The Barracks Under Fire
by EagleRock
Note: Something is screwed up in that it is not letting me post it, even though it's under 8,192 characters. So..., it's split up between two posts.
Chapter 1 - Congregation
Andrea364 had woken up from her long, restless sleep. She was on patrol trying to keep malicious Portal entrants at bay, when she was viciously attacked from behind. When she came to, she was in a dark room she had never seen before. Her body was protesting in pain whenever she tried to do anything, so she found it easier to just sleep.
-----
The sleep was no more comforting. Thoughts turned to the Newgrounds redesign and all the trouble it caused. Back then, she was in the Elite Guard. As a Corporal, she was respected as a promising recruit and well-liked. The Barracks Officers were quite happy with her, and her career was making her life in Newgrounds satisfying. Then, all of a sudden, the government changed everything. All of Newgrounds changed. They said it was for the better, but she only saw it become worse. Behind the glitz and glamour of the new look of the place, she saw conspiracy all around her. New levels came about, supposedly raising everyone's status. But did they? Was it all a plot to make people forget about what was happening around them?
That's when she was demoted. She received a letter one particularly dreary morning that the "new" Elite Guard had higher standards. Forget Corporal...she didn't even make the cut for Private. She was kicked out of the Elite Guard. In fact, the letter didn't even have "Elite Guard" written on it at all! It all seemed fishy to her, but she couldn't figure out what was going on. All she knew at that point was that she was discharged and she had nowhere to go.
Luckily, Supreme Commander EagleRock said that he didn't agree with all of the discharging and demoting that was happening, and that those that were discharged still had a home. Still, she had to find work, and it wouldn't be in the Elite Guard. Luckily, she was reinstated to the Newgrounds Police Department as a Captain. She had been discharged as a Captain a while back to join the Elite Guard, and now she was back where she started months ago. While Unit Ops TailsPrower comforted her that she was a gifted officer, she still felt uneasy about the changes made by the higher ups. The only thing she could do was drown herself into her work to make her forget about the Elite Guard. That's what found her working overtime on the Portal that fateful night.
-----
As she woke up, she felt a world better. Pain had left her body for the most part. The intense pain she had all over her body was now a mere annoyance in the back of her mind. As she got up off the cot, she got a look around the Spartan atmosphere she was entrapped in. Nothing was to be seen but a cot with no pillow and a door with no knob. A look around the room gave her shivers, as she was introduced to what looked like a new world that she was abducted into. She tried frantically to sort the whole thing in her head, to no avail.
Just then, a loud beep came over some loudspeaker in the room and an intercom started speaking in a crackly voice:
"Attention! The doors are now unlocking. We suggest that you congregate in your control room at this time. Rations will be served soon in the mess. You can locate the control room by following the red floor markings and the mess by the green floor markings. That is all."
As the crackly voice stopped, another loud beep came from the doorway, not unlike the ones you hear before a crash-test car is set to travel to its uneventful death. The large metal door then proceeded to recede into the wall next to it as she saw the hallway outside.
Immediately, she darted over to the side of the door, keeping watch for anything nearby. She instinctively grabbed for her holster to grab her blam pistol, but it was gone. There wasn't anything she could use as a weapon, either. Even the cot was bolted to the ground.
Fear started to fill her body as she listened intently for anything outside. Down the hallway, she started to hear the echo of boots as they came down the hallway. They sounded rushed, as if they had somewhere to go. Her breathing became hard as the steps approached her door.
-----
"Hello? Anyone there?" The voice sounded familiar to Andrea. She then saw a head peek in. It was Commander Coop83.
"Hey! Am I glad to see you! What the hell is going on here, Commander?"
"I don't know," he replied. "I just came to myself. This is all fucked up. I don't like this one bit. We need to get the hell out of here."
"I'm right behind you, sir. Let's see if we can get some weaponry or something."
"I doubt it. The flawlessness of these people's work would lead me to believe we're not going to find a stock of weapons just hanging around for us to find."
"Well we need to do SOMETHING. You think it's wise to head to that control center they're talking about?"