Portal: MADNESS

Prologue

Dusk had settled over Aperture Science. The towering beams of concrete and the endless boxes of offices, relaxation blocks, and whatever this facility was harboring had lost the dappled light on their surfaces. There would've been a soft red and orange glow instead, but a setting sun could never shine light into a place so deep below the Earth's surface. The only times where they received natural light in this crumbling world, was when noon came about. But that only lasted three to four hours until the facility relied on the flickering LED lights and the blue sky.

Something was wrong. Really wrong. It hadn't come to pass but it certainly would, plaguing this facility in its shadowy clutches. It loomed over everything: every little nook and cranny to the vastest of spaces. Even to places not touched by man before. That's what a strange man deduced one evening while staring at a white paneled wall full of paintings.

It started with a feeling in his gut, like all things did when he predicted that something would happen. Call it foresight but he just had that survivor's instinct that gave him little nudges in the right direction.

He had been perched beside a steel beam, overlooking the endless boxes of the Relaxation Center. It looked like a demented, twisted version of skyscrapers in cities above the surface. A never-ending maze of rows and columns. In daylight, it looked like a far cry from those human establishments. At night, they looked eerie, disappearing off into the shadows as if the void were swallowing them whole.

When that feeling came, he had slipped away from his spot to return to the various rooms and safe places that he constructed. They were his havens. They never moved, were never accessible to anyone but him, and were well—safe. There wasn't much to describe the rooms he made but they all followed the same sort of guidelines on things that they had to have: obscure paintings that hardly made sense to anyone else but himself, empty cans of beans, jugs of water, and an old radio fuzzily playing in a small corner. They were the bare minimums he needed to survive. He didn't need anything more. Not after the failure he had experienced all those years ago.

There were many ways on how one got into these special places. Though most of the time, squeezing past small places were involved. And that was no trouble for him. He had been running and hiding for his whole life, preserving rations and always on his toes. He had always been stick thin and able to fit through any space within reason. Even at times he had been paranoid that the already small spaces weren't small enough, but told himself that they should stay the same.

He entered the closest room, the one he had used the longest. This was because of someone. Someone within the nearby vaults that he needed to keep an eye on. And with this twisting feeling in his gut that promised nothing good, he would have to keep a better watch on them if the feeling turned out to be true.

He crawled through the small opening, the passage used so much that no pieces of plastic or pebbles littered the floor as they had the rest of the facility. This was the fastest way to get to the specific area, but the path was warped with twists and turns. It even branched off into more blocky tunnels as he went on. Once reaching the other end and exiting, he was met with a large room. This was probably the largest of all of the safe havens he made. Of course, it was because he had spent the most time here.

The room was lined with white panels leaning against the cracked black walls, some plastered with drawings and paintings of different sizes and colors. The only theme to these was the messy yet organized splatters and wavy lines. They constructed profiles on strangers, their faces lopsided and their eyes bulging as if they stared Death in the face. They spelled words written by a frantic and shaky hand in an uncomfortable yet orderly mix of all caps and lowercase. These mostly made no sense, only nonsense written by a loony. But each were comprehensible if one looked into them enough.

He sat down in front of a blank white panel which was devoid of any flecks of paint. That was when he made the connection from the horrible feeling in his gut to coming events. His mind began to crowd, worrying questions springing out as undesirable scenarios of what would come to pass danced in his head. He didn't want to bear host to them. He needed these out.

So he dipped his fingers in a nearby bucket of black paint and began to draw.

Something bad was coming and he didn't know what. Something would happen that would disrupt everything here. He didn't know when it would come, but he would be ready when it did.