Prologue: Late for Work
He'd just been a lowly PhD in a job where doctorates were barely enough to get your foot in the door. A secret facility, straight out of a conspiracy theorist's wet dream. He only survived the initial accident because he was forced to do the physical labor, which required a top-of-the-line powered Haz-Mat suit.
He was, in fact, not particularly special at all. But on the day the man-made apocalypse began, he'd been one of the few to fight back – and survive. As the facility was overrun by monstrous creatures and evacuated, he stayed behind trying to save his colleagues. When the Marines came with orders to cover up the incident by any means necessary, he fought back. When his superiors discovered that they could send someone to another world to decapitate the enemy leadership, he was sent in alone. But against those ridiculous odds, he succeeded at the cost of being lost to time.
Unfortunately these heroics had not been enough to save his own world. What they had thought to be an entire army was merely a small division of an even greater threat. A threat that spanned not just galaxies, but entire universes.
The war lasted seven hours.
Humanity surrendered, trading immediate extinction with a slow and painful one. The Combine installed a puppet government, allowing itself free reign over the world - stripping it of its resources, enslaving its people, and converting them into something... inhuman.
But humans have never taken their own extinction lying down. The few from that secret facility who survived became leaders of a new Resistance. And wherever they went, the story of the lone hero followed. Gordon Freeman freed the Vortigaunts. Gordon Freeman survived the portal storms at Black Mesa. Gordon Freeman took on the Combine by himself and won. When we were all doomed, Gordon Freeman saved us.
Gordon Freeman will return to save us again.
Gordon Freeman. The One Free Man as he was known to the Vortigaunts. Just a lowly PhD in a job where doctorates were barely enough to get your foot in the door.
Hell, he'd even been late to work that day.
