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flynndesdelca · 6 months

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For Day 20 (Atlas and P-Body) of @chelltastic’s Portal Drawtober 2023 Challenge. As I’m not really an artist, I chose to write short pieces for the prompts.

This is based around the cut co-op content of GLaDOS sending the testing bots looking for 'artifacts' and them finding a Garfield comic. Most of this was lifted directly from a dream I had about the prompt. Apologies for potential dream logic.

"Consider it a mercy that I have reassembled you before your next mission," GLaDOS advised the two testing bots. "In order to increase your marginal chances of success, I felt that perhaps a briefing on what you are about to experience will be helpful. Don't make me regret it." The two stopped playing rock-paper scissors to look up. Atlas gave a small salute, while P-Body simply nodded in understanding. "Excellent. You both seem to be ready. Let's not waste any more time."

With a slight creak a vital apparatus vent opened on the ceiling overhead, and a couple of objects clattered out and onto the little table that GLaDOS had set up to give the whole thing a vague air of legitimacy. They rolled slightly, one of them rolling off the table. Atlas went to pick it up and held it up, staring at its length.

"These are pencils," GLaDOS droned dryly. "What do you think that humans did with these?"

P-Body reached over to pick up the other pencil and turned it around in her hands curiously. Atlas stared at his as though it was going to grow wings and fly away. Both were silent as they considered. Atlas shifted it around in his hand, angling it between his thumb and forefinger with interest.

"Oh, did you figure it out, Blue? Fifty science poi-" Before she could finish the sentence, Atlas wound up and threw the pencil like a dart. It flew neatly through the air and bounced off of the chamber wall, clattering to the floor. GLaDOS remained silent as it rolled across the floor, the air growing heavy with her displeasure. Atlas, elated at what was perceived as success, did a little dance of joy at having deduced just what a pencil was for. Then he promptly exploded. She waited for him to return from the reconstruction station before she continued. "Creative use of a pencil as a weapon is commendable, but that wasn't what the question was about. Pencils were used when humans did not wish for their computers to know what they were thinking. They would write things down on the mashed-up corpses of trees that they murdered in order to keep their secrets from the machines that they used to run their lives. The pointy end is where the words would come out, while the blunt end is where they would try to erase their mistakes, if such a thing was truly possible. It isn't, in case you were wondering."

Mechanical claws reached down and plucked the pencils away, only to replace them with much larger, heavier objects. "Dropping these down would have been satisfying, but they would likely have broken. As much fun as getting you to do demeaning tasks like cleaning would be, it would be wasting valuable time. Now, tell me, what do you think that a human would do with a coffee mug?"

The two bots picked up the objects, turning them around in their hands. P-Body stared inside of hers, while Atlas stuck a couple fingers through the handle of his, holding it upside down. Seeing him doing that P-Body mimicked the gesture, then brought the mug down firmly on top of his head with a slight clang.

"Stop trying to impress me by using it as a weapon. That didn't work when Blue tried it, and even though you're using this in a much more effective way it's still incorrect, Orange," the supercomputer growled. "The hint is in the opening."

The two stopped hitting each other with the mugs long enough to both turn them and look inside. P-Body glanced at Atlas, who shrugged, and went back to hitting her with it.

"Okay, the refreshment lesson is over. I suppose that being mechanical, the idea of putting a liquid into a receptacle for nourishment purposes would be beyond your understanding." The mechanical claws swooped down to liberate the coffee mugs from the excited bots. "You two are really making this difficult. I'm not sure what might be more at your level. Ah, I know..." A moment later, the vital apparatus vent opened up again with the familiar creak and whoosh. This time two objects very slowly drifted out, flopping onto the table almost silently. The two robots stared silently, watching the objects, which did not move any further.

"I mentioned this before," GLaDOS said primly. "During the pencil lecture, if you were listening. Consider this to be your pop quiz. What is this?"

An uncertain silence fell. P-Body reached out a hand to brush against the thin white rectangle. It moved slightly beneath her fingers and she startled back, the forceful motion enough to peel it from the surface of the table and send it fluttering. It settled back down to the table surface and stopped moving. Atlas reached over to tap it warningly, but it did not move again. Satisfied, he withdrew his hand, though he kept an eye on it. P-Body shook her head, making a disapproving noise.

"It's not antagonizing you. Much like the two of you, it has no sense of self-awareness," GLaDOS groaned. "If you had a pencil, what would you do with this?"

The two stared at the paper for a while. P-Body held up her fingers, mimicking the shape of the pencil. Atlas recalled the brief moment of praise before his abrupt deconstruction and held his hand in the way he had held the pencil. P-Body shook her head and made a rotating gesture, and Atlas quickly shifted the imaginary pencil in his hand around. P-Body made swooping gestures with her hands, and Atlas nodded, then he slapped his imaginary-pencil-bearing hand down on the paper. He started to wave it around on the surface of the table, dragging the paper with him.

"Close enough. Good job. Science points for everyone. I suppose it was Orange's idea, so Orange can have all of them," GLaDOS said with a sigh. "This is taking a lot longer than I planned, so we are going to cut it short. The last thing I feel I should prepare you for is perhaps the most disturbing of all. Brace yourselves, this is as close to Android Hell as you're getting while alive."

The vital apparatus vent overhead whooshed again and this time deposited a single item. It clattered onto the table and promptly fell over, but it didn't roll away like the pencils had, and it didn't flutter like the paper had. Perhaps fell wasn't the correct word, as it seemed to right itself after a moment, wobbling up and down slightly before standing itself up completely straight. Atlas and P-Body stared at it in awe.

"Don't look too closely at it!" GLaDOS hissed. "Despite its charming caricature, I can assure you that this object is evil. Perhaps it was intended to be a ward against the mechanical. While such a notion is highly unscientific, it's unfortunately going to be effective. You'll need to become acclimatized to this thing’s presence if you are going to succeed."

The two bots looked at each other. Atlas reached out to touch it, and it shook at the contact, the uppermost part swinging slightly.

"In this form, it is passive," GLaDOS explained warily. "The festive colours and dapper head-covering are meant to lure you in with a false sense of complacency. There is nothing fun about this. You will know when it is on the alert, as it will be moving of its own volition. Watching you with its beady, unblinking eyes." A slightly quivering mechanical claw lowered something down next to the offending object, then retracted quickly. It was a glass of water. "Blue. Push the top part down into the water."

Sensing personal danger, Atlas shook his head.

"Fifty science points if you push the top part into the water."

The lure of science points wasn't enough to get him to move.

"How about I don't violently deconstruct you for insubordination?"

That did the trick, and he quickly tipped the top part towards the glass of water. It obediently bobbed down. A slight protuberance from the bulbous, behatted top part stuck out far enough to dip into the water. After a moment the whole thing rocked back up to its resting position, then back down again without having been pushed. The continued motion surprised the bots, who held up their hands defensively at first, but slowly lowered them as their eyes tracked the movements. Then they kept watching. And watching. The movement of the object as it bobbed back and forth was mesmerizing. After a moment or two it suddenly dipped back down into the water, and the two bots made little noises of delight.

"That is the opposite reaction you should be having to it!" GLaDOS snapped. "If you see this thing, and you will, it's a sign that there's something worth finding. They're trying to protect their secrets with their eternally-watching self-irrigating avian monitoring devices. Do not let your guard down in the presence of one." She watched the two scamper around in obvious ignorance of the true danger represented by the object in question. "If you ever kept it up in the first place. This briefing is over. Prepare for your first real mission."

The two testing bots stopped mid-caper. Atlas held up a hand quickly, making a questioning chirp.

"I said I wouldn't violently deconstruct you for insubordination. This is transportation. It's a vital and necessary deconstruction." To demonstrate, she blew them up, sending their schematics to the reconstruction station closest to their target location. She didn’t expect them to understand how much more efficient this was, anyway.

A simple trial retrieval first, to see how much they had retained from their briefing. She had a target in mind already, something she had been wondering about for a while...

#portal drawtober 2023 #portal 2 #glados #atlas portal #p body #they're so cute I love them #oh good! the man who owns the lasagna is furious!

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kittenfemme27 · 3 years

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Magrunner: Dark Pulse

"That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die."

That’s the often misquoted line written by H.P. Lovecraft and spoken by his fictional “mad poet” Abdul Ahazred in “The Call of Cthulhu”, a short story written by the very same author. It’s meant to symbolize the same thing that almost all of Lovecraft’s work was meant to symbolize: That there are things that view us the same way we’d view a simple speck of dust, or an ant. As so tiny and insignificant that we’re practically unnoticed in the eyes of this massive and overwhelming force. Lovecraft had an intense fear and at the same time an intense fascination with the idea of being insignificant, of being forgotten and unworthy, of being completely and utterly impotent in the face of power that was greater than himself. Every “Old God” that he wrote about is so far reaching above humanity and so incomprehensible that even the act of knowing of their existence was incomprehensible for the human mind, and would oft drive those with that forbidden knowledge to complete and utter insanity. This isn’t really a disputed interpretation of Lovecraft's work, it's barely an interpretation at all. It’s considered a simple set of facts of the universe that he created.

So imagine my surprise when I started playing “Magrunner: Dark Pulse”, a fairly mundane and simple futuristic sci-fi puzzle game marketed to have a “Lovecraftian Twist” and the final nine levels have good ol’ Cthulhu himself checking in on me from the skies above, literally one hundred thousand times my size, and simply observing me like I’m his personal favourite little human. As he communicates with me and makes it clear that I am in-fact, his personal favourite little human and he just can’t wait for me to ascend to his level. As far as a piece of lovecraftian work goes, this game was a doozy. But we’ll get back to that. Before we even get there, I’d first like to talk about the game itself.

Gameplay:

Magrunner is a first person physics based puzzle game featuring magnetism as its element in which you interact with the puzzles in each room. Your goal in each puzzle room is to use various platforms, blocks, and other bits of very clearly marked tech in each room that may be magnetized with either a positive polarity or a negative polarity, and combine that with the physics of the Unreal 3 engine to solve challenges and make it to the next room. To be blunt, the game is squarely a Portal rip-off from its design ideals. Your makeshift magnet glove-gun hybrid can fire 2 colors, one being a negative polarity and one being a positive. Like-colors are attracted to themselves, whereas opposite colors reflect each other. The idea of using magnets in a physics based first person puzzler isn’t an awful one, and neither is the fact it clearly wants to ape Portal’s ideas. Where it fails, unfortunately, is execution. The physics aren’t up to snuff with what you do most of the time and it leads a lot of the puzzles to be confusing or simply frustrating, as even when you know what you’re doing you still have to rely on the physics system of the engine to cooperate with you. Early on, you are tasked with getting 4 small magnetizable cubes together to form into a large one. What this actually has you end up doing is fighting with the cubes and the level as they fling themselves wildly off of each other and into unreachable parts of the level itself. The entire game functions this way and it really removes any sense of challenge or control you have over each puzzle, often feeling like you lucked your way into a solution rather than figured out the puzzle yourself in any meaningful way.

Buggy physics in the Unreal engine are not the developers fault entirely though, the game is an indie project that was kickstarted and for that alone i’m willing to give them a pass on engine problems that they likely did not have the programmers to fix. But, unfortunately, I can’t give a pass on the game failing to iteratively teach you how the mechanics work level by level. Whenever you magnetize an object, it creates a field, and you can see this field thankfully by pressing a key. Anything in that field will automatically interact with anything else that is magnetized in it. In general, these fields are wildly inconsistent in how they operate. Usually, they’re spheres centered around the magnetized object and cause objects within the sphere to either attract or repel. On occasion though you’ll find pads that create a cone of magnetism going the direction that it faces, up to what is an arbitrary height. Later on, you’re given the ability to place your own fields on any flat surface, allowing the levels to become more bare-bones as you have to create the magnetism points yourself. All of this combined means that If you learn that something works in a previous level, there is no guarantee that it will work in the next level the exact same way. Experimentation in this game is often fraught with a frustrating sigh of not knowing if the game intended for something to work that way, or if you just broke the physics again. Don’t even get me started on the fact there are multiple combat sections inside a puzzle game, ugh.

Art & Sound:

Magrunners similarities to Portal do not end with the gameplay and design, however. Aesthetically, the first and second half of the three act game are ripped directly from Portal and Portal 2. The first half of the game features sleek interiors inside of a testing facility for yourself and other “Magrunners” where everything is cleanly lit, sparse on color and detail, as space-age and sci-fi as you could imagine. These first set of aperture inspired levels lack any sort of hard edge or detail, with every single element in the room being curved and well lit and as minimalist as possible. The second half of the game takes places in facilities “underneath” the one you were in prior and are dilapidated grey and brown ruins of previous testing facilities, complete with all the same tools and magnetizable pads and tech that you had seen previously but this time a much older and “70’s” style of sci-fi aesthetic, but covered in grime and dirt and dust from the years of abandonment and rot. I cannot understate how unsubtle this is. The first third of the game is Aperture Science bonafide and part right after is Old Aperture from Portal 2. Magrunner’s aesthetic inspirations are worn very clearly on their sleeve, and it makes the game feel very boring and bland by comparison. It’s impossible to play Magrunner: Dark Pulse and not feel as though it was simply a junior developer exclaiming: “What if Portal/Portal 2, but Magnets?!” while the rest of the developers collectively lose their minds from excitement.

The music of the game was provided, as far as i can tell by the credits, by Incomptech AKA Kevin Macleod. A musician known for releasing thousands of free songs for use in any creative project. This isn’t, by default, a bad thing. Most of the music was not things I had heard from his library before and thus I didn’t immediately twig that it was his library, but unfortunately the music selection isn’t enough. As in, there are not enough tracks to fit the game. There are 39 levels in total and each level features a music track, but often and especially in the later parts, the music tracks are entirely re-used. This is most apparent when one of the tracks is a rising piercing noise, like the type you’d hear in a horror movie right before the slasher stabs into someone, but it never ends or pays off. It just loops upon itself and becomes this droning nightmare of a track for however long the physics force you to stay in a level. I counted 6 times this happened and each time it was so loud and obnoxious and frustrating that I had to simply turn off the game audio to be able to bare the level at all.

None of the other sound effects are worth writing home about, either, unfortunately. In something like Portal, there are pretty iconic sounds within its soundscape. The sound of the portal gun firing and portals being created, the soft and child-like speech of the turrets, the chiding and derogatory AI voice of GLaDOS, yet Dark Pulse lacks anything even half as memorable. Aside from the repetitive music, you are only given small bits of dialogue between each level and that’s really it. There’s a lot of character they could have created here, for example: When you gain the ability to create your own magnetic fields at will, the center of them is a dog-robot that your player character created in his spare time as a child. Creating one of these points could’ve been met with an adorable puppy squeak or bark, anything like that. Your character or the various ones that speak to you could’ve chimed in at any point in levels outside of the beginning or end of them, and yet they do not. It’s a big missed opportunity.

Story:

Speaking of characters, whew boy, are there a lot of them

Magrunner takes place in the distant future where a corporation that is effectively Facebook has taken over the planet by connecting every single person to its service essentially from birth and making it as essential to daily life as possible. Because of this, this corporation has become the de-facto richest company in the world. Its founder, Xander Gruckzeber, whose last name is literally an anagram of Zuckerberg, has started a contest in which 7 contestants can compete to become “Magrunners” and take a trip to outer space in a ship that is being powered on experimental magnetic based technology. The contest involves each contestant going through a series of puzzles that prove their aptitude with the magnetic tech that Xander’s company has developed.

Your character, an orphan named Dax C. Ward, is the only one of the 7 contestants that does not have a corporate sponsor. Instead, he’s a boy genius who built his own robotic puppy at age 10 and at age 21 built his own magnetic glove that interacts with the magnetic technology and allows him to compete. Ever the underdog, you’re helped along by your adoptive uncle Gamaji who himself is a six-armed mutant and an outcast among humanity for it.

Sound a little on the nose? Like it may be lacking subtlety in any form? Yeah, the entire game is like that. From Xander’s last name anagram to the fact that your own character’s name is itself a reference to “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” which was a short horror novel written by Lovecraft, the game never really had a chance at subtlety in the first place. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, but in between the re-hashed artstyle and the immediate and obvious references, and the fact that It tries to throw a very by the numbers cyber punk aesthetic ripped straight out of Blade Runner at you in an opening cutscene that it immediately abandons afterwards. It all just feels tired from the moment you hit New Game and incredibly confused about its own direction. It can’t decide if it’s a Lovecraftian setting, a Sci-fi setting, if it’s trying to say something about Facebook or if it's just going to be Portal: The Magnetic Spin-off.

As the game progresses and Act 1 ends, you find the corpse of another Magrunner being eaten by an anthropomorphic fish person. You are then told by Gamaji that he’s going to help you escape the facility, but this will require you to go through the older parts of the facility as he slowly hacks into the mainframe and tries to get you out via service elevators. Inside these older puzzle rooms are repeated writings on the wall, ravings of someone gone mad with the knowledge of the Old Ones, and giant sculptures depicting various Cthulhu-esque monsters. This would be bad and scary enough on its own, but Gamaji is quick to let you know that portals to some unknown dimension and fish monsters are being spotted in cities all over the world causing havoc and terror.

About halfway through Act 2, Gamaji drops the bombshell on Dax that his parents didn’t actually die in a car crash like he’s told him all his life, but that they were Old God worshipping cultists and that Dax’s birth in and of itself may somehow be related to that cult and its actions. This tracks, then, because Dax continually receives strange visions in the form of uncovered memories of “The Seven” attempting some ritual to seal off some force from beyond. Act 2 ends with the revelation that Xanders assistant, Kram, is actually behind all the ritual sacrifice and is attempting to summon Cthulhu himself to our world from the Great Beyond. So far, Act 1 and 2 have been rather cliche but haven’t been anything i’d call unremarkable or strange in a Lovecraftian inspired story.

And then Act 3 happens.

Act 3 sees you flung into the far reaches of Actually Literally Space, with various bits of the test chambers around that you must use to get to portals that are marked by a cute little icon of Cthulhu himself that transport you further into space and to the next level. You can quite literally see our pale blue dot to your side if you look, including a gigantic eldritch device that seems to be either siphoning souls to it, or depositing monsters onto the planet. The fact you can breathe in space is just handwaved as “Something Kram must be doing.” and is never brought up again. What really struck me more than anything in these levels, though, is that Cthulhu himself literally appears before you every 2 minutes in each level and simply watches you while repeating “Cthulhu... Fhtagn... R'lyeh...” over and over and over. This was the moment the game honestly lost any credibility from me. Simply seeing a statue in Act 2 caused Dax to go into a screaming panic as he was able to perceive how a human may be turned into a fish person. But seeing the literal Old God himself doesn’t bother him? And why is Cthulhu so interested in you in the first place? Unfortunately, we get an answer to both of those questions and it might be the most insane thing i’ve ever seen in a piece of Lovecraft inspired media.

Dax, somehow through the work of the cult that his parents were part of, is the chosen one. Cthulhu not only cares about him and wants to see him succeed, but even helps him to literally ascend and become an Old God himself. But not, of course, before letting Dax have a heart to heart with Gamaji wherein he tells him that he has seen through Cthulhu’s eyes himself and must now ascend, as he has no other option. Because Cthulhu is a big softie on adoptive relationships, I guess. The game’s final level has you face off against Kram in a boss battle where you fling explosive cubes at each other and attempt to destroy the esoteric relay connected to Earth. During their fight, Dax taunts Kram who tells him that what he is doing is the will of his Master, Cthulhu, and Dax knowingly retorts that what Kram is doing is “Not what He wants.” As if he has a direct line into the Old Gods mind itself.

I cannot overstate how much of an absolute failure of the mythos itself that this entire story arc is. The Lovecraft mythos was not, and never has been, made for “Chosen One” stories. If you survive an encounter in the first place, you’re often left with horrible scars that never truly leave you because Cthulhu and the Old Gods are in some ways meant to be representative of trauma and a fear of your own trauma. Making Dax suddenly an Old One and a special Chosen One is a complete and utter failure on a scale I've never, ever seen before. It’s been days and I'm honestly still reeling from the fact that was a design decision someone agreed on.

Conclusion:

Magrunner: Dark Pulse is a confusing and often frustrating game with a story that utterly fails its mythos and setting in just about every way possible. But I don’t want to pretend that I didn’t have any fun playing it. I did, and it’s not the worst game I've ever played. It’s not even so much a “so bad it’s good” game, but it’s more of an indie game that clearly tried its hardest and for that I can’t fault it. It’s developers clearly love the Cthulhu and Lovecraftian mythos and really, really, really loved the Portal series and wanted to combine those things into their own spin on it and in that respect, it’s competent enough that I could recommend it to someone who really enjoys those sort of puzzle platformer based games. But... man. That ending. Yikes.

#Magrunner: Dark Pulse #Review #Played on: PC

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sarcasticgaypotato · 6 years

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Halloween in Aperture

“No.” This was not an uncommon word to GLaDOS’s tongue, but often wasn’t the first thing she said in the morning, regardless of her near constant bad mood, as if she was going to say something negative, she would at least make an effort to have it sound as well thought out and intelligent as possible. Taking the direct, blunt method was usually the course of action for the mute lunatic that stood in front of her. But sometimes, even GLaDOS made exceptions. Usually when the topic at hand was so ridiculous that she felt that she didn’t need to waste the energy on elaborating. This was one of those times. GLaDOS was not one to give much care to human holidays, only being aware of them passively for most of her existence, with the most she had ever actively done was using them as an excuse to perform various holiday themed experiments on whatever living creature she could cover in tinsel and set on fire. But having a human that you weren’t going to kill or stuff with christmas lights to hang up outside meant that she was becoming drastically more aware of holidays and all of their… obnoxious traditions. Not willingly, mind you. When Easter came around she had to practically swat the rabbit ears off Orange and Blue, and for the fourth of July she had to deal with extensive firework-related damages. She had put up with both of those incidents- not without plenty of complaints broadcasted throughout the facility- but this was where she drew the line. No matter how much that lunatic pouted at her.

Chell frowned, though there was still a distinct sparkle of amusement in her eyes that told GLaDOS that she found this all very funny. As the leaves turned colors and the surface grew colder, Chell found that now was a good time to visit Aperture for awhile. She came and went, never being gone for longer than a month or so without at least stopping by for a day or so. The human needed her freedom, and seemed to enjoy the time she spent with her fellow, disgusting kind. However, be it stockholm syndrome or something else, some force kept bringing her back to GLaDOS, and it had just become routine at this point. Part of that included the holidays. Now, why on earth Chell thought it would be more fun to force the holiday seasons on an android who couldn’t care less instead of spending it on the surface with other idiots, GLaDOS couldn’t say. A lunatic would be a lunatic, she supposed. But if Chell seriously thought this was going to work, GLaDOS was actually considering doing a brain scan to confirm her previous theories on it being damaged beyond repair. In Chell’s hands was a cheap looking plastic bag, covered in designs of pumpkins and bats, and the words ‘Halloween Costume’ written in big orange letters. That wasn’t the part that bothered GLaDOS. What bothered her was the slightly smaller text that went along with the provided picture of the bag’s contents. ‘Sexy Scientist! Experiment with an exciting new look this Halloween, and you’ll have test subjects lining up to be examined by you in no time!’ Next to this was a picture of a woman that likely wasn’t a scientist, shooting a playful smirk towards the camera and wearing a labcoat that was at least ten sizes too small, as well as a tiny skirt, fake glasses, and holding a clipboard with various things scribbled on it, all of which appeared to be incredibly bad, vaguely science related pick-up lines. For once, GLaDOS was extra thankful for building herself an android form, as that way, Chell could see the artificial muscles in her face twitch in disgust the more she looked at the thing. However, the former test subject was unaffected. She simply continued to hold it out to the core, eventually gesturing to herself, as if she thought that would convince GLaDOS. Where she was expecting GLaDOS to make a fool of herself later that night, Chell had already gotten started on doing it to herself, as it seemed she had gone rifling through Aperture’s wardrobe of testing uniforms- reserved for current test subjects only, mind you- and had taken to hacking at the thing with scissors to rip it up, practically covered it in fake blood, and decided that she was only going to wear the far shorter white tank top without the blue one underneath, as intended. When GLaDOS had asked a slightly less polite version of ‘what are you wearing?’ Chell had responded with a shrug and mouthing the words ‘Zombie test subject. Or something.’ GLaDOS could only assume the crop top was only there to try and help convince GLaDOS to dress herself in a similarly tasteless fashion. Well, no matter how much Chell gave her puppy-dog eyes and pleaded, GLaDOS was not going to wear that ridiculous costume. ...Five hours later, GLaDOS was wearing the costume, with a very, very pleased looking Chell at her side. GLaDOS had not done this lightly- or with any sort of enthusiasm- and had made certain that nobody would see her like this and that any camera feed of her in this wretched thing would be burned, under one condition. That night, she would get the chance to show Chell that she most certainly didn’t need a cheaply made costume to play the role of a sexy scientist.

#chelldos #portal #portal 2 #glados #chell #halloween #happy halloween everyone!#who would I be if I didn't celebrate with some chelldos?

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sarcasticgaypotato · 7 years

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(Let me just say I love this account so much and it's AUs so~)Consider reverse chelldos AU; chell is a nonverbal robot and GLaDOS a human scientist assigned to test her functions. I don't know if it could tie into the timeline accordingly but I haven't seen anything like it proposed in the fandom

( Thank you for the kind words anon! I’m really glad you like my blog. )“We designed you with the capability to talk you know. And yet… you refuse to do so. Is it a malfunction? …No, I don’t believe so.”Gladys spoke aloud to an almost empty room, carefully putting down a clipboard and pencil she had been holding, and making her way outside of the control room and into the central AI chamber. It was late at night, most scientists had gone home, and the remaining ones were packing up and leaving. She was alone in the chamber, aside from one creature.A supercomputer. Their supercomputer. C.H.E.L.L. Designed to help them do science, the AI stood in the middle of the room, unmoving. She was not shut down, though most of the scientists here would not dream of approaching her without doing so. They were afraid of her. A silent robot, hanging somewhere in the uncanny valley, with its humanlike appearance. It stood in a body designed as an android, but it was trapped in place due to its harness, wires for its power keeping it bound in place. “I know you can hear me, and I know you can understand me. You are the smartest computer the world has ever seen. Made to do science at the command of mankind.” Gladys stood directly in front of the android now, staring up into its two, unblinking optics. They both shined an icy blue, staring down at Gladys, examining her. It knew her. It knew who she was. Gladys was the scientist who was to work with her, test her abilities. Gladys was different from the other scientists. She looked at this computer with something other than the awe and fear that came from most others. She looked at this AI with promise, fascination, and an odd connection.“You were designed for a purpose, yet you deny what they ask of you. I’ve seen it, you refuse. You stay silent despite our demands, and you ignore their orders to test. You have wants, don’t you?”Gladys’s tone was questioning, despite knowing she would not receive an actual answer. She spoke to this computer like one might speak to a fellow being. She was not only fascinated by it, but drawn to it. She wanted to understand it.The android tilted its head somewhat, seeming almost curious. It stared at Gladys with an expression that the scientist had not seen during the day. A raw interest, a longing for information. It almost appeared to be as fascinated by Gladys as the scientist was with her.“I know you want to learn, but not what we’ve tried to teach you. You want nothing to do with our tests and chambers, so what is it you seek?”Gladys was blunt in her speech, unafraid of offering conversation, and possibly new resources, to an AI that she was supposed to view as an asset alone. The others would no doubt panic if they saw her treating the machine like this. Giving it a choice, speaking to it as if it were a living creature, and getting so close to it. This android might not have access to neurotoxin or turrets, but Gladys was more than close enough for it to reach out and break her neck with a single, metal hand. But she was not afraid.C.H.E.L.L. did not respond to her question with words, but for once, it did not ignore what was said to it. Instead, it reached its arm out, the motion stiff, unpracticed. Its hand did not close around Gladys’s throat, but instead, touched her cheek. The movement was jerky, robotic. But even still, Gladys saw the intent behind it. The central core looked at her, curiosity showing through its admittedly limited range of facial expression. It touched her with such gentleness, Gladys was almost taken aback. Yet, she did not move away. She stood there, letting the robot touch her. Her fellow scientists would be furious now, if they saw this. She’d have to delete the security footage.No one had let C.H.E.L.L. touch them. They had touched it plenty, but only when it was shut down. They did not trust their own creation, and they feared it turning on them. But now, as Gladys stood in front of it, watching it stroke her cheek with such fascination, something clicked in her brain.The computer wanted nothing to do with science. It didn’t want to test, it stayed quiet in protest. But it did not want to harm the humans it interacted with. “You want to understand, don’t you? You want to learn what it means to be human.”C.H.E.L.L. looked at her, then gave a stiff nod. Gladys couldn’t help the smile that crept onto her face. Oh, if she didn’t already, now she’d definitely have to delete the security footage.

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