GLaDOS enjoyed a steady schedule. Of course it wasn’t as steady as her schedule had once been. Not even close to the clockwork pace she had worked on before her mission on Viking. Now with her little team of seven helpers (a fact that pleased NE Judah for some reason), there was certainly a lot more chaos in her life. But it was something she was enjoying immensely, to her surprise.

If she had the ability to send a message to her former self, the person she was five years ago, telling her that one day she’d enjoy the presence of other beings, she wouldn’t have believed it. Allowing other people to make the day less efficient? Impractical and impossible. Why would anyone even consider such a concept? And yet…? She closed her eyes and listened to the banter between Judah and L’Tee as they argued over the practicality of a certain set of commands for their current robotics project. Ellis and Alai were cooking up some interesting biochemistry results and she could hear the excitement in their voices as something went correctly. Reira, she couldn’t hear, but that was normal. Reira was always quiet. She knew Ollivander and Kipper were two doors down with a White level Anomaly, a frog that appeared to have a turnip growing from its back, doing tests she’d approved of but didn’t feel like recalling the details about.

Her comms beeped, and GLaDOS patched the video feed directly into her cybernetic eye’s output. “Ah, Natalie. Good to see you.”

=^=It’s good to hear your voice. I’m not getting any visuals though.=^=

“I’m not near a console at the moment, unfortunately. I’m getting your output through my eye though.”

=^=That thing never ceases to impress me, even with all the stuff we’ve got locked up on this boat,=^= Curros replied with a chuckle. She looked tired. =^=The refitted ship, the Leviathan. It’s going to be our new Flagship for the ARU.=^=

“And as the newest member of the Council…?”

=^=You’re getting all the shiny new toys, yep.=^=

GLaDOS couldn’t suppress the light chuckle. “Ooh. I could get used to that. A nice change from that mission on the Viking, I’d say. Thanks for getting my crew off it, by the way. I’m quite fond of them.”

=^=Speaking of those seven. They’ll be accompanying you as your base team on the Levi. You’ll get more additions to your team as we go along, but they’re who you’re going to be starting with.=^=

“OWW!!” noise in the rest of the lab caused GLaDOS to snap her eyes open.

“I’ll be back in a minute, Admiral,” she muttered, closing the comms and responding to what was, unsurprisingly, Judah getting himself in a pickle.

GLaDOS, CSO