Corruption

Part 14 - The Room

Chell paced around the room. Every surface was a portal surface but she's dropped her gun when the claw had picked her up. The room was only 7 or 8 metres wide and the ceiling was low enough for Chell to touch it with her fingers if she stretched. GLaDOS had taken to pounding the walls and screaming. She looked around the room. No entrance, no exit. They were trapped.

Hours had passed (actually only 10 minutes but shhhh) and Chell was getting frustrated. There had to be a way out. She stood back and looked at the room again, scanning for any small differences or imperfections. It took 3 walls and 40 minutes but she finally found what she was looking for.

A slight indentation, indicating some sort of button or pressure pad. She pushed it and stepped back, secretly ecstatic at her intelligence. GLaDOS looked up, realised something and stood up, hitting herself and walked over. The panel had shifted enough for the pair to squeeze through. A catwalk led somewhere in the distance. GLaDOS looked over at Chell and explained.

"That room is the second trap I made when I was in control. I got the idea from a book I read a while ago. If we are where we think we are, then we're one step closer to getting my body back. Because whatever that thing was, that wasn't Wheatley." Chell nodded in agreement. She then wondered where Wheatley was. It did resemble him: messy hair, lanky frame but lacked a certain quality Wheatley had. They also held themselves differently. Wheatley slouched, no doubt destroying his spine in the process, whereas It embraced his height and towered over everything.

After a while of walking (and going in circles), the unlikely duo found their way to a corridor with dozens of doors, all covered in the familiar chicken scratch of Chell's friend in the walls. She tried each door, pulling at the handles. No luck. She stopped and thought. She was doing a lot of thinking down here, it was ridiculous. She looked at her gun and remembered smashing one of the monitors. She chose a door and fired. Scared robot noises and burning wood told her it worked. She walked towards the burning mess of a door. Stepping over the rubble, she used GLaDOS as a light. Towers of large servers loomed in the shadows. The server room.

Chell walked along, dragging her fingers through the dust, leaving smudged trails. After seeing that there was nothing she could do, she walked outside back into the corridor. She slid down the wall and onto the plaster floor. What was she doing? She couldn't defeat him! She couldn't do this... She was so lost in thought, she hadn't noticed GLaDOS putting her arm round her. "Hey. Look, I'm not the best with advice but I know this: I know you probably feel like you can't do anything but that's not true. So you couldn't beat that bastard that one time? You'll get another chance, and I know you'll use it to kick ass! I know you don't trust me but believe me, just because you failed once, doesn't mean you'll always get it wrong. For now, let's just chill here. Did I ever tell you about the time I tried to teach Atlas and P-Body how to bake? I'm still scraping flour off the ceiling."