#mute chell

[non-cannon]

To all the Portal fic writers/Chelldos fic writers out there.

If you want to write a fic where Chell doesn't/can't talk, but you want to have her able to communicate/communicate with GLaDOS in a way other than writing it down or using ASL, and you're willing to make Chell a nerd/give her some kind of programing/mathematical background, Chell could use binary.

You can count in binary/represent numbers in binary using your fingers, and the entire alphabet, plus a number of other symbols, has a standard binary representation. And these standard representations use either 8 or 6 total digits depending on the application, so Chell, with her 10 fingers would be fine.

She would have to spell each word out, and it would be far less efficient than sign language, but if you don't think she knew ASL because she wasn't mute pre-Aperture or maybe GLaDOS doesn't know it for whatever reason, but you do think Chell was a nerd, it's a viable alternative.

[lime-ricky]

draw your comfort characters as the one Steven meme is the funniest art trend to come out of this year

[what-am-i-doing-in-this-fandom]

Best friends forever, I sure hope nothing happens to change that 🤞

[sapphics-with-guns]

Apparently not everyone gives mute protagonists personalities and that makes me kinda sad :(

[all-over-apertures-walls]

I'm not even sure if it's about Rattman and the companion cube being besties or about chell being a robotfucker

Made it at school so sorry if it's too messy 😩

[exploding-scarletbomb]

[sarcasticgaypotato]

The Best Solution

On cold, clear nights that bathed the world in pale blue light, Chell turned her chin up and looked at the sky.

She was not afflicted with the condition known as ‘sentimentality,’ no matter how many scorch-marked, heart-adorned metal cubes got thrown her way and left behind in fields of wheat a hundred miles away. But the ravaged surface world offered her little (save for her own freedom) and the nights were as quiet and lonely as the days, just without an excuse to fill her time by finding something to busy herself with under the light of the sun.

So, she looked upward and let her mind wander.

Every streak of a shooting star she hoped was a certain circular heap of scrap metal finally burning up in the atmosphere.

“Let go! I’m still connected. I can pull myself in.”

Of course he could. If she had given him half a chance, he would’ve pulled himself back in just fine—and let her fly off into space without a second thought if it would save his own steel.

The cold vacuum of space. When she closed her eyes, Chell could still feel it in the wind that tickled the stray hairs on the back of her neck, in the cold that stole the breath from her lungs as she gasped it. That rush of weightlessness, her eyes watering and freezing her eyelashes together, and that pit in her stomach that said, after everything she had survived, this might be it.

She stared up at the moon; a pale white beauty, once near enough for Chell to reach out and touch, now as distant as ever. A sliver in the night sky, it grinned down at her with a smile that knew the taste of her fear. An untouchable queen who would have her head, if she had her way. Chell would have called it as familiar as it was deadly, if not for one thing that nagged at her mind as she stared, lost among stars and memories alike.

This was always the point in her late-night stargazing that Chell started scratching absentmindedly at her wrist, where the phantom burn of cold metal claws still seared into her skin.

Chell never fell for any of GLaDOS’s tricks; she knew her too well. That hate was familiar, expected. Working together in Old Aperture was a surprise only for a moment; it was logical if they wanted to survive. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, or “Everybody likes revenge,” as a certain someone had put it. 

She trusted GLaDOS’s intelligence enough to know that she would play nice for as long as they had a shared goal, and for as long as Chell held all the power. Don’t bite the hand that holds your consciousness trapped in a potato battery, or something like that.

Chell had even been fairly confident that after they beat Wheatley (she never had any doubt that they would), as long as she kept her guard up and an eye on her, GLaDOS wouldn’t risk betraying her. The world’s most intelligent lifeform had finally learned that Chell wasn’t worth crossing—it only took two losing battles for the lesson to sink in.

GLaDOS would keep her end of the bargain as long as it was convenient to do so. That was why Chell couldn’t make sense of what happened. No matter how many times she replayed those seconds in her head, watching her own memories in slow motion as GLaDOS knocked Wheatley free of the chassis and sent him spinning into space, robbing Chell of her only anchor to Earth. 

Freefall. 

Could you call it falling without gravity? Spinning, flailing, her body wrenched outward, seconds away from dying in space, embarrassingly outlived by the very same moron who was responsible for this whole mess. In the second that she had to process her impending death, Chell took a small hint of satisfaction in knowing that at least she took him down with her. Sure, the lack of air wouldn’t kill him as quickly as it would her, but he was far from a self-proclaimed king of Aperture out here. He was nothing but a hunk of junk destined to get knocked around by asteroids like a pinball. At least GLaDOS had a death worth bragging about under her non-existent belt; Chell had blown her to bits in what she would humbly call ‘a spectacular fashion.’

GLaDOS. Was her last thought before unconsciousness took her going to be about GLaDOS? How apt. GLaDOS would’ve loved to hear that, not that Chell would’ve ever told her, even if she had the chance.

She wouldn’t have the chance. She wasn’t supposed to.

When Chell felt that familiar metal claw clamp around her wrist, the first thought her fading consciousness could conjure was that GLaDOS wanted to be personally responsible for flinging her out into space, maybe so she could get a good spin on the throw. The realization that GLaDOS was pulling her in, back towards Earth, to safety, was one that proved entirely too much for her oxygen-deprived brain to process. So, she passed out.

GLaDOS could have done nothing at all, and Chell would have died. If she wanted the satisfaction of doing it herself, she could have crushed her under a metal plate or thrown her in the incinerator while she was unconscious. Instead, GLaDOS saved her life, watched over her recovery until she awoke, and then … let her go with only a bit of theatrics and nothing else. 

She pinned the blame on Caroline and made a big show of deleting her, neither of which Chell believed for a second. That golden eye took her in, unflinching, with the same inscrutable expression before and after the automated voice cheerfully announced Caroline’s removal. A long dead secretary Chell had never crossed paths with had nothing to do with this; there was no difference between the GLaDOS that pulled her from space and the GLaDOS who watched the elevator ascend to the surface now.  

This was all her, and she was supposed to give them both a satisfying conclusion to them parting ways with weapons lowered, standing (even if one of them didn’t have legs) on equal ground. GLaDOS was supposed to make this easy by sending her off with an insult or a half-hearted threat of one last murder attempt for old times’ sake.

“Killing you is hard.”

Liar. 

Killing me would have been easy if you wanted to.

Why didn’t you want to?

[gmanmedias]

day 4: make a board based off of a headcanon that brings you joy!

🧡 🧡 🧡

🤍 🤍 🤍

💙 💙 💙

[thesugarhole]

the TAGLINE was 'now you're thinking with PORTALS' NOT!! now youre thinking with buttons and platforms and pellets and grills and TRAMPOLINES and BRIDGES and LASERS and FUNNELS and fucking BLUE ORANGE AND CUM GEL you robots are FUCKING INSANE

[sketchxx]

doodles i didnt post bc i forgotr

[gracebethartacc]

ortal :)👍

[moon-goggles]

PORTAL AU WIP,,, cux colorings a bitch 💥

[lime-ricky]

I love your chell art!

[thefishinyourwalls]

- Is Canonically mute

- Badass

- Can beat you up

- In one of the best games of all time

- Protag

[nooooough]

These four together would be wild

[ari-orangebox-collection]

Chell’s life Chell’s rules rat man, the face skunk has to go.