There is a muffled song coming from somewhere. It's not a song she's familiar with. In fact, the whole place is nothing like anything she's familiar with. She seems to be in some metal-and-glass pod, for starters, which is itself inside a rather peculiar...
...room.
There are no doors.
And then the little metal fingers at the end of her portal gun become connected by electricity and the cube twitches—
—and she can easily lift it with the portal gun, it's like it can just telekinetically move the cube like it's completely weightless.
And the door opens! "Once again, excellent work. As part of a required test protocol, we will not monitor the next test chamber. You will be entirely on your own. Good luck."
And in the corridor... from this distance she can see the emancipation field but not the actual device.
She closes her eyes and 'looks' with groundsense, feeling for the shape of the terrain. Well, more like shape of the architecture, in this case. Where are those wall fixtures?
They are... not there! Neither are walls. There are metal grids replacing a specific section of the walls, and the Emancipator fixtures are outside the chamber—they're not exactly the same as the ones Sable's seen before but are recognizable enough, set some ten feet back behind the grids.
And now that she's paying attention she might notice that there is rather a lot of empty space beyond the edges of the chamber. Like. A lot.
- that's a really unsettling thing to suddenly notice about one's environment. Um. What. She winces slightly and expands to her full range, trying to figure out - what's out there, why it's like this -
The walls that are not metal grids actually have more wallstuff separating the chamber proper from the empty space but eventually there is empty space in all directions. The chamber can apparently be disassembled—there are metal arms connected to all walls and test elements—and it's suspended/held up by these metal arms. There are lots of metal arms, in a lot of empty space, and farther away some other metal arms are moving and assembling or disassembling other rooms, moving wall parts around, moving other weird machines around.
The vertical track of rooms she's in is not the only one—there are in fact other similarly weird towers of rooms connected to each other by elevators. She is however still the only living thing within her range.
Um. Well. Fuck.
She can cut the power on the Emancipator fixtures, anyway. She does that.
"For the continued functioning of the test chambers, please do not destroy Vital Testing Apparatus."
"I am going to leave this place with all of my teeth," she says, proceeding toward the exit.
The voice does not respond, but if Sable hasn't stopped paying attention she'll notice a lot of movement in the chamber above, changing this and that and something else.
Like such:
There are two buttons connected to the exit, two elevated platforms, and a pit. The pit and one of the platforms have cubes, and the wall behind the other platform has the orange end of the portal. Pretty straightforward, all in all.
Welp. Time to put down her radios.
She traipses over to the pit and portals its cube onto the orange-portal platform, then makes a portal in the wall next to the pit and steps through and shoves the cube off the platform with portal-thingy telekinesis, then makes a portal in the opposite wall and steps through and shoves that cube off its platform, then - because she does not like jumping from heights if she doesn't have to - steps back through and makes a portal in the wall near one of the buttons and steps through that and arranges the cubes on the buttons and picks her radios back up.
The door opens. "As part of a required test protocol, our previous statement suggesting that we would not monitor this chamber was an outright fabrication. Good job. As part of a required test protocol, we will stop enhancing the truth in three, two, o—" Cut off by static.
The voice has used the metal grid trick again, except this time the electronic parts are much farther away—some hundred feet to either side rather than just ten.
She cuts the power to the Emancipator fixtures without breaking stride.
The elevator accepts her. As it ascends, the voice pipes up again: "It is incredible! Thanks to the efforts of the Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grid Research Team, the Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grid no longer poses a risk to crowns, tooth enamel, tooth filings, and teeth. Please proceed through the Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grid."
The elevator stops and there's another Emancipation Grid waiting for her. The device is in fact subtly internally different than the previous ones.
"But I've gotten so attached to my unauthorized equipment," says Sable. "And my ear canals. And you have not come off as particularly trustworthy in our interactions so far."
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