After the events of Portal 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode 2–
Chell squinted into the blaring sunlight as she gazed across the great expanse of… what was that? Wheat. That's right, wheat.
She hadn't been out of the underground labyrinth that made up Aperture for more than twenty years. And the world had changed.
Chell tried to remember the day that she had come to apply at the Aperture Science skyscraper in Upper Michigan. She remembered that there had been a very long drive to get to the skyscraper, and an even longer wait to get through security. Now Chell remembered.
But now, what was once a great expanse of concrete and scientist lodgings was now a field of wheat. Or was it barley?
Chell looked back to the shack that she had just entered from. There was a companion cube between her and the door. What had happened back there? The adrenaline that had accompanied her almost demise was still coursing through her veins and her heard was still slamming against her ribs. Chell hopped over the cube and gently put her hand up against the door to the facility. Chell remembered her. Even though it was hard to admit, Chell had been saved. Saved by her mortal enemy. Chell almost felt sorry for GLaDOS, and then remembered what all she had done to her. Chell took her hand off of the door and turned back towards the sun.
A gust of wind blew past Chell's face, and she breathed deeply. This air wasn't recycled. It wasn't her "one room full of air". It was real.
Chell still had her portal gun, and was grasping onto it with an iron fist, and when she realized that she was, she unclenched her hand, and dropped the gun. It whirred quietly as it fell with a dull thud. Chell didn't want anything to do with that gun anymore. There wasn't anything that she wanted to bring with her from the infernal place in the ground. Chell wanted to be human again, and not just a numbered test subject.
Chell would have stripped right then and thrown away her clothes, but she remembered her humanity, and stopped to think. Chell sighed. What was she doing? She had no one out there that remembered her. No one that cared. She might as well go back down the elevator and test some more. But no. She would not. She was a fighter, and she had conquered the unconquerable.
She was Chell.
Thirteen miles away, Gordon Freeman tried to sleep. His best friend had just been killed in cold blood, and he probably hadn't seen the Sandman in two days. He would occasionally wake up with a jerk, catching himself before he started screaming in horror; the dreams of headcrabs latching onto his brain and sucking away his humanity. After the fifth time jolting awake, Gordon groaned and sat up. He was in a barren, metal-lined room that was his room. There really wasn't any reason for him to stay in bed if all he was going to do was toss-and-turn the night away and besides, Isaac might need some help.
Gordon quickly dressed in his black jacket and jeans, relieved to not have to put on his Life Suit. He opened the iron door to his room at a creakingly slow pace, and finally was able to wedge himself through the door. As he shut the door, a gust of cold wind passed across to him, and made him shiver. He glanced over to the source of the wind; a blown out window that had been covered in a thick blanket that was now wedged to the side of the window ledge, letting a cold gust break through. Gordon walked over to it and lifted the blanket back into position, while looking out of the broken screen.
Not much had changed since the end of the Combine Occupation of Earth. The Occupation itself had done enough already for there to be any more room for change. People still cowered in their houses, and still kept their fair distance away from the Combine central hubs. Unlike the time before the Day of Invasion, there were no child voices to be heard laughing as their sources played together. The only sound to be heard was the occasional sparking of the various exposed electrical wires that lay in tangles where they fell. Gordon could remember the time when people didn't have to carry guns to kill the occasional headcrab that would manifest themselves in the pockets of rubble that lines all the streets in sight. There was still electricity to be harvested from the generators the Combine had left when fleeing the planet, and there were large arrays of computer systems to be salvaged from the rubble piles, but there were not many who actually knew how to use them anymore.
Gordon sighed and fastened the blanket to the window frame. Inside his heart he knew that he blamed himself for the Combine Invasion, but he wouldn't dare tell anyone this truth. Everyone regarded him as a "hero", but Gordon didn't feel like a hero. All he wanted to do was go back to his lab and conduct experiments like he used to do, but he knew he couldn't.
Gordon turned away from the blanketed window and walked back to the end of the hall where a series of voices and lights were coming out from underneath an iron door similar to his own. Gordon pushed open the door and walked inside, almost colliding with Isaac Kleiner. They quickly got themselves untangled and Isaac stammered out his apologies. Gordon waved them away with a "Doctor…" and a nod. Isaac readjusted his glasses and cleared his throat. "Ah! Gordon! I was just on my way to get you!"
Gordon noted that Isaac was obviously excited about something, and glanced questioningly over at Isaac's partner, Arne Magnusson. Magnusson just shrugged and bit deeper into the bagel that he was smacking on. Gordon turned his attention back onto Isaac, and motioned him to go on. Isaac scuttled over to the array of computers that lined the north wall. "Well, the good doctor and I" he motioned over to Magnusson "have been monitoring a certain spot for quite a while. This certain spot, as you can see here," he adjusted a few knobs on the panel in front of him enlarging a spot on the video on the computer screens "is the entrance to the Aperture Science facility. With the Borealis being a necessity as of late, we took the liberty of 'commandeering' a few of Black Mesa's defunct satellites to be the body of this operation. Today we noticed an anomaly at the site. This anomaly turned out to be a person. A woman, to be exact."
Gordon slowly walked over to the screens and observed the enlarged video that was being played and re-played. It showed a woman being ejected out of the entrance shack and behind her a cube of some sort followed her. Gordon grasped one of the screens that showed the woman's face. Isaac came up beside Gordon and nodded. "Yes, Gordon, yes. That is her. That is Chell.
