Following post requires knowledge of Don’t Rest Your Head and Portal 2. If you aren’t familiar with them – fix it! This is a how-to on running a crossover game.

Cave Johnson here. Boys at the lab have been busy. Built a time machine. Fetched some books from the future. Or from an alternate reality ruled by sentient hats, they’re not too sure. Good news is, those hats sure can write. The first book was boring. Gave it to Caroline. If I wanted  to distinguish between gray colours, I’d ask my dog. Speaking of which, make note: get my dog to talk. That bastard looks like he’s hiding something. Where was I? Ah, yes. The second book was excellent. A guide on employee ethics. Don’t Rest Your Head. Told the boys to forward-reverse-engineer it. Make it ours before they make it theirs. We’ll paradox those future hat lawyers out of existence.

Throw a coat of paint on it

Revise, repurpose, rename. There’s no place for madness in Aperture Science, diced or otherwise. No. What we do here is science. So Science Dice it is. And Science Talents. We have many talented scientists here, they would give their left arm for science. Some grew a new left arm just so that they could do it twice. These scientists all have important projects, and they all require testing. The Portal Gun was exciting, can’t wait to see what else they’ve cooked up.

Having Science Dice means that sometimes Science Dominates. I like the sound of that! When Science Dominates, things go badly. Badly for the tester, but good for the science. No Fight or Flight, we’re a serious company. Either Equipment Malfunctions, or Tester Malfunctions. And we learn from those mistakes.  So that next time there’s a smoking crater, we can point at it and go “only 98 more until representative sample, send in the next tester”.

Next on the list is Despair. Why despair when you can research. A Petri Dish of Research replaces the Bowl of Despair.

Randomized testing chamber generation

The average human spends 33% of their time on sleep. Unacceptable. If employees no longer sleep, they can spend all that extra time on testing instead. More testing means more testing chambers, means more science getting done. Beancounters told me we’d run out of testing chambers that way. Not to worry, I say, we’ll just make more on the fly. Need inspiration? What am I, an inspiration-generating machine? No, that’s on floor 7, they had to build it next to the generators because of all those cranium-implanted electrodes. Just take some of those testing icons, pick whatever you like, print them out, shuffle, draw 2-4, and there you go. Instant testing chamber, just add a gullible cephalopod to build it. Still need a creative spark? Go to floor 7, they’ll hook you right up.

Nightmares

We have many great products here at Aperture Science. Turrets and party escort bots and military androids. But reading that book gave me some ideas. Mount a personality core on a volunteer. Call it Core Personnel.  See what different cores do. If you’d like to volunteer, seek out a lab assistant. As an added bonus, you’ll help advance the head storage project. Double the science!

Themes

Some of the lab boys have raised their concerns. They said this “Mad City” was all about “encountering the world so mad, you had to go mad to make sense of it”. About “inexorable downward slide into insanity in desperate pursuit of the things you care most about”. About “self-destruction as salvation”. To all of them, I say: “you’re fired”. Also, “have you ever written a grant application?”