The Big Applesauce

This whole human business is really terribly, terribly complicated. How do they keep track of everything that needs doing all the time? He has keys - multiple! - and a little black square of a phone and an entire apartment he's supposed to be taking care of, only it doesn't seem to require the same kind of constant maintenance as, say, a certain Enrichment Center. Days of cautious experimentation have yielded certain infrequent results: the silver boxy thing in the corner dings cheerily and heats up when its trigger is depressed. Doing it three times successively isn't recommended, he's learned, when the box starts belching black smoke and sets some kind of alarm squealing and he dashes out of the apartment with his arms flung high over his head and nearly crashes slap-bang into a wall. Aside from the occasional hiccup - very occasional, certainly no more than once or twice a day, he's quite sure of that - it's been a very particular time of adjusting to the stumbling inadequacies of his newfound humanship.

His middle groans periodically with something, possibly hunger since food is, well, it's a thing humans need which is a bloody well inefficient means of refueling, and his head aches and he's got to remember to jam the great large-framed glasses over the bridge of his nose every morning, and it is an absolute bloody pain to remember every morning. The Enrichment Center didn't even have mornings.

It's a morning like any other morning when he puts key to lock, except for the part where he steps from apartment to a place that is not the hall just outside the apartment and Wheatley experiences a moment of pure, all-encompassing terror as he thinks, for a moment, that he's right back in the old Enrichment Center with Her shifting the cold matte black cubes of the facility around in Her overcomplicated chess games.

[ooc: old Wheatley's been hit by the Master Key and is not having a good time.]