Reading the reviews, it seems the audience has voted to let Gordon and Chell speak, and I cant's say how relieved I am. It was a real pain writing without dialogues.

One more thing: Half-Life and Portal are completely based on full immersion in the character, and you see everything through the protagonist eyes. So I have a new experiment to do: is it better first or third person? What do you think? This time I try the first, Chell's POV.

As I woke up, all the world was a blur, I could barely define my surroundings. The first thing I remember feeling was sunlight over me. I felt like I had not tasted anything lie that for centuries.... and maybe it was true. The light made me blind, and my whole body was aching. I suddenly averted a crippling pain in my right hand, like a jolt. What was I supposed to have in there..... the gun. The portal gun. My memories started to emerge from the shroud, I remembered the tests, the escape, the fight..... and then the rise to the sun. After that, nothing but broken visions and a strange, odd litany. My eyes were slowly getting used to the brightness, and I started to recognize the remains of the AI all around me. On most of the rubble was printed the same name I had seen in her room, GLaDOS. The name of the.... entity. The computer. I felt... pity for her. It was almost pathetic how she was left alone in there.... alone with me.

The psychedelic pursue through that laboratory was disturbing even to think about. It had definitely been deserted for years, at least since all the employees had been poisoned by the AI. I remembered the broken red phone in her room, the proof of how she had cut all the communications for her former masters. But there was not even any sign of their passage....

Which led me to the real question, how much time had passed since I first had entered that facility?

But even if I could know that, what could I understand? I couldn't remember a thing of how did I get there in the first place, nor of my life before it.... all that remained in my memory was the paranoiac adventure inside that cursed structure.... anything else was not just blurred, it was completely washed away.

I had more or less regained my consciousness. I looked down at my arm, seeing the Hand-held Portal Device, the basic of all of my efforts as well as the tool f my enemies. I tried to fire it, well knowing it wasn't going to work. The head of the gun slided back, while a few orange sparks fell out of it.

It was broken.

I tried, carefully, to open my fingers, but the hand didn't answer to my commands. I opened with my left hand the right fingers, one by one, until the device fell down. It was so light that I barely felt the loss of burden.... but as I finally got rid of it, I felt like being freed.

Now I had to understand where, when and who was I. And I had a single clue, the name of my captors, the cursed Aperture science.

I tried to move some steps. My leg's augmentations were still there, helping me not to fall.... I wondered if it was best to remove them. No, better to leave them into place... and better to find some shoes, the hot asphalt under my feet was not a good sensation. The building which probably used to be the Aperture office complex was a wreckage, the explosions down below had sunk in into the ground and shattered everything. Apparently, no one was there anyway.

Now that I thought of it, there was nobody at all. I expected to see firemen, police, ambulances, but all there was around me were hills, with steppe on a side and trees on the other. Just before the laboratory entrance there was a road. I could hitch a way to the closest city, assuming someone was going to lean a passage to a woman with leg prosthesis and an experiment suit.

I walked out of the fallen gates, seeing the borders of the road, far away. There was nothing and nobody. In the distance, I saw a village, or what it could look like a village. A few smoke columns were rising from it. I hoped it was the from chimneys or fireplaces, it made the city seem alive though in me was growing the sensation of being the only living creature left on the world.

I set on march, with the portal gun on my shoulder, walking beside the road, on the grassy ground. Under my feet, every irregularity of the surface and every little stone itching my soles reminded I was walking on the earth, on mother nature herself, not on the cold floors created by mother GLaDOS.

I decided to leave thoughts and imagination for afterwards, I just walked on slowly, enjoying the beauty of that landscape. After a few minutes, though, I considered it was more of a still life than a landscape. There were no animals, no people, no sign of life. Vegetation on the other hand had overridden the road and invaded any free space, no one seemed to have tried to stop it. But it seemed the road would've been useless anyway, since there were no cars at all.

Was there, in that world, someone who remembered me? Someone who could help me? Maybe in the Aperture Science? Maybe Black Mesa?

Wait-why should I think of that? I remembered it as a subconscious notion.... like someone had told that to me while I was asleep. What would Black Mesa mean, anyway? It seemed the name of a place, maybe my home city. Anyway I couldn't see anything which could even look like a mesa around me, not even in the distance.

I reached the village after a hour of walk, I didn't feel tired at all. Probably some Aperture technique to keep me always ready.

The village seemed more alive than the world around it, but not in a good sense. The stench of death and decay was in the air, an abrupt change from the aseptic environments I was used to. The sounds were unnatural, beastly howls and screams of pain. The instinct of survival which had sustained me in my lab-rat course overtook me again, but I knew if would've been hard now to think without portals. I tried the portal gun again, fruitlessly. Anyway leaving it behind was out of the question, it was a too important clue.

The streets were littered with broken car parts and destroyed furniture; as well as on the street, vegetation had the best on buildings.

I finally found a human being. Or at least something which used to be one. Hi body was maimed beyond recognition, he had been torn apart by something with claws. In his hand he held a handgun. I grabbed it and pulled out the magazine; surprisingly, it was full. He had not even tried to defend himself, apparently

In the corner of my eye, something moved. A human figure, apparently. Maybe a survivor.

I turned around suddenly, aiming the gun at it. It was clear that thing had not survived at all. Its body was covered in blood, he was hunched and lame, and above his head a group of enormous spiders was hissing and climbing up and down.

In had faced fear in many situations. The terror of being trapped in a closed room, the fear of fighting dangerous enemies, the constant paranoia of cameras watching my every step, but it was the first time I met something so physically horrible.

One of the spider-like creatures leaned towards me, preparing to jump. My reflexes were quicker than my mind, when it jumped I bashed it with the portal gun. Its disgusting blood stained me while the disarticulated corpse rolled down on the ground. The smell was unbearable, I would've thrown up if only I had ever eaten something.

The creature leaned back, while the spiders climbed one on the other to jump up.

I aimed the gun at it. "Stop, whatever you are!"

I had screamed. I had... spoken. I did it instinctively, without thinking.... it was the first time I had spoken in what I remembered of my life.... during the test, had not said a single word.... not even before GLaDOS, not even when the platform was sliding into the fire....

The monster did not seem so impressed, anyway. It moaned as another spider jumped.

I shot it, and unloaded the whole magazine on the others. Unsurprisingly, I seemed to be well trained to fight, my subconscious guided my movements.

I ran out of bullets while the last spider was still there. It was more than on the human, it was.... attached to it. Part of it, almost. A parasite. So that's what they were. Parasites. Maybe this was why everything was so empty.... so dead.

I ran away from that hunchback abomination. It was too slow to follow me anyway.

"You, human one! Come here!" a strange, unnatural voice called me. I turned to see a strange, humanoid creature. It had three arms, a brown, hairless skin. On its head, an enormous red eye.

He invited me into a house and locked the door behind. I didn't know if I could trust him, but he seemed less alien than the creature before.

"You don't belong here. Your essence is different, indeed." stated the creature.

"I don't know.... I can only tell I come from Aperture Science."

"I regret telling you that this name has no meaning to me."

"It doesn't mean a lot for me either. But my memory was washed away."

"I am afraid in this matter there's no help i can offer. To unveil the mists of your mind is more than I alone can archive."

"And does this symbol mean anything to you?"

I shown him the Aperture mark on the portal gun, and it retreated as if he had seen something horrible.

"That circle.... the broken round.... the mark of the enemies! You might not be unrelated to them!"

"Listen... this thing is part of an experiment I was used as a lab rat for. I don't know much about it, but this society was guided by a crazed computer."

"Shaenat.. a computer, you affirmed. This might mean more than we imagine." he touched the portal gun with the central hand "Hamnai.... Thamm...." green rays were flowimg in and out of his fingers.

"Yes. The essence is not different. The same technology which is used by our oppressors. Though their broken vision makes the symbol look different, they print it on their automatic weapons."

"You mean these.... oppressors are the same who used me?"

"Sadly, my lore is insufficient to answer your question. We will have to join my kin out of the city."

"Your kin? But... who are you?"

"I call myself Gathule. I belong to the freed ones who take the name of Vortigaunts."

"And... are you from this planet?"

"Your memory, is indeed, not unbroken. Many years ago, the dimensional breach which was the herald of the Combine's forthcoming joined our worlds, so that the Freeman could slay the dreaded Nilhilant and free my kin."

"Wait- you mean you come from another dimension, and someone from this one freed you?"

"Excellent understanding."

"But now there's this "combine" which dominates you again, right?"

"Precisely. They dominate my and your kin alike."

"And they use Aperture technology.... by ant chance, are these "automated weapons" you mentioned like... white, egg shaped tripod machine guns?"

"Their colour cannot be described as white, and the word 'egg' is new to my ear. But indeed, it's not false that they have three feet nor that they are the kind of machine you could call a gun."

"Damn. Do they have things like metallic cubes and spheres of energy?"

"Spheres of power are not alien to their devices."
"So this is it... whatever they are, they took much from Aperture... from my own captors...."
"This is hardly an improbable guess. But now hurry, we have to meet my kindred to discuss the matters of urgency."

The picture begins to clear up a bit..... maybe... but anyway, the next time you see a combine turret, try to look at the symbol and compare it with the Aperture science mark.... you'll see.