HOME | DD

Description
Chell was alive!  All thoughts of lost friends and colleagues, of the missing Borealis and its terrible unknown secrets, of the happy, ignorant man he once knew, flew out the window at the empty pedestal.  Proof was staring him in the face, proof that Chell was awake and she was alive and she had her portal gun that Doug had so carefully kept from harm.  He decided to follow her advancements through the test chambers, hoping, praying that they would be able to find an exit together.

... but he had no idea where she'd gone.  As he made his way through the testing area, the chambers he traversed seemed to have all been solved, and of course with no omnipotent power to oversee everything, they had not been reset since she had passed through them.  But no matter how fast he made his way through him, he seemed unable to catch up with her.  Perhaps he had been sitting in the chapel for far longer than he had originally thought.

Doug had been occupying himself with the old test chambers.  GLaDOS had a favorite testing track, of course.  The one with nineteen chambers that culminated in an incinerator.  But as he continued along the old path, he entered a room that was impossible to get through.  It was no longer a puzzle, just a jumble of broken panels and a tangle of vines.  His heart leapt at the idea that Chell was still in the room, and he tore at the rubble cluttering the room, pushing everything he could aside in an attempt to search for his savior, his beloved.  He prayed to... well, he had admittedly never been a religious man.  The only thing he saw fit to put his trust and belief in was Chell.  But even without a deity, he could still wish with an inordinate amount of desperation that she was sleeping somewhere in the room.

Eventually, he gave up searching and sat down near a dirty puddle of water that had leaked from the roof.  Of course Chell wouldn't just give up just because a test chamber was broken.  She would find a way to soldier on.  His theory was confirmed upon noticed a fizzling, broken portal generator on a nearby wall panel that had fallen to the floor.  He silently cursed himself for daring to hope.  What would he do upon finding her, anyway?  He stared into the puddle.  His beard had grown out since last he had the opportunity to look at himself.  His eyes were sunken and tired-looking, and he'd definitely lost weight.  Doug scratched at his chin.  Surely Chell would at least be startled by his appearance if they were ever to meet.  She was so beautiful, and he was so hideous....

But before he could finish that train of thought, the room shook with a violent tremor.  A camera on the far wall jolted to life and whirred, restarting its processors.  Doug's eyes went wide with fear.

What was Chell doing?!  Was... was she even still....

He leapt up, blood pounding with adrenaline, and grabbed up the nearest object he could find.  He jumped at the camera, his tall frame easily allowing him to reach its perch on the wall, and pounded it hard.  The evil machine fell to the floor with an electric shudder.  Never too careful, he stooped over it and continued to beat the thing until its lens had cracked and exploded, its outer casing had split in half, and the heavy object in his hands had shattered completely along with it.  He stared down at his hand, bewildered, and noticed that he was holding the snapped-off handle of something.  He looked down at the remains of the camera.

... oh.

It was the mug.  He was saddened that it was now in pieces, but somewhat impressed that it had been strong enough to do so much damage to the machinery before breaking.  He examined the handle, noting the fact that it was not, in fact, made of china as he had originally thought.  It was merely a heavy grade of plastic that his unwell mind had mistaken as ceramic.  Doug chuckled to himself, not entirely knowing why the whole thing was so funny to him.

He was certain that it was GLaDOS had caused the cameras to go back online.  He was also certain that her reawakening must have had something to do with Chell.  Doug pondered whether or not Chell was still alive.  Surely GLaDOS would want her gone for good?

No.  GLaDOS will want to play with her, first.  Torture her.  Make her suffer the same humiliation and pain that she had suffered.  To crush her completely, mentally and emotionally. He shivered at the thought.

He would need to act quickly.  There were other test tracks that Chell would probably go through.

... the test tracks!  Chell wouldn't die, GLaDOS would just put her through another series of tests!  He would find her.  He would scour the laboratories and he would find her.  And finally, finally he would stand in her presence.  Humble.  Loving.  Devoted.

He wondered if what he was doing would be considered stalking.

As he clambered around the room, he found an open panel on a nearby wall, and slipped inside.  It was a darkened area of the facility.  A pneumatic tube hissed and objects whirred past him in a blur of semi-familiar shapes.  He slipped about in the darkness, grasping at the tube and climbing atop it.  He walked forward, into the darkness that lay beyond, lit only by the occasional cube that rushed past him along his makeshift walkway.

In a matter of minutes he found himself suspended over the endless expanse of Aperture.  Testing chambers hung from the ceiling above, too high for him to even see, their massive rectangular forms repeating and extending down into the depths below.  They mulled about one another in clusters, like massive square cattle.  Connected by elevator shafts and wires.

He followed the tube until he was able to reach a tiny hole in one of the chambers.  Scrambling inside, he found himself in the ceiling of someplace.  He was able to reach one of the old monitoring stations from there, and was faced with a series of controls.  The monitors displayed a simple Aperture logo, their default screensaver.  There were buttons and keypads all designed to control the test chamber.  He toyed with them, and found one that controlled a ceiling panel.  He forced it upwards into the area above him and off to one side.  It was portalable, which meant that if Chell noticed the hole in the ceiling she could place a portal on it and fall safely into what would soon be Doug's latest den.

It took a little bit of work, but Doug had brought food and art supplies with him.  He'd managed to take the hard drives from a few of the computers in the area and fiddled with one until it would work as a rudimentary stove.  Making his way back into the ceiling, he opened a can of beans and set them to cook while he began working on another mural.  This time he made a drawing of GLaDOS, if only to help himself forget his anxiety regarding the almost certainty of her revival.

After he finished the mural, he ate his beans and left the can.  He wanted to leave her one that was not so empty, but couldn't bring himself to part with any food.  If she was smart, she could find her own food, he decided.  Besides, she was much stronger than he was.  The adrenal vapor pumping through the air should keep her going for several days at least.  He, on the other hand, needed to eat and rest on a more daily basis.  His body had long since built up a tolerance to the adrenaline.

From his den, he went back and forth along the test track through the corridors connecting the observation offices.  He found an older den closer to the beginning of the tests, in an office space above an aerial faith plate test.  He recalled his earlier adventures, long before Chell had been awoken, when he had programmed wireless SSTV signals to play on radios when they came close to certain areas.  He had been in this room before, he remembered.  This particular signal was of little importance to the overall puzzle.  He'd made the signals simply to occupy himself, hiding passwords and login information on the walls and triple-encoding the number for the Bulletin Board System.  Some were red herrings, including the one he'd hidden in this room.  He shook his head of the memories of his insane, paranoid escapades, and moved back into the corridors.

After that, he made his way to an area that led to a space above a large ventilation fan.  The walls were perfect for art.  He drew a sleeping Chell, and decided to attempt to communicate why he had chosen her in the first place, and sketched a quick bell curve labeled "TENACITY".

He was about to leave the area when he kicked a box over and a cascade of coffee mugs cascaded out of it and clattered onto the metal grating below his feet.  Memories rushed back and he clutched his ears at the overwhelming sound of the cups as they rolled and clinked along the floor.

He had been here before.

There was a box of mugs that he'd saved from the break room, back when his paranoia had only recently begun and he experienced a brief but violent period of hypochondria.  He had scoured the mugs in boiling hot water, and never drank out of the same cup twice.  Eventually, the fear passed, but it was a terrible time for him.  His skin would crawl at the slightest touch and he felt dirty, wet, and sick all the time.  So much so that it was impossible to sleep.

He carefully picked up a mug.  "ALPHA MALE", it read.  He set it down along the wall.  The next said "I DON'T DO MORNINGS", and he chuckled, setting it beside the first.  He didn't know any of the mugs' owners, but he continued this ritual, turning each one over in his hands and reading it slowly before placing it among the others.  Soon, they cluttered the floor.

Doug nodded at his handiwork, remarking mentally that the room now resembled a cemetery of china cups.  And indeed it was one.  A lot of people had died, and with their bodies long decayed or destroyed, this was the only way to honor them.  The last vestige of their personal belongings that he could enshrine, even if he'd only done so on a whim.

He crumpled the box and put it in his pocket.  He carefully programmed the wall panel to close behind the next person who exited the room, hoping to seal off the graveyard and preserve it, but so that the last living person in the facility could still see it.  The rat man left through the same corridor he'd come through, eventually finding his way to another maintenance shaft.

"Is anyone there?" said a tiny voice.

Doug stopped in his tracks.  A bright red laser flickered on and crossed his path.  He shivered at the sound of the thing.

"Sorry, we're closed," it said quietly.  "For choir practice."

He tilted his head.  What?

He slinked around, eventually finding a small hole in the wall that he could crawl through and got behind the turret.

"Are you still there?" it asked, its laser-guided eye searching its field of vision for him.

"... I'm still here," Doug replied.  "Now tell me about this choir practice of yours."

"... the Wife is teaching some of us to sing," it replied quietly.  "Are you a human?  Or are you something else?  I can't see you."

"Your sensors should be able to process that there's a life-form in the room.  That's all you need to know," he said indignantly.  "Can you do me a favor?  Can I move you somewhere else?"

He didn't want to kill it outright.

"If you're a human, then no.  Can you come over here?" it asked, laser circling the room for him.

"Then I'm not a human," he sighed.

"What are you?" it asked, more than a little scared-sounding.

"... I'm just a rat.  Nothing to worry about.  Can I move you?" he asked again.

"... yes."

He carefully picked up the tiny turret, and carefully pushed through debris until he reached a small grate over an opening that would have been just wide enough to fit through.  Had it not been obscured, at least.

"What is in that test chamber there?" he asked the turret.

"Discouragement beams.  It's a cruel trial," the turret replied.  "They set us on fire out there and we explode and there's nothing we can do.  Some of us can't even shoot the test subjects."

He was impressed at the turret's speech processors.  It must have been a newer model.

"So why are you in here?" he wondered.

"... the Animal King put us here.  He rules us now.  He can control things.  The whole world is at his beck and call.  And he puts us in places where we're needed.  I'm guarding his Wife right now," the turret responded.

"His wife?" Doug wondered.  Could it be Chell?

"Look down."

He peered through a hole in the floor and saw four turrets sitting in an alcove below him.  "Which one is the wife?"

"Not them.  Keep looking," it explained.

He angled himself so that he could see what the turrets were aimed at.  He recognized it immediately as a very high-grade military turret, designed to hold three times the number of cartridges as a normal sentry turret.  Only one or two prototypes were ever manufactured, and the idea was scrapped.  They were too heavy and unwieldy to carry around, and were damn near impossible to knock over if they went rogue.

He wanted to ask how this one had gotten here, but realized that the turret probably didn't have much more intel than what it had already told him about the Wife and the choir and exploding.

... wait.  Exploding, his heart leapt.  I can position the turret so that if Chell comes through, she can hit it with a discouragement beam and have it explode the grate right off the wall!  Then she can crawl in here!

And so he did.  He painted and ate beans to the melancholy, beautiful sound of four turrets learning to sing.

Description
Chell was alive!  All thoughts of lost friends and colleagues, of the missing Borealis and its terrible unknown secrets, of the happy, ignorant man he once knew, flew out the window at the empty pedestal.  Proof was staring him in the face, proof that Chell was awake and she was alive and she had her portal gun that Doug had so carefully kept from harm.  He decided to follow her advancements through the test chambers, hoping, praying that they would be able to find an exit together.

... but he had no idea where she'd gone.  As he made his way through the testing area, the chambers he traversed seemed to have all been solved, and of course with no omnipotent power to oversee everything, they had not been reset since she had passed through them.  But no matter how fast he made his way through him, he seemed unable to catch up with her.  Perhaps he had been sitting in the chapel for far longer than he had originally thought.

Doug had been occupying himself with the old test chambers.  GLaDOS had a favorite testing track, of course.  The one with nineteen chambers that culminated in an incinerator.  But as he continued along the old path, he entered a room that was impossible to get through.  It was no longer a puzzle, just a jumble of broken panels and a tangle of vines.  His heart leapt at the idea that Chell was still in the room, and he tore at the rubble cluttering the room, pushing everything he could aside in an attempt to search for his savior, his beloved.  He prayed to... well, he had admittedly never been a religious man.  The only thing he saw fit to put his trust and belief in was Chell.  But even without a deity, he could still wish with an inordinate amount of desperation that she was sleeping somewhere in the room.

Eventually, he gave up searching and sat down near a dirty puddle of water that had leaked from the roof.  Of course Chell wouldn't just give up just because a test chamber was broken.  She would find a way to soldier on.  His theory was confirmed upon noticed a fizzling, broken portal generator on a nearby wall panel that had fallen to the floor.  He silently cursed himself for daring to hope.  What would he do upon finding her, anyway?  He stared into the puddle.  His beard had grown out since last he had the opportunity to look at himself.  His eyes were sunken and tired-looking, and he'd definitely lost weight.  Doug scratched at his chin.  Surely Chell would at least be startled by his appearance if they were ever to meet.  She was so beautiful, and he was so hideous....

But before he could finish that train of thought, the room shook with a violent tremor.  A camera on the far wall jolted to life and whirred, restarting its processors.  Doug's eyes went wide with fear.

What was Chell doing?!  Was... was she even still....

He leapt up, blood pounding with adrenaline, and grabbed up the nearest object he could find.  He jumped at the camera, his tall frame easily allowing him to reach its perch on the wall, and pounded it hard.  The evil machine fell to the floor with an electric shudder.  Never too careful, he stooped over it and continued to beat the thing until its lens had cracked and exploded, its outer casing had split in half, and the heavy object in his hands had shattered completely along with it.  He stared down at his hand, bewildered, and noticed that he was holding the snapped-off handle of something.  He looked down at the remains of the camera.

... oh.

It was the mug.  He was saddened that it was now in pieces, but somewhat impressed that it had been strong enough to do so much damage to the machinery before breaking.  He examined the handle, noting the fact that it was not, in fact, made of china as he had originally thought.  It was merely a heavy grade of plastic that his unwell mind had mistaken as ceramic.  Doug chuckled to himself, not entirely knowing why the whole thing was so funny to him.

He was certain that it was GLaDOS had caused the cameras to go back online.  He was also certain that her reawakening must have had something to do with Chell.  Doug pondered whether or not Chell was still alive.  Surely GLaDOS would want her gone for good?

No.  GLaDOS will want to play with her, first.  Torture her.  Make her suffer the same humiliation and pain that she had suffered.  To crush her completely, mentally and emotionally. He shivered at the thought.

He would need to act quickly.  There were other test tracks that Chell would probably go through.

... the test tracks!  Chell wouldn't die, GLaDOS would just put her through another series of tests!  He would find her.  He would scour the laboratories and he would find her.  And finally, finally he would stand in her presence.  Humble.  Loving.  Devoted.

He wondered if what he was doing would be considered stalking.

As he clambered around the room, he found an open panel on a nearby wall, and slipped inside.  It was a darkened area of the facility.  A pneumatic tube hissed and objects whirred past him in a blur of semi-familiar shapes.  He slipped about in the darkness, grasping at the tube and climbing atop it.  He walked forward, into the darkness that lay beyond, lit only by the occasional cube that rushed past him along his makeshift walkway.

In a matter of minutes he found himself suspended over the endless expanse of Aperture.  Testing chambers hung from the ceiling above, too high for him to even see, their massive rectangular forms repeating and extending down into the depths below.  They mulled about one another in clusters, like massive square cattle.  Connected by elevator shafts and wires.

He followed the tube until he was able to reach a tiny hole in one of the chambers.  Scrambling inside, he found himself in the ceiling of someplace.  He was able to reach one of the old monitoring stations from there, and was faced with a series of controls.  The monitors displayed a simple Aperture logo, their default screensaver.  There were buttons and keypads all designed to control the test chamber.  He toyed with them, and found one that controlled a ceiling panel.  He forced it upwards into the area above him and off to one side.  It was portalable, which meant that if Chell noticed the hole in the ceiling she could place a portal on it and fall safely into what would soon be Doug's latest den.

It took a little bit of work, but Doug had brought food and art supplies with him.  He'd managed to take the hard drives from a few of the computers in the area and fiddled with one until it would work as a rudimentary stove.  Making his way back into the ceiling, he opened a can of beans and set them to cook while he began working on another mural.  This time he made a drawing of GLaDOS, if only to help himself forget his anxiety regarding the almost certainty of her revival.

After he finished the mural, he ate his beans and left the can.  He wanted to leave her one that was not so empty, but couldn't bring himself to part with any food.  If she was smart, she could find her own food, he decided.  Besides, she was much stronger than he was.  The adrenal vapor pumping through the air should keep her going for several days at least.  He, on the other hand, needed to eat and rest on a more daily basis.  His body had long since built up a tolerance to the adrenaline.

From his den, he went back and forth along the test track through the corridors connecting the observation offices.  He found an older den closer to the beginning of the tests, in an office space above an aerial faith plate test.  He recalled his earlier adventures, long before Chell had been awoken, when he had programmed wireless SSTV signals to play on radios when they came close to certain areas.  He had been in this room before, he remembered.  This particular signal was of little importance to the overall puzzle.  He'd made the signals simply to occupy himself, hiding passwords and login information on the walls and triple-encoding the number for the Bulletin Board System.  Some were red herrings, including the one he'd hidden in this room.  He shook his head of the memories of his insane, paranoid escapades, and moved back into the corridors.

After that, he made his way to an area that led to a space above a large ventilation fan.  The walls were perfect for art.  He drew a sleeping Chell, and decided to attempt to communicate why he had chosen her in the first place, and sketched a quick bell curve labeled "TENACITY".

He was about to leave the area when he kicked a box over and a cascade of coffee mugs cascaded out of it and clattered onto the metal grating below his feet.  Memories rushed back and he clutched his ears at the overwhelming sound of the cups as they rolled and clinked along the floor.

He had been here before.

There was a box of mugs that he'd saved from the break room, back when his paranoia had only recently begun and he experienced a brief but violent period of hypochondria.  He had scoured the mugs in boiling hot water, and never drank out of the same cup twice.  Eventually, the fear passed, but it was a terrible time for him.  His skin would crawl at the slightest touch and he felt dirty, wet, and sick all the time.  So much so that it was impossible to sleep.

He carefully picked up a mug.  "ALPHA MALE", it read.  He set it down along the wall.  The next said "I DON'T DO MORNINGS", and he chuckled, setting it beside the first.  He didn't know any of the mugs' owners, but he continued this ritual, turning each one over in his hands and reading it slowly before placing it among the others.  Soon, they cluttered the floor.

Doug nodded at his handiwork, remarking mentally that the room now resembled a cemetery of china cups.  And indeed it was one.  A lot of people had died, and with their bodies long decayed or destroyed, this was the only way to honor them.  The last vestige of their personal belongings that he could enshrine, even if he'd only done so on a whim.

He crumpled the box and put it in his pocket.  He carefully programmed the wall panel to close behind the next person who exited the room, hoping to seal off the graveyard and preserve it, but so that the last living person in the facility could still see it.  The rat man left through the same corridor he'd come through, eventually finding his way to another maintenance shaft.

"Is anyone there?" said a tiny voice.

Doug stopped in his tracks.  A bright red laser flickered on and crossed his path.  He shivered at the sound of the thing.

"Sorry, we're closed," it said quietly.  "For choir practice."

He tilted his head.  What?

He slinked around, eventually finding a small hole in the wall that he could crawl through and got behind the turret.

"Are you still there?" it asked, its laser-guided eye searching its field of vision for him.

"... I'm still here," Doug replied.  "Now tell me about this choir practice of yours."

"... the Wife is teaching some of us to sing," it replied quietly.  "Are you a human?  Or are you something else?  I can't see you."

"Your sensors should be able to process that there's a life-form in the room.  That's all you need to know," he said indignantly.  "Can you do me a favor?  Can I move you somewhere else?"

He didn't want to kill it outright.

"If you're a human, then no.  Can you come over here?" it asked, laser circling the room for him.

"Then I'm not a human," he sighed.

"What are you?" it asked, more than a little scared-sounding.

"... I'm just a rat.  Nothing to worry about.  Can I move you?" he asked again.

"... yes."

He carefully picked up the tiny turret, and carefully pushed through debris until he reached a small grate over an opening that would have been just wide enough to fit through.  Had it not been obscured, at least.

"What is in that test chamber there?" he asked the turret.

"Discouragement beams.  It's a cruel trial," the turret replied.  "They set us on fire out there and we explode and there's nothing we can do.  Some of us can't even shoot the test subjects."

He was impressed at the turret's speech processors.  It must have been a newer model.

"So why are you in here?" he wondered.

"... the Animal King put us here.  He rules us now.  He can control things.  The whole world is at his beck and call.  And he puts us in places where we're needed.  I'm guarding his Wife right now," the turret responded.

"His wife?" Doug wondered.  Could it be Chell?

"Look down."

He peered through a hole in the floor and saw four turrets sitting in an alcove below him.  "Which one is the wife?"

"Not them.  Keep looking," it explained.

He angled himself so that he could see what the turrets were aimed at.  He recognized it immediately as a very high-grade military turret, designed to hold three times the number of cartridges as a normal sentry turret.  Only one or two prototypes were ever manufactured, and the idea was scrapped.  They were too heavy and unwieldy to carry around, and were damn near impossible to knock over if they went rogue.

He wanted to ask how this one had gotten here, but realized that the turret probably didn't have much more intel than what it had already told him about the Wife and the choir and exploding.

... wait.  Exploding, his heart leapt.  I can position the turret so that if Chell comes through, she can hit it with a discouragement beam and have it explode the grate right off the wall!  Then she can crawl in here!

And so he did.  He painted and ate beans to the melancholy, beautiful sound of four turrets learning to sing.