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SCENE: CHARLES E. CHEESE ENTERTAINMENT CENTER (NOT A RESTAURANT!! VERY IMPORTANT!). some time between epilogue and hl2vrai trailer. yes the central limit theorem applies.
"How are you - "
Here? Alive? Is alive even the right word for it?
Benrey — the immeasurably towering, and then 12-, now 10- and finally 6- foot Home Depot skeleton, but with those uncanny glowing LCD-looking eyes there's little room for doubt that it is, in fact, Benrey — slaps their hands palm-down — or, well, bones down, but then it would be bones down no matter how they did it. They slap their hands down where the palms would be if they were more than bones on the table, splayed out.
They lean forward, nearly enough to pitch over, and for a moment Gordon worries the shitty plastic card table is going to collapse. Do they weigh less as a skeleton? (No idea.) Does Gordon have enough braincells in him at this specific moment to think back to if he ever, like, held Benrey or some shit like that in skeleton form? (No, he does not.) Other questions beyond the scope of this paper include: is the skeleton’s mass size-dependent? If so, does it scale linearly? Do they have scales designed to measure something with variant mass, or at least, scales like that that aren’t a fucking particle collider? Like, a veterinary scale? Why is that the first place Gordon’s brain goes? What about a person scale? Or, what the fuck, whatever they use to measure the world’s largest pumpkin, or all eight thousand or so of them, every year. Why the hell does Chuck-E-Cheese even have this thing, anyways? (No idea again. Oh well, at least he got a half-assed answer to one of his questions.) Anyways, there's more than enough booths in the place to seat everyone.
But whatever. It's not like anything about this follows the rules of nature, whether it be the ones Gordon learned in college and then, getting his Ph.D., learned are actually quite malleable under certain circumstances, or the ones that he's been slowly learning via mimicry his whole damn life.
"yeah," they say. "yeah, i'm alright, how are you?" Their voice is weirdly muffled, like it's coming from inside the walls, and Gordon half expects to hear the clanging and banging of clumsy limbs shuffling inside vents accompanying it. maybe a rat — or more likely a headcrab scuttling around in there.
But he doesn't. And it's definitely Benrey, beyond a shadow of a doubt, beyond even the tiniest sliver of shadow that falls beneath their eye sockets in the absence of that stupid hat, or a face, or even muscle or nerve or anything to separate bone from the outside world.
(Doesn't it hurt? Having your bone exposed like that? He flashes back, for a moment, to the memory of being dragged through the concrete tunnels, of searing pain that even the HEV suit's full tank of morphine couldn't fully take away, because behind the pain there was still nausea, still terror, still the absolute petrified shock of everything below the elbow on the ground separate from him and still twitching, still bleeding.)
"yo, feetm - gordos, you in there?"
He catches the slip, the (dare he assume? Dare he hope?) intentional amendment to a slightly less silly nickname. He doesn't comment on it.
"Yeah," Gordon manages, voice cracking, in response to Benrey's question. "Yeah," he echoes, to their prior words.
There's a long, awkward silence, where both of them avoid anything even close to eye contact. This, in and of itself, is not abnormal for either of them. With each other, though - yeah, it's a bit telling. Gordon had gotten comfortable enough with Benrey, over the course of their fucked-up little antihero's journey and the whole group's weird quest, that he didn't really think too hard about making eye contact with them, at one point. Now he does, though. Now it's like all that progress has been reset, and Benrey is a brand new person - person? Skeleton? Can someone be both? - encroaching on Gordon's space and he doesn't know what to make of it, whether to turn and run or curl up and in on himself and pretend this is all an awful, awful fever dream spurred on by taking too much Benadryl.
Benadryl isn't quite the same color as the almost sickly magenta of the missing textures, Gordon isn't sure where that name came from but he knows, intrinsically, that that's what the checkerboard black and pink is. The pills look more like the pink of some of the strands of confetti, frozen in midair above Tommy and his propeller hat, its tiny blades caught in a blur.
Oh, fuck. They aren't supposed to be doing that. Tommy hasn't blinked this whole time, or, well...absence of time.
Angry words form in Gordon's throat, and die before they reach his tongue. He doesn't even know if Benrey was the one to freeze the scene, to hit pause and leave the screen rippling weirdly, static lines warping their way down the image, every pixel countable if you lean in close enough to let your nose touch the cold glass, inviting in that little static shock and the particular noise it makes.
"so imagine i'm running windows, yea?" Benrey says, and Gordon just nods because sure, what the fuck, why not? He's used to their strange manner of speaking by now, their affinity for drawing parallels to the digital world, and all things considered, it sometimes makes a shocking amount of sense to him.
"and then, like, the os gets corrupted, gets too much malware, yknow how it goes. boom. hard drive inaccessible. no boot disk for benrey."
Benrey uses one hand to mime something exploding, and the table creaks a little, tilting slightly. Part of Gordon really wants to just get up and drag Benrey by the scruff to the nearest booth, but he can't shake the prickling apprehension, the feeling that something, something, he doesn't know what but it has to be something, is very, very off about this. He also feels, in no small part, like he's glued down to his seat at the moment. He's pretty sure Benrey isn't doing it, though it wouldn't be the weirdest ability they've suddenly manifested. He's pretty sure it's just...Gordon being Gordon. Normal Gordon moment. Gordon is losing his fucking mind and he really really doesn't want to let the overwhelm seep out of him and become physical so he's just frozen in place wide-eyed trying very very hard to actually process what Benrey is saying.
Currently, nothing. They're waiting for him to respond.
He blinks.
His tongue is leaden in his mouth.
"Y — yeah," he says, expertly. "Sure."
Well, they didn't pay him to get a degree in English, that's for sure.
Benrey continues amiably: "so like, imagine i'm just chilling there, in the hard drive graveyard file recycling bin kinda thingy, and i dunno how long i'm in there, but then they get in there and wipe everything and pull me out, and suddenly theyre live booting, like, a suuuuper fucked up and evil linux distro but that shit works, and they're all like, yo, dude, sucks that you kicked the shit so soon. planned obsolescence is for losers. you wanna 'nother chance?"
Gordon has. So many questions. His brain sorts and filters them all into neat little lists, of course, highlighting all the bits that make him wonder.
-
They? They like one person? Like a group of people? An unknown entity? Some vague concept defying definition? They in the same way as Benrey, who doesn't experience gender anything like a human, but also those are just their pronouns?
-
"Planned obsolescence" is not a phrase that Gordon has ever liked. He especially does not find himself thinking fondly of its implications in this particular scenario.
-
"Another chance". That's the nail in the coffin, isn't it.
And Benrey is done talking, miraculously, waiting expectantly for him to respond with something akin to the energy of Sunkist when she's done something incomprehensible in a very non-euclidian manner and is waiting for the others, with their feeble simian brains, to catch on enough to congratulate her. All that's missing is a wagging tail.
"Are you, like. Stuck. In that form. Can you — uh -- " Gordon gestures vaguely with his current prosthetic, which is temporary and really more of a cosmetic than anything. He's pretty sure Coomer lifted the chunk of plastic from a mannequin, possibly one in a dumpster. Oh well. At least it wasn't from a Charles Entertainment Cheese brand animatronic. Even in the current state, that fucking rat is staring him down from across the room, and he kind of wishes he had the Tau cannon, literally any service weapon would do, or even just, like, a fucking pocketknife to shank it in the eye with, because it freaks him the fuck out even more than G-man ever did.
Benrey peels themself away from the table and straightens up, each disc in their spine clicking and popping in a decidedly strange and offputting manner. Somehow it barely fazes Gordon. they lift their arms and turn them in what appears to be a full 360 at the elbow, both at the same time, rotating them back into place effortlessly.
Gordon recalls, vaguely, that he used to twist his arm at weird angles too, back in the day, when he was young and a little too stupid to take his carpal tunnel seriously. It was, all things considered, one of his more normal party tricks, if his other...talents could even be considered as such. He was never really one for parties, current company excepted. It occurs to him that he could ask the others to make the next iteration of his prosthetic rotate 360 degrees, but. He kind of doesn't want to. It would be funny, but also he's feeling just a little bit nauseous watching Benrey spin their forearms like the detachable parts of an electric mixer. All they need is some cake batter.
"yeah, no, i dunno why i'm like this," Benrey says after a few seconds of spinning, evidently having wrung all novelty out of their hypermobility. (At least in the elbows. Gordon prays they don't start trying to figure out if they can achieve the same effect with other joints, because he swears he remembers skeleton-Benrey whipping their neck around at angles that would even give an owl whiplash, and he can't deal with that shit today, man, he really can't.)
He should ask about any of the other things he noted. Literally anything else. He can barely form a coherent sentence and the one thing he managed to get out wasn't even related to the shit he'd actually given more than two milliseconds of consideration.
"You just...woke up like that?"
"one way to put it, i guess. i was, like, floating in the bios 'n' shit. it was kinda niiiiiice, actually." Their voice raises in pitch on nice, almost seeming to shift through Gordon's range of hearing from one side to the other, like a really small-scale example of the Doppler shift, or one of those ridiculous 8D audios. Then again, maybe he just needs to check the batteries in his hearing aids. They trail off into silence on where the blueshift would be, and a single blue bubble, beautiful flawless BIOS cerulean, same as the neon letters on Benrey's passport, escapes their jaw, seemingly spawning from nowhere.
Gordon's gaze flickers down to Benrey's chest cavity, wondering if another bubble will spawn. It's...probably a good thing that the Black Mesa® Sweet Voice™ is still intact? That means they still have... some of their... traits. Powers may not be the right word. And Gordon is really giving all these secondary details too much thought. He's being weird(er than usual). It may not even be a good thing that they're back, considering how their last encounter went, but. There were a lot of unanswered questions then.
A lot of things that both of them said, echoing in Gordon's mind.
One thing at a time.
He forces his gaze back to somewhere in the region of Benrey's skull, hovering over the pinpoints of light flickering in their eye sockets, warning sign yellow at the moment, before settling on the concave inverted heart of their nose. More like a weird spade, in Gordon's opinion. Asexual nasal cavity. Based nasal cavity. Cool. Yeah. He's putting all of that mit-certified brainpower into this, right now. His neurons are firing and they're coming up fuckin' empty.
The bubble floats up slowly in the air between them, coming nearly close enough to Gordon to brush against the rims of his glasses, but he doesn't feel anything except the familiar jolt of a miniscule static burst from a TV screen, the click of a VCR ceasing in its rewind and ejecting the tape, the distant noise of what might be a baby laughing (it sounds like Joshua, if he had been a Real Boy).
The smell of ozone reaches Gordon's nostrils, and he's not sure if he imagined it, as the bubble bursts.
"oh, sick," Benrey says. Their face betrays absolutely no expression, but the light in their eye sockets seems to glow a little brighter, more school-bus yellow now. "guess i can still do that."
They spit out a flowery line of magenta to lime, and Gordon frantically wracks his brain for any recollection of Tommy's enthusiastic prattling about what each color combination means, the language of Sweet Voice gradients about as comprehensible as that of flowers — that is to say, entirely subjective, and meaningless without a reference.
Tommy cannot help him right now. Tommy is still frozen. He looks over habitually to check on his companion and realizes, much to his confused horror, that Sunkist is wagging, Wait, what the fuck? How is she doing that? How is a fucking 2-dimensional pixelated dog able to resist whatever temporal magic the rest of them are caught in?
Gordon just stares, until Benrey gets sick of him not staring at them, hello, yes, i'm the centerpiece in this scene, okay? capisce?
Benrey cracks their jaw open a bit more, in a ploy for attention, and makes a rattling, echoey noise almost like a burp. It would maybe be a bit more convincing if any of the bodily motions that normally accompany a burp came with it, but how the sound is even…distorted like that without organs to echo inside of, Gordon doesn’t know. Nor does he particularly want to think about it. Is this whole thing some illusory glamour? If he reaches out and puts one hand flat on Benrey’s chest, will he feel — well, a chest? Maybe that’s a bit intrusive of him. especially if Benrey — oh, where is he even going with that thought? Places he really shouldn’t be, is where, both out of respect to Benrey and out of fear for his own (quickly dwindling, and really quite miniscule overall) sanity.
The pseudo-burp (not-burp? un-burp? !burp?) is followed by a string of missing-texture magenta, the first few bubbles significantly smaller than the previous singular one, and growing smaller still as they fade in a gradient to Benadryl™ pink, and then to Monster Energy™ green. The in-between shades are something like the actual color of Monster Energy, when you look in the can and realize it's just some fucking magenta slop.
The bubbles float, hazy and dreamlike, across the gap between them, and encircle Gordon’s shoulders in a manner that reminds him of the ball python his sixth grade math teacher had, who was brought into school one (1) time around exam season as a sort of therapy-dog-adjacent event.
He was at the age, then, where he hadn’t quite put a finger on the whole gender thing yet, mostly due to the fact that it generally hadn’t occurred to him that gender was a thing, beyond it being some kind of made-up thing like money (he had not yet learned the phrase “societal construct”) which happened to be less interesting than some of the adjacent entries in the dictionary. But he was at the age where compulsory femininity was starting to get shoved at him more aggressively than before, along with compulsory… developing a personality that fits into some loosely defined archetype, the details of which consistenly evade(d) him, and he threw himself headlong into the character from every “coming of age” movie that had the most traits he actually felt connected to.
That’s all a long-winded way, which Gordon mentally travels in what was probably a few seconds at most but feels like a solid five to ten minutes, of saying that he was the Weird Girl (not in the sense of actually being a girl, but rather that the vibes are the vibes, y’know?), and part of that was that he was usually the only person who didn’t react to a spider in the hallway with fear or a proclamation of intent to kill, but rather with a cup and a napkin. Or an open hand if it was recognizably just a little jumping spider or something harmless like that.
But he liked snakes a lot, too, and he especially loved the emotional support pythons, and so he finds that, surprisingly, he somehow doesn’t? really mind??? Benrey’s weird Sweet Voice courting display?
(Okay, maybe he minds it a little after calling it that, but he sits there, jaw clenched, a little tense, but more frozen in the way that you freeze when you encounter a small animal in the wild and you really don’t want to startle it — an almost soft, loose kind of freezing. He sits there, and he and lets the bubbles curl in a neon helix around his shoulders, up his neck and jaw, lightly brushing his hair, tickling the lighter parts of his beard on his cheeks where he hasn’t had a chance to shave in too long, and he tries not to think too hard about any of this.)
He maybe lets his discomfort — well, not really that, at least not in the way that it probably seems — show on his face a bit too much, because a yellow like on Tommy’s propeller hat flashes over Benrey’s dimly glowing eyes, and the bubbles stop spawning from between their two dentist’s-office-promotional-display levels of uncannily perfect teeth. Their skeletal form kind of looks like what would happen if you took the most generic, personality-lacking, Medical Default White Guy skeleton 3D model to ever exist — like, worse than the Voyager plaque type beat motherfucker — and pasted it into real life.
Well. The whole thing has kind of been a trip and a half, these last few… however long it’s been. Maybe only a few days. It feels like a hell of a lot more. Gordon didn’t have a great grasp on the passage of time to begin with, so.
There’s that.
The bubbles dissipate around his face, and he almost misses it — no he doesn’t, what the fuck is he thinking? He’s mad at Benrey. Mad. Angry, seething, loathing, malding. Gordon. Is mad. At Benrey. If he repeats it enough times he might actually believe it, but it’s a little difficult to do that right now.
A rattle of the lower jaw, and a sprinkle of something between bile and lime shades, kind of chartreuse, comes out in the wake of Gordon’s lack of response. These particles are between raindrop- and marble-sized, and evaporate quickly. What the fuck does that color mean? Gordon frantically struggles to dredge up any specificity in the slew of vague memories that pop up in his mind at this, trying to recall if Tommy ever mentioned what the difference between neon green and neon kinda-yellowy-green and neon-sickly-fucking-yellow is.
He casts a glance across the room at Tommy. Still frozen.
Sunkist is back to idling, but she thumps her tail idly as if reminding the both of them that she is not subject to the same laws of relativity that govern the every action of the others. She blinks slowly at Gordon, almost as if she is trying to reassure him, and her tongue lolls sideways out of her mouth. Gordon blinks, and she is back to being a static image. It's a testament to how well-adjusted he is to this bullshit that he doesn't even do a double take, because the dog is lowkey the most reassuring thing in the room right now.
Okay, he thinks. Big OK. Yeah, I trust you, I Think. For now — I trust the dog, at least, and she seems chill about it, so i'll trust you for now. We'll say I trust you just enough for it to apply to this specific situation. I'll believe that what you're telling me is the truth. Okay, let's roll with it. But I'm keeping my damn eyes on you.
Hands on hips, he narrows his eyes at Benrey. "Okay. What d'you want from me, then?"
Two orbs of light flicker ominously at him, a skeletal blink. "simple, i want your help, feetman. i wanna play another game."
"What do you mean?" Gordon pushes, not budging.
"i mean that i'm sick of this one. they won't let me have any more fun with it. i need a new one. and i need you to come with me. that way we can get back to the real world."
That gives Gordon a start.
"Huh? What the fuck do you mean this isn't the real world?" Not like it isn't also a game, but can't it be both? Gordon would remember if he stepped into a VR rig, or at least he thinks he'd be able to feel the damn thing on his head. The controllers in his hands, the weight of them. All he can feel when he concentrates is his own body, flesh and blood and one arm too little. Is that not in the real world? Was all that pain simulated?
Suddenly he itches to know.
Benrey just looks at him, like he's missing something critical. Like he should inherently understand exactly what kind of technopathic freak Benrey is, and how they're able to toy with the setting like they are.
"'m trapped here," they say, gesturing vaguely around the Chuck-E-Cheese's. "the last game was real as anything, at least, in your terms. compared to that, this ain't real. this is just… some shit. backroom where they keep the props in between acts."
Acts, stages, plays. So is this the post-credits scene? And the freezing time, is that Benrey punching their way in through the borders of the scene itself, rewinding the tape, climbing through the cracks in the window?
Gordon's never been good at giving up while he's still ahead, and he's already in over his head, so he keeps plowing on. Asks “So, well, then what’s the quote-unquote 'real world' like?” and for a terrifying moment it seems like Benrey actually sobers up a bit. Like they're almost thoughtful.
“well, there’s a few…this isn’t the only game, i guess. there’s a lotta games, they tried one where — my name is barney, how stupid is that shit? oh, oh, and there’s one where they replaced me with some guy named emmett!” They suddenly look very dejected. “some of them are cooooool. maaaaybe a little cooler than this.” They start twitching and fidgeting with their fingernails, hands held limply in their lap in a flimsy recreation of a business posture. The angles of their limbs are a bit off, like someone rigged their 3D model's bones incorrectly.
When they speak again, their voice is bashfully low. “there’s some that are real sad. i think that’s the version they slated for release. but this is the only one that has me. lotsa bennys but i’m the only benrey. and you’re — uhhhhhhhh — you’re the only gordos feetman.”
“That’s not my name,” Gordon mumbles, half-heartedly.
Benrey gives him a crooked grin, sadness still lingering in their eyes — is that grief or longing? Both?
“yea, but you’re the only — “ a vague hand gesture in Gordon’s direction “ — the only you. i fucked around in a few different test builds, i got all the fuckin uhhhhhhh. cheats. for like. the big one. did some dumb shit. but none of them were worth staying in.”
There's a lump in Gordon's throat as he casts his gaze back to Sunkist, suddenly too much work for him to keep looking at Benrey. Unspoken: was Gordon the thing that made it worth staying?
Is he the reason Benrey is here now?