Borealis Research Vessel

Though the Borealis is an actual ice-breaking research craft and a water-worthy ship on the Rookery's world, in the Repurposed dimension it wasn't so much a ship as a ... building. Thus a bit of confusion ensued originally when one Keenan discovered the other's had gone inexplicably missing. After all, Repurposed Keenan helped ... navigate the Borealis Alternative Temporal Shunting Harmonics Investagory Think Tank[1] into its ungainly and quite untenable position lodged into the side of the Enrichment Center, causing... Well, causing Alma Wade to blow it to hell, and Vortally shaking the entire world with it. It technically speaking did travel through time. That was what it was supposed to do! In no way, shape, or form did it do this because of what the scientists inside it had been working on. That would have been... all Keenan Lane's doing.[2]

Now, on the Rookery (and most other Earths) this Borealis is an actual ship that would have been put into the water at some point, had it not also had a little industrial accident of its own. Of course, on this ship, Aperture was experimenting with teleportation devices considerably stronger than their little hand-held 'portal guns', as well as storing a large quantity of backup drives for that Disk Operating System they were working on.[3]

Perhaps this world's Cave had something more in mind than just cooling the massive computer with chunks of ice teleported from the Arctic, or maybe a wire got crossed... But whatever is on that ship right now is going to help the Rookery, Humanity, and possibly the entire rest of the universe, defeat the Combine once and for all.[4]

It's taken all the effort in the world, first to even locate it; but then, also, to find a way in, what with it being frozen solid into a massive glacier and all. Whether it was covered by that glacier, or far more likely teleported directly into it [5], no one knows, as it's been in there at least 15 years according to any of the local folks who had a clue about it. Also of note the chunk of glacier that the Borealis is actually in, has alternately broken away from its main ice shelf, as well as having settled farther into the ocean with the lowering of the sea level. If the Combine keep draining the seas (which they will, unless someone stops them) it would eventually be grounded in addition to stuck inside a big chunk of ice.

By the time the Rookery gets involved with this craft, however, they have access to a good number of creatures, powers, and pieces of equipment that can help pry it out of its frozen tomb. More and more folks have been filtering in, and clearing out the remnants of the dead crew - not all of them died when the ship moved, and some on board now are quite alive even after the strange years between that event and the Combine's arrival! The placement of this craft in an extreme enviornment means that only the hardiest and most determined of the Rookery riders should even attempt to come here. The temperatures are forbidding, and even after the Combine have begun altering the weather due to removal of water resources, the atmosphere is usually frigid and windy, if not outright snowing or raining over the sea. The sea itself isn't as choppy as it used to be, which is a blessing for those who come from land...

Since it isn't very far off the coast of Norway, though quite a bit farther north than Carver's home in Spangeried on the south end of the former nation, a slow crawl of exploration is being done on land to support the staff now residing on the ship. Since they do have dragons the 850 mile trip is considerably quicker than it would be across the mostly-exposed fjords or the broken roads along the mainland. They do keep this location as secret as possible, and when Wilson finally does 'move' a copy of his home to this dimension, it becomes a staging area and medical center for those who sustain injuries on the ship. It's almost exactly the same 1300-odd miles between the Bungalow and Aerie Island, as it is from that island to the site of the Borealis, so people wanting to visit the undersea Rapture facility can choose to go straight there, or spend a night in Wilson's pleasant home before taking the same journey over the rough North Atlantic.

The ship itself was more based on a warship than an ice breaker, and though it is smaller overall than similar ships to the USS Newport News [6] the bulk of the ship's interior was not suited to living arrangements, and it held a crew of less than 400 as opposed to the nearly 1800 of the Newport News. The interior of the ship is still heavily secured, and the folks residing on or near it right now have yet to even get closer than a dozen meters to any of its many potential access points.

The Borealis is currently about 2/3 embedded inside the glacier, and will need to be fully removed before the craft is seaworthy, needing repairs that metal shapers and welders alike will be on hand to perform.

The folks who reside in it 'full time' have plenty of space to move around in, and have redone quite a few suites to their liking, since the crew aren't really on hand to worry about it. In the list below, only those marked with ^ were actually on the ship when it was moved, and have been there all this time.

-- Notes --

[1] Yes. That does in fact spell BATSHITT.

[2] Keenan stored the entire facility in stasis for nearly 30 years - it vanished in 1979, and returned in 2006. When it was 'needed', he shoved it back into reality, albeit about 1500 miles from where it started. Every single person inside it had absolutely no clue that they were 'on hold' for that long, they did feel... something weird. Very weird, and then nothing - because being fused with ground, a power plant, parking lot, and a massive fuel line all sparked into ash by Alma's pyrokinetic explosion tends to end life rather quickly. During that 'gap', Lane caused people to forget that there had ever been anything there - including Cave and Caroline, though it was an Aperture Science venture. "There was nothing where this facility was listed - it had been a vacant lot as long as anyone could remember."

[3] This bears much more resemblance to Canon Half Life and Portal, though here on Rookery Earth the Combine have not yet located it either. Originally slated as an ice breaker but refitted for experimental equipment, in an attempt to gain a government contract or two. It might have even been worth awarding, too.

[4] No, we still don't know what it is. It might be something quite powerful, or something clever. It may even be another Convocation entity being held in stasis by mechanical means, but then Local Lane might have had a clue about that, and he doesn't know what Cave was working on with this nutball project. By that time, he just didn't care. He probably should have, since it was what Caroline was sacrificed to run...

[5] It did vanish from the underground facility at North Aperture (then known only as Aperture Science and Technology), and its 'shipyard' where the craft was created is situated is in Shaft 5 above the Vortigaunt habitat, though they refuse to enter the area and seem to believe there's 'something' that might happen there once more. The dock and yard are very much the same as any above-ground shipyard, but ... are about 400 meters below the surface. It's likely that Cave wanted it to be 'secret' and didn't use the nearby shipyard found on the actual Great Lake nearby...

[6] The assets available in the game Portal and Portal 2 indicate that they were using blueprints for the USS Newport News flipped and slightly modified. That ship is not an ice breaker, which would be considerably smaller. The Borealis is around 550 feet long, directly between a heavy cruiser and an ice breaker.