Chapters
In the world, Chell finds, there are more stories.
When the group finds her and heals her back to life, it feels like getting to the surface once more; she has to adapt to yet another world, squeezed between a past and a future that never look alike.
She learns there are legends, in the fragments of peace that accompany the eternal war. It's been years, her companions say, but the resistance lives on. So does the occupation. She thinks of her stasis, the long dark, and relates.
It is easier to listen the night away, by the small campfire that smells of gasoline and humidity. When the others don't awaken their stories — of guns, brave men, and that one old incident — nobody feels like talking. She just stares at nothing, increases the silence. It is hard to tell when you have no voice.
She does not try to speak. Then again, even if she could, she would never find a language — even starting would make no sense. Her story rebuilds itself on its own; and the shadows of its events pass on her like clouds, ever intense and changing.
Chell does not want an audience; whatever she first tried to let on, what they rebuilt from her gestures and looks, always was too little to even be called truth. So vast, so hard to recreate, was the expanse of tiles.
She tells herself the tale, and it is never the last time. She cannot stop its cycle. The chambers, the row of days, are carved in her thoughts at the same depth; the intensity and shape varies each time.
There are moments when it all comes back at once, in a wave, and its build feels more concrete than that of her own body. Her legs waver beneath it. She sits and exhales and it fades with her breath, fast, leaving her alone in the concrete wasteland.
Sometimes it pierces her like the cold of cryo-chambers. Just then, her heart grows warm with a familiar dread she cannot let go of. It swells, it touches her, and shrinks back in the past.
Most of the time it comes in half, and it's slow and subtle. Her memories flicker on the surface of the world like the neon lights used to do — white flashes, seconds, on the fluid expanse that knew no end. Aperture melts in her sight, fragments, falls down to coat her new reality.
She stops noticing the difference in time. In the end, they make two settings — equally destroyed — to one life that knows no direction.
Chell thinks about it every night, wrapped by the one tattered blanket she owns. Her life is enclosed by two moments — the one she lives in, and the last hour she spent in there. The time span growing in between seems more useless each day.
Aperture trapped her, had her — more than the bundle of human warmth she found, more than the buildings that collapse around her each day. It became her certainty; nowhere else, not beyond its limits, there seems to be room for her. She knows no more — what she did, or will do, are complete darkness.
It began with a voice. It ended with a wheat field, and left her with a row of blank pages.
In pain, countless times, she dreams of starting over.
A bizarre mental exercise that started from one simple concept: the Portal series being played by thousands of people, and more than once. Dedicated to all friends who lived, and will live, the adventure.