"Daddy..."
Marten Otten was a hardworking, blameless sort of man. The necessary everyday routines of his farm meant that he had to get out of bed before dawn six days a week as a matter of course, and so he probably didn't actually deserve to be woken up at three o'clock on a Sunday morning by a small, worried, blonde apparition draped in a blanket, but life just wasn't particularly fair sometimes.
"Mnngg. What's wrong, honey?"
"Garret Rickey and Chell and Chell's monster say they need to get into the field and they're sorry."
"That's nice... tell Mommy about it, okay?"
"Mommy's asleep," said the quilt bundled up against his back, with a hint of warning in its voice.
"And, and Chell's monster says he's sorry 'bout my window too but he only meant to wake me up," said Ellie, twisting a few locks of her hair carefully around Linnell's head, which was pinioned under her small arm. "And Garret Rickey says he wouldn't go start making a, a racket down there in the middle of the night 'cept he thinks he's on the edge of, of a- of a something. And also he said to ask if can he, uh, can he borrow the generator."
"Sure, honey," mumbled Mart, rolling over and tugging a little of the quilt back off Heather, who made an indistinct growling noise. "That's fine. G'back to sleep."
Ellie padded obediently out of her parent's bedroom and along the creaky hallway of the big farmhouse, back to her room. On Linnell's advice, she'd pulled on her favourite red wellies before getting out of bed- shards of glass glittered on her carpet in the glow of her skim-battery nightlight, crunching underfoot as she pushed her dolls-house into a better position beneath the windowsill, and climbed carefully up to peer out of the shattered hole in the pane.
"Daddy says yes," she said.
()~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~()
By the time the sun had made its first uncertain, deep-orange-red appearance over the horizon, a small crowd of curious people had gathered at the bottom of Otten's Field. Eaden folk might not have been night-owls, but they were generally early risers, and anything out of the ordinary attracted attention. They were used to Garret, but the hysteria that seemed to have gotten hold of him, the inclusion of Chell's odd out-of-towner friend, the yelling, and the constant thudding roar of Mart Otten's biggest generator, all added up to something out of the ordinary.
"It's simple!" yelled Garret, over the generator. Communication was further hampered by the fact that he was twenty-five feet up Foxglove's tangled structure, yelling through his welding mask at Wheatley, who was backed up against one of the tower's huge hooves. "I've made the connection, just come on up here and do your thing! See if you can interface with her!"
Wheatley swallowed. His enthusiam had lasted right up until the moment when he'd realised exactly what Garret wanted him to do, at which point it had evaporated like sodium dropped into water, leaving stark terror in its place.
"It's- it's high, that. It's unnecessarily high, really, very risky, you'd never get that past Health and Safety guidelines, would you, if there, uh, were any- why can't you come down here and do it?"
"What?"
"I said, why can't you come down here and do it?"
"I can't hear you!"
Wheatley took a deep, unnecessary breath.
"Why," he bellowed, with a massive shrug and accompanying eyebrow-lift, "can't you," he pointed, "come down here," stabbing another finger at the safe, unmoving ground at his own feet, "and do it," an involved sort of knot-tying flail around the back of his own neck, "question mark!"
