Subject 3281; Chell's Story

A Course Completed

The door did open, and onto a very familiar sight. Subject 3281 was the first to step out into the room where they had first properly met each other, the room where they had received their first verbal instructions, the place it had taken her two attempts to portal to. The two had arrived at the compact room behind door #1 in the giant central chamber that she had been told to report to that fateful morning.

The room was quite as they had left it; lift at the far end, emancipation grill-covered door, a speaker above that, and a camera in the corner near the lift. She moved towards the back of the room and faced the camera, as was customary. She heard her partner join her, and waited. Their wait was not long.

"Congratulations, Test Subjects," said the human voice from above, "on completing the first course of the Co-operative Testing Initiative. In a few seconds, the door at the front end of the room will open, and you will be required to find your way to the entrance of the next course. Good luck!"

Subject 3281 threw a cursory glance at her partner, then turned and moved to stand before the humming emancipation grill guarding the door. As soon as her partner had joined her—that is, in about four seconds—the door opened to reveal a ledge, and a rather daunting drop.

Subject 3281 gripped her yellow striped gun as she surveyed the enormous room before them. At last she found what she had been looking for; door #2, directly across from them, though on a higher level. Her brow furrowed. There didn't appear to be a portal surface anywhere near the circular door marked #2. She was in the process of scanning the surrounding area for portal surfaces, when her partner took a sudden—and quite unanticipated—leap off the edge of the ridge the two had been standing on.

She leaned over the side and saw to her amazement that the boy actually appeared to have a plan in mind. As he fell, she saw him twist around mid-air, and shoot a portal above her head at the wall she herself had used to get to the door marked #1 all that time ago. She watched as the falling boy swung back around towards the rapidly approaching floor, and shot a portal beneath himself.

Her lips tightened, and she looked up as a flash of orange and white flew over her head and landed on the platform before the door marked with a #2. So he was good for something. It was about time he showed some actual brain power; this new course would most likely be much more difficult than the last, and Subject 3281 was not fond of taking chances when it involved her future in testing and, ergo, her life.

Subject 3281 threw a preemptive glance at her partner, and stepped off the ledge, positioning herself as best she could so as to land in light blue portal beneath her. He—luckily enough for her—seemed to have noticed that she needed his portals to stay open, and had not stepped through the circular doorway and, in consequence, the emancipation grill behind it.

Her flight was short lived, and in seconds, she was standing before an open doorway with the standard emancipation grill blocking an inside identical to room #1. As usual, Subject 3281 was the first of the two to venture inside, closely followed by her partner. She could hear his gun buzz, and portals fizzle out of existence behind them as he passed through the emancipation grill.

As soon as the two were both properly in the little black-walled chamber, Subject 3281 turned to find an odd expression on her partner's face. The boy's face seemed as grave as it could usually be relied on to look, though there was a sort of something in his air that made her suspect that he wanted something of her. Maybe it was the slight raise of his brow, or perhaps the unusual glint in his eye.

Subject 3281 felt her mouth tighten as she realized what it was her partner was looking for. Approval. Yes, she realized, this boy, who was in almost every physical way her superior, was currently seeking her approval and approbation, and she found this mildly amusing. She gave a slight nod in his direction, and a breath of a smile seemed to touch his cracked lips for an instant before he turned from her to face the camera behind them.

She did likewise, and the human voice came out of the speaker behind her. "Thank you for your co-operation in the Aperture Science Co-operative Testing Initiative," it began, "and welcome to the second course of your testing; Mass and Velocity. During this next course, we will be phasing in a new... piece of technology." Subject 3281 felt her eyebrows furrow. What did that mean?

"We ask that all test subjects treat it with delicacy, as it's in the primal stage of development, and we would not like to... disturb it." Subject 3281 turned to her partner to see if he could make sense of what the voice was saying, but he appeared just as perplexed as she. A  loud rumbling-crackle suddenly came from the speaker behind them, as if meant to keep the two on track. "Please enter the lift before you, and remember," the voice finished with an almost inaudible sigh, "you are making a valuable contribution to science."

The door to the small cylindrical pod opened before them, and Subject 3281 let her partner lead the way into the cramped lift, and to the next phase of the Co-operative Testing Initiative.

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