Hƛlf-Life 2 (Feat. Indigo)

Black Mesa East

Black Mesa East

“Goodbye, my love,” I left the airboat at the dock, climbing up the ladder and walking towards the building, blowing the vehicle kisses the whole way. I wished I could take it with me. Oh, well. I’d get to meet up with Alyx and DOG and Eli and Mossman and--

As soon as I stepped into the building, all the doors shut around me and the whole place went dark. Before the lights went out I’d seen that it was a small room with one curved wall and a window high up the opposite one. Now everything was black save the glow of the screen of a keypad I didn’t know the combination for.

Suddenly, two bright lights flicked on, blinding me for a moment. Two cameras flipped from the walls and pointed my way. A woman’s voice rang out through some speakers. “We’ve got something. Okay, it’s -- it’s human . . . hello? Take it easy in there. You’re safe now.” The window shutters pulled down to reveal two people. The first was some rebel guy working a control panel and the second was a woman with a reddish brown bun and that same white turtleneck she always wore. She didn’t seem to see me at first.

Some little node things moved across their tracks from the ceiling to the floor, dispensing steam. “You’ll have to forgive the scanning process. We can’t take any chances.” A red sheet of lasers appeared above my head, slowly lowering towards me. I ignored it as it brushed over my body.

I stepped up to the glass window and tapped it harshly. “Hey, Mossman! It’s me!” she turned when I tapped the glass, gasping.

“Dr. Freeman? Gordon Freeman? Is that you? I can’t hear you, Gordon. There’s no microphone on that side. You’ve made it here this quickly -- well, Eli is going to be amazed, not to mention relieved. I’m Dr. Mossman, Dr. Judith Mossman."

“Yeah, I know who you are!” I shouted sarcastically through the thick glass, crossing my arms and leaning against the wall under the long window. The laser sheet moved back up to the ceiling, scanning me once more.

“I told you, there’s no microphone -- ah, there we go. You can come through now.” The door on the far side of the chamber slid open and I stepped through. Mossman came out of the little control room and planted herself next to me. “I’ll take you down to Eli right away. He would never forgive me if I kept you waiting,” she chuckled lightly, treading down a corridor to a closed door. She punched a code into a keypad and the thing slid open. We stepped into another short, bent hallway. “We could certainly use the extra help around here. We’ve covered a lot of ground in the last few months, but things would go so much faster if we had more people with your training. Were closing in on a reliable local teleport technology . . .” she continued to blabber on about scientific stuff as she stood in front of the elevator button without actually calling the thing. I sighed and pushed the button for her since she’d seemingly forgotten. “Oh! Thank you, sorry. Anyway, Eli thinks their portals are string-based . . .” after some more blabbing, the elevator arrived. “. . . if they knew what we were doing with entanglement.” The doors slid open and I stepped in quickly, waiting for this to be over with. I didn’t want to engage in conversation with this lady, so I kept silent, staring at the floors we passed on the way down. The first looked like a lounge room with a Vortigaunt playing chess with a rebel. The second almost made me laugh out loud. A couple of Vorts were wearing big fluffy chef hats, chopping vegetables and cooking food for the people here. The third floor had a few of the aliens doing some kind of technical work, zapping generators with their laser magic stuff. “Oh!” Mossman pulled me from my thoughts as we lowered to the correct floor. “Here’s Eli now.”

“Alright, good. You keep that up,” Eli said to a Vortigaunt who was presenting him with a lab sample of some sort. The lab had a high ceiling and chunks of various technologies scattered around. Monitors and computer bricks coated every desk as large generators took up corners. Against one wall was an exact copy of the teleport in Kleiner’s lab.