Alone: A Portal Fanfic

Chapter 3 - Reactivation

Selene

A few test chambers later, we arrived at Chamber 7. That's when we were reunited with Wheatley. "Hey!" He called from his management rail above Chamber 8. "Oi oi! I'm up here! Oh, brilliant. You DID find a portal gun! You know what? It just goes to show: people with brain damage are the real heroes in the end, aren't they? At the end of the day. Brave."

I frowned. "What am I, chop liver?"

"Definitely not mate, I mean, we wouldn't have gotten this far without your plan. That makes you the boss of this operation."

Once Chell portaled us over to Chamber 8, I approached Wheatley. "Wheatley, I need you to disengage from your Management Rail."

He looked nervous. "Okay, listen, let me lay something on you here. It's pretty heavy. They told me never never ever to disengage myself from my Management Rail or I would die."

I resisted the urge to facepalm. Of course they did. Aloud I calmly responded with, "Well they lied to you. You won't die if you do it, I promise." I then held out my arms. "Don't worry, I'll catch you. Ready?"

The core fearfully nodded. "On three. Ready? One... Two... Three!" He blacked away. "That's high. It's too high, isn't it, really, that... Alright, going on three just gives you too much time to think about it. Let's, uh, go on one this time. Okay, ready? One!" With that, Wheatley disengaged from the rail. "Catchmecatchmecatchmecatchmecatchme!"

I caught him. "Gotcha."

He looked around. "You're right! I... Am not dead! I'm not dead!" He laughed. "Plug me into that stick on the wall over there. Yeah? And I'll show you something. You'll be impressed by this."

I nodded, then plugged him in. "There. Now do it."

"Ummmm. Yeah, I can't do it if you're watching. Seriously, I'm not joking. Could you just turn around for a second?" Selene and I rolled our eyes in unison and turned around. "Alright, you can turn around now!" We did and saw a secret panel had opened. "BAM! Secret panel! That I opened. While your back was turned. Pick me up. Let's get out of here."

Rolling my eyes, I picked him up. "Ready guys?" He and Chell nodded. "Okay then. Off we go."

—

The three of us were almost at the Central Core chamber when Wheatley spoke up. "Probably ought to bring you up to speed on something right now," he told us. "In order to escape, we're going to have to go through HER chamber, and she will probably kill us if, um, she's awake."

We were almost in GLaDOS's chamber when he panicked. "Okay, I'm gonna lay my cards on the table: I don't wanna do it. I don't want to go in there. Don't..." The core sighed in relief when he saw GLaDOS was offline. "She's off. She's off! Panic over! She's off. All fine! On we go." We were near her when he said, "There she is... What a nasty piece of work she was, honestly. Like a proper maniac."

It was hard for me to hide how much it hurt to see GLaDOS's corpse. Her remains lay in a heap on the floor. To my relief, her Genetic Lifeform component was mostly intact. I just hope her black box kept her safe... I wasn't sure what I'd do if something in her had corrupted.

"You know who ended up taking her down in the end?" Wheatley asked, snapping me out of my thoughts. "You guys are not going to believe this. A human."

"No!" I sarcastically gasped. "Really?!"

That's when I learned he hadn't heard of sarcasm."I know! I know, I wouldn't have believed it either. Apparently, this human escaped and nobody's seen him since."

"What makes you so sure it was a guy?" I asked. "For all we know, it could've been a girl."

"Fair point," he admitted, oblivious to the way Chell was looking at me. "Anyway, there was a sort of long chunk of time where absolutely nothing happened and then AEGIS tried to flood the facility with toxic goo. So that's pretty much the whole story, you're up to speed."