Chapter Text
“Watch where you’re going!”
The tall, slender woman with snow-white hair hissed as the scatterbrained lab boy collided with her, causing her to drop her stack of papers all over the floor.
“Oh, Miss Gladys! Very sorry, truly, didn’t see you at all!” the boy fixed his skewed glasses hurriedly, bending to start picking up the mess of reports. “I musta been in another world or somethin’. I tell ya, I’m just so damn clumsy…” when he heard no jovial reply from the woman he’d crashed into, the lab boy slowly lifted his head until he was on the receiving end of the most menacing death stare he’d ever had the displeasure of experiencing. The woman’s brilliantly amber eyes were almost smoking with fury.
Wheatley swallowed. “R-Right. I’ll just—I’ll just be going.” Gingerly he set the bedraggled collection of papers on the floor in front of her, backed away very slowly, and then turned and sprinted down the hallway as quickly as he could manage.
Once he’d turned the corner and disappeared, Gladys finally broke her stare and bent to pick up the remaining papers, grumbling angrily to herself all the while. With so many scientific and monetary setbacks, as well as the constant catastrophes ravaging the planet’s surface, fewer and fewer people had been coming in to apply for positions at Aperture. Recently, the situation had gotten so dire that they’d been forced to hire anyone who walked through the door. That particular lab boy—Wheatley, Gladys seethed under her breath—had been one of the particularly dire consequences of their current predicament.
Finally having gathered all of her papers—albeit in a jumbled mess that would no doubt take her hours to organize again—she made a mental note to have the higher-ups in the lab give Wheatley the brunt of the day’s janitorial duties. Again.
Her heels clack clack clacked on the linoleum floor as she stormed to the elevator and jammed her finger into the button. She barely even noticed the elevator’s other occupant as the doors slid shut behind her. Leaning back against the cool steel wall, she began leafing through her armful of reports to begin the process of sorting them again.
That mindless little ignoramus… I told those fools we couldn’t afford to hire that moron—
Suddenly, everything went incredibly dark. The elevator came to a juddering stop, and Gladys lost her balance on her very high heels and had to let go of her stack of reports in order to grab the handrail, making them spill all over the floor again.
Two muffled booms rang out from high above them, likely on the facility’s surface. The elevator trembled with each impact; the other woman in the elevator threw out an arm to steady a tottering Gladys. After another moment of tense waiting, the shuddering came to a stop.
In the inky darkness, Gladys’s heart was beating rapidly. Panic rose in her chest as she fought down the wave of terror coursing through her. She’d never been very fond of tight spaces, or of darkness, but hell if she was going to let her insecurities get the better of her in front of a stranger. Inhaling deeply to clear her mind and replacing her mask of indignation, she shrugged off the other woman’s hand and felt her way to the elevator door.
“You have got to be kidding me,” she grumbled. “Today of all days, I swear…“ She brought her balled fist down hard on the elevator door. “Hey! There are people trapped in here! Get us out this instant!”
When there was no reply, she banged on the door again out of frustration. “Great. We must be between floors. Just perfect.” She gave the door a swift kick, and grimaced inwardly when her toes jammed into the front of her pointed heels.
The dim emergency lights finally flickered on, and Gladys groaned at the sight of the mess of papers on the floor. “Fucking hell, why does this keep happening to me?” she got down on her knees, wincing at the thought of her incredibly expensive black pencil skirt being ruined by the filthy elevator floor. “You there, make yourself usefu—“
She glanced up and stopped dead in her tracks as she made eye contact with the other woman. Her pulse quickened even as her heart seemed to sink in her chest, and a flood of memories that were most certainly not welcome in her head suddenly sprang to the front of her mind.
“Oh. It’s you.”
"Gladys! There you are. Got yer list of new test subjects right here, ma'am.” Wheatley’s eyes glowed beneath his shaggy brown bangs as he shoved the clipboard into Gladys’s sternum. Gladys snatched it away from the overeager lab boy and began to turn away.
“It’s a good batch today, Miss Gladys. Lots of good ones. Should last you a bit longer than the last ones. I mean, I say should, but ah—you always find a way to, uh, y’know.” He passed his index finger across his throat and made a gargling sound.
“Are you quite finished?” Gladys asked, looking down her spectacles at the much shorter boy. He shuffled his feet nervously.
“Um, yeah, almost, it’s just that I, um, picked the last one on the list ‘specially for you. Tenacity rating’s off the charts. Thought she might be able to stand up to yer really hard tests. Y’know, the ones everyone else dies in.”
When Gladys didn’t respond, Wheatley excused himself rather abashedly and hurried off to clean the bathrooms, which had been his punishment for mucking up a whole slew of experimental agents in the lab the day before. Gladys took no notice of his absence and scanned the list of test subjects on the clipboard. Sure enough, the last one on the list had a tenacity rating higher than any she’d ever seen before. Well, she thought. This should be fairly interesting.
The remainder of the day was spent navigating the test subjects through her specially designed testing chambers. She was testing the ability of the average human to perform portal-based puzzle and problem solving with the use of the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device. So far, the average human was proving to be completely incompetent.
She’d gone through the list of test subjects in order from the top—the first had been mildly successful, making it four chambers in before a misplaced portal caused an active turret to land right in front of him. The next two had barely made it through the initiation chamber, proving to be particularly inept at managing 3D maneuvers at high speed. They met their ends splattered all over the test chamber walls. The next one dropped an Aperture Science Weighted Storage Cube on his head and caved in his own skull. On and on they went, one violent end after another, and Gladys was getting more and more bored by the minute.
None of this carnage fazed her in the slightest. Sure, she’d been a little disturbed by the frequent test subject deaths when she’d first started working at Aperture all those years ago, but she and the other scientists had become completely desensitized to it by now. Other scientists would come into her little booth from time to time and make bets on how long each subject was going to last.
Gladys pushed her snowy white hair—which was beginning to turn brown at the roots again, she’d need to re-dye it soon—behind her ears and let out a sigh of indignation as she reached the last subject on the list. With test subject applicants becoming increasingly rare, Gladys was on the end of her rope. If she didn’t have enough evidence that ordinary humans could handle something as expensive as the ASHPD, her project would be canceled. Years of good science wasted. She couldn’t have that.
Time to see what this particularly tenacious test subject could do. Gladys didn’t want to get her hopes up, but felt a tentative whisper of hope flutter through her chest as she called the last name on the list. Chell. No last name, just Chell. Odd, but Gladys didn’t particularly care for the personal details of her subjects. Not when they were likely to die in ten minutes or less anyway.
The subject walked into the first chamber, and suddenly Gladys couldn’t breathe.