"Are you still there…?"

"Searching…"

"Would you come over here…?"

This was the second chamber where I was forced to confront those deviously soft robotic voices.

I had already made it to test chamber five. Once more, I had to contend with Aperture Science's most "iconic" military-grade androids as stated by Rod: tripoded automated turrets. They had smooth white ovular bodies with a single red optic between their shell's seam line, antennae poking out from their tops, and they had curved black pincer-like legs.

My introduction to them in the previous chamber was a cruel one. A whole line of them had been revealed to be hiding behind a wall after it flipped upward. All of their bright red-targeting lasers locked onto me within less than two seconds and opened fire in less time.

I had made quick work of them after nearly dodging their shots as I ran to nearby cover and retaliated with precise strikes with magic fireballs. That appeared to be the whole point of the test because the door to the next chamber opened up seconds after the turrets shut down automatically. However, there was apparently a provided solution to disable the turrets, one the Rod had the simulated nerve to passively belittle me for overlooking it with a one-liner.

Now in the proceeding chamber, I was confronted by the same sentries again, but their arrangement was slightly different. They were in the middle of the main chamber, six total in a row, guarding the steps that led up to the exit door just behind them. I was able to get a look at each of their legs and saw that each turret was fixed to the ground with some kind of locking device. I was plenty ready to blast them to spare parts with some more magic, but Rod starkly prohibited me.

"Listen, kid, I like your plucky style, but you've got to solve it the way the chamber wants," he warned, after I sat him down behind our protective corner, concealing us from the turrets. "It has a way of knowing when you're being too crafty, even without cameras. You were lucky to have gotten away with it last time"

I was feeling impatient after the abrupt introduction of sentient turrets, but I reluctantly heard Rod out. "All right then," I relented, kneeling next to him as I held my deployed staff with its hilt planted on the floor. "What will the chamber do if I break the rules?"

"I, uh… I can't tell you," Rod said, blinking his optic a little nervously.

"What do you mean you can't?"

"I mean that I can't. It's a built-in precaution, see? I am programmed to not tell you much of anything during testing."

"So, you know the solution for this chamber?"

"I do, but I'd be liable for ruining the experiment if I tell, and there's a real chance I may explode if I do that. So, help a poor one-eyed metal coconut out, won't ya?"

I frowned and inhaled through my nostrils. "Fair enough," I grumbled. "What about suggestions? Is that permitted?"

"That's basically the same as telling," Rod said. "However, if one were particularly observant with visual cues, and I'm hoping that's you, you would understand where and what you needed to do."

My brow furrowed into a scowl as I looked at this snarky little robot who probably truly was helpless to help me thanks to a built-in failsafe, but I wasn't oblivious to the fact that Rod had been frequently jerking his yellow optic upward at something behind me while he was talking to me. I eventually looked up and saw a little white sign that was supposed to light up but was dark and broken―hence why I overlooked it the first time. It conveyed a simple picture of a bipedal figure running across an open stretch with gunfire spraying at it with a helpful arrow accompanying it.

The arrow directed my attention to the other end of the room, across the open gap where the turrets' targeting lasers were streaming and spotted a small flight of blocky steps leading up to a platform where a large glass pane was standing upright. I probably wouldn't have noticed that was there had I not spent so much focus on the turrets, which was a little hard not to do. At least I had some kind of destination, and I had a sense that something was up there that could maybe help me.

"Stay right where you are, Rod," I told him as I got up near the edge of our cover.

"Heh, believe me, kid, I'm perfectly braced for the coming storm," he quipped. I briefly glanced back at him because I felt like that was somehow a subliminal message, but Rod simply kept irking his optic to get me going. I chewed my lower lip indignantly as I crept to the further edge of our cover, just out of sight of the turrets.

"Is anyone there…?" I heard one of them say, clearly goading me with that harmless-sounding voice. I ignored it and kept my eyes trained on the steps twenty feet in front of me. I shimmied my feet for a moment as I took a deep breath, and without another moment of prep, I dashed across the turrets' line of sight.

"There you are…"

"Deploying…" a couple of turrets announced softly, less than a second before all the turrets unleashed their barrage of bullets at me. I cleared the space just in time, though I did feel one bullet graze across the white tip of my tail, tearing a little bit of fur off. I slammed my back against the wall of my new cover as the turrets ceased their fire.

"Searching…" more than one said. A sequence of peeping sounds began going off in their area as their targeting lasers were waving around, trying to locate that swift little vixen that just teased them with her presence. After searching around for a moment, the turrets concluded that they could see nothing in their line of fire and withdrew their guns back into their bodies, which were hidden in their side panels that could pop out.

"Hibernating…"

"Goodnight…" A couple of turrets uttered just as all of their targeting lasers straightened across the open area until they hit the wall―where enlarged shadows of their pill-shaped frames were casting ominously from a spotlight on their end of the chamber. I sighed with relief as I climbed up the steps to the platform fifteen feet off from the chamber floor.

My eyes skimmed the platform once I could see it, and there sitting by the window pane was a pedestal with a strange-looking box sitting on top of it. Naturally curious, I made my way towards it for investigation. As I neared the pedestal, I was soon able to see the line of seven turrets, consequently allowing them to see me through the glass.

My heart skipped a beat when I saw all the turrets flare up and aim their targeting lasers right at me―squarely on my chest no less―but even though their guns were deployed, they didn't fire. The glass must have been bullet-proofed; it looked thick enough anyway, and the turrets must have known that.

Even though they weren't shooting, I still felt immensely threatened as the turrets just silently stared at me, continuing to tag me with their lasers even as I reached the pedestal. Trying to ignore all the lasers that were still pinning me, I arrived at the box and found what it offered both curious and foreboding. The box had eight egg-like objects placed inside, and written on the box itself said in human letters: Xen Relay Granade. Design Intention: Assisting in the removal of general clutter in households and in various spaces.

I picked up one of these grenades and held it gingerly in my hand. It was pretty dense and weighty, and the sides of it bore the Aperture Laboratories logo. There was a big red button on the top of the grenade, which led me to assume that was where it was meant to activate. After studying closely for a moment, I soon noticed printed instructions on the pedestal along with a set of illustrations. This chamber was meant to test the strength of the singularity manifesting through the detonation of one of these devices, and the turrets down below appeared to be the intended targets to try these on.

I looked at the box of grenades warily. Rod had mentioned these before; I didn't like how they sounded then, and I definitely didn't like the implications being made here by these instructions. Doctor Mofuni had spoken to me of the border world of Xen numerous times before, and even the Vortigaunts regarded it with little affection when enslaved by the Nihilanth. This elusive dimension was where the Resonance Cascade stemmed from, so the idea of toying with gateways to that dimension made me feel uneasy. And I had to be honest with myself, I did not trust Aperture at all after all the stories and seeing what they offered here at Arbeit Communications, but I found myself trusting Rod, so I reluctantly resigned to following the chamber's directions.

Carefully approaching the edge of the glass―the turrets silent tracking my movements all the while―I held up the grenade and reluctantly clicked the button on its top. It then flashed red as a ticking sound began to go off. I then hurriedly chucked the grenade around the glass before the turrets could get a clean shot on me.

It bounced a few times along the floor of the chamber, rolling to a stop roughly a dozen feet behind the turrets. I watched in eager anticipation behind the glass, though I put a space between myself and it. The instructions on the pedestal warned that the pulling strength of the singularity could be unpredictable.

Seconds after, the grenade detonated in a bright flash, which bathed the chamber in a bold green light as a mass of imploding energy manifested. I could feel the air in the chamber getting sucked straight towards the portal, making my hair and fur whip ferociously as I instinctively grabbed onto the pedestal for safety. The vortex looked to be so much stronger up close than from where I was standing because the turrets were quickly dislodged from their clamps and got sucked into the portal one by one.

"WHOAA!"

"WEEEE!"

"GLORIOUS FREEDOM!" a few cried out as they got sucked through moments before the portal collapsed entirely with a dramatic disperse, which seemed to spur up a couple more anomalies around the chamber before they too dissipated quickly. The test chamber returned to an eerily quiet calm seconds after, which was soon interrupted by a sprightly ding coming from the exit door seconds before it slid open, revealing the way to the next chamber.

"Ay! Good job up there, kid!" the grainy voice of Rod called. "I haven't heard air this still since my last stand-up gig at Nunzio's. That was a tough one, Nunzio's, I tell ya."

Sighing again in the relief that this chamber was solved, I looked at the box of remaining Xen grenades again, giving them a glare of mistrust as I walked away to head back down the stairs. Moments later, I went and retrieved Rod. He looked a little surprised that I greeted him with a scowl.

"Test subjects were expected to run across a live-firing range to get to those devices?" I questioned him, holding him close to my snout. Rod blinked his optic a little anxiously, its yellow light shrinking from the scrutiny.

"Waivers, Krystal. Those bums knew what they were getting into," Rod insisted, rather unconvincingly.

"Suppose they did, but what was the point of putting automated turrets in a chamber meant to test those grenades? And across the pathway to them no less? Have people been killed trying to get to those grenades?"

Rod shifted his optic, clearly tense under the pressure. "They were homeless. Wasn't like anyone was going to miss them…?"

That struck a very deep and personal nerve with me. I remember being homeless; I was homeless for a very long time―ever since I was four years old. Rod must've registered his poor choice of words the longer he looked into my eyes and I could start to feel his handlebars trembling as I held them.

"Ah, jeez, tough crowd of one tonight," he chuffed anxiously. "If I had a tie, I'd be pulling at it neurotically…"

As much as I despised the notion of this company exploiting the homeless for their monstrous experiments, I knew it was unwise to want to take it out on Rod. He was created by Aperture; I knew he couldn't help himself when it came to his apparent shortcomings and insensitivities. Still, it forced me to assert a great amount of discipline to not lose control of my temper and remain focused on my current mission of regrouping with my friends.

"Never you mind, Rod. Forgive me," I encouraged with a dismissive shake of my head. "Let's just keep moving. I'd like to get out of these chambers as soon as possible."

"You and me both, kid," Rod agreed as I carried him with me to the door on the other end of the chamber. "Nothing makes me more antsy than being a rat in the maze that I helped design."

The next two chambers presented more tests involving the Xen Relay Grenade and turrets with identical outcomes.

Being that Arbeit was developing these dangerous devices right here where their secretive teleportation division was, it wasn't surprising to see them featured more than once in this series of test chambers. The nature of these tests was still so strange to me; they were more or less the same set of tests but with different variables affecting each one, such as throwing the grenades up onto a higher ledge or somehow trying to get the grenades to detonate below the platform these turrets were positioned in. I understood that the practice of science was fundamentally the repeatability of an experiment, but why the inclusion of hazards like automated turrets and pits filled with mutated phytoplankton? Wouldn't random inanimate objects be enough to test the singularity's pulling strength? How did these elements affect the reliability of the grenades?

Implications were certainly high and troubling before finding myself trapped down here beneath the facility, but the design philosophy in the making of these chambers revealed an uncanny sadism I felt. These hazards must have been purely for the entertainment value of the overseers―watching test subjects flounder around under pointless duress and fear of getting killed. I was naturally nimble and agile, but I imagined many test subjects before me were not so if the majority of them were the homeless that Aperture swept off the streets for cheap. The amount of angst I held for this prewar company stirred a lot of emotions in me the more I was confronted by their signs of clear negligence and downright malice in some of the chambers I cleared.

Fortunately, my spree as an unwitting test subject was almost drawing to a close by the time I wrapped up the sixth chamber. With only one chamber left to go before making it to the end of the track, anticipations were high on my end. But I wasn't left without a great deal of trepidation when it came to the certain side effects I bore witness to when using the Xen grenades.

One of the side effects of these dimensional entanglement devices was that sometimes when the turrets got sucked through, a few things came back through the same rip appearing out of thin air in green electrical discharges. Bizarre-looking flora appeared around the chamber in the place of the turrets; wet and pungent specimens that took on an almost coral-like appearance and shimmered with faint luminescence. Rod confirmed to me that these were specimens from Xen that got unwittingly entangled in the produced singularity, and opted for me to not spend so much time looking at it, for some specimens that had been brought back for study actually produced lethal spores that could kill within minutes if it didn't radically mutate their victims. I burned them all with some magic fire for cleansing's sake.

After that was done, I moved on quickly to the seventh chamber with Rod in my hands, but something was blocking our path. Just across the exit to the next chamber was a field of blue particles streaming into the walls, produced and maintained by white curvy generators that emerged from the walls. I had actually seen identical modules in each exit from the preceding chambers, though this was the first one to actually be doing this, and that frightened Rod so much he begged that I not dare move past the field.

"What is this?" I wondered, staring studiously at the particle field screening our exit in this dark-metalled corridor, which was our only way to the next chamber.

"B-Back up a few steps, would ya? I don't wanna be anywhere near that thing…" Rod pleaded, his spherical form jittering anxiously in his case, in turn making my arms tremble as I held his handlebars. I did as he asked, backing up to where there was a safe distance between us and the particle field, making him sigh in relief (a simulated sigh, anyway). "Aw, sheez… Thanks, kid. This is the first chamber so far to have a working emancipation grill. We've been pretty lucky until now"

"A what?"

"Emancipation grill," Rod repeated. "Every test chamber has one of these in their exits. They vaporise any unauthorised equipment that goes through. It's to discourage test subjects from smuggling things into subsequent chambers they think may help them solve them. It's a lot like airport security, only here you may actually be stripped naked instead of having some triple-digit incomer prodding at your private areas with a radioactive stick."

That idea mortified me. "Why would that happen?"

"Look at what you're wearing, kid. That's no test subject orange onesie you've got on," Rod said, spinning around to look at my worn suit and jacket. "Anything you've got on hand now, especially me, is liable to be disintegrated. Hell, you could be vaporised for all I know. We haven't extensively tested the grill's effects on alien DNA, but I don't think that's something either of us are willing to test right now."

"No. We do not," I agreed, a bit stumped by what to do next as I studied the particle field across the exit. Wanting to get a little closer to this peculiar obstacle, I gently sat Rod down a safe distance from the field before I approached it cautiously, making Rod a little anxious.

"Boy, you don't mind confronting danger so directly, do you?" he stated. "But I insist, please don't be stupid; I'm starting to like you and…well…you're my only way out of here, frankly."

"Don't worry, Rod, I'm just assessing our situation," I assured, now standing a full foot away from the particle field. Even from here the fur on my face tingled like I rubbed my cheeks with a slab of carpet. I put my hand out a few inches from the field and noted how a glow appeared wherever I held out my hand.

The particle field certainly registered my presence, and I was now hesitant to stick my finger through it lest it gets incinerated as Rod feared. So, to test its vitality, I eyed a few chunks of debris that were lying around nearby: a few chunks from the short concrete ceiling. Picking up the dusty chunk of concrete, I looked over at the field again and simply tossed it through. A violent hissing sound ensued as the chunk of debris floated through the particle field, turning a deep black while residual energy fizzled around it. It was all then completely reduced to pitiful cinders seconds later, which left a very perturbed gape on my muzzle.

"Brutally effective, huh kid?" Rod commented, able to have seen the whole process. "Listen, why don't we try looking at one of those observation windows back there? They probably have a clearer way out being so close to the lobby," he wagered. He was probably right, but I had stubborn tendencies. I never gave up on something when I felt like I was able to conquer it, and I had the same feeling even here.

"Hold on, Rod. I want to try something first…" I said, unclipping my staff from my belt before deploying it to full length. I planted its hilt on the floor as I studied the particle field some more, already having a crafty idea. I looked at my staff, twirling it in place contemplatively.

I vividly remembered how my staff circumvented the Combine's confiscation field in the outland depot. Not only did it manage to completely destroy it, but it also learned how it worked and could now reproduce its generated effects on command after having been bathed in its own incinerating effects. I began to wonder if my staff were receptive to another source of identical power.

"Do you wish to have a look?" I whispered to it. It was out of general affection; I didn't really expect a response, yet I felt a silent acknowledgement somehow―one of the numerous recurring signs that suggested my staff was far more aware of things than it liked to reveal outright. Perhaps my innate abilities helped me see this as a strong possibility.

Either way, I smirked dubiously to myself as I looked to the field again. "All right. Let's give you a feel for this…" I whispered again, holding my staff in two hands as I carefully extended its spearhead towards the field. Rod was oddly quiet as I did this; perhaps he was watching with silent curiosity, but he lacked the mind I needed to read to know for sure. Nevertheless, I proceeded with my risky idea, and after a delicate moment, I thrust my staff through the emancipation grill, and an incredibly violent reaction occurred.

My staff trembled profusely as it endured the field's destructive particles, making my grip on it alarmingly unstable, though that coaxed me to hold on even tighter as the reaction persisted. I could feel the power of the emancipation grill clamping down relentlessly on my staff, though it did not fizzle to dust like the concrete. The runic patterns around the shaft began glowing blue as an occurrence began manifesting in the spearhead's gemstone.

It was an eventful several seconds in total, but the tables began to turn on this test chamber screening feature. The generators producing the field began to spark with stress as their integrity began to fail simultaneously. And then, in a sprightly blip, the particle field collapsed in an instant―and if one were to blink in that exact moment, they would have seen the entire field itself and all of its particles collapsing straight into the staff's gemstone.

I registered the new kind of glow emanating from my staff as I looked at the adjacent generators that were once producing the disintegrating field now sparking with malfunction and overall brokenness. "Hmph," I chuffed to myself with modest triumph, planting my staff's hilt on the floor again. Quite the quick study it was. I was very proud of it.

"You never let me down," I told it, going so far as to even kiss it on the spearhead, knowing it wouldn't hurt. The runic patterns on the shaft fluttered a few shades of blue before returning to a solid muted cobalt. Some habits die hard; the relationship I established with my staff had not changed all that much since I was four years old.

"Sheesh. I'll be damned, kid. You're just full of surprises," Rod said from behind, prompting me to turn and look at him. He was just staring at me, that big yellow optic of his burning with bemusement.

"So I've been told before," I said, motioning my staff back into its retracted state before clipping it back onto my belt. "Shall we resume?"