Portal Stories: Mel

The Mod's Logo

Portal Stories: Mel is a free story mod for Portal 2 made by Prism Studios and released on June 25th 2015 on Steam. It met with good reception, with some even going as far as to say that it is the unofficial Portal 3, or rather, Portal 1.5.

## Story

Portal Stories: Mel follows the story of a test subject from the fifties named (unsurprisingly) Mel. She is placed in an experimental Short Term Relaxation vault, but the test goes wrong and she wakes up long into the future, along with a voice claiming to be Cave Johnson, who tells her that it is still 1952 and that the reason for the facility being in ruins is that there were 'earthquakes! Lots of earthquakes!' which even brought items from the future. It is later revealed that the voice is not Cave Johnson but a core named Virgil, who fell off his management rail and landed in a junkyard in the depths of the facility. Virgil guides Mel through the old testing facility until she reaches Virgil. Mel then attaches Virgil to his management rail and he gets a lift for Mel, after she turns on the power.

However, this alerts the Aperture Employee Guardian and Intrusion Security System, or AEGIS, an automated security system, to their presence. It identifies Mel, Virgil and something else as 'Unregistered Lifeforms'. Mel then goes through Virgil's testing track while he works out how Mel could escape, and what AEGIS is doing. However AEGIS seizes control of Virgil's testing track. Virgil then takes control back, and so on.

Virgil then remembers an overgrown testing track, and realizes that the plants and animals would interfere with AEGIS's sensors. He takes Mel there, and looks through some computers he found, to find out what AEGIS is and why it's trying to kill them. He then discovers that AEGIS. seems to think that Virgil and Mel were responsible for the murder of the Aperture Employees that GLaDOS killed, and will stop at nothing to finish them off, even attempting to flood the Enrichment Centre in deadly Goo.

After a few tests, AEGIS recalibrates it's sensors, and Virgil realizes that they will not be able to stay in the overgrown test chambers for long. He comes up with a plan to 'take AEGIS on. Head on'. It involves turning on some generators, changing the security systems and sabotaging the turret production using reprogrammed Mobster Turrets that he pulled out of the old facility. All goes well until they reach the turret production line. Virgil realizes that he cannot get a Mobster Turret to the template booth, meaning they have to override the targeting systems manually by pulling out a wooden cutout of a human (which tells the turrets to shoot at humans) and replacing it with an image of an AEGIS server bank, which causes all the newly-produced turrets to shoot at server banks instead of people. Soon, all the turrets in that part of the facility were replaced.

Mel then enters the lair of AEGIS and starts using the reprogrammed turrets to destroy AEGIS's servers. It responds by beginning to suck all the oxygen out of room. Soon, it discovers the Mobster Turrets that Virgil pulled up, and deploys them against Mel, as they are still programmed to attack humans. However, Mel destroys all the servers, causing AEGIS to be incapable of automated control. Mel then flings herself on top of AEGIS, where there is a hatch leading to a small room with a desk, allowing manual control over AEGIS. Mel first deactivates the deadly goo pumps, and then, before she shuts down the system, Virgil reminds her that there was a third target that AEGIS was after. Mel checks the target list, and they realize that the third target was GLaDOS (who is listed as offline, due to this happening before Portal 2). Mel then shuts down the system and leaves. Before she can go in the exit lift, she must incinerate her old portal gun. She then exits the facility, through the same town seen in 1952, now modernised and destroyed by the Combine invasion.

В посткредитном ролике показано, что выключение AEGIS истощило криогенную резервную энергию, тем самым разбудив Челла и запустив события Портала 2.

## Custom Testing Elements

* Human Flesh Emancipation Grid
* Mobster Turret
* Fire (can be extinguished with cleansing gel)

## Characters

* Mel
* Cave Johnson
* Virgil
* AEGIS
* Chris
* Rainbow Core
* Caroline