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The bright light was blinding after a life of darkness and fake light spent below ground. It took her eyes a moment to adjust, and when they finally did, all Chell could see was an ocean of gold, stretching out into eternity
Golden grass - she squinted at the image until it made sense. An ocean of golden grass and a sea of blue sky - blue sky!
Chell heard a clang behind her, and turned, finally noticing the decrepit metal shed. Out of place, in an otherwise untouched world. As the clanging increased and grew louder, her mind ran over what she knew of the history of the institution, and why they would have disguised their entrance as a shed.
The door flew open and out poured a very dirty, very beat-up Weighted Companion Cube. Chell recognized it instantly, and her heart surged with emotion, which she quickly fought down. She glanced away from the soft pink hearts, still ashamed to have been tricked into a fondness for the stupid thing, and made a mental effort not to rise to the obvious taunt (especially after what had happened the last time one of these things had been put in front of her).
Except it wasn't a taunt. The wind on Chell's cheek was real, the golden grass actually irritating around her long-fall boots, the light harsh in a way fake lab lights could never be. That stupid, lifeless box didn't spontaneously dissolve and it wasn't going to - it was a parting gift. Of sorts.
Chell sat down in the dirt next to it, putting one arm up on it in exhaustion. The material was still cool. She leaned against the cube as she pulled one long-fall boot off, then the other. The grass was no less irritating under the ex-test subject's feet, and the dry, rocky soil even more so, but it felt strangely comfortable to finally have her feet free. If she found a river, she decided, she'd have to take everything else off and take her first bath in....
She didn't want to think how long.
There was another sound behind her, and still jumpy, Chell scrambled up to face it, turning around in a flash and raising her bare arm out of instinct. Nothing came out of the shed, but she noticed movement on the ground. A tiny whitish animal had been lying out on its side, soaking up the sun. It must have awoken, when the Companion Cube appeared, and was now staring silently up at Chell with bright blue eyes.
Chell stared back. It was a cat, she finally decided. Or a kitten, were they called? A white kitten, out here in the middle of nowhere, pushing itself up onto its paws as it stared at her. It was too skinny for its size, covered in dirt and specks of dead vegetation but otherwise white.
The girl offered her fingers to the animal, who sniffed at them, sneezed on them, and finally started to lick them, biting softly as if it expected more.
There was no reason for it to be out here, Chell decided, and especially for it to still be alive. Where had it come from? How had it survived? Where was its mother, or whoever had been taking care of it? Probably dead by now, and this one might soon follow suit.
Chell sat on her cube, comforted by the familiar grooves in spite of herself, and watched the small animal. It ambled around for a bit, smelling the air and venturing towards the grass, pawing at the ground insistently. Probably looking for bugs. There was nothing she could do to save it or protect it, Chell reminded herself, even as she leaned over to pick it up by it's too-small middle.
The cat's nose was still wet, she noticed - so there must be water somewhere nearby. It was just starving, then - and it wasn't the only one. With their combined wits, Chell wondered if maybe they could take care of each other. A helpless kitten would certainly be better than... her previous company.
Chell looked over the kitten some more. A male, unkempt fur that would otherwise be short and shiny. Scrawny, with a long tail and limbs, and a wet nose and eyes. The eyes were blue - very blue. A treacherous sort of blue. A pitiful sort of blue.
She set the animal down again and looked away. Perhaps she would be better on her own after all.
The kitten ignored the disturbance and wandered back to the shed door, sniffing the dirt and metal paneling as it went. Chell stood up to follow it, and cautiously tried the door handle. It responded to her touch and swung open, revealing the true mechanism of the vault door. Inside was too dark compared to the harsh sunlight, that Chell almost couldn't make anything out. Her eyes took a minute to adjust, finally registering the simple room, an exterior remnant of Aperture Laboratories. An employee sign hung on the wall, but Chell didn't bother to check it, instead focusing her attention on the elevator plate on the floor.
The kitten didn't seem to have a problem with the darkness. It walked in as her eyes adjusted, exploring the edges of the room with its nose and cautiously approaching the elevator mechanism.
The plate was pressure sensitive, Chell knew. It was probably calibrated to her weight. She wondered what would happen if the kitten stepped on.
She didn't have long to guess. Curiosity getting the better of it, the small animal scrambled slowly up the metal ring, jerking slightly as the elevator chamber closed around it, and, before Chell could think, disappearing from sight.
She stared at the now empty elevator ring for a moment. The cat was gone, she considered, which left her one less thing to worry about. She wondered if it would be better off above ground, with her, or below ground, in the regenerating facility. Chell felt a bit guilty, after a moment, when she admitted to herself that she didn't know if she cared.
Chell turned to leave the shed, returning to her discarded long-fall boots as the vault door once again swung shut, and sitting down on her Weighted Companion Cube to pull them back on before she went to explore.
---
There was a fire somewhere in the far back of her mind [approximate remaining time to extinguish - 2 minutes 33 seconds] and several chambers were threatening to fall out of her reach if she wasn't careful, but GLaDOS was happy in the knowledge that her facility was no longer dying. The first few minutes after regaining control had been somewhat terrifying, and the following hours worrisome, but now for the most part everything was fine [chamber 62.4 lost, unrecoverable]. That's what happened when the right people were in charge.
Testing had resumed, through the Cooperative Testing Initiative [search for remaining human stasis chambers coming back negative - they've got to be around here somewhere], which luckily hadn't been completely destroyed when that idiot took over. The cooperative bots weren't as fun to kill, however, and they had this annoying habit of helping each other out needlessly [chamber 40.3 slipping - recovering surfaces], but one thing at a time.
It was extremely comfortable, being back in charge. GLaDOS didn't know how long she'd been in that potato, but every second of the experience had been a second too long. She was tempted to delete the memory from her hard drive; every time she came across it again her main body bristled in anger [oops, chamber 40.3 just fell apart, only 20% recoverable surfaces].
GLaDOS was happy, as it were, to be super-aware every section of her vast, underground domain again [fire: contained]. Her primary focus wasn't on her elevator shafts, unused when there were no humans around, but when the one moved she felt it like a jolt.
She quickly [2.4 seconds] cleared out the shaft and surrounding paneling in anticipation, removing a frankenturret and sending a nanobot crew to clean out an overgrown potato stem. Movement in the main elevator shaft could only mean that person had decided to return. A response to the admittedly obvious taunt [likelihood: high]?
As the elevator descended from the surface, GLaDOS drew her main body up impressively, running one last check over her chamber to see it was as clean as possible [residual scorch-marks; a single broken panel]. She was [not] disappointed when the elevator finally broke into the room, and appeared to be empty. It dropped to the floor, and GLaDOS checked her systems for a fault in the visual component [no fault detected].
The clear elevator pane slid open, and out tumbled a small white speck. GLaDOS had to lean closer to get a better look, trying to figure out what sort of creature it could be [Companion Cube manufacturing offline to save resources] and getting annoyed when it refused to answer any of her questions, or even look at her steadily. A quick [0.7 seconds] consultation into her archives seemed to suggest the animal was a cat, or a small kitten to be more precise. The reference data was impressive; nocturnal hunters, cats were apparently a highly domesticated animal, known for refusing to submit to the whims of humans.
Why had that person decided to send a kitten down the elevator shaft? Was this another taunt disguised as a parting gift, a response to GLaDOS' own [likelihood: low]? That person couldn't have been keeping this animal while she was in the facility [or could she? No of course not], so she must have found it up on the surface. And she thought it would be a good idea to send it into the labs?
The kitten was scratching at the floor panels now; why was it doing that [looking for food]? So it was hungry? That person expected GLaDOS to dig into the laboratory stores and find something to feed this useless animal? GLaDOS barely even fed the humans and they at least could test [could the kitten test? Probably not].
Or could it? There was no way a kitten could handle an ASHPD [kitten-size ASPHPD sent to secondary processing systems for further thought], but that certainly wasn't the only product in the laboratory that needed testing. And there were more reasons to keep a kitten alive besides testing; as well as having a naturally high intelligence quotient, these creatures apparently had a well-recorded dislike for [a certain detestable flying animal]. Certainly the scrawny white thing could make itself useful somehow.
Centuries later [or maybe it was just a little over a week], when the facility was more or less back to normal and she was cripplingly aware of an old chassis room under attack, GLaDOS grew angry that the tough little fighter she was trying to raise had refused to do more than play around with out-of-commission materials. Perhaps it was too young to understand her commands [likelihood: high] or perhaps she just hadn't gotten to it young enough. Yes, GLaDOS finally decided, when the worst of it was over, getting to the young as soon as they were born seemed to be the way to do it [new goal: keep newborn killers and their feline predecessor separate].