Chell

Chell is a Human in The Half-Life Universe.

“You’ve been wrong about every single thing you’ve ever done, including this thing. You’re not smart. You’re not a scientist. You’re not a doctor. You’re not even a full-time employee! Where did your life go so wrong?” - GLaDOS (Half-Life Universe)

## Biography

### Background

Although Chell’s origins are unknown, she was definitely among the people present during GLaDOS’ activation in 200-, as GLaDOS locked down the facility immediately afterward; Chell is confirmed to be the child of an Aperture scientist because one of the “Bring Your Daughter To Work Day” science projects is signed by her. The project board mentions an ‘ingredient from dad’s work’ also, with an Aperture logo illustrated nearby.

According to the psychological profile in her personnel file, Chell is "abnormally stubborn" and refuses to give up, no matter how daunting the challenge. Due to this, she was rejected as a test subject, but Doug Rattmann altered the testing order, having correctly guessed that Chell's extreme tenacity might allow her to defeat GLaDOS.

Chell's Test Subject Application Form states that she refused to answer the essay question and instead answered in binary. The binary can be translated to "The cake is a lie."

### Appearances in Events

#### Chell’s Escape from Aperture Science

Sometime after GLaDOS' takeover of the Enrichment Center and shortly after the Combine invasion of Earth, Chell is awakened from some sort of stasis pod in a Relaxation Vault by GLaDOS. Chell is released from the Vault through a Portal and begins to progress through a series of Test Chambers that require her to solve puzzles revolving around the use of the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device (ASHPD). Throughout the tests, GLaDOS guides Chell with what sound like pre-recorded scripted instructions; however, her comments are strikingly bizarre, and often seem to malfunction at suspiciously well-timed points in mid-sentence.

When Chell eventually makes it to Test Chamber 16, she discovers a hidden alcove where desperate messages were scribbled on the walls by mentally unstable former Aperture employee Doug Rattman while he was trapped in the facility and hiding from GLaDOS. The most prominent message, "the cake is a lie," is repeated several times. In the next chamber, GLaDOS introduces her to the Companion Cube, which Chell must carry through the chamber. Here she once again finds messages from Rattmann, who seems to have become emotionally attached to his Companion Cube and grieved over its "death." At the end of the chamber, Chell's Companion Cube meets the same fate when she is forced to incinerate it in order to proceed.

At the conclusion of the test, Chell travels on an Aperture Science Unstationary Scaffold away from the final Test Chamber. Instead of the promised cake, she is met with a pit of fire. To GLaDOS' surprise, Chell does not panic or give up in despair. Instead, she narrowly escapes certain death through clever use of the ASHPD and begins traveling through abandoned maintenance areas despite continued verbal discouragement from GLaDOS.

Throughout the decaying and neglected maintenance areas, Chell finds that Rattmann has been roaming around the facility for some time, leaving graffiti on the walls to guide her along the right path. After constant admonishment from GLaDOS and a massive Sentry Turret ambush, Chell finds herself in GLaDOS' main control room. GLaDOS attempts to deploy a "surprise" to eliminate Chell but ends up "accidentally" detaching her Morality Core, claiming she has never seen it and does not know what it is. Chell promptly incinerates the core.

GLaDOS, now unrestrained by the Morality Core, begins to flood the Enrichment Center with neurotoxin. She notes that the Morality Core must have had some ancillary responsibilities and that she cannot shut off the Rocket Sentry in her control room. Chell takes advantage of this and uses Portals to redirect the rockets back at GLaDOS, detaching and incinerating her Personality Cores one by one.

Before the neurotoxin can kill her, Chell destroys GLaDOS, who is apparently sucked to the outside with parts of her generator. Chell is dragged with her and ends up among GLaDOS' remains on the parking lot in front of the Aperture Labs entrance, only to be dragged back inside and placed in stasis by the Party Escort Bot.

Despite GLaDOS' apparent destruction, only a part of her was destroyed. GLaDOS reactivates a room full of Personality Cores and re-captures Aperture Laboratories, filing a letter to Chell, informing her that she is still alive and "not even angry" about Chell's actions—but not before extinguishing a candle on the cake, which was not a lie after all.

#### Doug Rattmann Saves Chell

Aperture scientist Doug Rattmann, the last employee remaining alive and free after the Bring Your Daughter To Work Day massacre, had made Chell a test subject as part of a gambit to defeat GLaDOS. Chell had been rejected as a candidate for testing due to her psychological profile, which showed her to be an extreme outlier in terms of tenacity. Rattmann, having correctly guessed that such stubborn determination might be the key to escaping, hacked the system queue. Chell was now first in line for testing.

This is not to be confused with Chell's actual Test Subject ID being changed. Chell's Test Subject ID is 234, as seen on the Relaxation Vault and forms. Rather, Chell was moved from the bottom of the queue to the top. This could imply that she has tested before, which is also referenced with GlaDOS welcoming Chell.

While unconscious after the explosion that destroyed GLaDOS, Chell was placed in a "Long-Term Relaxation Chamber," a large stasis chamber designed to look like a cheap motel room. However, the main power for the facility failed when GLaDOS was destroyed, and the chamber's life support systems were compromised.

Rattmann, who had managed to leave the facility in the chaos, was overcome with guilt at the thought that Chell would die after he had used her as a pawn in his own escape. At the cost of his own life, he re-entered the facility and restored power to the chamber by hooking it to the reserve grid, saving Chell's life but placing her in a semi-permanent state of stasis. The reserve grid was not programmed to wake her.

#### Chell wakes up/Escapes the facility for the second time

Some years after GLaDOS' partial destruction, Chell awakens from stasis and is approached by Wheatley, a Personality Core, and tries to escape with him. After multiple tests, which eventually get Chell a single portal ASHPD, they set out through the maintenance areas, which (like the rest of the facility) are overrun with nature. Not much later, the pair find themselves in the remains of GLaDOS' chamber, who is accidentally awakened by Wheatley; Chell loses the ASHPD, and GLaDOS is quick to accuse Chell of having "murdered" her years before. Chell is then forced back into the testing area, where she must complete more tests with the dual portal ASHPD.

Wheatley eventually breaks her out of the test chambers, and the two narrowly escape GLaDOS. Wheatley persuades Chell to help him neutralize GLaDOS' defenses by cutting off her turret production line and neurotoxin supply. He is unable to figure out how to actually accomplish this, but Chell manages to handle it without him. She first sets up a defective turret as the template for the scanner that approves new turrets, resulting in the functional ones being culled, and then uses portals to redirect lasers to sever the supply tubing to the neurotoxin generator.

GLaDOS eventually manages to trap Chell, bringing her into her lair. Her attempts to kill Chell with her sabotaged turrets and neurotoxin fail, allowing Chell to complete a core transfer. This results in GLaDOS' "head" being detached from her body and replaced with Wheatley. Now in control of Aperture, Wheatley summons an elevator to take Chell to the surface and celebrates his victory over GLaDOS. As the elevator begins to rise, Wheatley begins to grow mad with power and brings Chell back down to him. Gloating over the defeated GLaDOS, Wheatley integrates her personality into a potato battery. She goads him into a rage by pointing out that Chell did all the work in escaping and defeating her and claiming that Wheatley was originally designed as an "intelligence dampener" whose sole function was to render GLaDOS less dangerous by constantly generating stupid ideas. Furious at both GLaDOS and Chell, Wheatley begins smashing Chell's elevator into the ground, sending them down the elevator shaft and into the bowels of the facility.

Chell wakes up in the deepest part of the Aperture Science, which contains the old facility from as far back as the 1950s. Pre-recorded messages from Cave Johnson, with occasional input from his assistant Caroline, guide Chell through the tests. She makes her way upward, through progressively more recent parts of the Aperture facility. Along the way, Chell finds GLaDOS and agrees to ally with her against Wheatley, stabbing the potato onto a prong of the ASHPD. As GLaDOS listens to the recordings, she begins to remember her own origins: Caroline's consciousness was eventually uploaded into an A.I. network, creating GLaDOS. As she regains conscious access to Caroline's memories and personality, her attitude toward Chell begins to soften slightly.

When the two re-enter the modern section of the facility, they are captured by Wheatley, who puts them through his own poorly designed test chambers. His incompetence clearly poses a threat to the entire Enrichment Center, as he ignores warnings about an imminent reactor meltdown. Chell and GLaDOS manage to escape Wheatley's attempts to kill them and enter his lair. Working together, Chell uses Portals to redirect Wheatley's bombs against him, and GLaDOS provides corrupted cores for Chell to attach to him, hoping to trigger another core transfer. When Chell attempts to press the Stalemate Resolution Button, bombs explode around it, a trap devised by Wheatley. As the facility begins to fall apart due to the long-ignored meltdown, the ceiling splits open, revealing the night sky. Injured but still alive, Chell grabs the ASHPD and shoots a portal onto the moon. Both she and Wheatley are sucked out into the vacuum of space, clinging desperately to the straining wires of GLaDOS' mainframe. Chell is saved as GLaDOS regains control of the facility, dragging her back through the portal and Wheatley gets knocked off into space.

Chell falls unconscious and awakens sometime later to see GLaDOS, ATLAS, and P-body in a reconstructed AI chamber. GLaDOS, showing what seems like genuine concern for Chell's welfare, talks about what she learned from their experience together and says she now realizes Chell has been her best friend all along. She then adds that feeling this surge of emotion has allowed her to figure out where its source - Caroline - is located, and an audio notification promptly states that she has deleted it.

Despite being apparently back to her old, amoral self, GLaDOS says that she intends to release Chell, claiming that attempts to kill her simply have proven to cause too much trouble. An elevator takes Chell upward, and a chorus of turrets sing her a farewell song. Arriving on the surface, Chell opens the door to find herself exiting what appears to be a small tool shed in a sunlit field of wheat. The door slams shut behind her, then briefly opens again to spit out the scorched Companion Cube which she earlier threw into an incinerator.

### Appearance

Chell is a young woman in her early or mid 20's. Her ethnic background is somewhat ambiguous; she appears to be of Latin or multiracial descent. She has light brown skin and pale blue eyes (occasionally described as grey), and her hair was black with most likely stress-induced grey streaks in the first escape, before appearing as very dark brown in the second escape. This change in hair color could be explained by the grey streaks fading when the constant stress of testing stopped when she was asleep.

Throughout the first of Chell’s escapes, she wears a worn-out orange jumpsuit and has bare feet, with Advanced Knee Replacement prostheses surgically attached to her legs. She has a ponytail and mild "bed hair" from sleeping in a stasis pod for an unknown period of time.

During her second escape, Chell appears much better groomed and rested. Her knee replacements have been replaced by Long Fall Boots. She wears the same jumpsuit, but with the upper part folded down and tied around her waist, revealing a white tank top bearing the Aperture logo and tight-fitting pale blue shorts or pants. She also wears a white wrap up past the wrist on her right hand, presumably to provide joint support while holding the ASHPD.

GLaDOS and Wheatley both make fat jokes about Chell (the latter being very blatant with "fatty fatty"), even though she appears to be a thin, fit woman.

### Personality and skills

*You dangerous, mute lunatic.*"
―GLaDOS
As with her fellow silent protagonist Gordon Freeman, relatively little is explicitly known about Chell's personality. According to the file, psychological testing showed that Chell scored well in the 99th percentile on the trait of tenacity. A note on these test results characterized her as "abnormally stubborn," adding that "she never gives up. Ever." Because she was so much an outlier in this respect, she was initially rejected for testing until Rattman altered the records.

Rattman's comments imply that Chell's profile was not outstanding in other respects like she is in tenacity. She was not the fastest or most athletic of the test subjects GLaDOS captured (though she does appear to have strong stamina, strength, and balance), and some of the others had higher IQs, although Rattman implies that Chell's IQ was well above the average. Based on her accomplishments during her escapes, it can be surmised that Chell is highly resourceful, quick-thinking, very intelligent, strong-willed, good at creative problem-solving, and does not panic easily. Her file shows her fluency in binary code, demonstrating knowledge of coding. Chell's combined traits of athleticism, intelligence, and extreme tenacity make her an excellent test subject.