r/Portal • u/MaTTaX_M87 • 5h ago
Lore Portal 2 Intro takes place before Portal 1 Events
I have this idea that the first awakening in the Intro scene takes place before the events of Portal 1.
Why she was in the Room:
I think the first scene shows Chells daily life (50 day cycle) in the hotelroom-like cryo-room and the first scene could happen before Portal 1 and it would make sense with certain elements of the lore (Portal 1, Portal 2, Labrat comic):
- Chell is a registered adult test subject before GLaDos takes over (comic p.22)
- She was a Child on the "Bring your daughter to work day", a day that ended in a deadly disaster. (p2)
From this we can tell GLados did not take over the facility on the "Bydtwd", but that Chell could got injured on that day and might have ended up as a test subject after the incident. Maybe Aperture kept her to cover the incident and she was put into a cryo-room to heal and regenerate. GLaDos also got her Moral Cores installed after her attempts to kill all humans.
The Timegap:
The hotelroom-like cryo-rooms are used to keep all the test subjects alive and maybe regenerate them after a non-deadly test. Since Chell and others where test subjects before GlaDos took over its likely that Chell and many other subjects where put in these rooms. I think they are placed in the test chambers with mobile cryo-pods and dragged back by robots.
Between the routinely wake-up cycles period and the long sleep period must have been an event that caused the system failure:
- In the first scene the facility and the cryo-room works fine with 50day wake up cycles - GLaDos is alive
- GLaDos takes over and Chell becomes her first test subject.
- After Chell deafeats GLaDos, she gets dragged back to a cryo-room - The facility is without controll
- Without controll and failing power systems all the subjects would die in the cryo-rooms, but ratman connects her room to the emergency power system - from this moment on she will not have another wake up cycle and ratman even is unsure if she ever will wake up again.
For me this is the point where i think that her wake up cycles are before the Portal 1 events and her long sleep is after GLados is defeated.
I also believe that on the long sleep wake up the recorded voice is glitched and the counted time ("99999...") does not tell us how long she slept. But since the potatoes and some plants are still intact i think something about 50-100y.
From Chells perspective things could have looked like this:
["Bring your daughter to work day"] -> (Incident) -> [Awake in room] -> [?? Years] -> [Awake in room] -> [Awake in Test-chamber 01] -> (Portal 1 - Destroy GLaDos) -> [longsleep - ?? years] -> [Awake in room] -> (Portal 2)
With this we have the perfect order to play the games chronologically:
Portal 2 (Intro first half - about 2mins) -> Portal 1 -> Portal 2 (from Intro second half)
