Chell paid out another few yards from the long coil of cable looped, bandolier-style, over her shoulder, trailing off over the grass behind her in the direction of Foxglove's nearest hoof. She glanced across to Garret, who clipped a final couple of wires together in the jumble of tech laid out in the shade of the generator, flipped a few switches, and gave an eager thumbs-up.
Wheatley stared at the thing in front of him. It was a long steel pole nearly as tall as she was, and judging by the speckling of verdigris and the spiderwebs clotted in the clamps and screws along its length, it had probably been sitting propped in a corner in Aaron's stockroom for the better part of four decades, maybe more.
Twisted around with cable, topped off with a jointed swan-neck and a final sturdy clamp, it ended in a thing like a rounded, steel-mesh cocoon, splinted with a cage of wires like a shattered bone. It looked more like an instrument of torture than anything else, and it stuck up out of the haybale they'd dragged out from the barn like a badly-aimed javelin.
He should have been nervous- alright, fine, he was nervous- but the simple truth was that, right now, he just didn't feel like anything could go wrong. Not really. Not today, not here in this sunny field full of people- more and more of them as the word spread- not with her close beside him, now perched on top of the green-grey bulk of the generator and working away at something in her lap with a pair of wire cutters and a determined expression. He felt charmed- unimaginably blessed- and while he was dimly aware that usually these were exactly the kind of circumstances under which the cracks started to show, that pride on his part usually came before the sort of plunge that made Test Shaft 09 look like a bit of a pratfall, there was something different, this time.
He wasn't sure what it was, because he wasn't used to it in the slightest, but he had a suspicion that it- this deep, clear conviction that things weren't going to fall apart any time soon- might just be what people meant when they said they were 'confident' about something.
"Er, quick question, though," he said, out loud, "slight concern, if, um, if I... go ahead and plug in, down here, with everyone watching, there are quite a few people watching right now- aren't they going to think, 'hang on a second, big old wire sticking out the back of his neck, not an attribute generally associated with your average human, um, what's going on here?' You know? Just checking you have thought that through, because I think we got away with it just now, I was all the way up there and I don't think anyone got a proper look at what I was doing, but I wouldn't want to-"
She looked up, then tossed the thing in her lap across to him. Catching it awkwardly with both hands, he found himself holding the same chunky pair of ear-protectors he'd worn at the firing range the previous day. She'd threaded his connector cable securely through the back of the headband, and- at a casual glance- the whole thing didn't look that much different to an ordinary pair of headphones.
"Ahah! Thanks, right, there we go, perfect!" He pulled them on, fumbling for the port in his neck- thankfully, it got easier with practice. "Way ahead of me there, as usual, I was just going to suggest I stand up against the wall the whole time, but... yep, this is much better. How do I look?"
Chell folded her arms around her knees, her bare feet curled on the sloping sunwarmed metal of the generator. She gave him a raised-eyebrows sort of look, fond and amused, and all the comment he needed.
"Right, well, there you go. Plugged in. Annnd... what do I do now, exactly?"
She smiled- her sun-through-panels smile.
"Talk."
Wheatley blinked at the wire-mesh cocoon-thing. Talk? Nothing easier- except for the massive hand that seemed to be crushing his vocal processor, the huge barren tumbleweed-strewn desert in his memory banks where, up until a few seconds ago, the greater part of his vocabulary had been, and the sudden realisation that he had absolutely nothing to say.
