#AND THAT WHATEVER HE WRITES IS PHENOMINAL | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

jade-marie · 3 years

Text

Top 10 books fics I read in 2020

Tagged by @sothischickshe

I don’t read books. I’m trash. So have my top 10 fics. These aren’t in any real order, btw.

Finally got round to adding some content to each one. Send word to my family, I died doing this. All the fluffy goodness is hitting me right in the feels😭😭😭

Do not collect $200 by @mrslackles

My OG favourite series. I will talk about this till the cows come home, I will read it over and over again until the day I die. So fucking good. The plot, the characterisation, the angst, the fluff, it just has everything and I fucking love it.

Favourite snippet:

Her touch is so light that Rio shivers and his tongue darts out for a second, meeting two of her fingers, and it makes their eyes meet.

And the look she finds there, god, it’s indescribable – no words, there are no words. Yet she knows what it means. Nobody’s ever told me I’m a good kisser and nobody’s ever touched you like this.

She doesn’t say it aloud but it doesn’t matter, not really. They both know it.

And Beth doesn't know when she falls asleep, only that it's with her palm on his throat and her fingers splayed over his lips.

Lush life by @hereliesbb

Lush life is basically my comfort blanket. I have a bad day, I read it and I’m smiling again. Every time. Without fail. The fluffiest fucking shit I’ve ever read in my life, even the angst is fluffy. I love it so much, I cannot find the words.

Favourite snippet:

“What?” she asked when she saw he was staring. She looked back in the mirror to make sure she didn’t have anything in her teeth.

“You’re beautiful,” he said and then huffed like he was making fun of himself. Beth felt her face flush and about a hundred thousand butterflies take flight inside of her.

Warm water by @inyoursheets

Angst, yearning, friends to lovers, slow burn AND THEY WERE ROOMMATES. Such a good read omg 😫

Favourite snippet:

She kisses him.

Elizabeth. Elizabeth kisses him.

He can’t move—can’t think, not with her up close, her scent overwhelming him, her soft body pressed into him—when she’s already pulling back, jerking to a halt.

And just like that, he’s done. Finished. Can no longer find it in him to keep it up, his carefully crafted indifference, the control he tried to grasp so eagerly. No point guarding it from her any longer, not with those wild, wide eyes peering up at him like he can give her something, here, now.

Good sport by fireinsideforfun

Again, phenominal characterisation. I love the way she portrays their vulnerability. It’s just so so so beautifully written.

Also, the image of Rio drowning in a pair of ginormous pyjamas makes me feel some shit🤣

Favourite snippet:

“You’re not going to go rotten on me, are you darlin’?” he quietly asks her.

The question takes her aback, because although his voice is gentle his eyes are speaking volumes, something dark and desolate brewing.

“No. Never,” she says to him and means it.

He scoffs. “How can you know?”

“Because we’ve already been there before,” she says, and she can tell he knows what she’s referring to. “I already tried to get rid of the king and I couldn’t do it. We’ve been through those motions together. It’s done.”

Milkshakes by @emilykolburn

Dad Rio vibes, Rio and babies. Milkshake meetcute. I cannot. Literally so adorable.

Favourite snippet:

Rio was looking her up and down, slowly taking in every inch of her that he could, and she noted that he had that twinkle in his eyes again. When his eyes eventually found hers, he tilted his head to the side a little, tongue running slowly across his bottom lip. The intensity in the eye contact alone made her want to shrink away. She wasn’t used to it, she realised, but the longer they looked into each other’s eyes, and the way the corner of his mouth slowly twitched up into a smirk, she found she liked it.

Irresistible by @wakeupflawless

Highschool au. Enemies to lovers. I eat that shit UP.

Before anyone could say anything, she grabbed the front of his shirt, yanking him down to her for a very public, very dirty kiss.

“Oh, shit,” She heard Pedro say.

For once in his life Rio must have been stunned, because he was frozen against her for a moment. He grabbed her hips, pulling her closer to him and deepening the kiss. The bystanders erupted, she heard hoots and hollers coming from the guys and exclamations of “Oh my God!” from the girls.

“Hey! That’s enough” Called the Vice Principal, “Everyone get to class!”

Beth broke their kiss, panting slightly and grinning ear to ear.

“What was that?” Rio asked, raising his eyebrows.

“So everyone knows I’m hittin’ it,” Beth replied, smirking, “And also to say sorry,”

Love despite by @itsbriology

Dad Rio strikes again. If Lindsay throws in one more big-hand-small-baby-ratio reference... i’m pretty sure my ovaries will explode inside of my body and I’ll die of internal bleeding 🙃🙃🙃

Favourite snippet:

The hiccups lasted longer than he thought, almost to the point he wondered if there wasn’t something else he could do for her. But they eventually slowed and so did her tears, and then he stopped and looked down at her little head full of soft brown hair that had landed on his chest and watched her eyes drift shut again from the pure exhaustion of the near traumatizing event.

“There ya go, sleepy head. See, I told ya.” He laughed down at her as he continued holding her and pushing the cart down the aisle. A little old lady stopped and took in the sight of them.

“Someone’s a good daddy,” She smiled up at him with Jane cozy in his arms and he stopped. The lady looked to be about eighty and probably weighed seventy pounds.

“Uhh, no… this ain’t…” He tried telling her but she interrupted.

“What an adorable little girl you’ve got there.”

The lady looked up at them grinning.“Thank you.” He smiled back, not knowing what else to say in that moment.

Criminology 101 by @sdktrs12

College au. Cars being destroyed. Fluffy shit. Idiots being idiots. LOVE ITTTTT

He moves one hand up to brush her hair out of her face. “Do you trust me?”

I do that’s the whole problem, she wants to scream. She finds herself nodding quietly instead.

“That’s good.” He leans down, presses his lips against her temple in a soft kiss that makes her heart skip a beat.

Beth closes her eyes as she leans into him, giving in and letting herself fall into the dark abyss that is his touch, his smell, his voice.

Shit.

She’s in so much trouble.

Both sides of the law by @joeyjoeylee

Slow burn. Y E A R N I N G. But they don’t even know they’re yearning. Taking the constant oneupmanship and translating it into a law school setting - genius. So so good.

Favourite snippet:

“Shouldn’t you be at the bar?” She really needed to let Gretchen know some of the staff had a distinct professionalism problem. If, or when, she was in charge of throwing the party next year, she’d have to make sure they did a better job of recruiting the help.

“Was just there, actually.” He wiggled his hand to show her the beer bottle he was holding. “But Gretch got on me ‘bout not having my nametag.”

She was confused and a little scandalized. Was he really drinking on the job? And…”Gretch”? He had to mean Gretchen? Granted, Beth barely knew her, but Gretchen hadn’t seemed like someone who would be on a first name basis with the staff. And why would he have a nametag? Nametags were for the students, and he was just a bartender…

Oh.

Oh no.

Everything seemed suddenly to be moving very slowly and she seemed to be watching it all unfold from outside her own body.

She watched him lean closer again to reach behind her and pick up the last nametag from the table.

She watched him pluck the Sharpie from her hand and use it to cross out “Christopher” then write “Rio” in big block letters that still managed to look messy.

Then she watched as he made a production of pinning the nametag just so to his lapel, mirroring her, exact and mocking, grinning down at her all the while.

Oh no.

A time to kill @sothischickshe

JUSTICE FOR MICK. And his shirt. Poor bby did not sign up for dealing with these two dumbasses and their dumbassery. Grumpy Rio pov is always a winner in my book. It’s comedy gold.

Favourite snippet:

Jesus, her hair is past lank. He sniffs. “You’re ripe. Go shower, man.”

Elizabeth grumbles incessantly until he agrees she can have coffee first, but he draws a line under a single cup, demanding she hurry.

Rio opens the windows wide as they allow. There’s a distinct scent of manure in the air, but it honestly might be preferable.

“That shirt needs washing too!” he yells from a safe nasal distance.

She literally punts the shirt at him from the bathroom, before slamming then locking the door. The handle vibrates for ages after.

He debates sourcing some tongs to handle the offending item with. When he can’t find any, considers setting fire to it instead. Surely Elizabeth can make herself a dress outta all the hair she incessantly moults over every inch or some shit.

Eventually he chucks it in for a wash with some other bits, holding his nose closed.

Elizabeth’s in the bathroom for fucking ages. He assumes it’s payback for pointing out she stunk, or whatever. But it ain’t cute.

He jiggles the handle, knocks on the door. There’s no response.

“Oi!” Rio shouts. “Hurry up, I gotta piss!” It’s not, strictly speaking, true. But. It could be. Hogging the bathroom’s just rude.

“Go away!” she squawks. Then, “Go outside!”

He keeps it up, and she mostly ignores him. Though when he insinuates she’s taking the world’s longest shit, she does straight up tell him to fuck off.

Tagging @purplemagic @wakeupflawless @00gangfriend00 @joeyjoeylee

#tag game #fics #gg fic

31 notes · View notes

axolotiels · 7 years

Text

Kick in the Head Ch. 3

We return to our passive-aggressive/panicky robots today! Thanks to @weavingmemories who is better at writing GLaDOS than me and is also a doll. Thank you for the support, again, it’s phenominal,,

It took a good ten minutes or so for Wheatley to boot himself back up. Or really, if it was up to him, he was sure he would have remained in sleep mode for quite some time longer. But something sharp and shock-y had jabbed itself into his non-existent side and had jolted his systems awake. Wheatley himself was only partially conscious during the boot-up, his ‘thought’s muddled with delirium and the absence of any recent memory. He didn’t even recognize his own voice.

What? Oh.. ugh.. What happened… It wasn’t even a question really, more of an aloof statement that he couldn’t remember saying two seconds after saying it. Or rather, thinking it.

Personality loaded. Commencing autonomy boot and motor control boot.

He didn’t know whose voice that one was in the least, but it didn’t matter. Something was being loaded up to help him feel less like he’d been tossed from a high ledge. Usually after waking up from sleep mode he was right as rain could be while floating about in space. Today was horrible and he hadn’t yet loaded the cognitive ability to figure out why.

Autonomy boot complete, motor control at 54%. Okay, okay, that was all fine and good, now he could think.

It was like waking up after a nap at an odd hour of the day: rather than feeling rested he thought he’d been dunked into a wash basin and flung into the orbit of the earth. He was having a bit of trouble trying to actually remember what had happened and how long he had been out. He was in space and had been in space since he had to way to get out of space, and so therefore it should stand to reason that he had been in space before he had knocked out.

Let’s see, he’d been cleaning up his files and tucking the undesirable ones away. Wheatley would use the word ‘undesirable’ to describe technical files and repression files and the occasional recipe for food that he could neither prepare nor eat.

The shutters over his optic creaked open, and he found himself staring into the spotty and starry abyss that awaited him when not looking at the earth, the sun, or the moon. If he had a nose, he would have wrinkled it in mild dismay. He glanced from side to side, attempting to spin himself a bit to get a more interesting view. The little core did indeed spin but it ended up being much too quickly for his liking.

Irritated, he waited until he stopped and watched the white star pinpoints turn into pale white smears that bled into the blur of the earth and the moon. That voice that was not his own spoke up again.

Recent connection to Michigan Relay Tower 48 was broken. Host is requesting contact: y/n?

To say that Wheatley’s blood had run cold would not be accurate. Neither would be that ‘he was biting his nails’ nor ‘he was at death’s door’. Instead, imagine for a moment what it is like to have the rug pulled out from under you. Then imagine being wrapped in the rug, thrown down a flight of concrete stairs, picked up by the feet, lit on fire, and rolled from the top of a steep mountain only to be plunged into icy water hundreds of feet below. That would be about half the intensity of the amalgamation of emotions that Wheatley felt once he remembered everything that had recently happened.

The voice asked again, Grant host access to your communication channel: y/n?

It was like he’d had a bucket of cold water dumped on him, which he may have actually preferred to this. At least with the bucket of water he’d fizzle out until his systems managed to clean it away. All Aperture technology could shed water, after all; they would only get water damage if they were submerged. He did not remember how he knew this, likely something had gone wrong while he was still near the scientists and therefore still near water, but that was here nor there.

No no no, reject, reject! He yelped despairingly, none the wiser that the voice-that-was-not-his was not to be refused easily.

Please open the communication hub. The prompt continued and was silent for a few seconds before reiterating its wishes. Wheatley was at least thankful that it wasn’t her voice, but he knew it was probably her sending them.

Many expressions that we commonly use are often understatements, like the cavalcade of emotions that Wheatley was processing being boiled down to simple ‘surprise’. To say that the personality core had a ‘funny feeling’ that something bad would happen when he opened the communication hub to silence the nattering little voice would be like saying circus performers had a slightly challenging job or that Android Hell might be real. To describe it in a commonly used expression: it would be another understatement of the century.

Please open the communication hub. The voice-that-was-not-his said again, it’s tone not changing but Wheatley getting more and more put off each time it told him to. His cracked optic settled on the little bit of earth that he could see, and aside from the clouds nothing much had changed. It was still the lump of green, blue, brown, and white rock that it always was, or always had been to Wheatley anyway.

Quite suddenly, the little core remembered that GLaDOS’ relay tower was not the only thing that he had gained access to while sweeping out the code-y cobwebs of his head. There had been a radio station, one that had kept him occupied for a small period of time before he decided to bite the bullet and connect to the relay tower in Michigan. Now that Wheatley thought about it, albeit not very deeply, he wondered if the United States were still united at all.

While he was still in the facility being tweaked and poked and prodded by the white-coated buggers that dared to call themselves scientists he had gathered from being told that 1. He was in the United States, and 2. That the US was the only country that seemed to make scientific breakthroughs. He’d also gathered from a very angry and sick sounding man over the speakers that a country named Black Mesa had stolen quite a few things from Aperture, which Wheatley had in turn learned was in fact, not a country, but a building inside of a state inside of a country. For all the things that Wheatley had learned, he retained a remarkable amount, but only in hastily written jumbles of code that read more like stereo instructions than notes on the world around him.

But he was no longer in Aperture or its parent state or its parent country and was instead floating in the earth’s orbit with two little nattering voices to keep him company while he was on the brink of a simulated anxiety attack. Wheatley didn’t like his emotions in the least; they seemed rather useless to him. He’d seen other cores, one that lacked sufficient emotion or ones that were made entirely out of emotion, and they seemed to have no moral dilemmas on which direction to travel in that day or what to use to make spike plates look cooler before murder.

It was quite the easy dilemma to pick which station to tune into, but even despite this Wheatley had an even funnier feeling that GLaDOS could patch herself in any time that she wanted. She knew where he was in the atmosphere now, she could trace him. She probably had a little locator button pinging off over an image of the earth now.

Please open the communication hub. The voice said again, breaking his two-cart train of thought. Wheatley squinted uneasily at the earth again, and sighed.

He did open the communication hub, but rather than the hellish screaming and grating he had endured for two days straight, he was given the list of stations to pick from again. Michigan Relay Tower 48 was blinking green; he wouldn’t touch that with a ten-line code. Pirate Station Sinatra was still active, and a few others had been added to the list, but they looked to be relay towers for said station with names such as Sinatra Station 2 and Sinatra Station Kaltag.

So Wheatley did the logical thing and tried to shut himself off again.

Error: solar charge capacity reached. Unable to initiate sleep mode. Please connect to server.

Oh that’s just lovely. Wheatley scoffed at nobody. That was how he was still alive? Solar power? Solar powered what? I’ve got nothing to absorb sun juice or whatever it is I’m doing.

Wheatley was doing something known as ‘stalling’. Stalling can be talking an inordinate amount of time to someone you do not wish to talk to in order to buy time for either a friend or yourself to delay the oncoming and awful news that you do not want to hear. Stalling can also be described as doing any number of activities to keep yourself from doing a task that you find particularly boring or do not want to do anyway. Some will stall to avoid having to clean a tank of alligators as punishment for daring to have an opinion that a large sum of people did not like, likewise as some will stall by writing a four page essay on comedians or voice actors one particularly likes rather than writing a four page essay on the history of titanium alloy. In fact, you might say that I am stalling now while attempting to avoid work by writing this story or that I am stalling against telling the actual story in favor of descriptors, and you would be correct.

Wheatley shuffled between Station Sinatra’s access points a few times, feeling sure that if he opened any channel then some screaming and scraping would ensue, and if he did not open a channel then a channel would open itself and then things would get worse from there.

The command prompt hovered over acceptance of Pirate Station Sinatra, and he accepted. There was a horrifying few seconds of nothing, then the three connecting beeps that were followed by the middle of a song. He remained still and terrified that a high pitched shriek would tear through him at any moment, but it never came. The song that had been playing, whatever it was he could not remember, faded out into a light static buzz.

It was soon replaced by another song, one that actually did feature Frank Sinatra, though he would be damned if he knew which one. He liked them, but most of his music sounded the same. Baby this and sweetheart that all piped over a saxophone; if Wheatley hadn’t been starved for sound he would have disliked it all much more quickly. Luckily enough, Frank Sinatra was not all that played on Station Sinatra.

Wheatley fitfully listened to the music that was funneled up from the station, not really having anything to look at but looking out to see anyway. Many songs passed, some of them jaunty and some of them sad, but most of them blending together into one gramophone and radio filtered cluster of sound. It had been quite a while since Wheatley had found his thoughts wandering by accident, but beginning to wander they did.

The core, for once, asked all the correct questions. There are useless questions that he could have asked, like ‘How many budgerigars could I buy for 50 dollars’ or ‘If I was a human stuck in space how much flesh would be left on my body with nothing to break it down’. There are even more questions that would prove useless to him but prove quite useful in other situations, and it was a miracle that Wheatley did not ask any of them. But the questions that Wheatley did ask, be it of himself or of the night sky that he couldn’t get away from if he tried, were appropriate.

What is she going to do to me? Was the first and foremost, and for all he knew there was a bug or a tap in his head that let her monitor his thoughts. He wouldn’t put it past her to install such a thing. Another question was When is she going to do it?

Wheatley had been shuffling from absolutely panicked to bitter to oddly calm and all the way back for about two hours at that point. He was not very good at distracting himself on a good day, and absolutely horrendous at distracting himself when he had nothing else to do. The core decided that knowing others was just too much of a strain on him.

The scientists had been a strain, the other cores had been a strain, she had been a strain. He had often been torn between feeling sorry for himself, feeling sorry for her, and feeling angry at her in his early months in the atmosphere. Now he didn’t know how he felt on the issue, but most of it was bitter and the other half dismissive. All he had tried to do was help her, then she had the nerve to go behind his back, talk about him to that… that great yellow-eyed demon, and… and… Wheatley tried to concentrate, his shutters closing. That was what happened, right? He thought, having trouble recalling. He chirped to himself half-heartedly in a thinly-veiled attempt to not remember, because he simply did not want to. Of course that’s what happened, yes! I only fight back when I'm bein’ pushed, not unfair at all.

Wheatley, of course, was being very unfair.

He was glad there had been no leftover testing residue in his body left after he’d been ripped out of the chassis by the vacuum of space. He shuddered to think of how bad the itch could get if he were not wired into any sort of testing system at all. Serves her right now, to have no test subjects. The core thought resolutely. Killin’ them all off, what did she think was going to happen?

Wheatley did not acknowledge that he had done the same thing on a lesser scale. The core did not acknowledge a lot of things that made him feel guilty, as most of us do not. It is in human nature to disregard things that make us feel bad, dismal, or any other word that describes a negative feeling, and though Wheatley was not human, he was certainly more than capable of feeling those things. As previously discussed, he hated being able to.

A-and if you’re listening, you… you… He was going to say something that would be far too heinous to type out here, but luckily enough for me, he did not finish his sentence. Instead, he trailed away and rethought attempting to bolster her any further.

He sat in silence again, listening to Station Sinatra and their spurs that jingle-jangle-jingled. That’s definitely not ol’ Frank. He thought, staring down at the blurry sphere of the earth.

“I got spurs that jingle-jangle-jingle (Jingle jangle)”

It did not occur to Wheatley that he had begun twittering along, at least mentally.

“As I go ridin’ merrily along,

And they sing, "Oh, ain't you glad you're single",

And that song ain't so very far from wrong!”

“Wrong!~” There came a voice that was not his, was not the prompt voice, and was not GLaDOS’ voice but sounded an awful lot like it. He froze immediately, the music still piping along and the voice continued on.

Oh, what bloody now? The screaming wasn’t enough for you? You can’t let me rest after 2 days of nonstop android agony? He asked all these questions in an endless panicked stream of words, sounds, and the most raw fear that Wheatley had felt since GLaDOS had first patched in. Well, that wasn’t true. The first time was much worse, but that did not stop him from feeling as ‘ill’ as a machine could feel.

It is an odd thing, to speak nonstop in the face of danger. There are some places in which speaking nonstop is appropriate, such as attempting to call for help from nearby people or putting on an hour-long stand up special to a particularly drunk crowd. And then there are places in which it is the least appropriate thing in the world, like attempting to talk down a hungry looking pack of coyotes or trying to get a homicidal AI not to crush your smelly human in her claws like a fiberglass banana.

Wheatley’s predicament fell somewhere in the middle, as he was neither hosting stand-up nor was he trying to keep an ungrateful human fleshbag from getting her spine snapped. He was in no immediate danger, but dreaded the screeching that he was sure would be patched in at any second.

The robots on the other end of his incessant babbling could never have been more confused.

P-body was fairly smart, even as Aperture appliances go. GLaDOS didn’t refer to her as ‘P-body’ often, as she felt that would spoil her more than she already had been, likewise she did not refer to Blue as ‘Atlas’ for the same reason.

She was honestly a bit disappointed in herself that she had made them so sentient and then had not made them for doing anything useful, other than testing of course. They had seemed overjoyed when she had given them a task that was not completing a testing course, and had been attending it dutifully, which was a relief. She didn’t need them to do it, really, but it would be one less bunch of jargon she’d have to concern herself with until repairing the seemingly ever-growing facility was done.

GLaDOS heard Orange give a high pitched little warble in tandem with the radio that had been piping away since the moron’s broadcast had turned back on. She had a microphone feed coming in from the room where they were monitoring the signal, and it was soon jammed with panicked babbling and pleading.

It was all very amusing, especially the commentary that she found her two test gremlins to be giving.

Is this really the core who… who took over her facility? Orange twittered, her singing broken away.

He’s like a scared little kid who happens to sound like a 40 year old human. Is he still going? Blue responded testily.

“Of course he’s still going, he thinks he’s getting away with something.” GLaDOS droned through her own input, and was quite pleased when the yammering stopped.

There are many ways in which things can go wrong in a facility like Aperture. There could be the more bland things like coffee being spilt and frying a few wires, or you could go to either end of the homicidal AI extreme, be it with the original or a replacement core with a particularly annoying habit of never shutting up. There are other instances in which other things can go wrong that are more within the confines of the facility itself than to be blamed on any AI in control of said facility, and that is precisely what went wrong.

It could be felt all the way in her room, and the two test bots that were floors lower felt it even more so, frightened by a rather unpleasant sound: that of metal bending and collapsing. It made a horrible groaning and squeaking all at the same time, and several of GLaDOS’ image feeds went blank.

A bit startled, she tried to figure out what the problem was as Blue and Orange both gave surprised wails and scrambled to the nearest corner. Flipping around several of her nearby cameras and remaining feeds, she found that, much to her horror, one of the long pieces of rebar she had been using to make a reinforcement plate beneath new Aperture had buckled from the wall. The whole left side of the facility that had been resting on it had begun bending it.

This was easily enough fixed, she merely collapsed most of those rooms and shuffled them off to the side until she got their standard railings mounted. When she heard someone speak, she was both annoyed and even more surprised.

“What the hell was that?” It was Wheatley, who had been silent since she had patched herself into the communication relay.

She physically narrowed her optic; what the hell was he trying to pull?

“I would have thought you were aware of the grotesque mutilation you’ve imparted on my facility. I’ve been trying to repair it, you dolt.”

A soft staticy silence. “For… for three years?” He sounded astonished.

GLaDOS was angry, there was no doubt about that. She was also embittered, surprised, and even a little bit baffled by his inability to comprehend the amount of damage he had done to her home. The rebar had stopped creaking by then but she felt it as the bent piece finally broke away and shook the framing that she’d been setting, so she sent the sectional nanobots to repair the jagged edges of the broken bar.

For once, she didn’t know exactly what to say. This happened very rarely, usually when she was having a mental fit or there were too many scathing options to choose from. Today, it was a bit of both but mostly the latter. She sorted through her options painstakingly for what seemed like seconds, and decided it would be more fun to remain silent.

For good measure, she muted Blue and Orange’s audio input as well. A few moments passed as she resumed rebalancing the rooms that had been resting on the one faulty piece of rebar and she waited like a cocky leopard in the underbrush.

It wasn’t long until she either had another bit of reinforced steel brought or the little moron started chattering like a parakeet.

“Oh… hello? God what was that?” and then more to himself, “Bunch of idiots, it’s been three years and they’re still letting whatever it was kick around in there! Miss High-and-Mighty, Miss ‘You-Ruined-My-Facility’, she hasn’t done anything to keep that from happening’ again, has she?”

GLaDOS narrowed her optic again, knowing full well that the talking was more for the sake of himself rather than attempting to make contact. After all, what would that little idiot know about repairing a facility; he didn’t even destroy it all the way.

A few more moments of relative quiet passed and the nanobot crew reported the even shaving of the broken beam; she waved them away as he started talking again.

“This-this isn’t funny anymore.” He sounded afraid; good. “Oh… oh no.. that was… that was my only way… oh, nonononono.”

Here was a signal being sent in from Blue and Orange’s monitor room. “What’s going on? Is-is the facility collapsing?”

GLaDOS muted that signal too; far below a reinforced bar was being burned into place. She’d have to see what caused it to break in the first place from the nanobots soon, but for now, this was fun.

She didn’t think Aperture constructs were able to have panic attacks but he sure was trying. “Oh nononono, this… ohh, this is bad. This is very bad. That could have been my only way out, oh no.”

It was at that time another tremor did happen, and she realized that while she had many things focused in places that they needed to be, that this was causing quite a few things to rupture, a word which here means ‘explode violently and send tremors rippling through the facility, probably shaking rebar loose’. GLaDOS was practical in every sense of the word but even she could get distracted when playing around with someone who was isolated in space.

“You know, I’ve been thinking,” She began, finally giving him a response and shattering his chain of panicky babble. “Not that you would know how to think, of course, but anyway.”

GLaDOS couldn’t help but narrow her optic again, even though there was nobody there to witness it or the way her chassis coiled up to the ceiling like a venomous snake. “Simply put, it’s funny watching you squirm in space. But it’s only funny for a little while. Even if you aren’t here, you still manage to somehow take apart this facility in one way or another.”

Something in her told her told her that he’d flinched a bit, probably the gyroscopic mechanism that could only twitch in space. Another something or other shook and she turned several cameras, annoyed; Blue and Orange were still shaking in their built-in long-fall boots and pressing the contact button frantically. She blinked the disassembler to life and they scrambled for it, allow her to return her attention to the talkative little idiot that she could not see.

“I'm going to be very, very generous today, metal ball, so you might want to listen. Well, if you value your audio processors anyway. Given I have my hands full fixing my facility, I honestly don't have the time to be distracted by your... incompetence. So, instead of you deciding when to continuously break my concentration, I've come up with a better idea. Are you listening? ”

GLaDOS would imagine that he did, since he had no other choice but to listen, but he’d probably find a way to miss every point she’d made.

Her voice went smooth again, almost mimicking the purr of some great metal leopard.“If you check in to this channel every day for… say, an hour, then I won’t patch in Room 939. Unless you say something stupid, which let’s face it, is very liable to happen. Have we reached an agreement?”

Another ripple, but smaller; The reactor cores were finally calming down. There was no audible response but the channel was still live.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” She admonished in the same tone that a school teacher does when a troublesome student is finally expelled. “You already took up too much of my time today, even with the monitors on you, so-”

“Monitors?” Wheatley squeaked, scared and indignant at the same time.

“Yes, monitors. Those two robots you were going to use for nothing but testing? I’ve given them several other occupations, because unlike some constructs, I know when to quit.”

Blue and Orange were still in the disassembler but pinged something toward her, which she did not immediately answer.

“O-oh…” He sounded as though he was withering, even if he was in space and was a robot with the inability to wither. A bit of static struck the channel as the power surged, but GLaDOS wasn’t worried about that. “Do I… what time do I check in?”

“You have no internal clock.” She said simply, and without giving him a solid answer, cut the channel for the day and focused on making sure her facility did not fall into even more disrepair.

#portal #portal 2 #GLaDOS #Wheatley #Atlas #P-Body #kick in the head

15 notes · View notes