Chell

"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

Chell is an Aperture Science Test Subject (Subject #1, Formerly Subject #1498), and the esoteric, silent protagonist of Portal and Portal 2.

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 after her activation. According to the psychological profile in the personnel file, Chell is "abnormally stubborn" and refuses to give up, no matter how daunting the challenge. Originally, she was not supposed to be a test subject, but Doug Rattmann altered the testing order, having correctly guessed that Chell's extreme tenacity might allow her to defeat GLaDOS.

Portal
Some time after GLaDOS' takeover of Aperture Laboratories and shortly after the Combine's 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 pre-recorded scripted responses, which seem to malfunction at ominous 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 Rattmann 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. 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 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 an incinerator. Using the ASHPD, she narrowly escapes certain death, and begins traveling through abandoned maintenance areas despite 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, where the A.I. has been sitting alone for over twenty years. GLaDOS attempts to deploy a "surprise" to eliminate Chell, but ends up accidentally detaching her Morality Core, which Chell promptly incinerates.



GLaDOS, now unrestrained by the Morality Core, begins to flood the Enrichment Center with neurotoxin. GLaDOS 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 uses this to her advantage, 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 through a portal 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&mdash;but not before extinguishing a candle on the cake, which was not a lie after all.

Portal 2: Lab Rat
While unconscious, 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.

Doug Rattmann, the last remaining scientist alive and free in the facility after the massacre on Bring Your Daughter To Work Day, restored power to the chamber by hooking it to the reserve grid, saving Chell's life, though placing her in a semi-permanent state of stasis. The reserve grid wasn't programmed to wake her. It is also revealed at the end of the comic that Chell was rejected as a test subject due to her abnormal tenacity, which was precisely why Dr. Rattmann made her test subject number one.

Portal 2


Many years after GLaDOS' partial destruction, Chell is awakened from stasis by Wheatley, a Personality Core who has become concerned with the state of the facility, and convinces Chell to escape with him. Chell agrees, and they set out through the maintenance areas, which along the rest of the facility, are in decaying ruin, overrun with nature. They accidentally find themselves in the remains of GLaDOS' chamber. GLaDOS awakens, and is quick to accuse Chell of murdering her years ago. Chell is then forced back into the testing area, where she must complete more tests.

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 and neurotoxin supply. He is unable to figure out how to actually accomplish this, but Chell manages. She first sets up a defective turret as the model for the scanner that approves new turrets, resulting in the functional ones being culled. She then uses lasers to sever the tubes on the neurotoxin generator.

GLaDOS eventually manages to trap Chell and bring her into her lair. Her attempts to use turrets and neurotoxin to kill Chell fail, and Chell completes a core transfer, resulting in GLaDOS' "head," which apparently houses her personality, being detached from her "body" and replaced with Wheatley. Now the master of Aperture, Wheatley summons an elevator to take Chell to the surface and celebrates his victory over GLaDOS by plugging her into a potato battery. As the elevator begins to rise, Wheatley quickly seems to go mad with power and he brings Chell back down to him. GLaDOS goads him, telling him that Chell did all the work in escaping from 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. Enraged at both GLaDOS and Chell, Wheatley smashes them into the bowels of the facility.

Both Chell and GLaDOS wake up in the deepest part of the enrichment center, filled with test chambers 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, and she makes her way upward, through increasingly recent parts of the Aperture facility. Partway through, Chell reunites with 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 remembers her own origins as Caroline, and her attitude toward Chell seems to soften slightly.

When the two escape the ruins into the modern part of the facility, they are captured by Wheatley, who puts them through his own, poorly designed test chambers. His lack of intelligence is clearly posing a threat to the entire Enrichment Center, as he ignores warnings about an imminent reactor meltdown. Chell and GLaDOS manage to escape Wheatley's attempt to kill them, and they enter his lair. Working together, Chell uses portals to redirect Wheatley's bombs against him, and GLaDOS provides corrupted cores for her to attach to him, hoping to trigger another core transfer. Chell attempts to press the manual override that will complete the transfer, but Wheatley has booby-trapped the button with explosives. As the facility begins to fall apart due to the constantly ignored meltdown, the ceiling splits, revealing the sky. Injured but still alive, Chell grabs the ASHPD and shoots a portal onto the moon, which sucks both Wheatley and herself out into the vacuum of space. As they both desperately cling to the mainframe, Chell is, surprisingly, saved by GLaDOS, who pulls her back through the portal, leaving Wheatley in lunar orbit.

Chell falls unconscious and awakens some hours later to see GLaDOS, P-Body and ATLAS. GLaDOS, showing what seems like genuine concern for Chell's welfare, talks about what she learned from their experiences 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 promptly claims to delete it. Despite being apparently back to her old, amoral self, GLaDOS says that she intends to release Chell, claiming that attempts to kill her have proven too difficult. 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 in a sunny wheat field. The door slams shut behind her, then briefly opens again to spit out the scorched Companion Cube from the first game.

Appearance
Chell is a fairly thin young woman in her early or mid 20's. Her ethnic background is somewhat ambiguous; she appears to be of Latin or multiracial descent, and Valve concept artist Matt Charlesworth described her as having "a hint of Japanese ethnicity." (Chell's face and body model, Alésia Glidewell, has a Brazilian-American father and a Japanese mother.) She has light brown skin, dark hair with streaks of gray that are visible in the first game, and gray eyes. Her split earlobes suggest that she once wore earrings that were violently ripped out.

Throughout the first game 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.

In Portal 2, Chell appears much better groomed and rested. Her knee replacements have been replaced with 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 for joint support on the wrist that holds the ASHPD.

Personality and skills
"You dangerous, mute lunatic."

- GLaDOS

As with her fellow silent protagonist Gordon Freeman, relatively little is known about Chell's personality. The clearest information about her comes from the Lab Rat comic, which shows portions of her personnel file. According to the file, psychological testing showed that Chell scored well into the 99th percentile on the trait of tenacity. A note on these test results characterized Chell 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 particularly remarkable in other respects. She was not the fastest or most athletic of the test subjects GLaDOS captured however in trailers of Portal 2 Chell can be seen from a third perspective performing acrobatic feats while undertaking a test chamber, and some of the others had higher IQs, although Rattman implies that Chell's IQ was above the average. Based on her accomplishments in the games, it can be surmised that Chell is highly resourceful, quick-thinking, good at creative problem-solving, and does not panic easily.

Chell seems to rarely or never speak to GLaDOS; in the first game, GLaDOS asks "Are you even listening to me?" and in the second, she calls Chell "a dangerous, mute lunatic." However, Eric Wolpaw has stated that Chell probably can speak, but refuses to do so in order to avoid giving GLaDOS the satisfaction of a response. The Lab Rat comic showed that Chell declined to answer at least part of her test subject questionnaire, suggesting that her defiant refusal to answer GLaDOS may be a long-standing habit. At the beginning of Portal 2, when Wheatley asks her to speak, she jumps instead, which Wheatley interprets as a sign of brain damage.

Little else is known about Chell; all further information about her comes from comments by GLaDOS, who is by no means a reliable source of information. GLaDOS claims that Chell is "a bitter, unlikable loner," "pointlessly cruel," and that test results show that she is "a horrible person." As GLaDOS lies habitually about many subjects and has a particular interest in trying to make Chell feel uncomfortable, guilty, or worthless, none of her comments can be assumed to be fact.

Backstory
Players exploring the Aperture facility in Portal 2 can discover a presentation from the Bring Your Daughter to Work Day science fair signed with the name Chell. Several girls seem to have made potato batteries; none of them have rotted over the years, but Chell's potato has actually grown out of control, sprouting through the ceiling. One of the steps described in her experimental procedure is using a "special ingredient from Daddy's work." This strongly implies that Chell was the daughter of a male Aperture employee, was trapped in the facility during GLaDOS' takeover on Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, and spent her entire adolescence as one of GLaDOS' prisoners. Assuming Chell was of grade school age during the 1998 science fair (as evidenced by her vernacular on the poster board), this would put Chell in her late teens or early 20's during the events of the first Portal.

Virtually no other reliable direct evidence about Chell's background appears in the games, although players have speculated based on vague hints. In the Lab Rat comic, Chell's surname is redacted on the list of test subjects, while no other information is missing; this may indicate some sort of secret concerning her family background. However, the possibility that there is no in-story explanation for the missing name and Valve simply did not want to give Chell a canonical surname yet cannot be dismissed.

GLaDOS often drops hints about Chell's background, but since her comments are obviously intended to manipulate Chell or damage her self-esteem, they may not have any basis in fact. In the first game, GLaDOS said that she possessed a backup of Chell's brain, which she later claimed to have deleted in a fit of rage. Although the comment may have been a complete fabrication, some players speculated that Chell might be a clone or an android (although the game's writers have now confirmed that this theory was not intended). GLaDOS also asserts once in the first game and repeatedly in the second that Chell was abandoned by her birth parents and subsequently adopted. In context, GLaDOS' intent is clearly for Chell to find this information upsetting - even when fighting on Chell's side, she not only repeats the allegation but adds, "and it's terrible."

Behind the scenes



 * The heel springs were originally created for the Combine Assassin, cut from Half-Life 2. They were reused as the Advanced Knee Replacement for Portal due to disbelief by playtesters that Chell could survive the drops she was subject to, particularly those that involved falling recursively through portals.


 * Chell's real life reference model is Alésia Glidewell. She also served as the base for the original model of Left 4 Dead's Zoey.


 * It has been stated by Gabe Newell in an October 2007 interview that Chell has importance in the overall Half-Life universe, and will eventually have a fairly significant relationship with some of the other characters that we are already familiar with.


 * In the original Portal trailer, a balding male Test Subject is used as a placeholder for Chell. While it cannot be clearly seen, it may be the Half-Life 2 "male 07" Citizen.


 * As seen in a very early Portal screenshot, the hands and forearms of the ASHPD user were to be featured in the viewmodel. Chell's right hand and forearm are still present in the final viewmodel, although the texture is broken. However the texture file can still be found in the game files, revealing what may be an early Aperture Science logo, followed by the number "122-7605", possibly an early Test Subject ID. These are not featured in Chell's model, which probably did not (at least fully) exist at that time of the game's development.


 * As seen in the texture folder for Chell's model, it appears that she was at some point to wear a fancy hairclip (as the texture "chell_hairclip.vtf"), replaced in the final game by a simple ring / elastic.


 * As with all the playable characters in the Half-Life universe, Chell is silent. However female Citizen sounds (by Mary Kae Irvin) are reused when she is hurt.




 * As stated by Matt Charlesworth, designer of the Portal 2 Chell, she was really successful in the first Portal. She fit into the world really well and complemented it without the distractions that a more flashy character would bring, and served well her utilitarian purpose. However when the team started working on Portal 2, they were not sure whether they would bring her back or not, and explored a few other characters before returning to Chell, when they realized removing her would not benefit the game.


 * In Portal, Chell's orange jumpsuit is similar to the common American prison outfit. According to Bay Raitt, the team put Chell in an orange jumpsuit to reinforce the fact that she is a Test Subject. Visually, the warmer orange colors help her pop out against the colder tones of the environment. For Portal 2, her outfit was redesigned to reflect her "lab rat" status.


 * That new outfit went through many concepts before the final one was chosen: as stated by Matt Charlesworth, some of the concepts started with a sporty, motorcycle gear like look, which was very different from the original orange outfit, even though they were still going for clean and simple. They played around with proportion as well, trying to play a lot more with extreme feminine proportions and a totally different color scheme. They also explored changing Chell's nationality for a little bit, since her true nationality has never been explored nor revealed.


 * The constraints the team had were that Chell was supposed to be dressed by machines, so any markings on the suit would have been on there for readability by a computer. That includes machine-read imagery, and what extra things might be on that kind of suit, but they eventually leaned away from the bar code design, because they reckoned it has been done quite a bit before, and originality is something Charlesworth really associates with Portal. She was never to look as if she had been designed, something the team fought with – to make her still appealing to the player, but not look over designed (the team tends to cut anything that does not serve a real purpose on their characters).




 * In the end, the things the team considered successful were the more minimal, clean, utilitarian looks (nothing was on there for fashion), leading to the final design of a purposely and constantly dehumanized Test Subject, considered by the team as making her look physically capable, but at the same time showing some vulnerability about her (what Charlesworth considers attractive in every person), which they thought to really seem like it belongs in the Portal world.


 * That new design is not supposed to look like a sexy Marvel superhero suit, as Charlesworth states. It is supposed to look like it was designed without any thought of making her look attractive. They team does not want to make her unattractive, but still wants to balance that out, and have Chell look like what she is - a Test Subject, not a prisoner, a janitor, or something else. They also want people to remember that version of the character better than the first one. Before he started working on Portal 2, Charlesworth admits he barely remembered the first Chell.




 * The hat featured in that new design came up around halfway through the conception phase, and it seemed to strike a chord with the whole team. Charlesworth states that is is something that always reminds him of test pilots – people who were subjected to testing and extreme conditions. It also serves a second purpose, because if there is a graphic on it, it is constantly readable from all angles, making it trackable by any computer found in the Enrichment Center. That serves the fiction of her being tested by GLaDOS, and keeps the hair out of her eyes.


 * The team was not sure whether to keep the Advanced Knee Replacement for Portal 2. He states that some team members are attached to it, and that some are not, so they have experimented what to do with them, or how to replace them. It was replaced by the Long Fall Boot.


 * Chell's new outfit was revealed as two ASCII art images given by the BBS during the Portal ARG.


 * In the end, the outfit chosen for Chell in the final, retail version of Portal 2 had her wearing her jumpsuit from the first game, though her upper body is disrobed and the upper half of the jumpsuit is tied around her waist, revealing a white tank top with the Aperture logo on it. She also wears a white band around part of her right forearm.


 * Originally, Chell was to be one half of the two Portal 2 co-op characters, the other being another woman named Mel. When they were replaced by ATLAS and P-body, Chell was kept for the singleplayer mode only, and Mel was removed from the storyline.


 * "Chell" may be derived from "Chelle", which is the diminutive of "Michelle". However, the staff commentaries on Portal 2 pronounce her name as in church rather than Michelle. "Chell" is never given in-game, but is mentioned in the Portal end credits and can be found in the game files.



Trivia

 * It was previously speculated that Chell might be Test Subject 234, but this was disproved in Portal 2: Lab Rat, which stated that Chell was Test Subject 1438, until Doug Rattmann changed her to be Test Subject 1.


 * While it is kept ambiguous whether or not Gordon Freeman participates in conversations in the Half-Life series, according to Erik Wolpaw, Chell does not actually speak during the course of Portal. Wolpaw explained that this is because of Chell's annoyance at her situation, choosing not to give her surroundings the satisfaction of a response. Wolpaw further stated that Chell probably can talk. Also in Portal 2, GLaDOS does call Chell a mute, though this could just be an observation, not a fact. Additionally, Wheatley attempts to get Chell to speak to check if she has brain damage after being in suspension; the speech prompts provided actually make Chell jump instead. The only known noises that Chell makes are rare grunts of pain in the course of the first game.


 * Chell has left Aperture Laboratories three times and has been to the surface twice. First was after she defeated GLaDOS at the end of Portal, however she was dragged back into the facility by the Party Escort Bot. Second was when she launched a portal on to the surface of the Moon to defeat Wheatley, she was pulled in to the vacuum of space but was saved by GLaDOS. Finally and currently, she was forced to leave the Aperture Laboratories and was sent to the surface by GLaDOS where she exited the lift near a shed in the middle of a wheat field with a burnt Companion Cube.


 * It's not exactly clear how much time Chell has spent in stasis between events of Portal and Portal 2. At the beginning of Portal 2 she's woken up first time after 50 days of sleep, for mandatory set of physical and mental exercises. Next time she wakes up, the announcer fades out (or stutters) after uttering 5 nines, which could either mean that Chell was sleeping for at least 273 years or that the announcement system reached a maximum. It may alternatively have broken after much of the facility fell into disrepair after the defeat of GLaDOS at the end of Portal which could also mean that she might have been sleeping for less time than announced.


 * In the Lab Rat comic, one of the files Rattmann has on Chell states the question "Why should Aperture Science accept you as a research volunteer, and would anyone file a police report if you went missing?" Which HR notes: "Subject refused to answer". At the bottom of the file are lines of binary code that translates to The cake is a lie.


 * When visiting the Bring You Daughter to Work Day Science Fair, there's a large overgrown potato plant with information on a large piece of cardboard. If the player looks closely at the project's information, "by Chell" is written on the side. Wither this means that Chell was a daughter of an Apeteture Science employee before becoming a test subject, or if there was another girl with the same name is unknown.

List of appearances

 * Portal
 * Portal: First Slice
 * Portal: Still Alive
 * Portal ARG
 * PotatoFoolsDay ARG
 * Portal 2: Lab Rat
 * Portal 2
 * The Final Hours of Portal 2