Never let it be said that Chell was not a practical person. She believed this with all her heart, despite the many bug bites, cuts, scrapes, chilly nights, and other things that could easily be avoided. And she was indeed practical, but spiteful was another thing she was. She was both spiteful and practical with her money and goods on all accounts.

She was not to be haggled into high pricing, oh no. So when she had cornered a passing merchant who was looking too tall to be a real human, scraggly, and like he'd rather be elsewhere than eying her down, she made the quickest transaction of her life while managing to actually get a few things that she needed. A fresh pair of pants and a shirt, a hoodie, some ancient canned food, a carving knife, and a half-empty box of matches seemed like a fair trade for a few loaves of fresh (Well, relatively fresh) bread and some woven baskets.

Chell hated her wheat field. She knew exactly why she hated it, and she acknowledged that she hated it, but that did not help her come to terms with it. It wasn't even a full field, certainly not as wide and endless as the parent field that her seeds had come from. But because of the name she hated it. However, hating it was no reason not to use it. She tended to it but mercifully did not have to actually make anything with it herself most of the time.

As she trudged back to her little stead with the knife in her hand and everything else in a water-tight woven basket, Chell wondered if she should start keeping count of how many people she'd seen. She didn't know the exact amount of time that she'd been away from that abandoned phone-store from hell, but she surmised that she probably should have seen a few more humans than she had.

There was the family of two that lived upriver in a shed, and then a camp that nobody lived in that was mostly used for trade, but that was a day's walk and she'd been there only twice. Then there was the tall fellow she'd traded with today, who she'd seen make this trek a few times. I hate his voice. Chell dismissively thought, her eyes trained on the cluster of pine that began the forest where she lived.

Chell hated an awful lot of things. Maybe that's why people didn't like her around for long periods of time. This was fine; after all, the last time she'd had company there was a heinous amount of absolutely atrocious things that happened to her before she left.

It is perfectly understandable that Chell would hate things that reminded her of her time in Aperture. Some people are afraid of things that have wronged them, which is rational as well. But then there are those who are not afraid to confront their fears head on with a knife in one hand and a grenade in the other, however irrational that may sound. Chell was one of those people, though as of that time, she lacked a grenade.

The grass crunched beneath her feet as she hurried along, trying to get home before it was dark outside; this was big cat country. She'd never seen one herself, but she heard them at night, howling into the sky from mountaintops near and far. Three years in this place had kept her on her toes. Well, not three years; instead, two and a half years. The six month shifting and settling period had been harder than actually finding someplace to live and keeping that place up to snuff. If there was any way to measure the amount of distance she'd travelled from that little shack and the seemingly endless wheat field that surrounded it, she would have found that it was a rocky and hilly five mile walk. Chell had not gone in only one direction; on the contrary, she had looped back through the wheat field accidentally many times, much to her chagrin. But she didn't care about distance, she just cared that she was away.

Her legs had gotten rather strong, as well as the rest of her. She hadn't been weak by any means but now she could throw a grown man quite a few feet if she had to. Initially she didn't know this, but there was an upstart a year or so ago at that large market that had attempted to mug her. He managed to catch her beneath the eye with a knife but that was more of a slap the ego than anything; she'd let her guard down in the group setting that she knew was usually safe.

One of the many miscellaneous species of birds that inhabited the area whistled and flew past her into the heavy grove of pine; Chell liked them when they stayed out of her field and her slowly growing vegetables, though she never knew what kind they were. It seemed pointless to Chell to name everything. It made some sense to name things that were dangerous so you could identify them, like mountain lions or whatever the old people at the market had called 'tax-collectors', but to have a name for every solitary thing was ridiculous. It put too much stress on her memory.

There was one non-dangerous bird that she loved and was glad she knew the name of, which was a raven. Aside from it being the cursed bird that had nested inside Aperture, the species itself wasn't shabby looking either, and she had one in particular that was her favorite. It was a pretty little thing she'd found with its head stuck in a barbed wire fence when she had settled into her home. At first, she thought it was dead, only to find that it was chugging along, albeit weakly and with its head caught in a rather untoward spot. Chell didn't own the raven, but she considered it her pet, or if not her pet a companion. It was a far superior companion, one that didn't talk constantly and sometimes brought her shiny things. She had a drawer full of shiny things the raven had brought her. This raven had a very good memory, it seemed, and had taken quite the shine to her after she'd rescued it from the fence. It would land on her shoulder sometimes, but it would never let her pet it.

Chell hadn't seen the raven, whom she had nick-named Aleu, for a few days. That was fine, she was sure the raven had bird obligations somewhere in a flock or a field far away from there, but she still worried a bit. The raven was one of the few things she liked.

The sun was on it's way down, but she would definitely be able to make it back before dark. She'd managed to get into the forest at a decent clip, her ears pricked for suspicious movement but her mind admittedly wandering. Chell was getting hungry, so she'd check the trap closest to her home when she got near it; it was rabbit season, but the mountain lions, bobcats, and other assorted sharp-toothed predators knew that too, and would not pass up a trapped animal.

Chell had become quite adept at survivalist things; she could put those things at the front of her mind because surviving was actually something that mattered, not like naming every creature she came across or making nice with every person she came across. Of course, when she had been spat out of that shed in the middle of the wheat field, she had known little about survival and was much too angry to think about it immediately. If she hadn't had someone to teach her, she probably would have starved.

She reached the stream that marked the three-fourths-of-the-way home, and hopped lightly over the exposed rocks that she'd placed there herself. Chell could see her little shack now; it's light was on and there was a bit of movement in the window, a scraggly silhouette doing god knew what, probably working on one of his gadgets. That didn't bother her, as long as he wasn't breaking anything.

Making a beeline to the right of her trodden path, her eyes lit up when there, was in fact, a rabbit caught in her snare. It wasn't fat, but it would do.

Collecting her game and making her way back to the house, Chell heard the unmistakeable croaky caw of her little friend, and she smiled. The closer she got, she saw that Aleu was at the window and pecking it with its beak, occasionally flapping its wings and cawing again in a demand to be let inside. Once it saw it's big strong human come walking up with a bag on her back and a shiny thing in her hand, it turned a bit and made a deathly sounding attempt at human speech.

"Heh-lo." Aleu's beady little eyes glinted, no longer paying attention to the figure in the window. It shuffled its wings and hopped to the ground as she approached.

"Hey buddy." Chell responded, a bit more politely than she would with an actual person. When not being wrung through an underground facility and thrown down stories into an even deeper part of said facility, she found herself to be much more talkative and rather liked the sound of her own voice. At first she had been quite stunned when the bird had begun picking up human speech, but as it had been explained to her, more species of bird did this other than ravens. But ravens were local and other birds were not, so as far as she was concerned, she had the smartest bird around.

The human brushed the hair from her eyes and walked past the shed, prompting her raven to hop along behind her for a bit before taking off and landing on her roof. Behind the shed there was a fire pit that she was going to kick up, but for now she just wanted some alone time with the raven. It was something she enjoyed, if only for a few minutes.

She sat down at a makeshift chair (Which was really just a log, but it was a log she sat on, so it was a chair to her) and opened up the woven pack of goodies she'd accumulated earlier that day. She still had half a loaf of bread; she'd eaten so much of it that she'd become sick of the stuff. She almost hated the smell that it put out when it was baked, even if she didn't have to make it and it was to sell, but until her vegetables grew in more fully, bread and canned food it was. There was a surprising amount of canned food still available around here, but then again it was also a surprisingly empty place where she lived.

Breaking up the bread into smaller pieces, she tossed a few to her raven, who readily ate them. She could tell that Aleu was more interested in the rabbit she had taken up, but the rabbit was for supper.

Once Aleu had eaten a bit of the bread she began to focus more intently on the rabbit's carcass. Chell squinted with a smirk on her face, and got up to the work table that was at the back of the shed. The raven eagerly followed behind her, taking to the air and landing on the section of roof above the table, tilting its head as she put the rabbit down and began to skin it.

She had to skin rabbits or whatever it was she found out here now; her room mate was just too squeamish. Chell had no problem whatsoever with it since it netted her food. Taking one of the ears and cutting it off, she turned toward her bird and held it up. "What does Aleu say?"

"Pleez." said Aleu, though to Chell's ears it sounded more like 'blease'. It would suffice.

So Chell tossed it toward the bird and it greedily snapped it up and swallowed it whole. There were only a few things that her raven said, 'hello' and 'please' being among them. She hadn't been able to get it to say her name even if it was an imitation bird and she had said her name repeatedly for it.

When it began bending over the edge of the roof, it's shiny black head angled toward the rabbit, Chell held up the other ear and cocked her head at it and said, "What's your name?"

The raven took a moment, as if pondering, then answered. "Aloo." Aleu said, and was pleased when it was tossed another rabbit's ear.

Making short work of the rest of the rabbit and cleaning the blood from her hands, Chell left the undesirable bits in a little dish up on the roof, which was no trouble for her to reach. If Aleu didn't eat them the owls would, so it was no matter. Looking at the rabbit's pelt and liking how she'd skinned it, Chell decided that all in all, today had not gone so bad.

There was a tinny-sounding knock from the inside of the shed against the wall where she stood. Cutting up the meat she'd been able to get from the rabbit, Chell kicked back in equal rhythm, never lifting her eyes from her work.

"Are you done?" Came the raspy voice from inside, sounding nervous.

"Just about. Start up the fire." Chell responded curtly, looking for the skewers that she used to cook whatever game she had.

She heard the door open and a half muttered goodbye, soon followed by the jumpy steps of her room-mate. His eyes were forced toward the ground and in his hands was a box of matches that he held close to his chest, like he was afraid they would jump away.

He had a shaggy and oily mop of black hair that stuck out it many directions, and an equally scruffy looking beard that covered the bottom half of his face. When he had first met Chell (Though in truth he had been charged at, but that was something that Chell did not like to admit she had done) he had been wearing a tattered lab coat and clothes that could barely be described as clothes beneath it, but now he was wearing a light blue shirt with some decades old logo on it for something that didn't exist anyway, as far as they were concerned, and some cargo pants that were filled with crumbled up paper and pencils.

"Doug?" She said, having found the skewers and was pushing them into the cuts of rabbit meat.

It took him a moment to answer, as he had averted his gaze from the bloodied worktable entirely in favor of looking at anything else and was putting chopped up wood into the fire pit. "Yes?"

"Why didn't you let Aleu inside?" Chell asked him, a somewhat accusing tone in her voice.

Doug didn't answer at first, but she could hear him shakily opening the matchbox and getting ready to light the fire. "I was checking something." He answered in his usual matter-of-fact but still obsequious manner.

Chell furrowed her brow and forced her curling lip back to normal. "What's that supposed to mean?" She shed her jacket and turned toward the fire, a skewer in her right hand and the rabbit's pelt in her left.

Doug had since begun scrambling to set up the stands that would let her spitroast them, still not looking her in the eye, but he rarely did. She couldn't even remember what color his eyes were since he looked her in the face so little. "I know that um… that you don't particularly care about birds. And-and what to call them."

"Mhm."

Chell set the spitroast up and crouched down to help him light the fire. He continued, wiping the hair out of his eyes. "I was wondering about your bird-"

"Aleu."

"Yes, Aleu. I was wondering what it's gender was but I usually can't get close enough to see it." Doug stepped back, letting Chell blow on the fire; once he'd gotten some embers caught in his beard. Nothing happened but the many things that could have arisen from the event taught him not to put his face so close.

"So when it showed up and demanded to be let inside I took the opportunity to-to get a closer look." He said this part almost as if he was convincing himself as much as relaying information.

From on the roof behind them and casting a long shadow from the setting sun, Aleu gave a croaking call, apparently finished with the bowl of innards and knowing that it was being talked about. Chell saw Doug glance uneasily at it.

Almost lost in his own thoughts, he shook his head a bit and cleared his throat, trying to stand up straight. "A-anyway, I've come to the conclusion that I think your raven is a female. I think. I'm not sure."

Chell gave him a withering look as she stood up, ashes smearing her pants and the bottom of her shirt. "If you aren't sure then you should have let her in."

Doug looked away again, one hand finding the back of his neck and rubbing it. "Sorry. I just thought you might like t-to know." He mumbled, striding toward the other log that had been placed around the other side of the pit. Once he sat down he promptly began digging through his pockets.

She felt a little bad for snapping, but she didn't tell him that. Instead she reached into her back, brought out two cans of fruit with the labels barely intelligible, the hoodie, and stood over him. He looked up like a cornered rat, and she saw that Doug had blue-green eyes. What do you know?

He'd since grabbed his arms in a faux crossing gesture and half-cowered at her expectantly. She was a good head and some odd inches taller than him even when he was standing up, so this just made her seem even bigger. Chell held out the hoodie and one can of fruit.

It took a few moments to get Doug firing on all cylinders when he got startled, but eventually he got the idea. He took the can and immediately started putting the hoodie on. "Thank you…" he said, and trailed away.

Chell dismissively waved her hand and went back to her side of the bonfire, turning the meat a bit as she did. Things went on in relative silence for a few minutes, only the occasional 'wob-wob' sound from Aleu and Doug jumping at shadows. The crickets had begun chirping softly and the birds had quieted down, the deep blue of the night sky showing its broad face above them. The night sky was also something that Chell hated; or rather, what was in the night sky, regardless of whether or not it could be seen.

She hadn't told Doug every detail about what had happened to her. On the contrary, Chell had a sneaking suspicion that somehow, Doug already knew a whole lot more about what had happened than he let on. In fact, she was certain that he did, especially since he'd been met while scribbling someone that looked suspiciously like her on a wall. This was why she didn't really trust him; she of course trusted him not to make a mess of anything and not to dig through her stuff, but this was easily seen. He had come to her wearing a shabby Aperture Science Innovators lab coat after all, even if he looked out of his mind.

Chell had begun ruminating on these thoughts and had begun to look angry, staring into the embers of the fire that now crackled and popped.

Doug tilted his head and looked around it uneasily, still holding his can of fruit close to his chest with the box of matches. "Chell? Are-are you alright?"

She snapped out of it, her eyes moving but the rest of her head standing still. She gave him a wan smile, one she did not mean but it was an easy enough way to calm him down. "I'm fine, just thinking." She replied, and turned the meat again. "How's your radio?"

He seemed to untense a bit and the slight upturned corners of his mouth could almost be seen through his beard. "It's going pretty well. I think I almost fixed it… if there are any radio stations running, we'll have those soon."

Chell nodded in acknowledgement and stood up. She heard him mutter, "If I can get the antenna to work."

She looked at the skewered meat, decided that it was done enough, and went to go get a couple of forks and plates. Once she returned, she hacked open her can of fruit and found it to be peaches. Doug awkwardly shuffled up and got his plate and fork, as well as slightly holding out the can; he had no pocket knife.

Chell just gave him hers and a few chunks of rabbit while prying open the other can. Also peaches.

Doug returned to his side of the fire, jumping and almost dropping his food when Aleu decided it was high time to leave and cawed her goodbyes before taking off and fluttering loudly away into the dark forest.

Chell ate like a wolf, there was simply no other way to describe it. The rabbit required some amount of chewing since it was a bit stringy, but it was like she had swallowed the sliced peaches whole. Fruit was also one of the few things that Chell liked besides her raven. It was one of her life's ambitions to eat a fresh apple one day. It was a small thing but something she'd set as a goal.

Doug, on the other hand, ate slowly, as if he were sure he'd choke if he didn't. It wouldn't surprise Chell in the least if he thought this.

Once Chell was done, which was in no time at all, she put the rabbit's pelt on her drying rack. It was a pretty little pelt and would probably go for a good bit of whatever she needed at the market. "I'm going to Kaltag Crossing tomorrow. You're going to be alone for most of the day."

"Actually… I was wondering i-if I could come with you. To Kaltag Crossing." Doug mumbled, barely heard over the roar of the fire.

Chell glanced at him suspiciously. "Why? You hate crowds."

"Four merchants and a few customers isn't a crowd. I just wanted to snoop around a bit." Doug said, sounding as though he were hiding something but doing a terrible job at it.

"Fine. But you have to leave the cube here."

She could see Doug flash her a dirty look from the corner of her eye, but he nodded and got up. "Alright. I'm going to go in then. Early start." He said as he left his plate and fork at the very edge of the worktable.

Slumping back against the log and staring into the fire, Chell wondered what he could possibly want at Kaltag. There were people who sold mostly weapons there, clothes, matches that were way too expensive, canned food that was also way too expensive, and some knick-knacks that served no purpose other than taking up space.

She knew that Doug did not like weapons, had enough clothes to get by, was practical enough with 'money' that he knew better than to buy those matches or that canned food, and that the cube was the only knick-knack he needed. They had two of those damn things now.

They made good tables and Chell found, completely by accident, that they were also able to be used as storage cubes. She'd begun keeping most of the shiny things that Aleu had brought her in a drawer, but anything that may have held monetary value she kept in her cube. Of course, monetary value was in the eye of the beholder nowadays, but still.

The main thing that people seemed to think had value was usable stuff, be it for actual purposes or for adornment. She'd seen deer antlers that she was sure people valued more than a human life; this did not bother her as she thought it would. The value of a human life had been overlooked quite a lot in her time, so it was not all that different from her past experiences. If anything Doug seemed to care more if she got hurt than she did, which to her was a bit disconcerting.

As Chell was still thinking about what else she could bring to trade at Kaltag besides her pelt and a few loaves of bread, she heard the somewhat statick-y but still merry sound of music from inside the shed. There was a joyous yelp and some muffled talking that was soon followed by the door clanging open. Doug scrambled around the side of the shed with his eyes sparkling, just a little bit, and a grin on his face. In his hands was a box radio with most of the paint chipped away and the back hanging open, but that little box was making a lot of noise. It was choppy and cut noise, but it was still noise, and even Chell smiled, genuinely this time.

"-Love those de-dear hearts and gentle people

Wh- bzzzzt in my home town

Because those bbbzzrt and gentle people

Will ne-ever ever let you down."