#MSAPortal AU

[chantillyxlacey]

OKAY SO MSAPortal ideas here

Vivi and Lewis are both test subjects. Lewis remembers who he was before Aperture got its hands on him, even if those memories are a little scrambled. Vivi doesn’t remember a thing about her identity, how she came to be in Aperture, or indeed much of anything at all before she woke up in the Extended Relaxation Chamber.

What she lacks in episodic memory though, she more than makes up for with procedural memory about using the portal gun-- she was part of that test group before everything happened and she’s an absolute beast with the thing. Lewis was part of a different group (he worked mostly with personality cores; as sort of a human Turing test for them) and had never used a portal gun before, so he’s got to learn it from scratch.

Arthur is a personality core. He tried to wake every human up he could find once the reactor started to fail, but only Vivi and Lewis weren’t already vegetables. He’s hugely impressed with how much Lewis knows about AI and how good Vivi is with the portal gun and immediately takes a shine to them.

(More under the cut)

Shiromori is the equivalent of GLaDOS, though there was never a Caroline that got turned into her. She took sort of a Poison Ivy view of things, deciding that plants were more worthy of existing than anything in kingdom Animalia, and humans especially. So when she gets woken up, Aperture actually gets MORE overwhelmed by plant life, and the transformation it undergoes is more that the tangled overgrowth is tailored into a highly manicured garden full of exotic and often dangerous specimens.

Mystery is another AI every bit as complex as Shiromori, but he’s rather fond of humanity. He was dormant for a long while and didn’t ‘wake up’ until shortly before Shiro did. It was him who gave Arthur the idea to start waking up humans to try and assist in an escape from the facility, and the event that woke Shiro up was actually part of Arthur’s attempt to get Mystery plugged into the mainframe that would give him control of the facility instead of her. Mystery’s currently “hiding” from her by playing the part of another personality core, something with a role so innocuous that he’s not even worth thinking about. He can’t risk contacting the Arthur Vivi and Lewis directly, so he instead communicates in cryptic, Rattmann-esque paintings and radio messages.

I’m not sure yet what would be this AU’s equivalent of the cave, or how that would play out. It might be that they attempt to plug Arthur into the mainframe instead of Mystery in a move of desperation? And there’s something in that mainframe that’s the rough equivalent of ???; it was never a problem for Shiro because she’s got it outclassed by miles in terms of firewall protection, but Arthur is easy pickings in comparison. Rather than Shiro being the one to taunt him about his purpose as being a “cowardice” core, it’s ???. (Which is inaccurate anyway; Arthur was indeed designed to be a control measure on Shiro, but he was more meant to embody “self doubt” than “cowardice”)

I’m even more unsure what would follow that-- does Lewis die in this AU, or merely get separated? Does Arthur remain plugged into the mainframe and under ???’s influence or does he get ejected once Shiro is ousted from the mainframe and ??? has control? Does Mystery join their party (’they’ being Arthur and Vivi) now that Shiro isn’t a threat, because while ??? is still very dangerous, it doesn’t have a personal grudge against Mystery like Shiro does. Does Vivi know what happened in the mainframe chamber? If so, did she witness it or was it explained to her after the fact? Do Lewis and Shiro team up a la Chell and POTaTOS, gunning for revenge on Arthur and Mystery respectively? And if so, does Shiro KNOW that Arthur was under the influence of the ??? virus; would she tell Lewis this if she did and would he not believe her, or would she withhold this information?

The possibilities are endless tbh and whoever wants to scream about this AU with me is welcome to in fact I am literally begging you to I’m getting hyped about Portal again and it feels almost like an acid flashback.

#MSA #MSAPortal AU #Portal was my first fandom it's where I got my start on tumblr #so this au feels extra special to me lol

[chantillyxlacey]

i’m going to go harrass hang out with gabe so i’ll be offline for a bit but please continue to thrown AU ideas at me because i’m falling headfirst in love w it

@amongthegentlymad thank u for being such an enabler

(also! i do like the idea of Lewis becoming a rather literal ghost in the machine a whole lot, but i was clueless as to how to make it work :’) Also i liked the idea of having Arthur more or less play [REDACTED]’s role because i think there are a lot of interesting parallels there o3o ))

#plus mystery as a combo of Rattmann and a benevolent version of AEGIS from Portal Stories: Mel struck me as neato too #[REDACTED] is listed as [REDACTED] bc i'd like to protect Tristan from spoilers if possible but i figure you know who i mean there #MSAPortal AU

[chantillyxlacey]

guess whose having Legitimate Ideas about the MSAPortal au

i’m too sleepy to write them down now but you better believe i’m gonna

[chantillyxlacey]

i’m listening to the portal 2 soundtrack to get in the zone to write out ideas about the MSAPortal au and goddddddd this shit is still so fucking good

#aged like fine fuckin' wine #i fucking love portal