Chapter Text
Cold concrete. A coppery taste in her mouth. Dry, crusty eyes. Slowly, Chell regained consciousness. She was only distantly aware of what had just happened. She'd... defeated... the machine? That's what it had seemed like. The computer and all of the components attached had been sucked upward, along with Chell. She turned her head slightly, the coarse and uneven surface of the asphalt scratching her cheek as she did. There were rather impressive-looking pieces of machinery scattered around the... parking lot? She was in the parking lot. She'd... gotten out. She'd escaped.
That thought was enough to force her to stagger to her feet. Her body protested, muscles aching from the effort. She wasn't sure how long she had been out, but the fatigue from her trials and then the struggle against... well, one of the large pieces of technological rubble had the word GLaDOS stamped on it, so that was likely the acronym for whatever the machine was. GLaDOS, the strange computer that had wanted her dead for whatever reasons it may have had. Chell stretched her arms and legs, trying to work out the soreness and the kinks she could feel. The parking lot was deadly quiet, but that made a certain degree of sense. There was now a large gaping hole in it, from which random bits of computer had been blasted everywhere. If there had been any animals nearby, they'd likely fled when it had happened.
That sounded like a plan, actually. Staying put seemed like a very bad idea. She glanced around just in case, but there was no one else there. No people had come over from the security gate or even random cars to see what the noise had been. No other machines, no robots. Nothing. Outside of the task of actually making her way out of the place, there didn't seem to be any obstacles left for her to deal with. Once she felt as though her body was willing to cooperate with her, Chell began to weave and jump her way through the technological wreck and its debris. With a sense of finality she ducked under the lowered security gate of the parking lot. There was no one manning it at that moment to stop her. One step. Two steps. She glanced over her shoulder. The facility was behind her. She really was free.
Joy burst forth from her then and for a moment she took off running, not caring about anything. It felt so good to have the wind on her skin and actual ground beneath her feet. She ran as far and as fast as she could before collapsing to catch her breath. The grass she had landed on was stiff and prickly, poking up at her from where she laid. She didn't care. It was only after she caught her breath and sat up to look around that she started to realize that something was not quite right about the world around her.
It didn’t take long for her to figure out what was off. The parking lot itself hadn't seemed too badly decayed, though she had not really looked too closely at it. She had seen cars in between the hunks of computer though she had not paid much attention to them or their condition. The security gate, still distantly visible behind her when she turned to look back, was run over with vines, the glass broken, the mechanism that controlled the gate so rusted out that it was unlikely to ever function again. Out here, what might have passed for a road at one point was practically nonexistent. In fact, whatever signs of human existence might have been out there no longer seemed to exist either. Signs, both road and directory were all gone. The whole area seemed to be overgrown, as though left to its own devices with no human touch for a very long time. Apparently no one had been out that way for… who knew how long? Chell glanced up at the sky, suddenly mindful of the time but without any way to determine it. She had hoped to get a sense of how late in the day it might be. The sky was overcast, the clouds thick and heavy on the horizon. Had it just rained? That was a rainbow, but... it wasn't, she realized. A rainbow curved up across the sky in a high-rising arc, but this one went the opposite direction and curved downwards, as though diving towards the ground but pulling up at the last moment to return to the heavens. Distant and hazy, something that seemed to her tired eyes to resemble dark threads seemed to stretch down from the clouds to the ground. She wasn't sure what she was looking at, she wasn't even sure she had the vocabulary to describe it properly. It looked like rain off in the distance but somehow she felt that it was wrong somehow, like how the upside-down rainbow and the thin black threads that stained the horizon felt wrong too.
Hesitantly she decided to continue walking, to see if she could find a city or town or anything. There had to be something between Aperture and Detroit. Logic said there were towns, gas stations, farms, houses, anything on the route to a big city. It shouldn’t take too long to stumble onto some semblance of civilization. She had set off with high hopes, but after an indeterminate amount of walking she mostly found herself tired. There didn't seem to be anything as far as she had seen, not even the remains of where people might have lived. She wasn't even sure if she was walking in the right direction, as there was absolutely no signage or anything she could use to intuit direction. There was nothing outside of rolling hills. Grassy fields. Mossy rocks. A river that she had decided to follow alongside due to a lack of anything else to guide her. There was something deceptively relaxing about the whole experience and she wasn’t sure if she should be completely on edge or totally chill.
After another indeterminable while Chell stopped to rest her aching feet in the cold river water. There were various grasses along the riverbank, but one caught her attention. A nearby bush of weeds looked strong and sturdy, the leaves like long flat paddles. Inspiration struck her and she grabbed a handful of them. Plucking a few of the leaves, she pressed them against the sole of her foot and wrapped the long stalks over and around to hold them in place. Repeating with the remaining leaves on her other foot provided her with makeshift shoes. They might not last long but they would be better than the nothing that she currently had. The water itself was clear and seemed clean, and she took up a handful to drink. It tasted delicious; she cupped both her hands in order to take a second, longer drink. She felt much better for the water, and briefly wished that she had a way to take some with her. No matter. As long as she followed the river she'd have something to drink whenever she wanted.
Back to walking. Cresting a hill gave her a good view into a valley, and she stared in disbelief at what she saw. There may have been something there once but now all that remained was a jumble of concrete structures, and a lot of rusted out hulks that might have been cars. Staring at the place she felt an odd shudder roll through her, something unbidden from deep inside of her that she couldn’t describe beyond the seeming chill she felt from it. There was that reversed rainbow again, hanging low and heavy in the sky. It was definitely raining, too. The earlier wispy, stringy black lines were there as well, stretching down into the ruin like the dark strings of a marionette controlled by a distant, twisted god. The green of the grass seemed to stop some distance ahead of her, fading into an odd boundary that roiled brown and green in rapid succession.
Curiosity won out and Chell edged closer, but stopped when she could actually make out what was happening. Within the bounds of the rain wall the grass and other plants on the ground were spontaneously dying and sprouting over and over again, as though she was watching a time-lapse video of the life cycle of a plant on repeat. It was hypnotic but terrifying, and she couldn’t help but watch. It took a moment for her to snap out of it, and that was only because she had noticed that the dying-sprouting plant life was drawing closer to her. The rain was moving towards her. She took a few steps back, but with almost sinister intent the rain wall followed. Not wanting to find out what it would do to her, Chell fully turned and started to properly run, going in a wide arc towards the west in the hope of running around the entire downpour. What was going on? Was it some kind of acid rain on steroids? The computer - GLaDOS - had mentioned that something had happened outside of the facility, something that was apparently beyond even her near-limitless ability to fathom. Was... was whatever this was a part of that? Messed-up rain and the near-erasure of the signs of humanity outside of some sort of extant ruin? Chell slowed to a walk once she had put a bit of distance between her and the rain, keeping an eye on it and adjusting as it moved.
The sky was still overcast, but it didn't seem like it was getting any darker. Perhaps she had gotten out early enough in the day that it was still afternoon? Somehow that didn't sit right with her. Maybe it just felt like time was moving more slowly due to the natural air and light. She had gotten used to life in the Enrichment Centre, with its pumped-in air and fluorescent lights and an absence of any kind of dirt. Whatever adrenaline she was running on now was her own.
It definitely felt like a great deal of time had already passed, and the ache in her legs and her feet agreed with her. Testing was much harder work than walking; it didn't make sense that only an hour of walking would leave her that sore. It had to have been a few hours at the very least. She'd been forced to leave the river behind in her attempt to escape from the rain, losing that option to relieve the pain temporarily. She was certain that she was near one of the Great Lakes - Lake Michigan, most likely - which meant that if she continued on this way for a few more hours she'd run into Chicago. Or whatever was left of Chicago, she decided, given how little of anything else she’d seen so far. There should theoretically be small towns and cities along the way, but given her experience so far she wasn’t going to hold her breath..
After more than a few rests and a lot more walking than she felt comfortable trying to quantify she was very certain that nothing was happening in the sky. It was cloudy, but the sun behind the clouds had not seemed to change at all. It was the same as it had been when she’d first started out from the parking lot despite how long she’d been walking. She'd finally found the edge of the rain, watching it sweep past her off towards Lake Eerie or Huron and whatever else might have been along that way. Despite the storm being over the clouds above her had not broken. It didn't even look like the clouds themselves were moving. Everything was washed in that perpetual and almost dingy light, as though the sky was filled by something that filtered the sunlight through it, keeping the clouds in the air long past their natural point of existence.
Another large hill to climb. The land itself seemed a lot different than the dim memories she managed to dredge up. She had expected fields and cultivated areas. Instead there were so many hills, so many crags, so many rocks. She'd thought testing was a good workout, but this was definitely starting to put her through her paces. It was a bit of a slog to work her way up the steep incline. It was only after she'd crested the hill that she got a scope of just how wrong the world had become in her absence.
Rather than a hill, she was at the top of an impressive cliff. Somehow a chunk of the land had broken away and sunken very far down, leaving the line of long and craggy cliff she was currently atop of. From this vantage point she could see quite far away in most directions. She stared out towards the midwest, and her eyes were drawn immediately to something that she knew should not be.
Cutting across the land, as though it had been gashed open somehow, was a long dark body of what looked like very dark water. An inland sea? How had such a thing come to be? It stretched out as far as she could see in all directions, northward and southward and westward off to the horizon. From her vantage point she could pick out bits of what she assumed were the remains of humanity, areas of dingy grey and brown that stood out starkly against the natural shades of green and stony greys. Even further south, farther than she felt she might be able to walk, she could just make out the tops of what looked like a series of very large and spinning wind turbines. Something intact? Or was it another ruin? There was no way to tell from this far away, and she wasn't certain she wanted to take the chance. She could attempt to keep going and see if anything was left of Chicago, or turn back east and pray that she could find Detroit. The idea of encountering the rain again made her wary of that plan. After all, if that was what happened to the plants that got caught in it, what would it do to living flesh?
It seemed almost surreal that scant hours ago she had been celebrating her escape. Now, Chell realized, she should have listened to what GLaDOS had been saying. Whatever had happened out here, the computer had been keeping the facility safe from it. Was Chell a fool? No, of course not. GLaDOS had wanted her dead and would not have stopped until she had been gassed. It had been a matter of survival. Maybe, if Chell had been thinking, she might have been able to dig up some information about things, or scrounge up some supplies or… anything. She'd been so hasty to snatch up the freedom she’d found that she hadn't considered just what might have been going on in the world outside of the facility. The notion that things might have changed in her absence, and this drastically…
Chell sat on the edge of the cliff, staring out at the strange dark sea and wondering just what to make of what the world had become… and what she should do now. Finally she rose to her feet, new resolve filling her. She turned toward the turbines, the blades just barely visible beyond the endless miles and miles of world ahead. While the large cities might exist in some fashion, somehow she felt her chances were better with what might be an operational wind farm. She scanned around hoping to find the river again and then started to carefully pick her way along the edge of the cliff.
Something caught her attention a ways ahead and she changed course to make her way over to it in curiosity. It resembled a flat collection of fungi, almost like a mycelium coral. Above it floated a variety of small pink insectoids. Floating, she realized, but not flying. They didn't have wings. The structure gave her the same feeling that looking at the ruin and distorted rainfall had, a cold shudder that made even her hands shake. She swung out a hand to try to catch one of the insects. They fled at her swing, but she could feel something squirming in the palm of her closed hand. When she opened it to inspect her prize, she saw something that reminded her of a very large water bear. It stared up at her before floating off of her hand and down to the fungal coral to hide. That must have been some kind of hive. The thing hadn't stung her and they had been afraid of her, so clearly they weren't any kind of threat. Realization struck all at once, as she hadn’t thought about it since she’d left the parking lot: outside of this she hadn’t seen or heard any signs of life. No birds, no insects, no other animals. Even in the water she hadn’t seen any fish or other aquatic creatures. The world felt so very empty despite being lush and overgrown green.
Having caught her breath from the distraction Chell pressed onward. The ground was sloping downward and so she adjusted her pace and gait to avoid slipping or straining her ankles. With her eastward trajectory she eventually caught sight of the river again and veered towards it. A more than welcome friend, she splashed her face in its cool water and took another long drink. Sitting down on the bank, she let her legs dangle in the water. The soles of her feet were getting roughed up badly from walking, the leaves she'd bound up on her feet having mostly worn through. She wasn't sure if she'd be able to get as far as she needed to go like this. Walking through the riverbank itself was an option, but it was rocky on the bottom. Even with the chill of the water to help numb the pain the rocks would be hard on her feet.
Once more her thoughts turned to the warning she had taken as an empty threat, the last-ditch bravado of someone with nothing left to lose. She reached down to splash her face again in an attempt to focus on the here and now. Her stomach was starting to rumble, the hunger that had been creeping up on her much more difficult to ignore. There didn’t seem to be anything edible here - outside of the occasional nests of the water bear bugs - as she hadn’t encountered any berries or mushrooms. While she was hungry, she wasn’t sure if eating unknown insects was a good thing or a bad thing. There was no sense of day or night in the world anymore, just an omnipresent overcast sky with dim lighting at all times. She hadn't encountered any other ruins yet but she also wasn't sure she wanted to. Finding out first-hand about the rainbows and dark rain-threads was not high on her list of things she wanted to do at this point in time. The tips of the turbines, her goal, were closer, but still far enough away to elicit a stab of despair. It appeared as though there was the line of a cliff ahead as well, which meant climbing down a potentially steep surface. This had been the best choice, she reassured herself. An actual sign of life, rather than the potential promise of life of the cities. Given that nothing remained of civilization in the area she’d travelled, active and functional wind turbines surely meant something .
There was nothing to do but to keep on and carry on. With a sigh Chell slowly withdrew her legs from the water once more. The prospect of what was between her and there was terrifying in a way that what she had faced at Aperture hadn't been. There had been unknowns and deadly hazards there, but those had all been contained. She'd found ways to escape, to hide, and even to avoid in rare instances. The tests had been self-contained and easy enough to figure out despite the hard work involved in their completion. She'd even found signs of life in those steel walls, guiding directions here and there, and sometimes warnings. Out here there was nothing but open wilderness and unknowns that seemed unnaturally harmful despite the natural setting, the sort of test that she was not at all interested in engaging. She began to plod along the river bank, staring ahead of her, focusing on the road - or lack thereof - ahead.
Maybe you were right, she thought to the destroyed computer littering the parking lot that no one would ever see now that she had left. What did Aperture even look like at this point in time? She hadn't even thought to look before she had run. Had it been a ruin, too? It was too late to go back. Not after she'd already covered so much ground. She could only keep moving forward, and hope that if there was anyone out there, that they'd have some answers for just what had happened.