound like that, but there was a cruel truth to it. Humanity was a relatively primitive species, bound by their planet while only taking baby steps out into space. The Combine conquered countless worlds in who knew how many dimensions. How was humanity supposed to free itself on its own? That was the same question I found myself always dwelling on.
"The thing is, Krystal," Shephard continued. "I might not be as educated about our alien overlords, but we've got a knack for bouncing back real hard and real fast." He then gave me a little look along with a little twinge of a smile. "I don't know how the hell we're gonna pull it off, but I don't see these guys sticking around forever. These guys have propped up some big dominos; it's just a matter of finding a way to push them down."
I smiled back, finding myself optimistic in his mindset. "Well, I'm certain you'd know what your species is capable of far better than me. I pray one day that you and your kind will prosper again."
Shephard shrugged. "Hey. You never know. Everything we'll need to do that may be right here."
Not too long afterwards, the doctor and his core assistant proudly declared that system diagnostics were just about finished.
It had been a bit of a process, but little by little, the teleport chamber had been slowly coming back to life thanks to the efforts of Doctor Mofuni and Rod. All of the lights in the chamber were burning with life―aside from a few bulbs in certain areas that had gone out―and all of the monitors and consoles outside around the chamber floor and within the control room were once more active and humming with power. The doctor and the personality core were in very high spirits, so I was inclined to assume all things were proceeding as planned.
"All right, damping locks are set for dismounting," Mofuni checked off the procedure list, referring to a clipboard of instructions he held in his hands while checking readings on the main control consoles. "Nitrogen feed is at ninety-six percent, climbing fast and well. Reactor coolant levels are prime. Suspension relays are staggering a bit, but that's a given. Nothing that can't iron itself out with a few usages," he said, tapping at a dial with his finger before moving on, consistently looking over his system checklist.
"Yeah. Always making the poor thing run on fumes," Rod grumbled as he rolled back inside on his management rail, which had plenty of intersecting sections of tracks covering the ceiling of the control room. "I'll be honest, I've never been this manual with the actual machine here, and I gotta tell you, this thing looks like it works about as hard as a turtle trying to pleasure a shoe. The fuelling lines are full of twists and turns. Deliberately designed ones. I get the whole filtration process and all that―don't wanna make this thing run on bad juice―but getting this thing aroused is going to take an hour or more to recharge between each jump."
"We'll manage," Mofuni reassured, hardly feeling dissuaded as he paced around, reviewing every procedure on the clipboard. "I worked in the Enrichment Centre, my friend. I'm accustomed to pushing limits and long wait times. Remember one of our mottos!"
"There's a hole in the sky through which things can fly?" Rod wondered, shifting his yellow optic in the doctor's direction while he too examined readouts on the main control console.
"No no: grit your teeth and bear with it," Mofuni recited, reaching for his coffee and taking a confident sip. He had since run back to that breakroom to get a new cup in the midst of getting everything up and running.
"Oh. Never heard of that one yet."
"It was for executive staff like myself to say to the laymen. It never really resonated with them like it did me."
"Did it ever work?"
"I've made it this far as a mentally declining fool, haven't I?"
Shephard and I had been watching from the sidelines with interest as they made final preparations, and we were mutually impressed with how well they were working as a team. While I always knew Mofuni was a brilliant mind, his ticks in cognitive stability too often prohibited him from utilising his full potential. It was incredible to see him almost having returned to his prime with the reintroduction of his coveted caffeinated beverage.
"You think these loons are going to pull this off?" Shephard leaned in towards me as he watched.
"They definitely appear sure of themselves," I noted. "Confidence can go a long way. And besides, they're likely the only two minds on the planet who know how to work that thing out there."
"And one of them is a smart-mouthing robot," Shephard said, hardly sounding self-assured while adjusting his white and grey camouflaged shirt now that he was not wearing his heavy PCV. "These guys are not my first pick to manage an honest-to-goodness teleportation machine, but you're right. Better qualified options are a very scarce resource these days."
"Have faith, Corporal. We'll be fine," I reassured, making Shephard only shrug complacently.
Moments later, Mofuni ran through the last few instructions on the last page clipped to the clipboard before tossing it aside on the desk to his right before slamming his hands down on the main control panel (without smashing buttons, of course). "All right, children, the griddle's hot and greased," he proclaimed with triumph in his voice. "I'm ready to start flipping some pancakes. Who's with me?"
"Hey, don't leave out the OJ," Rod added, rolling up next to Mofuni, "We all need our daily intake of anti-scurvy!"
"You may as well be drinking a can of Pepsi with how much sugar is in one glass alone, my friend," Mofuni wagged his finger at the core somewhat belittlingly.
"The hell kind of OJ do you drink? Tropicana?" Rod sneered with a subtle arrangement with his optic and shudders. Their banter was mostly playful given how much of a good mood the two of them were in, which in turn put me in a good mood as I walked up to them.
"What's next, Doctor?" I asked with Shephard following behind me. "Are we ready to start sending supplies to our people?"
"In due time, my girl. We mustn't rush this marvel. She needs a little more warming up," Mofuni said, patting the controls tentatively. "We'll need to run a few tests on the displacement correlators before we can start linking up to my passion project back home in the Galacias."
"And besides, we haven't even gotten in touch with the storage wing yet," Rod pointed out. "That'll be a project of its own trying to wheel all those deadly assets out here to send over there."
"Where are these assets anyway?" Shephard asked with crossed arms. "Don't think we've actually been briefed on where that's being kept, let alone how we're going to haul the whole arsenal down here."
"See that large cargo door over there in front of the gantry bridge to the teleporter platform?" Mofuni asked, pointing his finger in that direction. It wasn't too obvious a while ago when most of the lights were off, but there was indeed a massive metal door in front of the retracted pathway that would have connected the main chamber floor to the platform in the middle of the teleporter. "That's where we'll wheel everything in from. The storage wing links up with this chamber; it's just a matter of getting the auto dollies to bring and stage everything for transport."
"Oh. Stellar," Shephard said, satisfied with that answer."
"Glad you think so, my boy," Mofuni smiled, taking another sip of stale twenty-year-old coffee before setting it down as he got back to work on one of the terminals. "That's immediately next on the agenda. Before we can do any of that, we've got to make sure all the necessary relays are in working order. Remarkably enough, our own satellite relays are still working after all these years! This guarantees a reliable and steady connection between our two global displacement points."
"You kids should feel mighty lucky with that," Rod inserted. "You'd likely end up with half of the arsenal you'd want to have. The other half would likely end up in the same dimensional landfill all other broken mistakes end up, like my former dormmates after huffing bromine in the Griswold building's boiler room. They ended up giving the joint a free fumigation job."
While Mofuni found that joke funny, Shephard and I only gave each other a tolerating glance. At least it had a better context than the last joke he went out of his way to avoid making. Putting the "joke" quickly aside, Rod honed in on the new task at hand along with his partner, who were both now regarding each other with mutual looks of determination.
"All right, doc, before we rev up her engines, why don't we conclude our diagnostic with a little relay verification?" Rod nudged.
"Will do," Mofuni nodded with enthusiasm. He then turned his full attention to the monitor he was standing behind before frantically typing away at the keyboard, keeping a close eye on all the readouts appearing on the screen while me, Shephard and Rod leaned over him to watch. After a few incessant taps with the "enter" key, Mofuni dawned a look of satisfaction.
"All right, relays are looking good. No discrepancies in any of the peripheral receivers. Everything looks like it's checking out…" Mofuni's speech fell when a series of odd-looking texts started appearing on the screen―different in structure to the preceding ones. "Huh…?" Mofuni grimaced, putting me and Shephard on edge.
"Doctor?" I asked. Mofuni ignored me at first and began to type on the keyboard again. He apparently didn't get what he desired when he finished the code because the same stream of texts appeared once again. "Oh no…"
"Talk to us, doc," Shephard demanded, very eager to know what was wrong.
"Oh, that ain't good…" Rod's optic shrank with dread as he read the texts, making his handlebars drop.
"Hey! What's the problem?" Shephard demanded once more, even more impatient, but Mofuni only wiped his forehead with apparent dismay.
"The Xen relay," he uttered, his voice soft and very distraught―quite an unusual tone for him. "It's disconnected…"
"The what?" I wondered, getting increasingly worried over the radical shift in the mood. Doctor Mofuni finally looked at me with his wide, fretful eyes.
"Well…I really don't wish to alarm you, my dear girl, but it appears that the focal point is down," he said technically, adjusting his glasses nervously. "As long as it's down, we can't use this thing. Pinpointing the desired teleporter location on Earth is nearly impossible without it."
"Could you explain what that even means?" Shephard asked, calm but stern in his voice.
Rod and Mofuni looked at each other for a moment before the doctor began to stand more upright to adjust his coat. "It means that teleportation is a far more meticulous endeavour than one may assume," he started to explain. "You see, dear children, teleportation isn't as easy as going from point A to point B―even though we literally set those points up. No. The pioneering days of teleportation research led all of us in the secretive scientific community to the discovery of the border world. Xen. No matter how much we tried, we could never jump through a generated displacement current without passing through that dimension.
Mofuni anxiously then tugged at the skirt of his coat as he explained further. "Long story short, Xen, the border world, acts as a gatekeeper, keeping us from creating accurate exit points on Earth. Further research led to the discovery of attaching focal points to certain crystalline structures unique to the border world's composition, which fixed the accuracy problem. However, we're left without that crucial focal point. It's been disconnected somehow. The teleporter has a very off sight now without it. You know what I'm trying to say?"
"No. What are you trying to say?" I wondered, feeling quite uneasy about this situation.
"What I'm saying is that we need to reengage the focal point. Manually," Mofuni alluded, looking very trepid. "In other words…someone will have to go to the border world and reengage it."
"Oh God, are you serious?" Shephard winced, not at all pleased to be confronted with this.
"I'm afraid so, son," Mofuni nodded with dread. "I'm afraid there's no other way around this. Someone needs to go to Xen and reactivate the focal point, otherwise Red Bay won't be getting its needed armaments anytime soon unless someone goes to reinstall the focal point."
I had only heard stories of this elusive border world of Xen from the doctor himself and a thorough empathetic recount from the vortigaunts through the Vortessence. While I may have had a concept of what it was, I still knew little about it. But that hardly stopped me from recognising the severity of the task at hand. And for the greater good, I knew it had to be completed despite my internal worries.
"I'll go," I volunteered, standing firm and direct.
"Not without me you aren't," Shephard refuted, making me look at him in mild surprise. He gave me an unwilling but reassuring smirk. "I know you've got a way of sensing things from behind, but someone's still gotta watch your back, right?"
This made me smile with gratitude. I couldn't think of a better companion to accompany me on this sudden expedited departure from this world. And besides, he had been there briefly a few times. He already had a taste of what to expect.
Having understood or disposition, Mofuni nodded complicitly. "Right then," he decreed, turning over to Rod. "Rod? Why don't you show them to the armoury? They're going to need the proper gear for their jump."