Chapter Text
Light, as white and bright as the sun, shone through the now cracked open wall. It blinded Miss Pauling as it stared right into her soul and she turned her head away from the rays. For a minute, she felt her life flash before her eyes – into brief moments where she had seen such a glaring display of lights before. Once in a hospital, thrice darting in front of a car, twice on a medical bed and another in the middle of a battlefield. This was her eighth time, then, seeing that overwhelming light. She dreaded her ninth, like a cat on its last life. In hindsight, she wasn’t sure if it truly was the sun that she was seeing. Maybe it was, or maybe it was artificial light coming alive under the new activity from Wheatley. In the distance of her mind, she could hear Wheatley’s voice continuing to talk and talk and talk but she couldn’t focus on it. It went in one ear and out the other, droning on and humming like a microwave; she clung to the other woman, flesh on flesh, trying to stop her flat shoes from slipping against the floor and dragging her out of the container that was now rapidly swinging into various walls. Every time they hit another metal beam or concrete wall, she felt her heart skip a beat, jumping around in her chest – and that was so often that her heart might as well be using a jump rope.
“Okay, look, I wasn’t gonna mention this to you – but I’m in pretty hot water here,” Wheatley yelled from somewhere above them, piloting the room in a wild manner. Miss Pauling wasn’t sure what the walls were made of but it was not a strong material – not with how easily it fell apart. It reminded her of when you crush small beads of clumped powder, only this was much more deadly for her.
A particularly large hit sent half of the ceiling falling down on them – both of the girls moved in sync into an area where the roof was not falling on them, towards the back between the bed and the indented wall. It landed with a gust of wind and dust that Miss Pauling could feel only a couple of inches away from her skin, grazing her like a feather – it was a close call but both of them remained unharmed for now. Looking up at Chell, Miss Pauling saw her face was annoyed but not frightened or panicked in the slightest (unlike her own).
After that severely narrow escape, Wheatley chimed in with the worst timing. “How are you doing down there? You still holding on?”
Finding her voice, Miss Pauling screamed out to Wheatley in a fit of rage – the only reaction she could grasp in this fit of fear. Her voice-box crackled as she spoke but the trembling in her voice couldn’t be stamped out. Not in this situation. “No thank to your steering!”
“You try piloting a metal container- It’s not exactly easy!” He protested but he didn’t pay her too much attention, distracted by something else (only focused on his own problems, Miss Pauling thought bitterly, and not who he was dragging into them).
When he spoke again, it was about the ‘hot waters’ he was in – in any other situation, Miss Pauling would have tried to jot down what he was saying on her small yellowed notepad but for now she would simply have to memorise it for later. Despite the air-headedness of this particular robot, she felt his anecdotes would provide some good insight. She was proven right by his next statement. “The reserve power ran out, so of course the whole relaxation centre stops waking up the bloody test subjects!”
Chell winces upon hearing that, Miss Pauling barely able to hear it over the thundering of the walls collapsing inwards. It would be much easier to see the look on her face than use the audio cue but Miss Pauling couldn’t even begin think about sparing a glance – her thoughts remained entirely on the movements from the crumbling room and what information Wheatley had given away so easily. She could feel the container moving up and the blurry space she could see outside of the holes grows more colors – the light (artificial or not) revealing much of what they couldn’t see before. However, her thoughts quickly became consumed with what Wheatley had just said.
The ‘reserve power’? Is that why the test subjects were in a vegetative state? How long had it been going on for? How recent did the test subjects fall into their vegetative states?
…
Had they been alive when the Administrator had gained the information?
She was certain Chell was questioning similar things (apart from the Administrator – Miss Pauling was sure Chell had no idea who that was) and felt a pang of sympathy for her. It wasn’t out of the question that Chell knew at least a few of the other test subjects and – regardless of how close she was to them – there was a high chance she was not happy about it. Her? Well, she wasn’t too happy either – for a separate reason. She couldn’t fault the Administrator for gaining misinformation. After all, not everything could be accurate all the time! But she wondered if, in another life, they could have saved more people.
Saved? That wasn’t what the mission was. Internally she chastised herself. Of course, it could be a side mission but it would be too much of a risk to save that many people and attempt the main mission alongside it. Too many unknown variables, she thought, too much potential for something to go wrong.
A flitting question pecked at her feet after she pondered it – didn’t it go wrong anyway?
Wheatley’s voice interrupted her thinking (she suspected this might become a pattern). “Hold on, this is a bit tricky!”
Before Miss Pauling could even think about what that could imply, the container began swinging into the metal beams in front of them like a battering ram. Currently, the only part of the front that remained was the thin steel structure – the skeleton of what it previously was. She let out a short shriek and both her and Chell pressed their backs to the wall behind them. Miss Pauling wasn’t a religious person (not in her line of work) but she wondered if she should pray to whatever god there is for a good enough landing – or a half decent afterlife.
Debris flew at them and around the room – like panicked doves – as Wheatley continued to rant about what he had begun before. “And of course, nobody tells me anything! Nooo, why should you tell me anything?”
“Can you please focus on keeping us alive?” Miss Pauling called out, her patience running thin.
Her plea went ignored by Wheatley as he continued to rant, the container no longer slamming against the wall and instead rising – a temporary peace. “Why should I be kept informed? You know- about the life functions of ten thousand bloody test subjects I’m supposed to be in charge of!”
“We won’t stay alive if you keep swinging us around like that!” Miss Pauling pointed out, her expression looking almost as angry as the woman’s next to her – albeit for a different reason. Again, that stab of sympathy grew hot in her side as she heard Chell’s growl of frustration. Was she angry at Wheatley or the facility? Maybe both. Emotions were never rational at this point, she pointed out in the safety of her own mind, even if Wheatley hadn’t done anything wrong Chell might still feel angry at him. She had felt that way sometimes in her own story.
Once more, her annoyance went ignored for the moment. Now that they had stopped being used as a battering ram, she could see the outside a lot less blurrily. It was like she had been placed in the middle of a computer, the metal labyrinth going on for what looks like forever. It grew actually foggy after a certain point and it felt like some kind of concrete jungle – tall towering steel trees and thick branches of wires hanging down.
From an outside perspective, it might be beautiful – Miss Pauling thought – but she could admire it later. Right now, she needed to try and not fall.
“Why, it’s close! Can you see? Am I gonna make it through? Have I got enough space?” Wheatley’s rapid fire of questions gave the breathless Miss Pauling no time to answer as the container began heading forwards again.
“Ah! Just- just gotta get through here-“ She heard him say through the wind screeching in her ears.
For a moment, it felt like some kind of flying – leaving Miss Pauling winded and weightless – before they crashed into the empty skeleton of another room in front of them. Miss Pauling could feel her own body attempt to fly out, like a ragdoll – but the arm around her waist kept her stable.
“Okay, I just gotta concentrate!” He said, the nervousness more apparent. Aperture Science must have been thinking strange things to make their robots sentient in this manner, Miss Pauling thought. Unless it wasn’t intentional. And wasn’t that a thought for later! She mentally noted that down too.
After gaining her breath back (for the most part), Miss Pauling turned her head upwards and snapped back at him. “You weren’t concentrating before?”
“Concentrate more I mean-“ He replied for what felt like the first time since she had begun talking to (though it felt more like ‘at’ sometimes) him.
Once more, they were rising. The gap they were going through was much darker – as enclosed of a space as it could be in here – but Miss Pauling could see some dim warm lights in the distance. Here the rubble was thicker and, with her eyes darting around so much, she could only see slivers of distant fog through the small gaps in the pipes and crumpled frames. That was until she saw Chell looking out of the side and she turned – now able to see the fog once more. Massive skeletons of metal tunnels lay discarded, mixed with a wired mesh of some kind. Huge containers lay still, gutted like a man-made whalefall. Here, there was nothing but time to eat away at such a carcass. All Miss Pauling could think about it how all of this material would easily feed the Engineer’s hands as they craft new machines for them (and their own teams, of course, not just the Administrator’s team). In the frantic depths of her mind, she could almost hear his southern twang.
As she admired the wreckage, Wheatley picked up his rant from earlier – tossing around his thoughts like a hot potato – and began angrily speaking away. “And who’s fault- Do you think it’s gonna be when the management comes down here and finds ten thousand flippin’ vegetables?”
He continued to move them past huge shelves full of rusting boxes – the stickers plastered on them fading away from the little sunlight they get down here. Large damaged barcodes the size of her head fly past them, making Miss Pauling feel very very small. Not in a height way, she knows how short she is – even standing next to Chell she’s only just above chest height. In a ‘wow this facility feels like it was made for actual giants’ kind of way. The type that really made her question her place in the world and whether she was even on Earth anymore. Everything here felt so alien to her.
Once again, the room they were in slammed against a metal crate and it shuddered as it tried to keep itself together. Miss Pauling yelped and Chell pulled her back as the flimsy wall’s materials darted towards her. Her heart was beating fast in her ears and she almost missed Wheatley admitting his fault. “Alright! See now- I hit that one, I hit that one.”
Regardless, he kept on moving the room in that direction – pushing the crate that had the misfortune of being in the right place at the wrong time. It eventually fell away with several loud clangs and found itself stuck elsewhere; it now narrowly avoided the bottom of the room that her and Chell clung to. With this brief moment of inanimateness, she managed to steal a look at the text surrounding the barcodes on the crates they were knocking into. They were a faded yellow and, on most of them, they looked like they had been scraped past many times. Unsure of by what exactly in this place, she thought, but it had been damaged. What interested her most was what was written on them. Her eyes, through the thick lenses of her glasses, tried to make the floating words become clear and joined together. It slowly fell into puzzle pieces, with a mounting horror that felt like piecing together a ransom note.
‘Test subject’ was the title in a neat white font, followed by several square boxes with their own different labels. The first pair said ‘ADLT’ and ‘CHLD’, which Miss Pauling quickly deduced meant ‘adult’ and ‘child’ (she would soon discovered that every one of the longer labels on the smaller square boxes lacked vowels for the sake of convenience). Below that were a pair that read ‘FAT’ and ‘SLM’ (an odd choice to place). The third row read the classic ‘M’ and ‘F’ options – male and female – though she was surprised to see only those two options. In a scientific space, it’s common knowledge that bodies can’t always fall into those two categories. In the final row, there were the labels ‘SHRT’ and ‘TALL’.
Short and tall.
Male and female.
Fat and slim.
Adult and child.
All were labels for a person. For people. Her face dropped.
Perhaps it could mean animals! Or a type of robot! She tried to distance herself from her conclusion as much as possible but, no, she wasn’t mistaken. There were people in the boxes they were being bashed into. The other test subjects. Her stomach boiled and hissed at the thought and she had to swallow to get rid of the dryness that had collected itself like dust at the back of her throat. Miss Pauling briefly looked at Chell and managed to choke out a sentence. “I think I’m going to have a heart attack the moment we stop moving.”
Chell’s normally half-lidded eyes widened and she awkwardly pat Miss Pauling on the arm. Either she had already reached that same conclusion or she had no idea – and Miss Pauling didn’t want to have to be the one to tell her. Instead, she kept her mouth shut.
Out of the two of them here, Miss Pauling was one hundred percent certain that she had much more experience with being surrounded by corpses. These were not corpses in the traditional sense but there was absolutely no way they would make it out of here alive. They were trapped in their own minds, endlessly. Isn’t that an afterlife? To Miss Pauling, it would be. Maybe it’s good for some of them, and torturous for others. But their outcome wouldn’t be because of their actions in life. It would be up to random chance. Maybe some awful people get the chance to be trapped in good memories and maybe saints get trapped in their own hells.
She snapped herself out of those thoughts. Allowing herself to feel guilty for a brief moment was alright but there was nothing she could do about it. It was all decided before she could change it. Even Chell waking up was an act of fate, something that Miss Pauling had no part in.
However… She didn’t think that she was meant to be here to interfere. Maybe she could change fate. She’d done it before, of course. In her own small ways. Hinting and nudging the mercenaries in ways that went unnoticed. A dropped photo here, a comment – a small, minor comment – there and she could see the cogs turning in their minds. The majority of information was kept hidden from them though, with Miss Pauling dutifully wallowing in her silence.
Now she did that exact same thing by keeping her mouth shut and not telling Chell about the masses of bodies hidden away in neat boxes. They were floating through a graveyard of metal cuboid coffins and she had no idea. It was like when she went caving with those people and realised that it was the same caves she had hidden an unfortunate amount of her dead bodies in. That memory was a distraction and she slipped into it before she could think otherwise.
Pushed along by both the mercenaries and her employer, she was encouraged to explore more events that she hadn’t had the time or energy to try before. Some of the activities were done alongside the mercenaries, these ended up being the most enjoyable. Among total strangers? She couldn’t find any comfort. That caving trip was one of the least comfortable ones she had been in. It was cramped and she found herself mentally flicking through paperwork just to entertain herself while the tour guide droned on about the safety procedures and all of the junk she already knew and would they just hurry up? She could literally feel her eyebags grow heavier as the words kept on piling up and up.
When he finally stopped talking, she had to force down any relief that might show on her expression. Sure, she killed people, but she’d rather not be rude to a person who had been paid minimum wage to recite all of those instructions. With a dull-eyed expression, he began handing out the equipment and she vividly remembers feeling the plastic cheap helmet beneath her fingers and -with a jolt – it felt like a plaything. This to most people was simply a plaything. To her? It was her job. Her life.
Regardless, she had donned the helmet and entered the cave behind a couple that wouldn’t stop talking about magazines and in front of a snotty child with their nervous mother. Luckily, once in the caves, she was allowed to split away from the group as long as she stuck close. Feeling the cold familiar stone beneath the pads of her clammy hand, she made her way into one of the narrower tunnels. No one would follow behind her, she was certain. Water bubbled ahead and her tights would end up soaked but she was lucky they didn’t rip. In the distance above her, she swore that she heard squeaking. Sure enough, when she had looked up later she saw bright reflective eyes from several places and the shuffling of skin-wings. All of these factors made the tunnel she was currently in much less popular.
It was lucky she was alone really; a phone call came in and she remembered the last time she answered a call of this variety in a public place – it drew some strange looks from people. How did she know what type of call this was? It was plain and simple. She only had one number on her phone.
All the information flowed into her mind from the voice on the tinny speaker and she took out the folders she had snuck with her (of course she had taken them with her, how couldn’t she? Hidden away in the caves would be the perfect opportunity to work on her paperwork… Even if she wasn’t meant to on her contractually obligated holiday). Her fingers flew through the papers easily, flipping them with an ease that comes almost naturally to her and found the exact contract she needed in a manner of seconds.
The first phone call ended with a hiss of static, then a click. With one hand on the folder, she began pressing the number that she needed for her latest contract. If she remembers correctly, it might have been Sniper she called. Asking the mercenaries now would be useless since what happened next became almost famous around the bases (she wasn’t even sure how it spread to BLU) and who gained the fated call would be a messy task to find out.
"Hey, Pauling here. I'm on a Teufort cave tour and…” Her voice had trailed off for a moment as a sinking feeling built in her stomach. Oh god. The cave walls had been familiar to her, really familiar, and she thought it was just that all caves looked the same but no. The depth of these caves, the rock type, the water, the bats, the location – it was all part of one system. One that she knew well. “Oh my God. These are the same caves I bury bodies in."
Almost as if on a cue from a script, a person shrieked from somewhere else in the cave with a scream that would surely hurt their throat. “There's so many bodies!”
"And they found them,” Her face had felt as pale as a sheet and she remembers gingerly slinking even further away from the group.
Her new distance hadn’t stopped her from hearing the other scream, a cry for help. “Somebody call the police!”
Holding in a sigh because of course she would have to deal with this now, the police really couldn’t know about any of these bodies and the witnesses would have to be handled – killed or not – and maybe she would need to find a new spot and-
Oh she was still on a call.
"Okay, anyway, here's a contract," She had rushed out her sentences, getting through the contract as quickly as possible before anyone managed to call the police. It had been a very hectic day for her afterwards but she was luckily able to hide any trace of the bodies before the police arrived. When they did arrive, they were reassured by ‘medical staff’ that the people had saw some dead bats and just felt frightened, that’s all, there were no bodies! She paid them well later and asked where they had got such convincing disguises.
However, the part that had stuck with her the most was when she saw the corpses she had stashed away herself. It had been years since she saw them and she didn’t expect the state they were in. Her tights had survived the water, sure, but they had to be thrown out after bits of the dead bodies fell onto them. The stench, the decay… It stuck with her. Most of all the eyes did. Glassy and round and they were practically gone on most of them. The ones that did have eyes? They were milky and pale, like the eyes of a blind person but lifeless and unmoving.
Eyes were the window to the soul, she had been told. It wasn’t something she believed entirely – many exceptions existed – but it was the only phrase she could conjure up after seeing these ones.
Corpses were strange. An entire life ridden from a body that would never move again, discarded as the mind shuts down. It would be like if the masses of files that she owned and had worked for and had kept safely placed, organised, loved – if it all burned up in flames, turned completely to ashes in an instant. She couldn’t imagine her own corpse. She couldn’t imagine being still for that long. She didn’t want to imagine her own lifeless eyes.
A rough warm hand slipped next to hers. It was grounding as the fingers filled the gaps in-between hers. A solid squeeze and then gentle holding. Miss Pauling looked up to the woman she was clinging to and couldn’t tell what the expression on Chell’s face was exactly but it was less tense than before. Maybe Chell could see she was spiralling and wanted to offer comfort, maybe she wanted to have that comfort for herself. Either way, Miss Pauling felt her face heating up – all horrifying thoughts evaporating under the warmth – and tried to focus on what was around them instead of the developing feelings that fluttered around in her gut. Pink and soft. Warm like a hot drink sliding down her throat.
She was awkward, yes. A clunky personality. Some would say she’s an efficient worker, others would point out simply how career driven she was. Work was easy now as an assistant for the Administrator, it wasn’t a customer service job like she previously had (or maybe it was, she is serving customers by definition). But in this job? She doesn’t have to interact with people in a friendly way all that often. Sometimes she has to be polite, yes, but people care less about your speech slipping up and more about how well you can shoot someone without the world even noticing they’re gone.
People often assume she’s never fallen in love, or felt it at all. She understood that some people don’t, and that’s fair, but she does. Often. Painfully frequently. It’s almost always a one-sided feelings situation, so that’s why she doesn’t tell anyone. Of course, that’s not the only reason… The other is that almost all of the people she’s fallen in love with? They were women. Although she’s seen some of the male mercenaries dating other men, she’s never had the courage to mention her own preferences before – nor has she ever had the time to.
At some point, she had repressed her feelings entirely. It was always the easier option. Pretend it’s not happening and it will go away, she told herself, it’s going to be fine. No one will notice and you just don’t have to get a partner full stop. Inside she felt miserable about it. She would hear people on the news, people like her – her people – get killed or be outed or have horrible abuse thrown their way and it was always treated as a joke, because who would care if a gay person had horrible things happen to them?
She did.
How could she not? They were like her, they understood why she was feeling this way, and they were being relentlessly abused for it. So, she pretended she wasn’t one of them. She would never be rude towards them, no, but she wouldn’t acknowledge her feelings. At some point she was tempted to tell the others – the mercenaries. Engineer would be nice about it, she thought, and both Heavy and Medic would completely understand (perhaps even give her advice?). Pyro could be like her, but no one really knew so she didn’t want to risk it. Maybe Demoman and maybe Soldier but she was worried about them slipping and spilling her precious secret. ‘Precious’ wasn’t exactly the word for it. Fragile? Delicate? It was like an explosive, certainly, like one of Demoman’s pill grenades. Wild and uncontrollable – unless you were precise about it. A ‘bombshell’ is a phrase some people use, she’s heard. It’s a small bit of information in comparison to other secrets she’s heard and kept close to her chest, like how Spy is Scout’s dad (a fact that she tucks away for the sake of both of them), but it’s something that will impact how other people see and treat her.
So she won’t tell them.
When she looked up at Chell, at her firm and solid expression, she wondered – just for a brief flickering moment – how would she react? Would she not care? Would she hate her?
Would she feel the same way?
Her eyes widened, both from snapping herself back to reality and from her thoughts wandering again. Once again, these thoughts permeated her brain and it took all of her effort to bring them back to reality. She couldn’t keep thinking like this. For now, she had a mission to focus on.
Chell’s hand tightened suddenly around her own. Furrowing her brows, Miss Pauling turned to look up at her with concern. Her tanned skin didn’t pale but her mouth was ajar – naturally dark lips parted revealing pale teeth, straight for the most part but interrupted by a crack in one of the front ones from where one tooth was split in half. If Miss Pauling strained to get a better line of sight then she was sure she would be able to see the whites of her eyes growing, revealed by the pushed eyelids. Something had shocked Chell and, with a sinking feeling growing in her gut, Miss Pauling was certain she knew what had happened.
After that near miss revealed a clearer shot of one of the barcodes, Chell must have figured it out. How couldn’t she? Assuming isn’t something Miss Pauling likes to do within her line of work, so she began to whisper a question to confirm her suspicions. Her voice was a bit raspy from how dry her throat had become. “The boxes… Do you know… What’s in them?”
If it was possible, Miss Pauling could feel Chell hold her closer – the fabric from her soft (cotton?) white tank top brushing against her cheek. It was an awkward height to be hugged at but Miss Pauling couldn’t even fathom the idea of pushing her away – not right now. A short, solid nod was all the confirmation that she needed to prove her suspicions correct.
For the sake of the other, Miss Pauling didn’t comment on the cracked teeth biting down on the wobbling lower lip – or the building glowing rage beneath the surface of her face, crackling like lightning in her hazel eyes. Internally, she was both impressed and jealous at the mostly held-together expression of the other. The emotions she saw were difficult to spot at first glance and she sorely wished for a similar ability.
“Okay listen-“ At the sound of Wheatley’s voice, she physically jolted and felt Chell do the same. Oh god, she’d almost completely forgotten he was here! How much time had she spent in her own thoughts? It felt like forever but it must have only been a few seconds. He interrupted her and Chell’s moment together, though she was sure he was unaware that they were even interacting. “We should get our stories straight, alright?”
“What stories?” A hushed whisper from Miss Pauling was sent Chell’s way, and the reply was a small shrug. Half of the time, she wasn’t sure where Wheatley’s monologues were heading and she was sure Chell didn’t know either.
“If anyone asks, and no one’s gonna ask, don’t worry-“ He jumped between sounding fairly nervous to downright panicked in the space of seconds, despite his attempts of reassurance. This seemed to be a common thing with him, stuck in his own feedback loop of emotions. “But if anyone asks tell them as far as you know the last time you checked everyone looked pretty much alive.”
She shouldn’t be blaming him, not really, but she can’t help feeling annoyed at that statement. “We can’t even see them! How are we meant to know?”
His enthusiastic response agitated her even more. “Exactly! You can’t even see them! So, it should be a piece of cake, right?”
Fighting against literally falling out of the room, she couldn’t find the time to argue back against him as both Chell and her flattened themselves against the most intact wall. Its cold surface provided a more solid comfort than the other decaying walls – but she knew it wouldn’t last for long. At first, she had thought the floor below them was strong enough to stay together. Why wouldn’t it be? It literally had to hold up people regularly, surely they would have made it out of stronger material than the walls. Unfortunately, they had not and now along with holes in the walls she had to look for holes in the floor.
And because of her flat shoes lacking grip, she almost slipped directly through one.
Her stomach had leapt to her chest and she was close to having another fall – though she certainly wouldn’t survive this one. Luck can only let her live once, she’s learned.
The only thing that saved her was Chell’s instinct to move backwards, turning the almost fatal fall into a strange slump. Miss Pauling’s ankles were dragged along the floor until she finally registered the fact she was not, in fact, dying or falling and could stand again. A grateful nod was sent Chell’s way, accepted with little fanfare.
Through the metal frame reminding Miss Pauling too strongly of prison bars, she saw a pile of the corpse crates (she noted to herself to make a more creative name for them later) topple over like a tower of bricks from the impact of the room knocking into the previous one. It sickened her to hear the thumping of their metal hit the ground as they scraped against each other. What seemed so normal and mechanical moments ago now seemed too dark for words.
The arms around her tightened in sync with her own wincing.
Around them, the swinging room aggressively lurched in another direction like a wild animal. Once more the view had shifted and she saw a concrete wall standing tall before them. It had yellow arrows painted on it (still bright but damaged from the lack of maintenance), along with some text that – no matter how hard she squinted – she couldn’t make out from this distance. Wheatley’s voice sounded out from above them again. “Okay! Almost there!”
They stopped with a shudder and Miss Pauling found herself clawing onto Chell as the taller woman (seriously, she was taller than Sniper!) attempted to right herself and swing with the gravity rather than against it – something that probably was much more difficult with Miss Pauling attached to her like a limpet.
“On the other side of that wall is one of the old testing tracks,” Wheatley explained briefly, assuming the both of them knew what he meant by that. Miss Pauling had no idea what the ‘testing tracks’ looked like – though she had heard of them – but Chell snapped her head up to the wall at the implications this held. Miss Pauling knew from the files that the ‘testing tracks’ were something test subjects were sent on – meaning Chell might know her way around them much better than she ever could. “There’s a piece of equipment in there that we’re gonna need to get out of here.”
Equipment? Miss Pauling tried to imagine what it could be. There was a lot of experimental technology in Aperture Science and, from the information she had been given, it could range from a modified toaster to a genuine laser cannon. Perhaps it would be something useful? There was a chance it could help them both.
“I-I think this is a docking station,” Wheatley’s lack of certainty came through in his voice as he spoke again and Miss Pauling felt her heart flip at the tone of it.
“You mean you aren’t sure?” She called out, unable to help herself from reigning in the fear that dictated her voice.
“I’m pretty sure it’s a docking station…” And his reply was absolutely nowhere near reassuring. Miss Pauling didn’t really have a choice to get off and she wasn’t sure this robot could be persuaded, even when he did listen. Speaking of, the room began shuddering once more and he called out to them. “Get ready!”
Metal beams hit stubborn sheets of concrete and it felt like a small earthquake had been contained within their transport. The screeching noise that clawed its way out of her throat left behind the metallic taste of blood. Her bones jittered around inside of her, wobbling like her skeleton was desperate to escape. No matter how hard both Chell and her clung onto the wall, they were unable to stop the momentum from throwing the two directly into the beams. Pain shot through Miss Pauling as she had the brunt of the force directly into the protruding pipes. A crack sounded out and her breathing became laboured – a broken rib maybe? It had happened before to her.
“Good news: this is not a docking station,” Wheatley’s voice slid through the blood pounding in her ears and the oncoming whiplash and also all of the adrenaline from breaking a rib. “So there’s one mystery solved.”