Portal 3

Sun Core

On the wall within the office that Chell and Wheatley had found, was a piece of graffiti. She was staring at it, seemingly unable to focus on anything else. That graffiti on the otherwise bare wall, depicting a winged woman - a symbol of the sun behind her head like a halo - and the black Aperture logo.

This woman appeared powerful and majestic, her presence felt even with only a static image.

Her hair was honey blonde, darkening into a orange ombré at the ends, and her eyes were a sparkling aqua blue. Those eyes appeared to have no whites, and the pupil itself was a smaller version of the sun symbol. She was covered in what seemed to be a skintight armour, which was white as a base colour with orange and yellow detailing. She wore heavy gauntlets on both hands, a melee weapon designed for very close and destructive combat. Those wings, of which there were two, were feathered like an angel's, and golden. Wheatley had only heard descriptions of it once or twice, but he was reminded quite strongly of the sun.

Whoever she was, she was probably very important. Yet the significance of this woman, Wheatley didn't yet understand.

So who was this woman... and what was her name?

After a few more milliseconds of looking, Wheatley noticed there a heart nearby her head, with Doodlebug written onto it. At that, he realised this was the Aperture equivalent of a mural. This meant, that this woman was either dead; or had left. Also, from the depiction, adding the fact this was a mural, made it apparent that she was known and adored by the machine community of this God forsaken laboratory. Thus, this woman was somehow a machine, but exactly how was still a mystery.

Further more, who had taken the painstaking time and effort to draw this? Taking the consideration to the accuracy of detail and the quality, whoever did this cared enough to spend time on it. If this woman was a part of machine community, then a lot of conscious beings would have cared about her.

That was when Wheatley realised that she must be a Core. By whatever means, the person was changed into a Core, and apparently a powerful one at that. What he couldn't help but wonder, was if there were more Cores like this. Where were they now? What were they doing?

He gazed over to the opposite wall, where a desk and chair were idly sitting. Wheatley noticed a faint line of indents on a writing pad. To a normal person, they might not make sense of the lines, maybe not even see them. However, Wheatley could. It were lines written in a language known to machines, and it uses an utterly different character system to English - or any other human language. It is universally known to machines on an intuitive level, so a machine would recognise it anywhere. Wheatley could tell the message on the writing pad was something called an identifier; a name. That name was of course written in this machine language, but it has a simple translation into human English. When translated, the name meant "Sun Core".

His gaze panned back over to Chell. Her expression was saddened, even slightly tearful. He began to feel anxious for her. It came to him then, by inferring her reaction, that she knew this person somehow, and that she was significant. It seemed as though Chell recognised this woman as a motherly figure.

Suddenly, Wheatley's CPU created an idea. He turned back to the desk, and started looking through the drawers. The top drawer was empty, but the deeper bottom drawer had a pen inside it. He managed to pick it up with his antigravity, something that amazed and confused him. His antigravity is capable of holding and lifting objects besides himself, allowing him to manipulate his environment like he never has before. Wheatley turned back to Chell, who was now silently gazing to the exit door. He began to hover beside, taking the pen with him. Chell looked to him, her expression questioning, but there was exhaustion beneath that.

Trying not be to as nervous as he was, he took her hand using his antigravity, then wrote something onto her palm. When she looked to it, her jaw dropped and tears began to trickle from her eyes.