There is a muffled song coming from somewhere. It's not a song she's familiar with. In fact, the whole place is nothing like anything she's familiar with. She seems to be in some metal-and-glass pod, for starters, which is itself inside a rather peculiar...
...room.
There are no doors.
Yeah that's not ominous or anything. Well, there's a portalable surface visible through it; she lands one there.
And the orange portal that was behind her is now on another wall so she'll need to wait until the new gun is pointing her way again.
After a couple more seconds, the door closes.
She examines the unseen area with groundsense while she waits for the orange portal to come back around. (Orange portal!!!!!) (She is pretty sure this puzzle is going to naturally lead to her picking up the orange portal device, but if it does not, she will cheat.)
If she steps through the orange portal there is a risk the energy pellet will hit her—the floor there is high enough that it's level with her. However, there are stairs down to a lower area she can hide in so she won't be hit. The room is otherwise empty.
Then she can choose her timing so as not to be hit by the orb, and go through and down the stairs and... aha. If she waits until the orange portal has gone onto the wall opposite the orb grabber, and the orb is heading toward its scorch mark, she can put the blue portal on the scorch mark and the orb will pass through and go across the room, over the orange portalizer, and straight into the grabber. Poor timing may result in stray orbs, which are nobody's friend, she's sure.
The moment comes. Boop, portal.
The Pellet goes through the portal... wait, wait... success!
And the Unstationary Scaffold starts moving.
Such that if she puts a portal in the wall next to her and waits until the platform reaches the wall and the orange portal comes back around again, she can step out and onto the platform and the platform will start taking her directly toward the orange portalizer! She vibrates with excitement. One of the radios tucked under her arm slips a little and nearly falls into the death goo, but she manages to save it.
The business end of her portal gun starts glowing a bit when she approaches the other one.
Is it going to do something cool? It's going to do something cool, isn't it.
Yep! When she points her gun at the new one they both glow, her gun vibrates, and her trigger changes under her finger to become two triggers.
"The device has been modified so that it can now manufacture two linked portals at once. As part of an optional test protocol, we are pleased to present an amusing fact. The device is now more valuable than the organs and combined incomes of everyone in," and the voice changes to that other weird one and says "SUBJECT HOMETOWN HERE."
The pedestal with the other portal gun sinks into the floor and a button pedestal is raised up from the goo in front of her.
"Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee," says Sable.
What happens if she pushes the button.
The door above the orb receiver opens! And a ticking sound starts.
Also the wall behind that door is portalable.
She puts a blue portal on the wall behind door number two, and turns around and puts an orange portal (!!!) on the wall where the moving platform goes, and goes onto the moving platform to get a ride over to the wall.
The voice has outdone itself.
The rig with Emancipators is similar to that huge one from before, except there are no portalable surfaces at all anywhere, and there are even more emancipators.
Also where the door was there is now a plate with spikes slowly and inexorably advancing towards her.
"Please walk through the Material Emancipation Grids to the next chamber," the voice requests politely.
—no, now there is a plate with spikes that is perfectly stationary because several crucial pieces of the mechanism propelling it have crumbled into grey dust.
"I am not going through those," she says. "If you would like me to continue, you can get them out of my way."
"The Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grids are an important part of the test environment."
"You will not be harmed by the Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grids. The risks of tooth and ear canal evaporation are negligible."
"You have not been behaving in a trustworthy enough way for me to feel safe believing you about that! For example, you tried to push me through them with a wall made of spikes!"
"It is standard testing protocol to incentivize test subjects to comply with standard testing protocol."
"Then perhaps you should do that, instead of incentivizing me to cheat and break things," she suggests.
"The enrichment center is not responsible for test subjects' unreasonable reactions to the environment."
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