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1[[foldercontrol]]
2
3[[folder: Killing [=GLaDOS=] in Portal 1]]
4* We find out cores are foreign AIs attached to [=GLaDOS=] in an attempt to control her. So why in ''Portal 1'' did destroying all of [=GLaDOS=]' cores destroy her?
5** When you dismantle [=GLaDOS=] in ''Portal 1'', you are also hitting her with rockets. The combined stress of missile fire and ripping working (though still a bit insane) cores off destabilized her enough to shut her down. It's also why the [=GLaDOS=] personality was still intact after the machinery got reactivated, it had just lacked functional hardware work with up until then.
6[[/folder]]
7
8[[folder: Old Test Shaft Construction Timeline]]
9* After Wheatley throws Chell and [=PotatOS=] down the shaft, we start to encounter dates painted on the walls; presumably these are the construction dates for various parts of the old facility. The abandonment hatch to Test Shaft 09 Zulu Bunsen is dated 06 15 1961. The area just beyond that, with the foyer and the elevator tower, is dated 1952. The first three test spheres are dated 1953, 1957, and 1958, respectively. So far, so good. But Pump Station Beta is dated 1971, ''ten years'' after the shaft was supposedly abandoned. Spheres 4 and 5 are dated 1972 and 1976. Immediately after exiting Sphere 5, you're looking at a wall marked 1978. Pump Station Gamma is dated 1982, while the offices immediately after are dated 1981. Sphere 6 has two dates on different parts of the interior wall surrounding the conversion gel pipe, 1982 and 1986; one assumes the four-year construction time for the relatively simple test area was due to Aperture's financial difficulties. If the shaft was abandoned in June of 1961, why was Aperture still constructing test chambers in it at least twenty-five years later?
10* Another one of Aperture's bizarre ideas, presumably. Building an abandonment hatch years before actually needing to use it.
11** Or they hired a bunch of painters with no sense of time and no one bothered to correct them. Aperture isn't exactly known for hiring people with common sense.
12[[/folder]]
13
14[[folder:Wheatley and Spanish]]
15* When Wheatley takes over [=GLaDOS=]' body, he spouts a bunch of Spanish saying that he's doing something wrong and to consult the manual, and follows it up with "I don't even know what I just said!" Which would imply that he doesn't speak Spanish, which is perfectly reasonable, except for the fact that if you hang around in the Relaxation Chamber for long enough, he asks you to open the door in perfectly good Spanish. What gives?
16** All he says at the door is a very stilted and badly accented "Hola, amigo, abre la puerta". In fact, [[BilingualBonus if you speak Spanish]] you'd find his tone is completely off. So there's good chance he either only knows very basic Spanish (and the translated sentence was too fast for him to fully comprehend) or is just parroting words without knowing what they mean.
17** In fact, Wheatley's pronunciation is pretty much what I'd expect from an English speaker who'd never even ''heard'' Spanish spoken before, if they were given some written Spanish and told to read it. So I find it possible, nay probable, that he can't actually speak Spanish at all, and was using the translation program in text mode.
18[[/folder]]
19
20[[folder:Both sides vote on Stalemate Resolution]]
21* Regarding the Stalemate Resolution Button: why does the corrupted core get a choice? Aperture being Aperture again?
22** Yes.
23[[/folder]]
24
25[[folder:Sound in space]]
26* How could Wheatley hear the Space Core talking? Sound doesn't travel in space.
27** Built-in short-range radio transmitters.
28[[/folder]]
29
30[[folder:Leaving and returning to [=GLaDOS=]]]
31* When we first left [=GLaDOS=]' chamber, how did we get back? First we fell down. Then there were tests, and each lift was taking us down. Again! And then we escaped, found some tubes, and got back. Where all the miles went?
32** Well, we know from ''Portal 1'' after you escape that Chamber 19 is close to Chamber 14 and 9, which suggests the levels are not linear and you don't keep going down or up. The elevators can probably move sideways and you've been pretty close to the surface all this time until you swap [=GLaDOS=] with Wheatley and fall down into Old Aperture.
33[[/folder]]
34
35[[folder:Architecture of the facility]]
36* In the original ''Portal'', the Aperture Science Facility seems to be a normal building (solid, in other words, and in no way, shape, or form, mix and matchable). However, in the sequel, we see that it is, more or less, a giant collection of disconnected rooms that can be moved at random, to fit whatever [=GLaDOS=] or whoever chooses. So, a few questions:\
37One, why do the air ducts and back rooms even exist?\
38Two, why doesn't [=GLaDOS=] move said air ducts and back rooms to try and get you during ''Portal 1'' when you've escaped?
39** The Enrichment Centre is the oldest part of the facility, and is also the one still built with humans in mind (before [=GLaDOS=] was plugged in). Most certainly the oldest chambers [=GLaDOS=] has any control over. She sends Chell through these chambers because they're the most basic tutorial chambers and testing obsession requires her to follow the protocol. That facility is physically static and lacks the state-of-art technology of the rest of Aperture facilities which is why Rattmann is capable of hacking/breaking parts of it to create the dens where he lives, while being able to evade relatively little presence [=GLaDOS=] has there.
40[[/folder]]
41
42[[folder:Fat turrets]]
43* During the ending chorus of turrets, why do the fatter and giant turrets exist? There isn't much purpose for them.
44** Larger ammo capacity as evident in the "Turrets" trailer.
45[[/folder]]
46
47[[folder:[=GLaDOS=] and Caroline]]
48* [=GLaDOS=] deleting Caroline seems rather counter-productive if [=GLaDOS=] is Caroline. And the more [=GLaDOS=] becomes her former self/Caroline, the less likely she should want to wipe her Caroline persona out.
49** [=GLaDOS=] is not ''necessarily'' a brainscan of Caroline, it could be a fully sentient AI that happened to have Caroline's memories added to it (like a secondary personality core or something). As seen with the [[http://www.thinkwithportals.com/comic/ Lab Rat comic]] done by Valve, [=GLaDOS=] tried to kill all of the scientists in the facility within one sixteenth of a picosecond after being turned on. That doesn't sound like something Caroline would do.\
50So, that said, [=GLaDOS=] becoming a potato and getting in touch with Caroline / developing a conscious was a form of CharacterDevelopment, which [=GLaDOS=] promptly shut down by deleting Caroline because she (roughly near the end) revealed she was terrified of it.
51[[/folder]]
52
53[[folder:[=GLaDOS=] regaining control after the Stalemate Resolution failed]]
54* Considering the stalemate button blew up in Chell's face before it's activated, what caused [=GLaDOS=] to be be plugged back in the mainframe while Wheatley and Chell had a little trip on the moon?
55** But how do you know it wasn't activated? Who's to say that the button didn't have an automatic toggle in the event it is destroyed? Wheatley's original function of "come up with the worst plan" justifies the idea that his trap fails, and the button gets turned on.
56[[/folder]]
57
58[[folder:Funding]]
59* Aperture Science have achieved a tech level so staggering it makes the goddamn Combines look like cavemen. At the same time, they are a company who makes Umbrella Corp looks like the ultimate shiniest paragon of sanity. Point being, where does Cave Johnson get his money, especially considering that pretty much every attempt at selling their stuff ended up with more and more lawsuits?
60** Cave Johnson became a billionaire selling shower curtains to the US Navy. Seriously, that's what Aperture Science was founded to do. If it can make Johnson personally a billionaire, Aperture Science itself must've been significantly richer. Also for a while, they were getting government contracts to research all kinds of crazy stuff. After all, they've had portal technology since the 70s.
61** The Perpetual Testing Initiative DLC ends with Aperture Science finding a universe made of money. While this likely isn't the same universe as the vanilla game [[spoiler:(That universe cancels the [=GLaDOS=] project)]] it's possible that something similar happened to the universe we know of.
62[[/folder]]
63
64[[folder:Wheatley: Stupid or brilliant?]]
65* If Wheatley's supposed to be so stupid, then how can he be so clever? First, a dumb person wouldn't have even thought of using the portal gun to escape or even react quickly when he found out that the power went out. There's also that part where he interrupts [=GLaDOS=]'s test to save you. That was very clever. And what about the part with him watching Chell kill [=GLaDOS=] and planning accordingly? He didn't even TELL you he booby trapped the stalemate button. Plus, he changed a jump pad to go in the wrong direction so he can trap you.
66** A common misunderstanding. Despite [=GLaDOS=] repeatedly calling him a moron, Wheatley was designed to come up with the worst plans, not be dumb, which was the big reason why he betrayed you after being plugged into [=GLaDOS=]'s body. Him staying in the mainframe is the most terrible decision by a long shot as it'll cause the facility to blow up.
67[[/folder]]
68
69[[folder:Wheatley in charge of hibernation]]
70* Why was Wheatley put in charge of ''watching over hibernating test subjects'' in the first place?
71** Wheatley mentions in his banter that the foreman gave him to job of "tending to smelly humans" after filling the position that Wheatley wanted with an exact duplicate of himself. This means that a robot made the decision, and we all know that the robots in Aperture are either dumb or uncaring.
72[[/folder]]
73
74[[folder:Deleting Caroline and "Want You Gone"]]
75* Why did [[spoiler: [=GLaDOS=] say that Caroline was still with her in the ending song, when she supposedly deleted her just moments before?]]?
76** Still Alive asserted things that turned out to be false, like how [=GLaDOS=] was still alive after you destroyed her, was happy for you, and wasn't angry you burned her, even though she wasn't any of those things. Why should Want You Gone be any different?
77** [=GLaDOS=] is a [[DepartmentOfRedundancyDepartment lying liar who lies]]. There's a lot of speculation that she was lying about deleting Caroline and just trying to cover up the fact that she actually has something of a conscience now.
78[[/folder]]
79
80[[folder:Likelihood of final shot location]]
81* Probability of hitting a spot on the moon that has an abandoned Lunar lander?
82** David Hand's improbability principle. Just because it's highly unlikely doesn't mean it's impossible.
83[[/folder]]
84
85[[folder:Emancipating [=PotatOS=]]]
86* Why didn't the Empancipation Grills destroy [=GLaDOS=]' potato? Even if her personality core isn't considered "unauthorized material", what about the potato itself?
87** The Emancipation Grills are intended to destroy "Unauthorized Aperture Science Equipment". [=GLaDOS=] is authorized, and the potato is a potato and not Aperture Science Equipment so it's overlooked. Besides, the Grill isn't supposed to affect organic material (occasional ear-tube-emancipation notwithstanding), otherwise they'd have a lot of fizzled test subjects.
88[[/folder]]
89
90[[folder:The setting of the end]]
91* Why are you in a nice looking field in the middle of nowhere? Doesn't this game take place some 30 years after ''Half-Life 2''? Where's the Combine?
92** The field is actually part of Aperture, as evidenced by one of the videos showing how Hard Light bridges are made that play in the elevators ([[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKfthzDla5k see here]]). Therefore what you see at the end has little to no relation on what the rest of the world looks like now, and [=GlaDOS=] has just been doing a good job keeping the Combine away.
93[[/folder]]
94
95[[folder:Getting moon rocks]]
96* So if moon rocks were so expensive they could hardly afford them, why didn't Cave just send someone up to the moon in a pressurized suit using an airlock and a portal gun so he could go grab some?
97** Aperture didn't actually ''need'' the moon gel (concrete conducts portal surfaces just as well); Cave stated rather explicitly he just wanted to buy a whole bunch for no reason.
98[[/folder]]
99
100[[folder:The logo on the Borealis]]
101* In [=HL2E2=], the Borealis has the modern Aperture Science logo on it. In Portal 2, you find the Borealis' former Drydock. Sounds fine, right? Notice the logo hanging in the lobby and in the loading screen. Why would they be using a logo from the future on their gigantic ship? How would they know what it'd look like?
102** The ship may be newer than the drydock. It's not inconceivable that they didn't update the logo.
103** Alternatively, they updated the logo on the ship later on at some other harbor.
104** Doylist reason: Valve was saying "Episode 3 is coming, just be patient" by referencing where you were heading at the end of Episode 2.
105** More to the point, what is a ''ship dock'' doing several kilometres ''underground''?
106*** If you are going to run some crazy teleportation experiment that you don't want a certain rival company to see... Well, it's probably the best place to put it.
107** The Borealis has some sort of advanced technology that is useful against the Combine, my guess is teleportation or larger portals or something, but in any event it didn't sail out of there.
108*** Maybe it didn't, but that doesn't answer the question of how it sailed ''in'' there to begin with.
109*** They probably built it there.
110** Based on the [[http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Borealis#Miscellaneous documents]] from the screenshots in ''Half-Life 2'', we know that the Borealis was in service for some time before she disappeared. Since ice breaking ships need to be refurbished after 20-30 years of service (and the AI version of [=GLaDOS=] was being developed as a new fuel system de-icer), it's probably safe to assume that Aperture's engineers were trying to teleport the ship back to the underground drydock for upgrades when she vanished.
111[[/folder]]
112
113[[folder:Gravity on the moon]]
114* The moon has gravity, and even though it's less than Earth's, Wheatley should not be going fast enough to be knocked into orbit.
115*** Maybe Wheatley is just in a high sub-orbital trajectory that will eventually impact the lunar surface. He might've also gained a bit of speed when [=GLaDOS=] knocked him off the mainframe with that mechanical arm.
116[[/folder]]
117
118[[folder:Poisonous Conversion Gel]]
119* Cave Johnson says that ground up moon rocks are "pure poison." Chell comes into contact with, and can even bathe herself in, Conversion Gel multiple times throughout the game, and yet she's completely fine? How does this work?
120** The poison thing has a basis in real life: Inhaling lunar dust has effects similar to inhaling asbestos. In fact, Cave said that "ground up moon rocks" are poisonous. He doesn't say "conversion gel" is poisonous. In any case, Chell was only exposed to Conversion Gel for a few hours, while Cave worked with it for years. Maybe she got away with it, maybe she gets lung cancer later in life, but the effects won't be seen within the timeline of the game.
121[[/folder]]
122
123[[folder:[=GLaDOS=]'s new body in her old location]]
124* If the chamber where [=GLaDOS=] re-activates is the same chamber that you killed her in, why does she have her new body instead of the old one?
125** Because last time the entire thing was blown outside the complex. Presumably the bots put her back together but couldn't boot her up.
126[[/folder]]
127
128[[folder:Chell's age]]
129* If Chell was a kid at the time of the Bring-Your-Daughter-To-Work Day Massacre on May 16th, then she was in the relaxation pod for about twenty years before being woken up at the start of Portal 1. That means that she was still growing up into womanhood despite being in stasis. If that is the case, then why does she not age over the span of time she spent trapped in the Relaxation Chamber in Portal 2?
130** For you to visibly age in any semi-realistic cryo-sleep, you'd have to stay asleep for hundreds of thousands of years, probably millions of years (cryosleep generally uses temperatures below -170C, which means chemical reactions, including anything aging-related, happen roughly one millionth the rate they happen at room temperature). If you age, at all, it's not cryosleep but suspended animation, which is about considerably slowing your bodily functions without terminating them. If you're in suspended animation, you could age 20 years biologically in 100 years of stasis, or something like that. The technology used between Portal and Portal 2 is likely not the same.
131[[/folder]]
132
133[[folder:Position of the final room]]
134* In the final battle, you shoot through the roof of the facility at the night sky, right? Then in that EXACT SAME ROOM just a bit later, it's required to ride in an elevator up an unusually long shaft in order to reach the surface because the whole facility is underground. Non-Euclidean ceilings, perhaps?
135** The entire facility is reconfigurable. One moment, Wheatley has it at the surface. [=GLaDOS=] put it back when she had control again.
136*** That even fits with their personalities. Wheatley has a fragile ego (remember how he bragged about his size and "intelligence" after he took over [=GLaDOS's=] body); he'd want to be literally "at the top". [=GLaDOS=] herself is more of a cold manipulator type; she'd want to be at the center of things.
137[[/folder]]
138
139[[folder:Moving portals]]
140* Just a small detail I noticed: Portals are supposed to disappear if the surface they are on moves, right? Then how was that whole 'chop off the tubes leading to the neurotoxin generator with a laser through a portal on a moving platform' thing possible?
141** This is a bit WMG: but it's likely you can't place portals on surfaces with a surface that's ''changing'' its velocity. After all, everything, like the Earth, is moving in one way or the other because relativity.
142[[/folder]]
143
144[[folder:No one got the gun before Chell?]]
145* Wheatley says near the end of the game that Chell was the fifth person he woke up to get the portal gun and the rest died trying to get it. Getting the portal gun was really really easy even for those not familiar with portals (there wasn't anything really dangerous involved) so why did all those others fail to get the gun?
146** The only reason it was so easy was because he dropped you off at the right spot -- but he had to break through a wall to get there. This means that the others had to have been dropped off somewhere else in the facility -- likely somewhere more dangerous.
147[[/folder]]
148
149[[folder:Defective turrets]]
150* How did the defective turrets all come out the same way? If they're based off the real turrets, how'd they lose the cute little voice and personality?
151** That facility is pretty damn old, and though impressive, Aperture isn't infinite. So it's plausible all of the faulty turrets come from the same assembly line.
152[[/folder]]
153
154[[folder:Neurotoxin]]
155* It's kind of a big thing when you shut down [=GLaDOS=]'s neurotoxin production. And it's not like you just flip a switch, you cut the neurotoxin tubes and implode the entire producing unit (or whatever that big thing is). So... where does Wheatley get it later?
156** There's enough time between then and now for him to have restored it. Wheatley does mention that [=GLaDOS=] can fix it given time. He had that time.
157*** But he's also Wheatley.
158*** So? He may be stupid, but he's not a drooling brain-damaged imbecile. He intentionally chose to fight Chell in a way similar to her original fight with [=GLaDOS=], which included the neurotoxin. Of course he'd fix it.
159*** It does raise another question: If he fixed the neurotoxin generator, why didn't he also fix the turret line?
160*** Because he's Wheatley.
161*** Maybe designing/creating/'training' the frankenturrets distracted him-- it could be that he was using turrets rescued from the redemption line to build them, and just didn't question the fact that they were perfectly functional (which would have been the ideal for the experiments, anyway).
162*** He did fix the turrets, but he forgot to throw out the old ones. He brings out some functional turrets later on. Also, [[OverlyLongGag because he's Wheatley]].
163** The Neurotoxin generator doesn't seem to be much of a generator. Cutting the pipes has gas pumping out the pipes, showing that they were flowing into the generator, and also the thing implodes showing that there's a lot of suction inside the generator. Either 1) The generator only combines ingredients (Suggested by a headscratcher below), meaning that Wheatley only had to rebuild one component of neurotoxin assembly. Or 2) only Wheatley calls the thing a 'generator,' (May have missed a sign, but there didn't seem to be any signage saying it's a generator) and it's actually a central pump, so neurotoxin generation only required rerouting.
164[[/folder]]
165
166[[folder:Falling for a long time]]
167* When you fall down that shaft for a kilometer or so in Chapter 6, you end up crashing through a few planks of wood before (presumably) passing out and hitting the ground. You wake up lying on your back. Now, if long fall boots work the way they do, then either Chell managed to land on her legs and stay like that in her sleep, or she has a very, very strong back... any explanation?
168** She could have absorbed the shock from the boards and then fell the short way to the ground positioned in a way that the boots absorbed a lot of impact, but there was still enough to knock her unconscious.
169*** I get the idea that Long Fall Boots work whether you're conscious or not.
170*** Indeed, in the pre-release Boots trailer, Cave mentions that the user is actually incapable of not landing on their feet, even if they try.
171** Maybe she got knocked out by the boards hitting her in the head, landed on her feet anyways, but then simply tipped over backwards.
172** People in media survive absurdly long falls all the time. No need to invent crazy justifications.
173* While we're on it, how did [=GLaDOS=] survive that fall? Even if the Long Fall Boots broke Chell's fall, [=GLaDOS=] is just a potato. She ought to have been mashed potato nanochips.
174** Maybe the bird caught her?
175** It would be impossible for a simple set of boots to protect an entire human being from fall damage. Even if it could somehow cushon her feet and knees, the rest of her body would have collapsed from the strain of landing and suffered serious, possibly fatal injuries. Therefore, we can assume that the Long Fall Boots project some kind of {{inertial dampening}} field around the user, and [=GLaDOS=] just happened to be close enough that she was caught in the field as well.
176[[/folder]]
177
178[[folder:Pressure]]
179* The pressure difference between the chamber and the actual moon is enormous. Even if air could have let Chell breathe, as hard to believe as it is, the pressure loss would have still caused her blood and bones permanent damage, right? Alternatively, how can you explain she could both breathe and hold onto an object when she was in outer space.
180** It's not that hard to believe that she could hold her breath before being sucked out. Plus, she's survived much worse (Repulsion gels, being flung about, sucked through Portals, plus the psychological impact that [=GLaDOS=] has had on her), I don't think it's too crazy to imagine that she could have the willpower to last in space for a few seconds.
181** In the comic, Chell's file says that she is tenacious to a fault. Perhaps she really is such an impossible badass that the vacuum of space does nothing to her. Also, [=GLaDOS=]'s "adrenal gas" couldn't have hurt things.
182** It takes around thirty seconds for exposure to vacuum to cause permanent damage, assuming you don't hold your breath, and Chell wasn't out for that long. Besides, [=GLaDOS=] could have provided medical attention while she was unconscious.
183** Chell was never properly exposed to the vacuum of space. With all the air rushing past her it's more like she's in a wind tunnel, and any damage can probably be healed by [=GLaDOS=].
184[[/folder]]
185
186[[folder:[=GLaDOS=]' redesign]]
187* Why does [=GLaDOS=]' head look different between games? The new one is nice and everything, it just seems strange to give a major character an inexplicable change in appearance between games when she's been lying there undisturbed for the entire time between games.
188** In the Lab Rat comic Doug clearly says that even though the queen is down, the hive is still kicking. It's not out of the question that they moved her pieces back inside and updated her head for some reason.
189*** Still, they'd replace her head but leave her turned off?
190*** They might not be smart enough to turn her back on.
191** Quite simply, the old one was destroyed. You can see it smoldering in front of you at the end of Portal 1. Presumably she was backed-up somewhere in the facility and some cores rebuilt a body and loaded her into it, for whatever reason. You can also see [=GLaDOS=] with her original head in Rattman's artwork next to where you find the portal gun. It's even possible that the new head is just the old one with the covering around the eye removed (although retconned to white).
192*** But her original head is still rounder-looking and smaller, even if you mentally remove the covering.
193** Maybe her head was extremely damaged and maybe the nanobot work crew rebuilt it to the new design but weren't able to power her back up.
194** There's always the possibility that there are several [=GLaDOS=] interfaces/bodies and the memory is stored in the entire facility. Maybe Wheatley and Chell activated a backup [=GLaDOS=] which retrieved the memories from the old one. It may have been a new prototype, in a similar dock, that was impacted by the explosion of the original [=GLaDOS=] but not as destroyed.
195*** Somewhat confirmed in the Peer Review DLC; the plot involves [[spoiler: the bird from the single player campaign taking over an old chassis of [=GLaDOS=]' body, so [=GLaDOS=] may have multiple backup bodies.]]
196[[/folder]]
197
198[[folder:[=GLaDOS=]'s claws after reactivation]]
199* Where did [=GLaDOS=] get these two claws with which she lifts Chell and Wheatley after being reactivated? She didn't use them in the first game, even though they could have helped stop or kill Chell right then and there, nor does she or Wheatley use them when revisiting the chamber later in the second game.
200** She used the claws in other places. Maybe she had more freedom now, or the damage to the room allowed them in.
201** She actually ''did'' use her claws in the first game. Maybe the Morality Core affected her ability to use them (just like it affected her ability to turn off the Rocket Sentry), or perhaps she was just that confident that the neurotoxin would be enough to finish her off. She's a sadist, so maybe she preferred the idea of watching Chell suffer (death by neurotoxin is not a pretty sight) to killing her quickly and simply with claws.
202*** When did she use them in the first game?
203*** They aren't animated, but they're implied to be how [=GLaDOS=] gets the turrets around the complex.
204[[/folder]]
205
206[[folder:[=GLaDOS=] controlling the claw]]
207* Where did [=GLaDOS=] get the big claw thing at the end of the final battle? There wasn't one of those things that was under [=GLaDOS=] in the core swap scene. Also, how did she control it? She wasn't hooked to the mainframe and had no way to because, again, there wasn't a core swap thing under the mainframe. ALSO, where did her old head come from? It wasn't there before.
208** The claw? It was probably there, but wasn't used the first time. Controlling it? Remember how the cores from the first game only stopped affecting her after you destroyed them? She was already linked to her body by some temporary/not very powerful remote connection just like the cores. The head? It was probably still in that area with the claws from when Wheatley put her in a potato. And, before someone brings up how she got back into her head, remember when she says "I already fixed it!"? It was a fairly fast process, and Wheatley transferred her to the potato in just about the same amount of time, if not less.
209** The mainframe area is highly reconfigurable. Wheatley probably had the claw stashed somewhere out of the way (note that it's also present when you repower [=GLaDOS=]). It's rather ironic because it would have made all the FinalBoss battles rather one-sided.
210** Isn't it the claw she dangled the Adventure and Fact spheres from?
211*** Nope, that's the one she crushed Wheatley with. The big one is present in the control room before the final battle (Wheatley [[PunctuatedPounding punches-you-into-this-pit]] with it.)
212[[/folder]]
213
214[[folder:Time between Portal 1 and 2]]
215* Many people seem to be confused about how many years have passed before Portal 2 begins. Some think it's only a matter of days, some only a few years, some believe around 30 years, and some 300. How could someone think hundreds of years ''haven't'' passed between Portal and Portal 2 though, after taking into account the complete decay the facility has fallen into? Plants don't grow into infrastructure and buildings don't fall apart after a short amount of time. It takes ''a long'' time for that to happen. In addition, when the AI wakes you up for a second time, the machine stutters when saying the number 9, implying that it surpassed its upward counting limit loooong ago, which may even be ''higher'' than 300 years. Plus, didn't Valve more or less confirm that its been hundreds of years?
216** The problem with assuming 300 years is that you run into serious RagnarokProofing issues. For example, take the Bring Your Daughter To Work Day exhibit. Even 30 years would have caused the potato batteries and the poster boards to crumble into dust. Most plastics used in the construction of the facility would become brittle and crack. Electronics would decay and fail. In 300 years, the structural metal would have long since rusted into uselessness and the entire facility would collapse on itself. Then take the old Aperture Labs facilities. No AI was maintaining them, and they still have working lights and electricity. These contradictions make any sort of effective dating impossible.
217*** Keep in mind, however, that even though they had no AI, they DID have prerecorded messages to use so that testing could continue, even during post-apocalyptic conditions. Not only that, but all Aperture Science facilities are able to run at as low as 1.1 volts. In addition, even though no AI was maintaining things in real-time, the personality cores activated after [=GLaDOS=] was killed most likely kept everything in acceptable working condition, at least as well as something with no arms could. So the facility was far from abandoned during that time. As far as the Condemned Testing Labs go, it's not impossible that the tech down there could run at 1.1 volts too.
218** Various media such as ''The World Without Us'', ''Earth Without Men'', and ''Life After People'' shows pretty much nothing created within last 200 years would last very long without anybody to sometime add a coat of anti-rust or change the de-moisturizer, especially if it's electrical. 30 years is more than enough to account for the state of the center. Note that you can see sunlight entering the rooms in the very first levels, which means holes leading to the surface, which mean flood at the first rain. Ever saw a house that's been flooded? At best, the paint on the walls is screwed, at worst, the walls themselves take the hit and become structurally unsound. ''From being submerged a few hours.'' The fact that there is working equipment in the upper layers of the center thirty years after the Seven-hour war is a near miracle, so 300 years would be pushing it way too far. Hell, where did the remaining equipment get its power? No battery could ever last 10 years, fuel become unusable after a few months, nuclear reactors go critical if not constantly tended to, and even then their fuel would never last 20 years.
219*** The state the facility is in is far too bad for a mere 30 years to have passed. Not even mutant super potatoes could cover that much of its insides in vegetation in just 30 years, especially when you consider just how mind-bogglingly huge the facility actually is. Furthermore, 30 years isn't long enough to provoke the kind of comments Wheatley and [=GLaDOS=] make on how long you've been gone. 30 years is pretty long, but it's not mind-boggling. Three centuries, however, is quite staggering. As for what the point about electrics, yes, okay, but that's regular electrics. Aperture tech is specifically mentioned ''during the game'' to be apocalypse-proof in a variety of ways and it's quite preposterously durable during the first game, too, what with it being able to survive temperatures of up to 4000 degrees Kelvin. With nuclear reactors, again this takes place in a world that has portal technology in the fifties. Right at the beginning of the game the automated messages tell you that the reactor is about to go critical, so presumably the emergency sub-systems that took care of it finally gave out after all those years and would have taken out everything if [=GLaDOS=] hadn't been awakened. Basically, everything in either game shows that, while they lacked common sense and any kind of moral judgment, Aperture built their equipment to ''last''.
220*** I think you're ''seriously'' underestimating Mother Nature. Go look at [[https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&as_q=Pripyat&tbs=isz:lt,islt:4mp,sur:fmc pictures of modern-day Pripyat]], which was abandoned in 1986 (36 years ago as of this writing) due to the UsefulNotes/{{Chernobyl}} disaster. If anything, the state the facility is in is far too ''good'' for a ''whole'' 30 years to have passed.
221*** This theory falls apart a bit when you take the historical sections of the facility in to account. In the 1950's section we see cloth, wood, and even paper that is in remarkably good shape for 80 years, let alone 350. And even if we were to assume that all of these materials are long-lasting synthetics invented by Aperture (an Aperture who had barely graduated shower curtain manufacture at the time, no less,) that doesn't explain the foreign materials found in the trophy case, such as a newspaper. Also problematic the fact that Aperture didn't invent AI until well after the lower levels were sealed. Not only do they have no real reason to maintain the electronics and stuff in the older parts of the facility, but they lack any discernible method to boot. Well, perhaps except for the one possible saving grace for the "300 years" theory: the briefly-mentioned nanobot work crew. "Jerry" and his pals could be invisibly refreshing the perishable materials in order to keep the entire facility from rotting/rusting away. Admittedly both theories require some leaps in logic, but "30 years" just seems to make more sense story-wise in relation to future Half-Life crossover.
222** Nothing said to you in the game gives a clear indication of just how much time has passed. The wake up voice recording was glitching out, [=GLaDOS=] lies to you all the time, and Wheatley is a moron. Anything they say has to be taken with a grain of salt.
223** Really, the biggest challenge believing it's anything more than 30 years is the fact that Aperture was exposed to the elements.
224** Those in the 30 years camp forget take into account all the maintenance AIs and self-repairing systems implied in the game. The place has deteriorated enough that it takes personal interference from [=GLaDOS=] to fix things up again, and she manages to get the place close to pristine condition in the matter of hours again.
225*** We don't know how all those self-repair systems were coordinated; [=GLaDOS=] being knocked offline could have knocked others offline and the ones that remained would have been hard pressed to maintain the facility. Besides, the only areas that we see with actual overgrown vegetation was the original testing area, which would likely be close to the surface. Therefore all that flora could have made it through the hole made at the end of Portal 1 and into the original testing course. The rest of the maintenance systems were likely knocked out by [=GLaDOS=]' destruction and those that remained were unable to fully fix the facility on their own. Therefore the 30 year figure is actually fairly plausible.
226[[/folder]]
227
228[[folder:The moon isn't flat for portals]]
229* I'm curious how in all the questions about the Moon portal this one gets omitted. Seeing how the portals can only be placed on perfectly flat and smooth surfaces, how can you place one on the Moon surface that is most obviously neither?!
230** Cave said that lunar dust is uniquely suited to conducting portals. So who says it has to be flat and smooth?
231** The moon is enormous. Have you ever seen a space walk? On a human scale, the surface of the moon is pretty flat. It's not quite as flat as, say, the Earth, but still.
232** Not to mention the portal hit at an Apollo landing site. What is the first primary key feature that would have been looked for when evaluating possible landing sites?
233** The portal projectile somehow has the ability to autocorrect and find a flat surface when you fire just off of one. There is a lot of distance available for the projectile to turn in when you fire at the moon, so it could have sought out a nice, flat surface.
234[[/folder]]
235
236[[folder:Logic bombs]]
237* After [=GLaDOS=]'s LogicBomb fails to fry Wheatley, she says "That almost killed me!" How a LogicBomb works is that it sends the AI into an infinite loop (to be precise, infinite recursion) trying to work out the "correct" answer, pegging the CPU and ultimately overloading it, but if said AI is intelligent enough to understand that there ''is'' no correct answer to a paradox, then such a disastrous code path should be entirely avoidable.
238** Think about who we're talking about here. These are '''Aperture''' robots. We're talking about robots built by people insane enough to believe you can do anything with anything if you bend the rules and avoid awkward questions. Every single mechanism in that place, sentient, sapient or otherwise, is devoted to science and discovering how it works. For robots whose entire existence is devoted to finding answers, a paradox is not something you can just say no to. These robots are literally COMPELLED to find the answers to impossible problems. Even if you somehow find it hard to believe that every robot in the place functions as such, it's more than believable that [=GLaDOS=] herself -- the most intelligent Aperture AI ever built and created with the explicit purpose of overseeing and masterminding every future discovery of the facility whilst ensuring that research continues with or without the lab or even ''society'' being functional -- finds the threat of an unsolvable paradox dangerously life-threatening.
239[[/folder]]
240
241[[folder:Orbiting Wheatley]]
242* The final scene where [[spoiler:the space core is orbiting Wheatley]], along with a little bit of physics, can be used to estimate Wheatley's mass. Unfortunately it also implies that Wheatley weighs something like 100 million tons. What's up with that?
243** It's a StealthPun. Wheatley has a lot of mass because he's so [[spoiler:''dense''.]] If Wheatley really weighed 100 Mt (or Tg), if any other Aperture technology wasn't as massive, he would ''obliterate'' Management Rails, [[spoiler:[=GLaDOS=]'s body right at the moment it hangs onto it]], and if he was given enough velocity he would smash right through the entire three mile deep facility.
244** What if the cores have some net charge between them? That would be enough to keep them in orbit at a much shorter distance.
245*** The Space Core could also have some system for direction control in space (since he was designed for operating there) and is just staying near Wheatley out of habit/companionship.
246** WMG: The [[AllThereInTheManual Developer's Commentary]] mentions how the pneumatic tubes are an absolutely horrible idea for transporting things around the facility, because they get banged up in the process. It also mentions that the employees don't care, because [[WeHaveReserves they can just make more turrets and cubes]]. But the cores are unique, and difficult or impossible to replace if damaged. So, how do you transport cores around the facility? Carry them yourself? Hang them on the management rail and tell them where to go? Wrap them in bubble wrap before shoving them in the tube? All of these would make at least ''some'' sense, so naturally, [[IncompetenceInc Aperture]] would do something completely different: give the cores maneuvering thrusters and a self-preservation instinct, and trust them to keep ''themselves'' off of the walls. This would also explain how Wheatley was able to turn and spin while being held by the portal gun without anything (visible) to push off of.
247[[/folder]]
248
249[[folder:Chell's brain]]
250* ''Is'' Chell brain-damaged? There's the gag at the beginning where you "Press A to Speak" and she jumps, but aside from that she never speaks once in the game. The WordOfGod reason for her being mute in the first game is supposedly as to not give [=GLaDOS=] the satisfaction, but there are long stretches of this game where [=GLaDOS=] cannot hear her or where speaking to Wheatley would make sense.
251** She might be mute because she never learned to speak.
252*** She obviously learned to write if she made that science project. She has to know. She just doesn't.
253*** Yes, she is brain damaged. Wheatley said it was normal for people in suspended animation for more than a few months to suffer brain damage (and Chell was under for ''years''), and the whole "jumping instead of speaking" gag made it pretty clear that Chell wasn't an exception. Plus both Wheatley and [=GLaDOS=] believe it to be true and continue making comments about it throughout the game. Personally, I say it was a really clever way to justify having a silent protagonist (sure beat's Freeman's unexplained muteness).
254*** Jossed by Erik Wolpaw. He said that the ''intent'' at least was that Chell just isn't bothering to talk to the robots.
255*** After dealing with [=GLaDOS=], she's probably not terribly trusting of artificial intelligences, no matter how friendly they may seem. She also may just have gotten used to not talking. As to why she didn't give Wheatley the paradox when it became clear that [=GLaDOS=] couldn't, it's noted in the Ratman comic that she's abnormally stubborn. She probably noticed how Wheatley basically had a total personality shift, and still believed he was salvageable.
256*** Emancipation Grills. They have been known to emancipate dental fillings, tooth enamel, teeth, and now ear tubes. Meaning she might as well be deaf and mute.
257*** She's definitely not deaf, because the player can still hear what she hears. Maybe the grills did make her mute though.
258*** Even beyond brain-damage (which is, let's face it, a probability), her silence towards [=GLaDOS=] can probably be explained by an understandable reluctance to engage in pleasantries with the intelligence that forced her to literally jump through hoops for her own sadistic amusement. As for Wheatley, even when he's 'good' this can be easily be explained by the fact that when he's around her, Wheatley barely shuts up long enough to allow her to get a word in edgewise anyway.
259** There's no way Chell is brain-damaged, or at least not as much as she would have to be after however long she was in suspension. She never could have done the things she does in the game otherwise. As for the jumping instead of speaking, that's obviously just RuleOfFunny.
260** Not speaking to [=GLaDOS=] can be explained by the reason above - not wanting to talk to the sadist who spent however long testing, insulting, and trying to kill her. Wheatley looks pretty much identical to the cores Chell incinerated except for the eye color - she probably started out not trusting him, and later he turned evil and she didn't talk because of that. She may also just be a naturally quiet person. (I imagine the jumping was a way to acknowledge Wheatley but mess with him at the same time. Chell might be an abnormally stubborn person, but that doesn't mean she can't have a sense of humor.)
261** Keep in mind this woman survived an explosion, and from her point of view, very little time has elapsed since. If her mutism were the result of brain damage, she wouldn't be able to understand anything said to her either, which would make her conspiracy with Wheatley impossible.
262[[/folder]]
263
264[[folder:How does uploading a mind work?]]
265* Cave said something about "putting a brain into a computer," but how exactly did that work? Is [=GLaDOS=] the surviving remains of Caroline's mind and consciousness, or was her personality simply based on an exact copy of Caroline's? Cave may have wanted the project to survive, but I don't think he'd made Caroline suffer such a terrible fate, if the former case is true.
266** Cave outright says to force Caroline to undergo the procedure.
267** There's unused audio recordings of Caroline screaming and begging Cave Johnson not to put her into an AI.
268** "Brain Mapping. Artificial Intelligence. We should have been working on it thirty years ago. I will say this - and I'm gonna say it on tape so everybody hears it a hundred times a day: If I die before you people can pour me into a computer, I want Caroline to run this place." Given this directive, if Aperture scientists failed to develop a method for "uploading a mind", it's not implausible that Plan B would in fact be "[[{{BrainInAJar}} putting a brain into a computer]]". And the tape they'd been listening to a hundred times a day specifically says "[[{{Squick}} pour me]]" into it...
269[[/folder]]
270
271[[folder:Every turret becomes defective]]
272* Why does sabotaging the turret production line replace every functioning turret with a bad one? The factory runs nonstop, so [=GLaDOS=] should still have an enormous stockpile of functioning turrets to draw from even if she can't make any new ones.
273** One of the dev commentaries mentions that the turret production line actually ends with all the newly packaged turrets being unboxed and then scrapped for parts to be reused at the beginning of the line. So it would seem the only way for [=GLaDOS=] to get turrets for tests and traps is by removing them from the line before the end, and since she has been dead she hasn't had a chance to stockpile any.
274** The bad turrets in the line are also destroyed, and when Chell sabotages the line the good turrets are considered defective.
275[[/folder]]
276
277[[folder:Portals on white surfaces]]
278* This is something that isn't explained in either game, why do the portals only work on white surfaces? In the second game before you can shoot a portal in certain places you have to make sure there is white paint covering the surface.
279** Since you are in TEST chambers, it seems reasonable to think those were designed to be ColorCodedForYourConvenience.
280* It's not the color that makes the portals conduct, it's the material. Portals can conduct on dry nonreflective surfaces like concrete and office walls, and the white gel that conducts portals is stated to work because it's made from ground-up moon rocks in a paste. Hence why shooting a portal to the Moon works too. These elements are all just colored white for game-design visual coding to direct the player.
281[[/folder]]
282
283[[folder:Wheatley's bars]]
284* Relatively minor, but at the end of the game, how does Wheatley get his bars back? All personality cores have those two bar things above and below their "eyes," and Wheatley's are taken off as part of the procedure to be added onto [=GLaDOS' body=]; the developer commentary even notes that he can move around more in this state. How, then, does he get them back by the end sequence where he wishes he could apologize to Chell? We see the entire process by which he gets into space.
285** He has them even before he ends up in space, Chell is hanging onto him by them. They were probably retracted behind his head where you can't see them, but when his cable became detached they came out again.
286[[/folder]]
287
288[[folder:Revamped rooms]]
289* Apparently, the facility can only be altered when some entity (e.g. [=GLaDOS=] or Wheatley) is controlling it. After the events of the first game, it's more than implied that nobody was tending to the facility (even as Wheatley puts it, you killed [=GLaDOS=], then nothing happened, then you attempted to escape with Wheatley), so naturally the whole place fell into disrepair. My question is this; how did the original testing track change so much if there was nobody around to change it? Two of the chambers have been completely revamped, two entirely new chambers seem to have found their way in, one seems to have been fused with another, and yet another one doesn't even come back into play until ''after'' you've revived [=GLaDOS=]. Then you have all the elevators getting completely replaced. Assuming that the "announcer" at the beginning of the game has no direct control over the facility, how and ''when'' exactly did all those changes get made?
290** Those could be different chambers that already existed by the events of Portal 1. You enter an elevator at the end of each chamber -- it could simply have taken you to different ones.
291*** The different elevators are ArtEvolution. The developer's commentary explains that there is no in-game reason for the elevators to be different, they just wanted to redesign them. Same story for the new Material Emancipation Grids.
292** Presumably the facility did continue to receive some upgrades after the events of the original Portal. While [=GLaDOS=] was dead, other, unseen robots continued to manage the test chambers as best they could, i.e. installing more movable panels, new elevators, etc. Eventually they stopped, possibly due to attrition as they broke down or from being unable to handle any problems that fell outside their programming. It would be like the entire management of a company vanishing one day. The office drones would probably continue doing their work for a while, even managing to complete previously-assigned long-term projects, but without any direction the company would eventually fall apart.
293** During the hotel room ride, Wheatley mentions "one of the old testing tracks." There might be several.
294[[/folder]]
295
296[[folder:Cores exploding]]
297* If all Aperture technologies remain safely operational up to 4000 degrees Kelvin, and the Companion Cube survived, why did the cores explode? If they survived, why have a furnace at all? And why did [=GLaDOS=] explode when they were removed, as the Lab Rat comic and sequel describe them as just voices in her head?
298** Maybe they outsourced for some materials. Some things they bought from other companies don't have such high tolerances and explode under extreme heat. The Aperture records simply don't take that into account.
299** FridgeBrilliance: An Emergency Intelligence Incinerator in the same room as a potentially-hostile AI shows some astounding forethought on Aperture's part - they either deliberately built the cores with combustible materials, or the incinerator was hotter than 4000K. Either one would justify the cores' explosions.
300** Aperture continually lied to its AI (''They told me if I ever used this, I'd die. They said that about everything!'') So the hardware could get recycled (in the same way that the turrets are recycled) and [=GLaDOS=] etc only think that the cores get destroyed.
301** Maybe the cores have a remote connection to her until they're destroyed or too far away? That could explain the tractor beam-like thing.
302[[/folder]]
303
304[[folder:Reasoning behind obstacle courses]]
305* Why does Aperture Science test their products by incorporating them into elaborate obstacle courses that require the ability to warp space to navigate? If they wanted to test repulsion gel, couldn't they just throw stuff at it, or tell people to jump on it if they really must have human testing? Why is it necessary for the test subjects to solve a dangerous puzzle while they're jumping on it?
306** C'mon, this is Aperture Science we're talking about. At this point it is utter foolishness to ask, "Why would they achieve Goal A in this convoluted, inefficient way, when they could have done it in this obvious, simple, effective way?" Utter foolishness. Plus, if you're testing the gels and the portal gun, why not combine the chambers and test both at once?
307* The wiki claimed Cave didn't "know how science worked, but knew a lot about how people worked". He has the determination to run a scientific research firm, but he couldn't watch a bunch of lab techs (whom he frequently expressed resentment towards in his recordings) running safe little simulations. He needed to see action, people in motion, people he could talk to and motivate. Cave liked obstacle course testing and, in his words, paid the bills around there. Like it or go work for those clowns over at Black Mesa. By the time Cave died, obstacle course testing was just the Aperture way. The fact [=GLaDOS=] has been running the tests for a long while and is at least partially Caroline (who supported Cave for decades) means she probably shares her former boss's views.
308[[/folder]]
309
310[[folder:Human testing]]
311* According to Cave Johnson's prerecorded messages, human testing nearly bankrupted Aperture Science. They started out testing astronauts, Olympians and war heroes in the 50s, but thanks to expensive lawsuits and government fines, by the 70s they were hiring bums off the streets and by the 80s they were reduced to forcing their own employees to "volunteer" for testing. In fact, in one of Cave Johnson's last messages he states that Aperture is phasing out human testing. So why is that in the modern facility the game starts in, not only are they still testing on humans, but According to Wheatley, there were 10,000 of them being held in the Relaxation Center (until they all died under his supervision)! And in co-op mode the players find a huge vault of humans in cryogenic sleep who are still alive. Where did they get all those test subjects from?
312** Aperture was ''going'' to phase out human testing -- while it was still run by humans. Once [=GLaDOS=] took over, she presumably saw no reason to carry on with those plans. As for the test subjects in stasis, presumably they were either Aperture employees or people visiting the facility, captured and suspended by [=GLaDOS=].
313*** The subjects being employees seems plausible - each is given a scientific job title as they're scanned during the credit sequence and [=GLaDOS=] seems to know personal details about most of them. But what about the 10,000 humans suspended in the relaxation center where Chell wakes up? Where did they come from? Hard time believing that Aperture had that many employees, especially considering Cave Johnson's complaint about how employee retention had plummeted after "voluntary" employee testing became mandatory.
314*** If you look closely at some of the stickers on the relaxation vaults (you can see them if you zoom in during the ride in your hotel room at the beginning) the packing dates are from the 1970s. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them were homeless people who were somehow convinced to do that.
315** This was in the 80s. Aperture obviously got back on its feet between then and the first Portal.
316[[/folder]]
317
318[[folder:Condition of the old courses]]
319* How the heck are all the old sealed off testing courses still in such fantastic condition? Seriously, the first few modern facility test courses you visit are more broken down despite having more advanced building material, self-repairing technology and the once-off mentioned nanobot "work crew" to keep them in shape! But none of those things are present in the old Aperture. It's amazing that they still have working lights down there after 50 years (plus however long Chell was sleeping), let alone elevators and pump stations. There's not a spot of mold or dust in the various offices you come across, there are paintings and posters in mint condition everywhere, and wooden boards that haven't warped or rotted all over the freakin' place. Yes, there are rusted and broken catwalks everywhere and the ground floor is covered with trash and mud and the elevator to the surface is shut down, but aside from those the place is for the most part so clean and organized and ''functional'' that it's hard to believe it's been abandoned for over a year, let alone half a century.
320** Impressions are that the old chambers were deliberately ''preserved'', not just passively let to rot like it was the case with the modern facility. Thus they could have taken the measures to prevent decay, such as reinforcing the walls and covering the furniture in whatever protective stuff they have at Aperture. They simply shut the power and gel flow down and let the area rest until Chell reactivated it. Notice also that while the test chambers and offices are well-preserved, the vast space between them isn't; Aperture probably didn't bother taking measures to preserve the maintenance areas while sealing them off.
321*** Cave Johnson says that the Enrichment Spheres are coated in Asbestos to keep the rats out. Kinda flimsy, but if he covered them with enough of it, it should hold off most of nature for at least a little while.
322** Deep underground the chambers wouldn't be exposed to a lot of things like rain, wind, plants, and sunlight so it would last longer even setting aside Aperture's obsession with RagnarokProofing. It's implied that even a lot of the upper test chambers are underground. With the chambers from Cave's era, they're so far down they're practically like preserved fossils. That said, it is significantly damaged, there are many areas where you have to make portal jumps because walkways have collapsed.
323** Keep in mind, though, that they're still in '''a salt mine''', and in a planet that was in the process of being taken over from below by burrowing Antlions (unless the Antlions were only introduced to the eastern hemisphere).
324** There's also the matter of complexity. The upper, modular testing tracks are probably a lot more complex than the old, static testing spheres. It's not hard to imagine plantlife and the like working its way between all those moving bits over the time of disrepair. Perhaps there's just less things to go wrong with the old tracks, especially since they're probably too far down.
325[[/folder]]
326
327[[folder:Position of the earth and the last portal]]
328* At the end, when Chell portals to the moon, the two surfaces the portals are on are, for all intents and purposes, parallel to each other. However, when Chell looks at the earth, she's not looking straight up, relative to the moon; she's looking sideways. Did the moon suddenly rotate ninety degrees while we weren't looking?
329*** It's possible that the portal didn't land in the center of the visible side of the Moon, but closer to a polar region. After all, the game doesn't take into account where you actually aim the portal gun -- it doesn't even care what color the portal is!
330*** But the twinkle before you get sucked out is clearly ''not'' at a polar region.
331** What if the portals don't just warp you through space - they warp you through space''time''. And the time dilation is in some way proportional to the distance involved. Then, the time difference from one portal to the next is unnoticable across a few metres like during most of the game, but over a quarter of a million miles, it's enough time for the Moon and Earth to turn a significant amount.
332** The moon isn't flat, its a sphere(oid). From the player's perspective, the portal seemed to hit about halfway between the middle and the edge. The Earth, as seen from that point, should be about 45 degrees above the horizon (the orientation of the portals doesn't matter, it's the location that counts). Now, it seems to me that the Earth was actually closer to the horizon than that, but since we don't have any [[DepthDeception usable reference points]] during that shot, we can't say for sure.
333[[/folder]]
334
335[[folder:Astronauts]]
336* Where did Cave find any astronauts in 1952, nine years before Gagarin's flight in 1961?
337** He said they were "missing" astronauts. Possibly as in, ''[[GovernmentConspiracy really]]'' missing due to portal malfunctions. The term "astronaut" has also been around since [[http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=astronaut 1929]], so maybe it meant something else then.
338** Or the recording was not made once and forgotten at the time that that section was built, and what Chell hears is the last revision used for that section (when astronauts are around). The Borealis, assuming continuity with the blueprints from Episode 2, was far newer then its drydock when lost.
339[[/folder]]
340
341[[folder:[=GLaDOS=] can't help you?]]
342* The bit about [=GLaDOS=] being unable to tell you the solution to a given problem. I don't get it; either the punitive shock is tied into the main core, in which case [=GLaDOS=] should have been unaffected; '''or''', the shock is tied into ''all'' personality cores, in which case Wheatley should have known about it long before it became relevant. And in either event, [=GLaDOS=] is currently working with one-point-six volts; what energy could she possibly muster to significantly shock herself with?
343** Presumably the shock is built into all personality cores to prevent them from helping test subjects solve the puzzles, and Wheatley would have known it if he had tried to help Chell before (and he didn't). Why didn't he know it? I see three explanations, all plausible: 1) He's Wheatley. 2) He did know, but just couldn't resist helping Chell to get her through the test chamber faster. 3) The most likely one: he didn't know about the shock because unlike [=GLaDOS=], he was never meant to administer tests.
344** Or 4) [[OverlyLongGag He's Wheatley]]
345*** They probably told him he'd die if he ever helped a test subject solve a test, and after having been cried wolf multiple times he presumed that warning was rubbish like all the other things they told him would kill him. Hilariously, turns out that one was partially true.
346** Note that whenever she uses too much energy, she temporarily shuts down. It's possible that it would start to shock her, only to instead shut her down, which would be more of a hindrance because she's gone for a while.
347** There's also the fact that the puzzles you do with her are handmade by Wheatley either from scratch or by combining multiple test chambers together, so she would be trying to figure them out as much as the player since it's likely she knows the answer to one component or one chamber, but not when the components are put together in a new arrangement she hasn't seen before. In a way when it's mentioned, it's [=GLaDOS=] telling you why she couldn't have helped you before even if she wanted.
348** Maybe she wasn't entirely sure if it would shock her or not, but didn't want to risk frying her potato (which could kill her).
349[[/folder]]
350
351[[folder:Hazards of the gels]]
352* OK, so Repulsion Gel "Does NOT like the human skeleton", and the moon rocks in Conversion Gel are toxic if inhaled, but what's the extra (that is, outside of what would happen if it was ingested) hazard of Propulsion Gel?
353** Not stated in the game. Could be anything.
354** Whatever the effects were, either Cave Johnson thought they were too minor to mention or too terrifying. Not sure which is worse.
355** Was it still being made of asbestos/causing no food whatsoever to be absorbed into the user's body?
356** Let's make one up! How about interior friction burns? Oh, and cancer. Everything causes cancer.
357*** Running into a wall at 90 miles per hour seems like a pretty bad side effect.
358*** The lab boys tell me that if you get this stuff on you, there's a good chance trying to move would... I don't know, something about peeling an egg with a sand blaster, I wasn't really paying attention. Now I'm hungry. Caroline, what's the lunch situation?
359*** [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking I'm sure it stains pretty badly as well.]]
360** Maybe Aperture just didn't realize that bouncing that high in the air without Long Fall Boots (which the 1950s test subjects probably didn't have) is gonna damage your skeleton, gel or no gel.
361[[/folder]]
362
363[[folder:Keeping the Companion Cube]]
364* Why would [=GLaDOS=] keep [[spoiler: The Companion Cube alive...I mean intact]]?
365** She didn't, it either survived on its own ("all Aperture technologies remain fully operation up to 4,000 degrees Kelvin"), or she just [[spoiler: gave her a new one, but charred it a little for effect]]...although that makes you wonder [[LimaSyndrome why she'd go to the trouble...]]
366*** Or [[spoiler: it's the Companion Cube seen on the edge of the incinerator in the teaser trailer. It could have caught on something like that and survived that way]].
367** WordOfGod says that [[spoiler: the Companion cube was having an adventure of it's own, and just happened to get out at the same time as you]].
368[[/folder]]
369
370[[folder:[=GLaDOS=]'s lack of morality]]
371* Chell destroyed [=GLaDOS'=] Morality Core in the first game, which made [=GLaDOS=] go from "Use humans for test subjects" to "Kill all humans". How come when Chell reactivated [=GLaDOS=], she didn't immediately try to kill Chell and instead sent her off to do more tests? Her body was repaired, but there was no sign that [=GLaDOS=] got a new Morality Core.
372** [=GLaDOS=] was going for a FateWorseThanDeath this time, as is plainly obvious. The facility is in ruins and her neurotoxin probably wasn't online at the time. She needed to have Chell waste time solving tests. Note that as soon as she has the place up and running again, she does immediately try to kill you.
373** Maybe the Morality Core didn't really work, [=GLaDOS=] just tricked everyone into thinking it did? The core never talks, and [=GLaDOS=] might have dropped it off ''on purpose'' so that Chell could destroy it, thus pretending to have more of a justified excuse in killing her. After all, even ''before'' you get to [=GLaDOS's=] chamber, she says "Turn back or I will kill you."
374** [=GLaDOS=] attempts to kill you once well before you get to her room in the first game. It's made quite clear that the Morality Core never really worked, all it succeeded in doing was preventing her from using the neurotoxin specifically.
375** I think [=GLaDOS=] kept Chell alive because she was the only test subject available at that point. She was planning on killing her once she'd finished building ATLAS and P-body to replace her, [[spoiler:as indicated by what [=PotatOS=] says when Wheatley discovers the Cooperative Testing Initiative.]]
376*** I mean, she does say she has another suprise for Chell "with tragic consequences". We never get to see what she had planned considering Wheatley pulled Chell out of the test chamber before we actually ''got'' to the surprise. The fact that [=GLaDOS=] sounds incredibly smug as she says that is a pretty clear indicator that her "surprise" might be [[{{Understatement}} more than a little lethal]].
377[[/folder]]
378
379[[folder:Plumbing]]
380* How does the plumbing in Old Aperture still work? There's switches for the gel pumps, but nothing that controls water, so there's no reason to assume that it was ever switched off. So how have the tanks for the water in some of the test spheres not run dry over the course of god knows how many years? (Unless it's just purified sludgewater pumped in from the other spheres, which is [[NauseaFuel gross]].)
381** [=GLaDOS=]states that the air everyone breaths in the Enrichment Center is just re-used air. A similar process may work on water. Besides, we just know that it's a clear liquid. [[NightmareFuel It could be anything.]]
382** Singapore gets part of its drinking water from recycled sewage. So really, not that unbelievable.
383** It could be that all that water is what's responsible for the filling of the Enrichment Spheres and the salt mine with sludge/acid/stuff. It might also explain why, if the top levels of the facility are exposed to the elements, rainwater doesn't flood the old testing tracks; it's just drained to the bottom (maybe as a way to drown off the Mantis Men?)
384[[/folder]]
385
386[[folder:Chell getting recaptured]]
387* How did Chell get recaptured in the first place? [=GLaDOS=] was dead. Did those androids find her and put her in the Relaxation Vault?
388** The "Lab Rat" tie-in comic, available on the official website, explains this.
389** Even before that, a Portal update modified the ending, showing Chell get dragged back in.
390--> "Thank you for assuming the party escort submission position."
391[[/folder]]
392
393[[folder:Core corruptions]]
394* What is core corruption, anyway? In ''Portal'', [=GLaDOS=] had several personality cores attached, thus was corrupted. However, you had to remove them to defeat her: Making her "pure" again. [[spoiler: But in ''Portal 2'', they say she's corrupted, but she's the only core in the mainframe. Okay, so maybe the computer thought that her insanity was enough to make her corrupt... but that doesn't explain why Wheatley becomes corrupt just after you attatch other personality cores to it. I mean, the guy was MADE to be a moronic imbelice, so insanity counts as core corruption but having "Be a moron" between your codes lines is cool? Also, when you're heading to Wheatley's Lair, you stumble across some corrupted cores, according to [=GLaDOS=]. Honestly, the guy you were trying to beat and [=GLaDOS=] herself are in many ways worse than those guys.]]
395** The corrupted cores' behaviour make it clear that there's some fundamental flaw in their programming. Wheatley wasn't considered corrupt because his programming wasn't damaged, and he was still doing exactly what he was programmed to do ("be a moron"), and he wasn't totally messed up like the corrupted cores. [=GLaDOS=], on the other hand, is very clearly corrupt. It's pretty clear that there's something wrong in her programming, somewhere.
396** It's referencing the fact that her cores were removed. [=GLaDOS=] had four cores hung on her mainframe in the first game. As you defeat her by destroying them, they obviously were semi-vital to her function. In ''Portal 2'', the announcer says that [[spoiler:she is 80% corrupted. Four cores plus [=GLaDOS=], the main core, is five cores. Four "corrupted" (nonexistent) cores to one intact core is 80% corruption. Also, you need Wheatley to be at 100% corruption with three corrupted cores plus him not doing the mainframe because [=GLaDOS=] is still at 80% corruption (if not more) while she's [=PotatOS=], and the core transfer can only replace a more-corrupt core with a less-corrupt one.]]
397[[/folder]]
398
399[[folder:Wheatley surviving getting crushed]]
400* So after he accidentally revives [=GLaDOS=], she crushes Wheatley and tosses him aside. A few levels later, he's back and somewhat fine (if a bit twitchy), on his management rail again. How did he get back onto that rail?
401** Wheatley tells you himself, kind of, in Chapter 4. It's something of a NoodleIncident but apparently involves a bird.
402** Perhaps he has an identical twin.
403** Actually, the few times you see him hiding behind panels before he reveals himself to you, he looks slightly damaged. He wasn't completely crushed, but his casing appeared to be squashed a bit.
404[[/folder]]
405
406[[folder:Tone differences between Portal and Half-Life]]
407* ''VideoGame/{{Portal}}'' takes place in the same universe as ''VideoGame/HalfLife''. So how is it that Cave Johnson and Aperture Science can take RefugeInAudacity while everything related to Gordon Freeman, Black Mesa and City 17 are much more realistically treated?
408** Because they are different games that are related only by very broad-strokes ContinuityOverlap. Valve is trying to keep them as separate as possible plotwise and thematically.
409*** The original Half-Life was actually quite silly, too. Black Mesa was an absurd place with NoOSHACompliance through the wazoo.
410[[/folder]]
411
412[[folder:Preventing the facility's explosion]]
413* The Lab is impending explosion since the beginning of the game. So when [=GLaDOS=] is revived, why didn't she do something about it while in control? Was her [[UnstoppableRage hatred]] towards Chell THAT [[YouWouldntLikeMeWhenImAngry distracting]]?
414** [=GLaDOS=] did fix the reactor after being woken up. It happens offscreen -- in fact, the supposedly impending explosion is never mentioned at all after the opening sequence so one wonders if Valve simply decided to ignore it. And her hatred for Chell is also clearly not distracting her from managing the facility in the first half of the game anyways - [=GLaDOS=] leaves Chell alone in the testing chambers several times early on to go fix things.
415** Presumably [=GLaDOS=] was in the middle of ensuring the reactor core didn't explode at the same time as testing Chell, and had managed to prevent immediate catastrophe, but hadn't managed to sufficiently complete them before Wheatley overthrew her -- at which point, work on the repairs stopped as he devoted everything to testing, and he let what repairs ''had'' been done decay until they fell apart.
416** Truth is, it's one of those things that required regular maintenance to keep it in working condition (e.g. press a key every hour) and Wheatley just didn't bother doing it.
417[[/folder]]
418
419[[folder:Wheatley hates moron more than idiot]]
420* Another thing that confused me. Wheatley didn't seem to care for being called an idiot, but being called a moron sends him flying into a rage! Is it just he's in a bigger body now or something? Is moron somehow worse than idiot? It's real confusing that a smaller word would be more insulting...
421** It's his BerserkButton. It doesn't have to be logical. His is the small mind that resents being reminded of the fact. It doesn't help that [=GLaDOS=], once learning of that button, doesn't hesitate to press it at every opportunity.
422*** Perhaps he doesn't understand what an idiot is?
423*** Maybe, maybe not. He is actually referred to directly as an idiot ("Do NOT plug that little idiot into MY mainframe!") and replies rather succinctly ("No, you should plug that little idiot into the mainframe!"). You can insult Wheatley as much as you like, but the word "moron" does seem to be a trigger.
424** It's worth noting that the words [[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/idiot idiot]], [[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/imbecile imbecile]], and [[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/moron moron]] used to have formal definitions, and under those, being a moron was actually better than being an idiot. So maybe he's so dumb that he's getting that backwards?
425** On a similar note, right before [=GLaDOS=] tries to hit him with a LogicBomb, she says "Hey, moron!" and he just goes "Oh, hello." Why didn't he fly into a rage like he did the prior and subsequent times he was called a moron?
426** Because he wasn't expecting anyone to show up to talk to him, so he blew it off.
427** [=GLaDOS=] directly calls him the 'Moron Sphere,' maybe he doesn't mind other nasty names for the same reason a non-white person wouldn't mind being called 'honky' as much as other epitaphs.
428*** Maybe he thinks 'idiot' is a designation, like how the Adventure Sphere's real name is Rick.
429** It should be noted that he is still affected by being called a moron in the last part of the game. The first instance, he does appear to shrug it off, but eventually he starts getting annoyed with it to the point he [[FeigningIntelligence fakes reading Machiavellian works and plays classical music to appear intelligent.]]
430-->'''[=GLaDOS=]:''' [[AC: I think I took that "moron" thing a little too far this time.]]
431** Maybe it's a glitch?
432* Opposing other {{WMG}}s proposed here, Wheatley does know he's a 'moron sphere.' That's actually what he was called, a moron sphere. So it's not insults in general, it's that particular word that really gets his goat, because it's telling him of his purpose. Idiots and dolts are just words, words that can be temporary labels, but being called a moron is reminding him that he was specifically built to be a moron. The time he doesn't rise to the occasion is because it's when Chell and [=GLaDOS=] have just finished climbing out of old Aperture, and he was surprised by their reappearance.
433* Personally, I think Wheatley was just {{late to the punchline}}. The only time he's actually called an "idiot" (that I recall, anyway) is when he's desperately trying to get Chell to plug him in, so he's so focused on the goal that the word just flies by without him even realizing it.
434[[/folder]]
435
436[[folder:Building the facility]]
437* Has it occurred to anybody else that Aperture labs is built upside-down? Seriously, the earliest parts of the complex are the furthest from the surface. It doesn't seem like an ''Aperture is incompetent'' trope to me because if that was true then they worked out exactly how much space they would need for the next 40 years.
438** Building up from the bottom is hardly unusual. What would be unusual is if they started at the top and built ''down''.
439*** That's how they would do if they built the base from scratch, but since they bought some abandoned mining complex instead, they already had the tunnels ready, and could start from the bottom.
440*** If you're making a building, obviously you build from bottom to top, but when you're making a tunnel or a mine, it's far more logical to start from the top and build down. Two main reasons: Firstly, all the earth you dig up has to be transported out, and equipment transported in. You can theoretically manage with a single deep shaft, but it's just easier to keep the supply lines as short as possible. It's easy to do this if you have available space nearby i.e. directly above you, where you can keep all your equipment, personnel and supplies, and just keep gradually moving it down as you dig. Secondly, "digging up" is inherently dangerous. Ceilings have a habit of falling apart when you poke them with shovels or drills. No matter how hard you dig at a floor, it isn't going to fall on top of you. But, to answer OP's question: Hey it's Aperture Science! It's their MO to do everything in the most dangerous, money-wasting manner possible.
441** The facility wasn't ''built'' from bottom to top, it was ''abandoned'' from bottom to top. When Aperture started running out of money, they closed the bottom test sphere, but kept updating the rest. Then, as they sank further into insolvency, they repeated with the next-lowest sphere, and so on.
442*** Nope, that's the order it was built in too. Like the point above said, they bought a mine, so they just started down there. I suppose they made enough money at first to add on to it up above.
443*** Even in an existing mine, it's cheaper and easier to build from the top down.
444** This is ''Aperture''. The whole point of them is that they don't do the cheaper and easier option, but go to painstaking lengths to complete a task in the hardest and most inconvenient way imaginable. So yeah, they totally started building upwards at the bottom of a mineshaft, because that's what they do.
445** With all the dangerous technologies either under development or being actively tested during Cave Johnson's tenure as Aperture CEO, building their main testing facility two miles underground is a remarkably prudent safety measure.
446
447[[/folder]]
448
449[[folder:Wheatley knows about Bring Your Daughter To Work Day]]
450* Upon entering the room where Bring Your Daughter To Work Day was held, Wheatley remarks that it "did not end well". Did he witness whatever happened himself, or was he told the story or what? I'm wondering how he apparently knows about the event.
451** He, along with all the other AI constructs, was around when [=GLaDOS=] went berserk and it's hardly odd that he knows the story. Remember, Aperture had been creating AI's for decades -- since at least the eighties.
452** Even if he was created afterwards (possibly even ''because'' of the incident), it is pretty clear that other AIs could have told him stories. Soomeone told him about the screaming robot room, for instance. The AI constructs seem to have something of a folklore.
453[[/folder]]
454
455[[folder:No gels in the new chambers]]
456* Is there any in-game reason that the gels were not used in the newer testing chambers?
457** Well, none is mentioned, but I could imagine it was one of the following: a) the gels were too poisonous, even for Aperture Science, b) they'd already sufficiently tested the gels by the time the newer test chambers were build, c) newer inventions made the gels redundant, d) they got bored of them.
458** The second time you open a gigantic vault door (the horizontal one that drops a lift for you) you see three large pipes from inside the room connect with pipes to the outside. The upper, newer sections were literally cut off from the gels until Chell opened the way. The gels were buried and forgotten by [=GLaDOS=]'s time.
459*** Though, [=GLaDOS=] did say that Wheatley's tests were ''her'' tests now, just jammed together out of different skeletons that she had kept. You used the gels quite a bit in those areas. Maybe she had initially worked her away around those pipes and did nothing with them in those chambers?
460** There's a dummied out line somewhere in the script files where [=GLaDOS=] knows about the conversion gel, at least ("Wait. I HEARD about this. We discontinued it after all the test subjects kept escaping.").
461[[/folder]]
462
463[[folder:Thinking of the paradox]]
464* In order to use a paradox on Wheatley, [=GLaDOS=] needed to think about the paradox to use on the way up, yet she didn't short out. Maybe Caroline helped, since she was reunited with [=GLaDOS=] in Chapter 7? [=GLaDOS=] does say each word of the paradox one at a time with a pause, even the first one, like she's repeating each word after someone's saying it...
465** [=GLaDOS=] giving the paradox word by word seemed to be a way of bracing herself. Immediately after saying "FALSE" she starts muttering "don't think about it".
466*** That could be a possibility - still doesn't explain much about not freaking out from the time she got the idea to the time she said the paradox aloud, since technically, she'd need to think about the paradox in order to plan out what to say if she was doing it on her own.
467*** What [=GLaDOS=] thinks is true necessarily has to be true.
468** WMG is that [=GLaDOS=] stored the paradox as individual words. Being kept as separate strings of data that weren't related to each other allowed her to carry it without having to 'think' about the random assortment of words. Her stating every word individually is her recalling this data carefully, one word at a time, again trying to not think about what the words mean together.
469[[/folder]]
470
471[[folder:The bird]]
472* So where the hell did this bird even come from? First off, Wheatley talks about finding one shortly after you meet him again during [=GLaDOS=]'s test chambers, then he uses her eggs to jam a door mechanism, then that same bird somehow ends up at the bottom of Old Aperture and flies off with [=PotatOS=], and ''then'' she appears one last time at the end of the Peer Reviews DLC before leaving the facility for good. How did she even get in here?
473** Who says it's the same bird? They're obviously breeding in the facility.
474** Well, the bird obviously got in originally through the huge cavernous holes in the walls and ceilings exposing the insides of the facility to the outside world when it was a crumbling ruin. As for how it keeps appearing all over the place, there ''are'' interdimensional portals being opened up all over the place. Perhaps the bird's just sort of following you around and accidentally crossing through them without being noticed.
475[[/folder]]
476
477[[folder:Wheatley's 'eye']]
478* All the other personality cores seen in the games have black pupils. So, why doesn't Wheatley have one? His is more white-ish.
479** The other cores may all have black pupils, but they also have different designs. It's possibly Wheatley is just the first one we've encountered so far that doesn't.
480[[/folder]]
481
482[[folder:Rick the Adventure Sphere]]
483* What happened to Rick? Was he pulled into SPACE with Space Core and Wheatley?
484** If you watch closely, he's detached just before Wheatley is. Not sure why he didn't appear in the ending sequence, though. However if you look in the games' sound files ([=GCFScape=] will do the trick to open the gamefiles. Look for a pak01_dir.vpk) theres dialogue that sounds like he was meant to be.
485** But that makes one wonder what happened to the Fact Sphere. Was it, too, pulled into space?
486[[/folder]]
487
488[[folder: Did Wheatley know his purpose?]]
489* Did Wheatley ever give any indication that he knew he was an Intelligence Dampening Sphere and was once attached to [=GLaDOS=] before she said so?
490** I don't think he did. Like you said, he seemed to be surprised by the revelation. And from what we've seen, cores connected to the main A.I. are not entirely conscious (seeing how all the very MotorMouth cores turned almost completly silent when connected), they can probably become aware of the situation if they want to (the Curiosity Core knowing who Chell is, Space and Rick talking while connected to Wheatley) but WMG that they're in sort of a sleep-like state when attached. [[FridgeHorror And yes, it does mean you killed the Portal 1 cores only minutes after their first independent thoughts]].
491** He didn't seem that confused when [=GLaDOS=] mentioned it. More surprised that [=GLaDOS=] was about to reveal it, like he hoped she didn't know (Considering he may have been disconnected from her for a while) or that he hoped she'd be more polite than to reveal something so embarrassing.
492[[/folder]]
493
494[[folder: Cutting the neurotoxin lines]]
495* One of the puzzles in the game involves using a laser to cut the neurotoxin lines. When this happen, you can see the gas leaking out before the tank implodes. Wouldn't there be enough in the tank to kill Chell or at least make her very sick when it all leaks out?
496** If you do it right, she's not in the room that long; maybe the neurotoxin leaked into other chambers as well or got sucked out the pipe when Chell did.
497*** Maybe the pipes just feed inactive components into the big compressor, and it doesn't actually become active until after that.
498[[/folder]]
499
500[[folder: Why was the portal gun required?]]
501* Why exactly did Wheatley say you needed the portal gun to escape? If I recall right, after he opened the panel there was nothing you couldn't simply jump over (plus, with simply a single-portal device, there wasn't much you could do anyways). The only thing I can think of is that he was too heavy for Chell to carry by herself and she needed the tractor-beam, but then in the Lab Rat comic you can see people carrying around cores without any problem.
502** Because [[OverlyLongGag he's Wheatley]]. He's a moron.
503** Because he knew that the person who got rid of [=GLaDOS=] and presumably escaped used a portal gun to do it.
504** Because a portal gun is a GREAT boon to a potential escapee. Being able to transport between two locations as long as there's enough concrete makes getting out of a destroyed and ruined facility much easier.
505** Strictly speaking, you never did escape Aperture because of the waking-up-[=GLaDOS=] fiasco, and the ending scene showed you still had a long way up to go before the surface. It's likely you simply never encountered obstacles that would've made escaping without the gun difficult yet.
506[[/folder]]
507
508[[folder: Bird eggs]]
509* How exactly does a personality sphere with no appendages drop bird eggs into a door?
510** A lot of trial and error on a management rail.
511[[/folder]]
512
513[[folder: Defective Turret Vision]]
514* If the defective turrets can't see anything, how did they know they were facing a woman with a potato?
515** I doubt all the Defective turrets were blind.
516[[/folder]]
517
518[[folder: I punch those numbers into my calculator, it makes a happy face.]]
519* What exactly do you have to punch in a calculator to have it make a happy face?
520** "It's an Aperture Science brand calculator, I told the eggheads I wanted a calculator that instead of solving every equation you input into it, it instead displays happy, sad or angry faces. How does that help with mathematics? Who cares?! I'm not paying you to sit around doing math!"
521** It could be a graph calculator.
522** He was probably just being metaphorical. As a salesman-turned-science philanthropist (Of a sort), he probably likes using such odd language in an attempt to get on a customer's good side.
523** [[CatSmile 83]]
524[[/folder]]
525
526[[folder: Stalemate Booby Trap]]
527* Three questions about the Booby Trap at the end of the game: 1. How did Wheatley even think that he should booby trap the button? Knowing him, he should have forgotten about the whole thing after the transfer! 2: If you pause before the trap goes off, you'll notice it's made out of the bombs used in the fight. The bombs in the fight explode on contact, and these bombs didn't have anything holding them up, so how come these didn't just blow up while Wheatley was making the trap? 3: The Stalemate Button didn't appear to be damaged, so couldn't Chell have just ran over and pressed it? The doors has been blown off by the trap, she wasn't dead, and Wheatley didn't have any sort of way of stopping her!
528** Ok, in order: 1. It's mentioned somewhere up above in another folder that Wheatley was programmed to make the worst decisions possible rather than necessarily being stupid. He shows himself to be fairly intelligent earlier in the game, so there is some evidence for that. Anyway, booby trapping the stalemate button was the worst possible decision to make because that means [=GLaDOS=] can't be plugged in to save the facility, so it'll explode instead. 2. Who's to say those bombs can only explode on contact? If they did, they'd blow up everything they touched including the launchers that fired them. So it's likely they can also be set to proximity detonate. 3. Wheatley expected the bombs to kill her, as he screams at her in surprise when he sees that Chell survived. As for Chell, she was wounded and likely wouldn't have been able to make it in time, hence shooting a portal at the moon.
529*** For 1. I meant when would he have the time to booby trap the button? He was probably too busy soaking in the power following the accidental fall of Chell and [=GLaDOS=], which would have been the ideal time to do it. Then he probably got the "itch" he mentions after the room where you first meet Frankenturrets and tried cheating the system by making Frankenturrets to solve the tests for him. He couldn't have done it while Chell and [=GLaDOS=] were progressing through his tests, as he was watching them progress through.
530*** Why would he forget about that? Even if someone is mad with power, they usually make sure that they protect what put them in power. I seriously doubt Wheatley would forget about the stalemate button, considering it put him in that position and can take him out of that position. Do you really think Wheatley can only do one thing at a time while in [=GLaDOS=]' body? For all we know, he did booby-trap the button immediately after punching [=GLaDOS=] and Chell into that pit, seeing as he clearly mellowed out after a while and got the itch to test then. Granted, at the time he likely had no reason to do so, but after they returned Wheatley had plenty of opportunities to set the trap (He rebuilt his entire lair to ensure he doesn't make the same mistakes as [=GLaDOS=], he could have done it at that point). He wasn't just watching Chell and [=GLaDOS=] progress through the chambers, he was also setting up the chambers and traps for them ahead of time, who's to say that's all he was doing. Hell he could have done it in the middle of his fight with Chell. After all, he ''is'' an AI; even a moronic one like Wheatley is still capable of multitasking and seeing multiple perspectives at once, it really isn't that difficult for computers to do. If [=GLaDOS=] can do it, so can Wheatley.
531[[/folder]]
532
533[[folder:Offices in the elevator]]
534* Just after old Aperture Enrichment Sphere #6, you begin climbing back out of Aperture. One obstacle is an elevator shaft with a stuck elevator. And, for some reason, offices within the elevator shaft... Why are there offices in an elevator shaft, with windows looking out into said shaft?
535** Are you really questioning Aperture Science building practices? Their entire MO is doing everything in the most nonsensical and money-wasting manner possible. In-universe, it's possible that Aperture wanted their employees to get a look at all the famous people serving as test subjects, or to allow monitoring of test subjects without deviating them from their schedules.
536[[/folder]]
537
538[[folder:Daytime/Nighttime]]
539* At the very end, when you shoot your portal at [[spoiler: the moon,]] it's night out, but when [[spoiler: you're on the moon, North America is in sunlight which should mean that it's daytime at Aperture.]] Unless I'm wrong with how sunlight works, is this a mistake?
540** Probably falls under RuleOfCool. Seeing Earth is an instantly recognizable WhamShot of "oh my God, we're on the surface of the ''moon''", and it doesn't work as well if the Earth is in shadow.
541** Consider the fact that a short while later, Chell is deposited on the surface in daylight, and that it's a relatively well-known fact that the moon can be seen during the day, and the evidence points to the night sky being the blooper.
542[[/folder]]
543
544[[folder:[=GLaDOS=] and her potato body]]
545* When you first find [=GLaDOS=] after you and her fall into the lower part of the facility, she is being pecked on by a crow. Except, why does she have any sense of touch in potato body to begin with? Yes, even assuming her normal core has sense of touch, it doesn't make sense for her to be able to "feel" her potato parts.
546** It's likely not so much the potato as the AI core itself, getting electric shocks from the bird pecking away that translate into pain signals.
547[[/folder]]
548
549[[folder:Time problems]]
550* So Aperture was perfectly fine on its own when [=GLaDOS=] was dead for years, but [[spoiler:put Wheatley in charge for 2 hours]] and everything goes to hell! If the reason for [[spoiler:the facility almost exploding when Wheatley was in charge]] was that "he made the bad decision to neglect the essential functions required to keep this facility from exploding", then how did [=GLaDOS=] maintain those functions while she was ''dead''?
551** One theory constantly tossed around is that the facility was going to explode anyway, and that Wheatley just sped that process up.
552** Perhaps there were autonomous functions that kept the facility from exploding, but Wheatley had the "great idea" to shut them off for one reason or another.
553[[/folder]]
554
555[[folder: Wheatley's normal voice]]
556* Why is Wheatley literally the only Aperture Science AI to not have any traces of synthesizers or computerization in his voice?
557** Maybe they're trying to invoke HumanityIsInfectious, since he spends so much time watching over the smelly humans?
558** Knowing Aperture they probably were able to make them sound perfectly human but Cave made them more roboty for whatever reason. (Actually, it's not even that unusual - we do it in RealLife, because of TheCoconutEffect).
559[[/folder]]
560
561[[folder: How did Chell survive Bring Your Daughter To Work Day?]]
562We know she was there, as evidenced by the fact that she has a potato there, and we know that [=GLaDOS=] floods the enrichment center with neurotoxin on the same day. The fact that Chell was a test subject also means that she was probably still in there when the center was flooded, otherwise why would she come back later? So how did she survive?
563** [=GLaDOS=] mentions the scientists putting the cores on her as an attempt to slow her down, and Wheatley is explicitly a core that was made, tested on her, and then discarded (as he's not in the first game.) So there has to have been a passage of time between [=GLaDOS=] being turned on for the first time and flooding the center and her taking complete control of the facility. Chell would just have to have escaped during Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, and come back as a test subject later when she was an adult and before [=GLaDOS=] took over (There's an interview she has as a test subject that also supports this but it's been a while.) So, she clearly did come back. And for surviving that initial day, I guess she held her breath and ran.
564[[/folder]]
565
566[[folder: How far down were you at the end of the game?]]
567* The roof of Wheatley's lair falls off and you see the moon. Which means that the roof must be on or near surface level. After [=GLaDOS=] has taken over again, she releases you and sends you on a loooooooooong elevator ride straight upwards, after which you finally reach the surface. The ride is much longer than it would take to reach the roof of [=GLaDOS=]' chamber. Plus, there's a wide field of wheat around you. No trace of a hole in the ground through which you could have seen the moon before. Even though [=GLaDOS=] has certainly repaired the walls and roof of her chamber, she couldn't possibly have filled a hole in the field on the surface and have grown wheat on it.
568** This ''is'' a facility that could restructure itself at will. Presumably the chamber at the end cutscene is not the same as the one you were in while fighting Wheatley.
569*** Any reason why [=GLaDOS=] would suddenly move it many stores underground before releasing Chell?
570*** Because it was in a giant mess after that fight with Wheatley?
571[[/folder]]
572
573[[folder:Want You Gone]]
574* "Goodbye my only friend . . . oh, did you think I meant you?" Wait, then who DID she mean?
575** [=GLaDOS=] is being very {{Tsundere}} with that line. She DOES mean Chell, but she wouldn't state it outright like that, and would immediately deny calling Chell her only friend.
576[[/folder]]
577
578[[folder: [=GLaDOS=] and Her Strange Wording]]
579* Perhaps this is just [=GLaDOS=] being [=GLaDOS=], but during the "You Monster!" scene in the beginning of ''Portal 2'', why does she tell Chell "We both said a lot of things you're going to regret"? Chell doesn't talk!
580** [=GLaDOS=] is a delusional, passive-aggressive psychotic maniac who [[SelfServingMemory clearly tries to rewrite history and downplay / ignore the many wrongs she committed against Chell]] and over-stress the fact that Chell 'murdered' her so that she can [[NeverMyFault play the victim card]]. The fact that she claims they're both at fault is entirely consistent with [=GLaDOS=]'s whole MO of unfairly trying to paint Chell as the bad guy and herself as a wronged, wounded innocent.
581[[/folder]]
582
583[[folder: Wheatley's Name]]
584* Why does he have a proper name instead of simply being referred to as the Intelligence Dampening Sphere? The Adventure Core refers to himself as Rick, so it's not that weird, but then again, Wheatley is a fairly uncommon ''last'' name.
585** FridgeBrilliance that it's exactly what a core designed to make dumb decisions will do?
586[[/folder]]
587
588[[folder: Bird]]
589* How did a bird end up 4000 feet below sea level?
590** It might have once been a test subject, or the descendant of a test subject.
591** The Aperture Science architecture clearly can be rearranged and has obviously been moved around quite a lot over the years. Chances are the bird, like you, originally were fairly close to the surface and got caught up in all the chaos until they ended up at the bottom.
592[[/folder]]
593
594[[folder: Wheatley and Neurotoxin]]
595* If Wheatley and Chell destroyed the neurotoxin before the core transfer, how did Wheatley have access to it for the FinalBoss battle?
596** He's not dumb. He just makes exceptionally horrible decisions. His plan on how to defeat [=GLaDOS=] worked pretty good after all, it was the outcome that was kind of unfortunate. Wheatly mentioned after destroying the Neurotoxin tank, that [=GLaDOS=] could rebuild it, given enough time and Wheatley had quite a few hours to do so.
597[[/folder]]
598
599[[folder: Aperture's Maintenance]]
600* [=GLaDOS=] said that when Wheatley took over the facility, he must have decided not to maintain the functions that keep Aperture from blowing up. But nobody was maintaining the facility when [=GLaDOS=] was dead in between Portal 1 and 2. And clearly a long time passed between 1 and 2. So why didn't the facility blow up then?
601** In Lab Rat, it's shown [=GLaDOS=]' destruction shook the place apart but didn't cause total power loss - emergency low-power functions were probably still online. But when Wheatley is in control, the facility is at full power and you can see fires, collapsing infrastructure, so on and so forth. Wheatley probably also disabled failsafes under the impression that they were only in his way or making annoying sounds.
602[[/folder]]
603
604[[folder:Moon portal]]
605* Who closes the moon portal after [=GLaDOS=] pulls Chell back in?
606** [=GLaDOS=] is shown in both games to be capable of opening and closing portals.
607[[/folder]]
608
609[[folder:That's a lotta testing]]
610* Why or what did Aperture test the portal gun for a whooping fifty years for?
611** Because it wasn't stable until shortly before [=GLaDOS=] was turned on. Cave at one point says that it can mess with the fabric of time. You could imagine how many athletes/astronauts/hobos/scientists sped into a portal only to never come out. There was a lot of other data to be collected. For example, if a laser goes through a portal, does it lose any power? What about bullets? Do you get any momentum change based on the mass of the object? The tests aren't just for Chell, [=GLaDOS=] is testing the latest iteration of the portal gun through a massive number of circumstances in her own insane way.
612[[/folder]]
613
614[[folder:Portal speed]]
615* How fast would a portal fired - because you have to fire a portal - reach the moon? Would it be able to hit the moon in that short amount of time it took in the game (a few seconds)?
616** The moon is, at different times, between 356,400km to 406,700km from Earth. The portal "bullet" moves at lightspeed, thus it would take 1.19 to 1.6 seconds. The commentary specifically states that the shot takes 1.4 seconds. They were considering making it instantaneous because playtesters would take the shot and then assume that nothing happened, but they settled on the better solution of starting the cutscene the instant you pull the trigger.
617*** However, we can see the portal projectile fired from the Portal Gun, which would mean it moves much slower than the speed of light, below the speed of sound even! That would take months to reach the Moon.
618*** That was the gun in ''Portal 1''. The gun in ''Portal 2'' is instantaneous (well, lightspeed).
619[[/folder]]
620
621[[folder:Seeing the moon portal]]
622* How can you SEE the portal right as it arrives at the moon? Shouldn't you have to wait another 1.4 seconds for the light to reflect and reach your eyes?
623** That was just auditory feedback so you know your Portal hit and doesn't exist in-game. Otherwise, you should have experienced the portal vacuum before saw said twinkle.
624[[/folder]]
625
626[[folder: Wheatley's accent]]
627* Why does Wheatley, a robot built by an American lab, by American scientists, in America (where all other robots talk with either American or "robotic" accent), have a British accent and vocabulary?
628** Given his job was to annoy her with an endless string of bad ideas, maybe they just wanted to give him a good, distinct accent so he wouldn't blend in with the other ones in her ear. He's speaking fast and in an accent that you wouldn't normally hear in Idaho making him harder to tune out or turn into general background noise.
629** WMG here but [=GLaDOS=] happens to have the same voice as her human counterpart. Maybe Wheatley is based off a human who happened to have a British accent? The only established method in this universe to make an AI as sophisticated as Wheatley is to start with a human, and the scientists can't have had a great deal of time on their hands.
630** Maybe they felt like it. This ''is'' Aperture Science, after all.
631[[/folder]]
632
633[[folder:The logo on the Borealis]]
634* In Episode 2, the Borealis has the modern Aperture Science logo on it. In Portal 2, you find the Borealis' former Drydock. Sounds fine, right? Notice the logo hanging in the lobby and in the loading screen. Why would they be using a logo from the future on their gigantic ship? How would they know what it'd look like?
635** The ship may be newer than the drydock. It's not inconceivable that they didn't update the logo.
636** Alternatively, they updated the logo on the ship later on at some other harbor.
637*** Outside of story reasons, I figured they threw that in there as a way to say "Episode 3 is coming, just be patient" by referencing where you were heading at the end of Episode 2.
638** More to the point, what is a ''ship dock'' doing several kilometres ''underground''?
639*** If you are going to run some crazy teleportation experiment that you don't want a certain rival company to see... Well, it's probably the best place to put it.
640** Based on the [[http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Borealis#Miscellaneous documents]] from the screenshots in ''Half-Life 2'', we know that the Borealis was in service for some time before she disappeared. Since ice breaking ships need to be refurbished after 20-30 years of service (and the AI version of [=GLaDOS=] was being developed as a new fuel system de-icer), it's probably safe to assume that Aperture's engineers were trying to teleport the ship back to the underground drydock for upgrades when she vanished.
641[[/folder]]
642
643[[folder:Submerging the gun in gel]]
644* One of the warnings you get when you pick up the portal gun is to never submerge the device in liquid, even partially. Here, you can literally stand in a never ending cascade of the various gels without issue. Then there are two parts of the game where the gun can safely touch water (including when the sprinklers come on after the final boss fight).
645** The gels are likely designed with the portal gun in mind, hence why it's safe. According to the PTI, the clear liquid is not water, but "Cleaning Gel".
646** It could be a new, waterproof model of the Portal gun.
647** Given it's [[SkewedPriorities Aperture]], it might be a case of "if you drop it in water we'll have a really hard time getting it back, so please don't. It's expensive."
648[[/folder]]
649
650[[folder:[=GLaDOS=] controlling the claw]]
651* Where did [=GLaDOS=] get the big claw thing at the end of the final battle? There wasn't one of those things that was under [=GLaDOS=] in the core swap scene. Also, how did she control it? She wasn't hooked to the mainframe and had no way to because, again, there wasn't a core swap thing under the mainframe. ALSO, where did her old head come from? It wasn't there before.
652** The claw? It was probably there, but wasn't used the first time. Controlling it? Remember how the cores from the first game only stopped affecting her after you destroyed them? She was already linked to her body by some temporary/not very powerful remote connection just like the cores. The head? It was probably still in that area with the claws from when Wheatley put her in a potato. And, before someone brings up how she got back into her head, remember when she says "I already fixed it!"? It was a fairly fast process, and Wheatley transferred her to the potato in just about the same amount of time, if not less.
653** The mainframe area is highly reconfigurable. Wheatley probably had the claw stashed somewhere out of the way (note that it's also present when you repower [=GLaDOS=]). It's rather ironic because it would have made all the FinalBoss battles rather one-sided.
654** Isn't it the claw she dangled the Adventure and Fact spheres from?
655*** Nope, that's the one she crushed Wheatley with. The big one is present in the control room before the final battle (Wheatley [[PunctuatedPounding punches-you-into-this-pit]] with it.)
656[[/folder]]
657
658[[folder:Time between Portal 1 and 2]]
659* Something that's been somewhat confusing to me: Many people seem to be confused about how many years have passed before Portal 2 begins. Some think it's only a matter of days, some only a few years, some believe around 30 years, and some 300 (I personally believe the last). Here's what I can't wrap my brain around... how could someone think hundreds of years ''haven't'' passed between Portal and Portal 2, after taking into account the complete decay the facility has fallen into? Plants don't grow into infrastructure and buildings don't fall apart after a short amount of time. It takes ''a long'' time for that to happen. In addition, when the AI wakes you up for a second time, the machine stutters when saying the number 9, implying that it surpassed its upward counting limit loooong ago, which may even be ''higher'' than 300 years. Finally, didn't Valve more or less confirm that its been hundreds of years?
660** It's hard to say, really. The problem with assuming 300 years is that you run into serious RagnarokProofing issues. For example, take the Bring Your Daughter To Work Day exhibit. Even 30 years would have caused the potato batteries and the poster boards to crumble into dust. Most plastics used in the construction of the facility would become brittle and crack. Electronics would decay and fail. In 300 years, the structural metal would have long since rusted into uselessness and the entire facility would collapse on itself. Then take the old Aperture Labs facilities. No AI was maintaining them, and they still have working lights and electricity. These contradictions make any sort of effective dating impossible.
661*** Keep in mind, however, that even though they had no AI, they DID have prerecorded messages to use so that testing could continue, even during post-apocalyptic conditions. Not only that, but all Aperture Science facilities are able to run at as low as 1.1 volts. In addition, even though no AI was maintaining things in real-time, the personality cores activated after [=GLaDOS=] was killed most likely kept everything in acceptable working condition, at least as well as something with no arms could. So the facility was far from abandoned during that time. As far as the Condemned Testing Labs go, it's not impossible that the tech down there could run at 1.1 volts too.
662** A book I read, ''Earth Without Men'' I think was the title, goes out of its way to explain why pretty much nothing created with technology from the last 200 years would last very long without anybody to sometime add a coat of anti-rust or change the de-moisturizer. I'm strongly inclined to believe that 30 years is more than enough to account for the state of the center. Note that you can see sunlight entering the rooms in the very first levels, which means holes leading to the surface, which mean flood at the first rain. Ever saw a house that's been flooded? I did. At best, the paint on the walls is screwed, at worst, the walls themselves take the hit and become structurally unsound. ''From being submerged a few hours.'' I'd already considered the fact that there is working equipment in the upper layers of the center thirty years after the Seven-hour war a near miracle, so 300 years would be pushing it way too far. Hell, where did the remaining equipment get its power? No battery could ever last 10 years, fuel become unusable after a few months, nuclear reactors go critical if not constantly tended to, and even then their fuel would never last 20 years.
663*** Nope, 300 years. The state the facility is in is far too bad for a mere 30 years to have passed. Not even mutant super potetoes could cover that much of its insides in vegetation in just 30 years, especially when you consider just how mind-bogglingly huge the facility actually is. Furthermore, 30 years isn't long enough to provoke the kind of comments Wheatley and [=GLaDOS=] make on how long you've been gone. 30 years is pretty long, but it's not mind-boggling. Three centuries, however, is quite staggering. As for what you said about the technology, yes, okay, but that's regular technology. It's like you haven't looked at any Aperture tech at all. The stuff is specifically mentioned ''during the game'' to be apocalypse-proof in a variety of ways and it's quite preposterously durable during the first game, too, what with it being able to survive temperatures of up to 4000 degrees Kelvin. And you claim that no fuel cells last that long in real life? In a world that has portal technology in the fifties? As for the reactor, you don't know how much extra fuel it had. Also, right at the beginning of the game the automated messages tell you that the reactor is about to go critical, so presumably the emergency sub-systems that took care of it finally gave out after all those years and would have taken out everything if [=GLaDOS=] hadn't been awakened. Basically, everything in either game shows that, while they lacked common sense and any kind of moral judgment, Aperture built their equipment to ''last''.
664*** This theory falls apart a bit when you take the historical sections of the facility in to account. In the 1950's section we see cloth, wood, and even paper that is in remarkably good shape for 80 years, let alone 350. And even if we were to assume that all of these materials are long-lasting synthetics invented by Aperture (an Aperture who had barely graduated shower curtain manufacture at the time, no less,) that doesn't explain the foreign materials found in the trophy case, such as a newspaper. Also problematic the fact that Aperture didn't invent AI until well after the lower levels were sealed. Not only do they have no real reason to maintain the electronics and stuff in the older parts of the facility, but they lack any discernible method to boot. Well, perhaps except for the one possible saving grace for the "300 years" theory: the briefly-mentioned nanobot work crew. "Jerry" and his pals could be invisibly refreshing the perishable materials in order to keep the entire facility from rotting/rusting away. I admit both theories require some leaps in logic, but I still tend to lean toward "30 years" because it makes more sense story-wise in relation to future Half-Life crossover.
665** But nothing said to you in the game gives a clear indication of just how much time has passed. The wake up voice recording was glitching out, [=GLaDOS=] lies to you all the time, and Wheatley is a moron. Anything they say has to be taken with a grain of salt.
666** I would be more accepting of a 300 years time span if the facility had been made entirely of glass and plastics, two materials that GaiaVengeance tend to break its teeth onto. And again, holes in the roof, meaning the facility is exposed to everything nature can throw, from dirt to water, insects, animals (that bird must come from somewhere) and plants (those potato plants must have access to natural light). A devastating combo for any man-made construction.
667** The old facility throws all this on its head anyway, as I pointed out earlier.
668** Those who talk for 30 years don't seem to take into account all the maintenance AIs and self-repairing systems implied in the game. The place has deteriorated enough that it takes personal interference from [=GLaDOS=] to fix things up again, and she manages to get the place close to pristine condition in the matter of hours again.
669*** We don't know how all those self-repair systems were coordinated; [=GLaDOS=] being knocked offline could have knocked others offline and the ones that remained would have been hard pressed to maintain the facility. Besides, the only areas that we see with actual overgrown vegetation, was the original testing area, which would likely be close to the surface. Therefore all that flora could have made it through the hole made at the end of Portal 1 and into the original testing course. The rest of the maintenance systems were likely knocked out by [=GLaDOS=]' destruction and those that remained were unable to fully fix the facility on their own. Therefore the 30 year figure is actually fairly plausible.
670** I have always believed that the announcement for how long Chell was in suspension was just messed up like the rest of the facility at that point. Besides all the ruin you see shortly after this, the announcement reads each digit independently (9 9 9 9 9 etc.) instead of as a really big number (999,999 or whatever the max may be).
671** According to The Final Hours of Portal 2, Portal 2 takes place ''50,000 years'' after the original game.
672[[/folder]]
673
674[[folder:Orbiting Wheatley]]
675* The final scene where [[spoiler:the space core is orbiting Wheatley]], along with a little bit of physics, can be used to estimate Wheatley's mass. Unfortunately it also implies that Wheatley weighs something like 100 million tons. What's up with that?
676** It's a StealthPun. Wheatley has a lot of mass because he's so [[spoiler:''dense''.]]
677** If Wheatley really weighed 100 Mt (or Tg), if any other Aperture technology wasn't as massive, he would ''obliterate'' Management Rails, [[spoiler:[=GLaDOS=]'s body right at the moment it hangs onto it]], and if he was given enough velocity he would smash right through the entire three mile deep facility. As ThinkingWithPortals forum said, "Do Wheatley and the Space Sphere have enough mass to orbit each other? No. Why are they doing it in the ending video then? [[RuleOfFunny Because it was funny.]]
678*** What if the cores have some net charge between them? That would be enough to keep them in orbit at a much shorter distance.
679*** I don't remember that scene, but is it possible that they're not actually orbiting, but the camera is just circling around them, making it look that way?
680*** Unfortunately, no; looking at the stars in the background during the scene, it is clear that the camera is merely moving slowly to the left, and it is the two cores who are doing almost all of the movement.
681*** The Space Core could also have some system for direction control in space (since he was designed for operating there) and is just staying near Wheatley out of habit/companionship.
682** My theory: The [[AllThereInTheManual Developer's Commentary]] mentions how the pneumatic tubes are an absolutely horrible idea for transporting things around the facility, because they get banged up in the process. It also mentions that the employees don't care, because [[WeHaveReserves they can just make more turrets and cubes]]. But the cores are unique, and difficult or impossible to replace if damaged. So, how do you transport cores around the facility? Carry them yourself? Hang them on the management rail and tell them where to go? Wrap them in bubble wrap before shoving them in the tube? All of these would make at least ''some'' sense, so naturally, [[IncompetenceInc Aperture]] would do something completely different: give the cores maneuvering thrusters and a self-preservation instinct, and trust them to keep ''themselves'' off of the walls. This would also explain how Wheatley was able to turn and spin while being held by the portal gun without anything (visible) to push off of.
683[[/folder]]
684
685[[folder:Chell's brain]]
686* ''Is'' Chell brain-damaged? There's the gag at the beginning where you "Press A to Speak" and she jumps, but aside from that she never speaks once in the game. The WordOfGod reason for her being mute in the first game is supposedly as to not give [=GLaDOS=] the satisfaction, but there are long stretches of this game where [=GLaDOS=] cannot hear her or where speaking to Wheatley would make sense. I understand its a Valve tradition, but considering how well-written and acted their other characters are, the mute PC stands out more and more IMO.
687** She might be mute because she never learned to speak.
688*** She obviously learned to write if she made that science project. She has to know. She just doesn't.
689*** Yes, she is brain damaged. I really don't understand how you can be confused by this, Wheatley said it was normal for people in suspended animation for more than a few months to suffer brain damage (and Chell was under for ''years''), and the whole "jumping instead of speaking" gag made it pretty clear that Chell wasn't an exception. Plus both Wheatley and [=GLaDOS=] believe it to be true and continue making comments about it throughout the game. I thought it was a really clever way to justify having a silent protagonist (sure beat's Freeman's unexplained muteness). Look up Dysarthria if you want to know more.
690*** Jossed by Erik Wolpaw. He said that the ''intent'' at least was that Chell just isn't bothering to talk to the robots.
691*** Pretty sure that explanation only applied to the first game, when the only other person to talk to was a homicidal robot intent on tormenting and killing her. It's understandable that Chell might refuse to talk to [=GLaDOS=] in that situation just out of stubborn resentment. It doesn't explain why she wouldn't talk to Wheatley though.
692*** After dealing with [=GLaDOS=], she's probably not terribly trusting of artificial intelligences, no matter how friendly they may seem. She also may just have gotten used to not talking. As to why she didn't give Wheatley the paradox when it became clear that [=GLaDOS=] couldn't, it's noted in the Ratman comic that she's abnormally stubborn. She probably noticed how Wheatley basically had a total personality shift, and still believed he was salvageable.
693*** Emancipation Grills. They have been know to emancipate dental fillings, tooth enamel, teeth, and now ear tubes. Meaning she might as well be deaf and mute.
694*** She's definitely not deaf, because the player can still hear what she hears. Maybe the grills did make her mute though.
695*** Even beyond brain-damage (which is, let's face it, a probability), her silence towards [=GLaDOS=] can probably be explained by an understandable reluctance to engage in pleasantries with the intelligence that forced her to literally jump through hoops for her own sadistic amusement. As for Wheatley, even when he's 'good' this can be easily be explained by the fact that when he's around her, Wheatley barely shuts up long enough to allow her to get a word in edgewise anyway.
696** There's no way Chell is brain-damaged, or at least not as much as she would have to be after however long she was in suspension. She never could have done the things she does in the game otherwise. As for the jumping instead of speaking, that's obviously just RuleOfFunny.
697** Not speaking to [=GLaDOS=] can be explained by the reason above - not wanting to talk to the sadist who spent however long testing, insulting, and trying to kill her. Wheatley looks pretty much identical to the cores Chell incinerated except for the eye color - she probably started out not trusting him, and later he turned evil and she didn't talk because of that. She may also just be a naturally quiet person. (I imagine the jumping was a way to acknowledge Wheatley but mess with him at the same time. Chell might be an abnormally stubborn person, but that doesn't mean she can't have a sense of humor.)
698** She doesn't talk to [=GLaDOS=] in the first game out of spite, and in the second game she can't talk to Wheatley because she's mute from shell shock. Keep in mind this woman survived an explosion, and from her point of view, very little time has elapsed since. If her mutism were the result of brain damage, she wouldn't be able to understand anything said to her either, which would make her conspiracy with Wheatley impossible.
699[[/folder]]
700
701[[folder:The Borealis's drydock]]
702* The Borealis's drydock is found several kilometers ''underground''. HOW DOES THAT MAKE ANY SENSE?!
703** The Borealis has some sort of advanced technology that is useful against the Combine, my guess is teleportation or larger portals or something, but in any event it didn't sail out of there.
704*** Maybe it didn't, but that doesn't answer the question of how it sailed ''in'' there to begin with.
705*** They probably built it there.
706[[/folder]]
707
708[[folder:Revamped rooms]]
709* Apparently, the facility can only be altered when some entity (e.g. [=GLaDOS=] or Wheatley) is controlling it. After the events of the first game, it's more than implied that nobody was tending to the facility (even as Wheatley puts it, you killed [=GLaDOS=], then nothing happened, then you attempted to escape with Wheatley), so naturally the whole place fell into disrepair. My question is this; how did the original testing track change so much if there was nobody around to change it? Two of the chambers have been completely revamped, two entirely new chambers seem to have found their way in, one seems to have been fused with another, and yet another one doesn't even come back into play until ''after'' you've revived [=GLaDOS=]. Then you have all the elevators getting completely replaced. Assuming that the "announcer" at the beginning of the game has no direct control over the facility, how and ''when'' exactly did all those changes get made?
710** Those could be different chambers that already existed by the events of Portal 1. You enter an elevator at the end of each chamber -- it could simply have taken you to different ones.
711** Or, if you do not want to accept that it just has always been that way, perhaps it was a leftover from the storyline where there were more cores then just Wheatley, and they were running the facility, like the big Game Informer article said.
712*** The different elevators are ArtEvolution. The developer's commentary explains that there is no in-game reason for the elevators to be different, they just wanted to redesign them. Same story for the new Material Emancipation Grids.
713** I assumed that the facility did continue to receive some upgrades after the events of the original Portal. While [=GLaDOS=] was dead, other, unseen robots did continue to manage the test chambers as best they could, i.e. installing more movable panels, new elevators, etc. Eventually they stopped, possibly due to attrition as they broke down or from being unable to handle any problems that fell outside their programming. It would be like the entire management of a company vanishing one day. The office drones would probably continue doing their work for a while, even managing to complete previously-assigned long-term projects, but without any direction the company would eventually fall apart.
714** During the hotel room ride, Wheatley mentions "one of the old testing tracks." There might be several.
715[[/folder]]
716
717[[folder:[=GLaDOS=]'s claws after reactivation]]
718* Where did [=GLaDOS=] get these two claws with which she lifts Chell and Wheatley after being reactivated? She didn't use them in the first game, even though they could have helped stop or kill Chell right then and there, nor does she or Wheatley use them when revisiting the chamber later in the second game.
719** She used the claws in other places. Maybe she had more freedom now, or the damage to the room allowed them in.
720** She actually ''did'' use her claws in the first game. Maybe the Morality Core affected her ability to use them (just like it affected her ability to turn off the Rocket Sentry), or perhaps she was just that confident that the neurotoxin would be enough to finish her off. She's a sadist, so maybe she preferred the idea of watching Chell suffer (death by neurotoxin is not a pretty sight) to killing her quickly and simply with claws.
721*** When did she use them in the first game? I've played Portal 1 a lot but I don't remember there being any claws like that.
722*** The claws are in the game. They aren't animated, but they're implied to be how [=GLaDOS=] gets the turrets around the complex.
723[[/folder]]
724
725[[folder:Neurotoxin]]
726* It's kind of a big thing when you shut down [=GLaDOS=]'s neurotoxin production. And it's not like you just flip a switch, you cut the neurotoxin tubes and implode the entire producing unit (or whatever that big thing is). So... where does Wheatley get it later?
727** There's enough time between then and now for him to have restored it. Wheatley does mention that [=GLaDOS=] can fix it given time. He had that time.
728*** But he's also Wheatley.
729*** So? He may be stupid, but he's not a drooling brain-damaged imbecile. He intentionally chose to fight Chell in a way similar to her original fight with [=GLaDOS=], which included the neurotoxin. Of course he'd fix it.
730*** I'm in favor of this theory, but it does raise another question: If he fixed the neurotoxin generator, why didn't he also fix the turret line?
731*** Because he's Wheatley.
732*** Maybe designing/creating/'training' the frankenturrets distracted him-- it could be that he was using turrets rescued from the redemption line to build them, and just didn't question the fact that they were perfectly functional (which would have been the ideal for the experiments, anyway).
733*** He did fix the turrets, but he forgot to throw out the old ones. He brings out some functional turrets later on. Also, [[OverlyLongGag because he's Wheatley]].
734*** Thank you! Someone who also questions the neurotoxin usage!
735** The Neurotoxin generator doesn't seem to be much of a generator. Cutting the pipes has gas pumping out the pipes, showing that they were flowing into the generator, and also the thing implodes showing that there's a lot of suction inside the generator. Either 1) The generator only combines ingredients (Suggested by a headscratcher below), meaning that Wheatley only had to rebuild one component of neurotoxin assembly. Or 2) only Wheatley calls the thing a 'generator,' (I may have missed a sign, but there didn't seem to be any signage saying it's a generator) and it's actually a central pump, so neurotoxin generation only required rerouting.
736[[/folder]]
737
738[[folder:Reasoning behind obstacle courses]]
739* Why does Aperture Science test their products by incorporating them into elaborate obstacle courses that require the ability to warp space to navigate? If they wanted to test repulsion gel, couldn't they just throw stuff at it, or tell people to jump on it if they really must have human testing? Why is it necessary for the test subjects to solve a dangerous puzzle while they're jumping on it?
740** That would be too rational for Aperture Science. Plus, if you're testing the gels and the portal gun, why not combine the chambers and test both at once?
741** C'mon, this is Aperture Science we're talking about. At this point it is utter foolishness to ask, "Why would they achieve Goal A in this convoluted, inefficient way, when they could have done it in this obvious, simple, effective way?" Utter foolishness.
742* I forget exactly where in the Portal wiki I read it but it was something to the effect of Cave didn't "know how science worked, but knew a lot about how people worked". He has the determination to run a scientific research firm, but he couldn't watch a bunch of lab techs (whom he frequently expressed resentment towards in his recordings) running safe little simulations. He needed to see action, people in motion, people he could talk to and motivate. Cave liked obstacle course testing and, in his words, paid the bills around there. Like it or go work for those clowns over at Black Mesa. By the time Cave died, obstacle course testing was just the Aperture way. The fact [=GLaDOS=] has been running the tests for a long while and is at least partially Caroline (who supported Cave for decades) means she probably shares her former boss's views.
743[[/folder]]
744
745[[folder:Human testing]]
746* According to Cave Johnson's prerecorded messages, human testing nearly bankrupted Aperture Science. They started out testing astronauts, Olympians and war heroes in the 50s, but thanks to expensive lawsuits and government fines, by the 70s they were hiring bums off the streets and by the 80s they were reduced to forcing their own employees to "volunteer" for testing. In fact, in one of Cave Johnson's last messages he states that Aperture is phasing out human testing. So why is that in the modern facility the game starts in, not only are they still testing on humans, but According to Wheatley, there were 10,000 of them being held in the Relaxation Center (until they all died under his supervision)! And in co-op mode the players find a huge vault of humans in cryogenic sleep who are still alive. So why is Aperture Science still performing human testing, and where did they get all those test subjects from?
747** Aperture was ''going'' to phase out human testing -- while it was still run by humans. Once [=GLaDOS=] took over, she presumably saw no reason to carry on with those plans. As for the test subjects in stasis, presumably they were either Aperture employees or people visiting the facility, captured and suspended by [=GLaDOS=].
748*** The several hundred humans frozen in the co-op vault I can believe were Aperture employees. Each is given a scientific job title as they're scanned during the credit sequence and [=GLaDOS=] seems to know personal details about most of them. But what about the 10,000 humans suspended in the relaxation center where Chell wakes up? Where did they come from? I have a hard time believing that Aperture had that many employees, especially considering Cave Johnson's complaint about how employee retention had plummeted after "voluntary" employee testing became mandatory.
749*** If you look closely at some of the stickers on the relaxation vaults (you can see them if you zoom in during the ride in your hotel room at the beginning) the packing dates are from the 1970s. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them were homeless people who were somehow convinced to do that.
750** This was in the 80s. Aperture obviously got back on its feet between then and the first Portal.
751[[/folder]]
752
753[[folder:Condition of the old courses]]
754* How the heck are all the old sealed off testing courses still in such fantastic condition? Seriously, the first few modern facility test courses you visit are more broken down despite having more advanced building material, self-repairing technology and the once-off mentioned nanobot "work crew" to keep them in shape! But none of those things are present in the old Aperture. It's amazing that they still have working lights down there after 50 years (plus however long Chell was sleeping), let alone elevators and pump stations. There's not a spot of mold or dust in the various offices you come across, there are paintings and posters in mint condition everywhere, and wooden boards that haven't warped or rotted all over the freakin' place. Yes, there are rusted and broken catwalks everywhere and the ground floor is covered with trash and mud and the elevator to the surface is shut down, but aside from those the place is for the most part so clean and organized and ''functional'' that I simply can't believe it's been abandoned for a year, let alone half a century.
755** I got the impression that the old chambers were deliberately ''preserved'', not just passively let to rot like it was the case with the modern facility. Thus they could have taken the measures to prevent decay, such as reinforcing the walls and covering the furniture in whatever protective stuff they have at Aperture. They simply shut the power and gel flow down and let the area rest until Chell reactivated it. Notice also that while the test chambers and offices are well-preserved, the vast space between them isn't; Aperture probably didn't bother taking measures to preserve the maintenance areas while sealing them off.
756*** Cave Johnson says that the Enrichment Spheres are coated in Asbestos to keep the rats out. Kinda flimsy, but if he covered them with enough of it, it should hold off most of nature for at least a little while.
757** Deep underground the chambers wouldn't be exposed to a lot of things like rain, wind, plants, and sunlight so it would last longer even setting aside Aperture's obsession with RagnarokProofing. That said, it is significantly damaged, there are many areas where you have to make portal jumps because walkways have collapsed.
758** It's implied that even a lot of the upper test chambers are underground. With the chambers from Cave's era, they're so far down they're practically like preserved fossils.
759** Keep in mind, though, that they're still in '''a salt mine''', and in a planet that was in the process of being taken over from below by burrowing Antlions (unless the Antlions were only introduced to the eastern hemisphere).
760** There's also the matter of complexity. The upper, modular testing tracks are probably a lot more complex than the old, static testing spheres. It's not hard to imagine plantlife and the like working its way between all those moving bits over the time of disrepair. Perhaps there's just less things to go wrong with the old tracks, especially since they're probably too far down. As one of the above posters said, they're basically like preserved fossils.
761[[/folder]]
762
763[[folder:Position of the earth and the last portal]]
764* At the end, when Chell portals to the moon, the two surfaces the portals are on are, for all intents and purposes, parallel to each other. However, when Chell looks at the earth, she's not looking straight up, relative to the moon; she's looking sideways. Did the moon suddenly rotate ninety degrees while we weren't looking?
765** Or Chell moved her head.
766*** It can't be that; the surface of the moon is still visible when Chell looks at the earth, even though it shouldn't be.
767*** It's possible that the portal didn't land in the center of the visible side of the Moon, but closer to a polar region. After all, the game doesn't take into account where you actually aim the portal gun -- it doesn't even care what color the portal is!
768*** But the twinkle before you get sucked out is clearly ''not'' at a polar region.
769** What if the portals don't just warp you through space - they warp you through space''time''. And the time dilation is in some way proportional to the distance involved. Then, the time difference from one portal to the next is unnoticable across a few metres like during most of the game, but over a quarter of a million miles, it's enough time for the Moon and Earth to turn a significant amount.
770** The moon isn't flat, its a sphere(oid). From the player's perspective, the portal seemed to hit about halfway between the middle and the edge. The Earth, as seen from that point, should be about 45 degrees above the horizon (the orientation of the portals doesn't matter, it's the location that counts). Now, it seems to me that the Earth was actually closer to the horizon than that, but since we don't have any [[DepthDeception usable reference points]] during that shot, we can't say for sure.
771[[/folder]]
772
773[[folder:Astronauts]]
774* Where did Cave find any astronauts in 1952, nine years before Gagarin's flight in 1961?
775** He said they were "missing" astronauts. Possibly as in, ''[[GovernmentConspiracy really]]'' missing due to portal malfunctions. The term "astronaut" has also been around since [[http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=astronaut 1929]], so maybe it meant something else then.
776** Or the recording was not made once and forgotten at the time that that section was built, and what Chell hears is the last revision used for that section (when astronauts are around). The Borealis, assuming continuity with the blueprints from Episode 2, was far newer then its drydock when lost.
777[[/folder]]
778
779[[folder:[=GLaDOS=] can't help you?]]
780* The bit about [=GLaDOS=] being unable to tell you the solution to a given problem. I don't get it; either the punitive shock is tied into the main core, in which case [=GLaDOS=] should have been unaffected; '''or''', the shock is tied into ''all'' personality cores, in which case Wheatley should have known about it long before it became relevant. And in either event, [=GLaDOS=] is currently working with one-point-six volts; what energy could she possibly muster to significantly shock herself with?
781** Easy, it's a HandWave. They needed a reason she couldn't help you, and the other idea they had -- having her "puzzle solving memory" getting constantly pecked off by a bird -- wasn't technically feasible.
782** Presumably the shock is built into all personality cores to prevent them from helping test subjects solve the puzzles, and Wheatley would have known it if he had tried to help Chell before (and he didn't). Why didn't he know it? I see three explanations, all plausible: 1) He's Wheatley. 2) He did know, but just couldn't resist helping Chell to get her through the test chamber faster. 3) The most likely one, in my opinion: he didn't know about the shock because unlike [=GLaDOS=], he was never meant to administer tests.
783** Or 4) [[OverlyLongGag He's Wheatley]]
784*** They probably told him he'd die if he ever helped a test subject solve a test, and finally catching on, he presumed that warning was rubbish like all the other things they told him would kill him. Hilariously, turns out that one was partially true.
785** Note that whenever she uses too much energy, she temporarily shuts down. It's possible that it would start to shock her, only to instead shut her down, which would be more of a hindrance because she's gone for a while.
786** There's also the fact that the puzzles you do with her are handmade by Wheatley either from scratch or by combining multiple test chambers together, so she would be trying to figure them out as much as the player since it's likely she knows the answer to one component or one chamber, but not when the components are put together in a new arrangement she hasn't seen before. In a way when it's mentioned, it's [=GLaDOS=] telling you why she couldn't have helped you before even if she wanted.
787** Maybe she wasn't entirely sure if it would shock her or not, but didn't want to risk frying her potato (which could kill her).
788[[/folder]]
789
790[[folder:Hazards of the gels]]
791* OK, so Repulsion Gel "Does NOT like the human skeleton", and the moon rocks in Conversion Gel are toxic if inhaled, but what's the extra (that is, outside of what would happen if it was ingested) hazard of Propulsion Gel?
792** Not stated in the game. Could be anything.
793** Whatever the effects were, either Cave Johnson thought they were too minor to mention or too terrifying. I'm not sure which is worse.
794** I seem to recall it still being made of asbestos/causing no food whatsoever to be absorbed into the user's body.
795** Let's make one up! How about interior friction burns? Oh, and cancer. Everything causes cancer.
796*** Running into a wall at 90 miles per hour seems like a pretty bad side effect.
797*** The lab boys tell me that if you get this stuff on you, there's a good chance trying to move would... I don't know, something about peeling an egg with a sand blaster, I wasn't really paying attention. Now I'm hungry. Caroline, what's the lunch situation?
798*** [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking I'm sure it stains pretty badly as well.]]
799** Maybe Aperture just didn't realize that bouncing that high in the air without Long Fall Boots (which the 1950s test subjects probably didn't have) is gonna damage your skeleton, gel or no gel.
800[[/folder]]
801
802[[folder:Keeping the Companion Cube]]
803* Why would [=GLaDOS=] keep [[spoiler: The Companion Cube alive...I mean intact]]?
804** She didn't, it either survived on its own ("all Aperture technologies remain fully operation up to 4,000 degrees Kelvin"), or she just [[spoiler: gave her a new one, but charred it a little for effect]]...although that makes you wonder [[LimaSyndrome why she'd go to the trouble...]]
805*** Or [[spoiler: it's the Companion Cube seen on the edge of the incinerator in the teaser trailer. It could have caught on something like that and survived that way]].
806** [[WordofGod Word of God]] says that [[spoiler: the Companion cube was having an adventure of it's own, and just happened to get out at the same time as you]].
807[[/folder]]
808
809[[folder:[=GLaDOS=]'s lack of morality]]
810* Chell destroyed [=GLaDOS'=] Morality Core in the first game, which made [=GLaDOS=] go from "Use humans for test subjects" to "Kill all humans". How come when Chell reactivated [=GLaDOS=], she didn't immediately try to kill Chell and instead sent her off to do more tests? Her body was repaired, but there was no sign that [=GLaDOS=] got a new Morality Core.
811** [=GLaDOS=] was going for a FateWorseThanDeath this time, as is plainly obvious. The facility is in ruins and her neurotoxin probably wasn't online at the time. She needed to have Chell waste time solving tests. Note that as soon as she has the place up and running again, she does immediately try to kill you.
812** Maybe the Morality Core didn't really work, [=GLaDOS=] just tricked everyone into thinking it did? The core never talks, and [=GLaDOS=] might have dropped it off ''on purpose'' so that Chell could destroy it, thus pretending to have more of a justified excuse in killing her. After all, even ''before'' you get to [=GLaDOS's=] chamber, she says "Turn back or I will kill you."
813** [=GLaDOS=] attempts to kill you once well before you get to her room in the first game. It's made quite clear that the Morality Core never really worked, all it succeeded in doing was preventing her from using the neurotoxin specifically.
814** I think [=GLaDOS=] kept Chell alive because she was the only test subject available at that point. She was planning on killing her once she'd finished building ATLAS and P-body to replace her, [[spoiler:as indicated by what [=PotatOS=] says when Wheatley discovers the Cooperative Testing Initiative.]]
815*** I mean, she does say she has another suprise for Chell "with tragic consequences". We never get to see what she had planned considering Wheatley pulled Chell out of the test chamber before we actually ''got'' to the surprise. The fact that [=GLaDOS=] sounds incredibly smug as she says that is a pretty clear indicator that her "surprise" might be [[{{Understatement}} more than a little lethal]].
816[[/folder]]
817
818[[folder:Plumbing]]
819* How does the plumbing in Old Aperture still work? There's switches for the gel pumps, but nothing that controls water, so there's no reason to assume that it was ever switched off. So how have the tanks for the water in some of the test spheres not run dry over the course of god knows how many years? (Unless it's just purified sludgewater pumped in from the other spheres, which is [[NauseaFuel gross]].)
820** [=GLaDOS=]states that the air everyone breaths in the Enrichment Center is just re-used air. A similar process may work on water. Besides, we just know that it's a clear liquid. [[NightmareFuel It could be anything.]]
821** It could be that all that water is what's responsible for the filling of the Enrichment Spheres and the salt mine with sludge/acid/stuff. It might also explain why, if the top levels of the facility are exposed to the elements, rainwater doesn't flood the old testing tracks; it's just drained to the bottom (maybe as a way to drown off the Mantis Men?)
822[[/folder]]
823
824[[folder:Chell getting recaptured]]
825* I can't believe nobody's asked the most obvious question: How did Chell get recaptured in the first place? [=GLaDOS=] was dead. Did those androids find her and put her in the Relaxation Vault?
826** The "Lab Rat" tie-in comic, available on the official website, explains this.
827** Even before that, a Portal update modified the ending, showing Chell get dragged back in.
828*** "Thank you for assuming the party escort submission position."
829[[/folder]]
830
831[[folder:Core corruptions]]
832* What is core corruption, anyway? In ''Portal'', [=GLaDOS=] had several personality cores attached, thus was corrupted. However, you had to remove them to defeat her: Making her "pure" again. [[spoiler: But in ''Portal 2'', they say she's corrupted, but she's the only core in the mainframe. Okay, so maybe the computer thought that her insanity was enough to make her corrupt... but that doesn't explain why Wheatley becomes corrupt just after you attatch other personality cores to it. I mean, the guy was MADE to be a moronic imbelice, so insanity counts as core corruption but having "Be a moron" between your codes lines is cool? Also, when you're heading to Wheatley's Lair, you stumble across some corrupted cores, according to [=GLaDOS=]. Honestly, the guy you were trying to beat and [=GLaDOS=] herself are in many ways worse than those guys.]]
833** The corrupted cores' behaviour make it clear that there's some fundamental flaw in their programming. Wheatley wasn't considered corrupt because his programming wasn't damaged, and he was still doing exactly what he was programmed to do ("be a moron"), and he wasn't totally messed up like the corrupted cores. [=GLaDOS=], on the other hand, is very clearly corrupt. It's pretty clear that there's something wrong in her programming, somewhere.
834** I always thought that it referred to the fact that her cores were removed. [=GLaDOS=] had four cores hung on her mainframe in the first game. As you defeat her by destroying them, they obviously were semi-vital to her function. In ''Portal 2'', the announcer says that [[spoiler:she is 80% corrupted. Four cores plus [=GLaDOS=], the main core, is five cores. Four "corrupted" (nonexistent) cores to one intact core is 80% corruption. Also, you need Wheatley to be at 100% corruption with three corrupted cores plus him not doing the mainframe because [=GLaDOS=] is still at 80% corruption (if not more) while she's [=PotatOS=], and the core transfer can only replace a more-corrupt core with a less-corrupt one.]]
835[[/folder]]
836
837[[folder:Wheatley surviving getting crushed]]
838* So after he accidentally revive [=GLaDOS=], she crushes Wheatley and tosses him aside. A few levels later, he's back and somewhat fine (if a bit twitchy), on his management rail again. How did he get back onto that rail?
839** Wheatley tells you himself, kind of, in Chapter 4. It's something of a NoodleIncident but apparently involves a bird.
840** Perhaps he has an identical twin.
841** Actually, the few times you see him hiding behind panels before he reveals himself to you, he looks slightly damaged. He wasn't completely crushed, but his casing appeared to be squashed a bit.
842[[/folder]]
843
844[[folder:Preventing the facility's explosion]]
845* The Lab is impending explosion since the beginning of the game. So when [=GLaDOS=] is revived, why didn't she do something about it while in control? Was her [[UnstoppableRage hatred]] towards Chell THAT [[YouWouldntLikeMeWhenImAngry distracting]]?
846** [=GLaDOS=] did fix the reactor after being woken up. It happens offscreen -- in fact, the supposedly impending explosion is never mentioned at all after the opening sequence so one wonders if Valve simply decided to ignore it.
847** And her hatred for Chell is also clearly not distracting her from managing the facility in the first half of the game anyways - [=GLaDOS=] leaves Chell alone in the testing chambers several times early on to go fix things.
848** Presumably [=GLaDOS=] was in the middle of ensuring the reactor core didn't explode at the same time as testing Chell, and had managed to prevent immediate catastrophe, but hadn't managed to sufficiently complete them before Wheatley overthrew her -- at which point, work on the repairs stopped as he devoted everything to testing, and he let what repairs ''had'' been done decay until they fell apart.
849** I thought it was one of those things that required regular maintenance to keep it in working condition (e.g. press a key every hour) and Wheatley just didn't bother doing it.
850*** That's exactly what it is (other than the press a key part). [=GLaDOS=] mentions at one point that he has clearly stopped maintaining the reactor.
851[[/folder]]
852
853[[folder:Wheatley hates moron more than idiot]]
854* Another thing that confused me. Wheatley didn't seem to care for being called an idiot, but being called a moron sends him flying into a rage! Is it just he's in a bigger body now or something? Is moron somehow worse than idiot? It's real confusing that a smaller word would be more insulting...
855** It's his BerserkButton. It doesn't have to be logical. His is the small mind that resents being reminded of the fact. It doesn't help that [=GLaDOS=], once learning of that button, doesn't hesitate to press it at every opportunity.
856*** Perhaps he doesn't understand what an idiot is?
857*** Maybe, maybe not. He is actually referred to directly as an idiot ("Do NOT plug that little idiot into MY mainframe!") and replies rather succinctly ("No, you should plug that little idiot into the mainframe!"). You can insult Wheatley as much as you like, but the word "moron" does seem to be a trigger.
858** It's worth noting that the words [[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/idiot idiot]], [[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/imbecile imbecile]], and [[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/moron moron]] used to have formal definitions, and under those, being a moron was actually better than being an idiot. So maybe he's so dumb that he's getting that backwards?
859** On a similar note, right before [=GLaDOS=] tries to hit him with a LogicBomb, she says "Hey, moron!" and he just goes "Oh, hello." Why didn't he fly into a rage like he did the prior and subsequent times he was called a moron?
860** Because he wasn't expecting anyone to show up to talk to him, so he blew it off.
861** [=GLaDOS=] directly calls him the 'Moron Sphere,' maybe he doesn't mind other nasty names for the same reason a non-white person wouldn't mind being called 'honky' as much as other epitaphs.
862*** Maybe he thinks 'idiot' is a designation, like how the Adventure Sphere's real name is Rick.
863** It should be noted that he is still affected by being called a moron in the last part of the game. The first instance, he does appear to shrug it off, but eventually he starts getting annoyed with it to the point he [[FeigningIntelligence fakes reading Machiavellian works and plays classical music to appear intelligent.]]
864-->'''[=GLaDOS=]:''' [[AC: I think I took that "moron" thing a little too far this time.]]
865** Maybe it's a glitch?
866* I think that, opposed to other theories proposed here, that Wheatley does know he's a 'moron sphere.' That's actually what he was called, a moron sphere. So it's not insults in general, it's that particular word that really gets his goat, because it's telling him of his purpose. Idiots and dolts are just words, words that can be temporary labels, but being called a moron is reminding him that he was specifically built to be a moron. The time he doesn't rise to the occasion is because it's when Chell and [=GLaDOS=] have just finished climbing out of old aperture, and he was surprised by their reappearance.
867[[/folder]]
868
869[[folder:Building the facility]]
870* Has it occurred to anybody else that Aperture labs is built upside-down? Seriously, the earliest parts of the complex are the furthest from the surface. It doesn't seem like an ''Aperture is incompetent'' trope to me because if that was true then they worked out exactly how much space they would need for the next 40 years.
871** Building up from the bottom is hardly unusual. What would be unusual is if they started at the top and built ''down''.
872*** That's how they would do if they built the base from scratch, but since they bought some abandoned mining complex instead, they already had the tunnels ready, and could start from the bottom.
873*** If you're making a building, obviously you build from bottom to top, but when you're making a tunnel or a mine, it's far more logical to start from the top and build down. Two main reasons: Firstly, all the earth you dig up has to be transported out, and equipment transported in. You can theoretically manage with a single deep shaft, but it's just easier to keep the supply lines as short as possible. It's easy to do this if you have available space nearby i.e. directly above you, where you can keep all your equipment, personnel and supplies, and just keep gradually moving it down as you dig. Secondly, "digging up" is inherently dangerous. Ceilings have a habit of falling apart when you poke them with shovels or drills. No matter how hard you dig at a floor, it isn't going to fall on top of you. But, to answer OP's question: Hey it's Aperture Science! It's their MO to do everything in the most dangerous, money-wasting manner possible.
874** The facility wasn't ''built'' from bottom to top, it was ''abandoned'' from bottom to top. When Aperture started running out of money, they closed the bottom test sphere, but kept updating the rest. Then, as they sank further into insolvency, they repeated with the next-lowest sphere, and so on.
875*** Nope, that's the order it was built in too. Like someone above me said, they bought the mines, so they just started down there. I suppose they made enough money at first to add on to it up above.
876[[/folder]]
877
878[[folder:Wheatley knows about Bring Your Daughter To Work Day]]
879* Upon entering the room where Bring Your Daughter To Work Day was held, Wheatley remarks that it "did not end well". Did he witness whatever happened himself, or was he told the story or what? I'm wondering how he apparently knows about the event.
880** He, along with all the other AI constructs, was around when [=GLaDOS=] went berserk and it's hardly odd that he knows the story. Remember, Aperture had been creating AI's for decades -- since at least the eighties.
881[[/folder]]
882
883[[folder:No gels in the new chambers]]
884* Is there any in-game reason that the gels were not used in the newer testing chambers?
885** Well, none is mentioned, but I could imagine it was one of the following: a) the gels were too poisonous, even for Aperture Science, b) they'd already sufficiently tested the gels by the time the newer test chambers were build, c) newer inventions made the gels redundant, d) they got bored of them.
886** The second time you open a gigantic vault door (the horizontal one that drops a lift for you) you see three large pipes from inside the room connect with pipes to the outside. The upper, newer sections were literally cut off from the gels until Chell opened the way. The gels were buried and forgotten by [=GLaDOS=]'s time.
887*** Though, [=GLaDOS=] did say that Wheatley's tests were ''her'' tests now, just jammed together out of different skeletons that she had kept. You used the gels quite a bit in those areas. Maybe she had initially worked her away around those pipes and did nothing with them in those chambers?
888** There's a dummied out line somewhere in the script files where [=GLaDOS=] knows about the conversion gel, at least ("Wait. I HEARD about this. We discontinued it after all the test subjects kept escaping.").
889[[/folder]]
890
891[[folder:Thinking of the paradox]]
892* In order to use a paradox on Wheatley, [=GLaDOS=] needed to think about the paradox to use on the way up, yet she didn't short out. Maybe Caroline helped, since she was reunited with [=GLaDOS=] in Chapter 7? [=GLaDOS=] does say each word of the paradox one at a time with a pause, even the first one, like she's repeating each word after someone's saying it...
893** I always saw [=GLaDOS=] giving the paradox word by word as a way of bracing herself. Immediately after saying "FALSE" she starts muttering "don't think about it".
894*** That could be a possibility - still doesn't explain much about not freaking out from the time she got the idea to the time she said the paradox aloud, since technically, she'd need to think about the paradox in order to plan out what to say if she was doing it on her own.
895*** I don't think what [=GLaDOS=] thinks is true necessarily has to be true.
896** My guess is that [=GLaDOS=] stored the paradox as individual words. Being kept as separate strings of data that weren't related to each other allowed her to carry it without having to 'think' about the random assortment of words. Her stating every word individually is her recalling this data carefully, one word at a time, again trying to not think about what the words mean together.
897[[/folder]]
898
899[[folder:The bird]]
900* So where the hell did this bird even come from? First off, Wheatley talks about finding one shortly after you meet him again during [=GLaDOS=]'s test chambers, then he uses her eggs to jam a door mechanism, then that same bird somehow ends up at the bottom of Old Aperture and flies off with [=PotatOS=], and ''then'' she appears one last time at the end of the Peer Reviews DLC before leaving the facility for good. How did she even get in here?
901** Who says it's the same bird? They're obviously breeding in the facility.
902** Well, the bird obviously got in originally through the huge cavernous holes in the walls and ceilings exposing the insides of the facility to the outside world when it was a crumbling ruin. As for how it keeps appearing all over the place, there ''are'' interdimensional portals being opened up all over the place. Perhaps the bird's just sort of following you around and accidentally crossing through them without being noticed.
903[[/folder]]
904
905[[folder:Wheatley's 'eye']]
906* All the other personality cores seen in the games have black pupils. So, why doesn't Wheatley have one? His is more white-ish.
907** The other cores may all have black pupils, but they also have different designs. It's possibly Wheatley is just the first one we've encountered so far that doesn't.
908[[/folder]]
909
910[[folder:Rick the Adventure Sphere]]
911* What happened to Rick? Was he pulled into SPACE with Space Core and Wheatley?
912** If you watch closely, he's detached just before Wheatley is. Not sure why he didn't appear in the ending sequence, though. However if you look in the games' sound files ([=GCFScape=] will do the trick to open the gamefiles. Look for a pak01_dir.vpk) theres dialogue that sounds like he was meant to be.
913** But that makes me wonder what happened to the Fact Sphere. Was it, too, pulled into space?
914[[/folder]]
915
916[[folder: [=GLaDOS=]' head]]
917* In one of the last scenes of single-player, you [[spoiler:see [=GLaDOS=] dragging her head back with the claw while it 'wakes up.' But where was it the entire time? How did she stuff herself back into it? Where did the potato go? Also, how was she able to control the claw that she sends the corrupt cores to you with? Perhaps being plugged into the core input thing was part of it, but I don't think I entirely get it.]]
918** Since [[spoiler:both wanted control and no one pressed the stalemate resolution button, Wheatley's evacuation from [=GLaDOS=]' body meant that there was nothing preventing her from being in control, possibly even just by being plugged into the core input.]]
919** [=GLaDOS=]'s head was probably stored just beneath the chamber. Wheatley removed her CPU from it, and probably just tossed the head aside and promptly forgot about it. It was easy for [=GLaDOS=] to find as soon as she was plugged back in.
920** [=GLaDOS=] mentions that Chell needs to stun Wheatley for her to be able to send a core to her. Being plugged into the receptacle gives her some limited access, but unlike Wheatley, [=GLaDOS=] is _good_ at hacking. She can gain access to many systems as long as Wheatley isn't actively opposing her. If he's stunned or heavily distracted, she can do a lot.
921[[/folder]]
922
923[[folder: Did Wheatley know his purpose?]]
924* Did Wheatley ever give any indication that he knew he was an Intelligence Dampening Sphere and was once attached to [=GLaDOS=] before she said so? This has been bugging me for a while now, because he seems to be surprised about it during that scene.
925** I don't think he did. Like you said, he seemed to be surprised by the revelation. and from what we've seen, cores connected to the main A.I. are not entirely conscious (seeing how all the very MotorMouth cores turned almost completly silent when connected), they can probably become aware of the situation if they want to (the Curiosity Core knowing who Chell is, Space and Rick talking while connected to Wheatley) but I [=WMGed=] that they in sort of a sleep-like state when attached. [[FridgeHorror and yes, it does mean you killed the Portal 1 cores only minutes after their first independence thoughts]]
926** He didn't seem that confused when [=GLaDOS=] mentioned it to me. More surprised that [=GLaDOS=] was about to reveal it, like he hoped she didn't know (Considering he may have been disconnected from her for a while) or that he hoped she'd be more polite than to reveal something so embarrassing.
927[[/folder]]
928
929[[folder: Cutting the neurotoxin lines]]
930* One of the puzzles in the game involves using a laser to cut the neurotoxin lines. When this happen, you can see the gas leaking out before the tank implodes. Wouldn't there be enough in the tank to kill Chell or at least make her very sick when it all leaks out? I know there's GameplayAndStorySegregation but that part seems a bit odd.
931** If you do it right, she's not in the room that long; maybe the neurotoxin leaked into other chambers as well or got sucked out the pipe when Chell did.
932*** Maybe the pipes just feed inactive components into the big compressor, and it doesn't actually become active until after that.
933** You're in a pretty big area that probably isn't airtight. Wheatley says he can smell neurotoxin after you cut the first one (don't ask why a core has a sense of smell) but it could be that the neurotoxin:air ratio didn't reach a lethal level before Chell was sucked out. For a real world example, you can smell rotten eggs long before natural gas from a leak reaches a lethal or even harmful concentration.
934[[/folder]]
935
936[[folder: Why was the portal gun required?]]
937* Why exactly did Wheatley say you needed the portal gun to escape? If I recall right, after he opened the panel there were nothing you couldn't simply jump over (plus, with simply a single-portal device, there wasn't much you could do anyways). The only thing I can think of is that he was too heavy for Chell to carry by herself and she needed the tractor-beam, but then in the Lab Rat comic you can see people carrying around cores without any problem.
938** Because [[OverlyLongGag he's Wheatley]]. He's a moron.
939** Because he knew that the person who got rid of [=GLaDOS=] and presumably escaped used portal gun to do it.
940** Because a portal gun is a GREAT boon to a potential escapee. Being able to transport between two locations as long as there's enough concrete makes getting out of a destroyed and ruined facility much easier.
941[[/folder]]
942
943[[folder: Bird eggs]]
944* How exactly does a personality sphere with no appendages drop bird eggs into a door?
945** A lot of trial and error on a management rail.
946[[/folder]]
947
948[[folder: Defective Turret Vision]]
949* If the defective turrets can't see anything, how did they know they were facing a woman with a potato?
950** I doubt all the Defective turrets were blind.
951[[/folder]]
952
953[[folder: I punch those numbers into my calculator, it makes a happy face.]]
954* What exactly do you have to punch in a calculator to have it make a happy face?
955** "It's an Aperture Science brand calculator, I told the eggheads I wanted a calculator that instead of solving every equation you input into it, it instead displays happy, sad or angry faces. How does that help with mathematics? Who cares?! I'm not paying you to sit around doing math!"
956** [[http://ishipitlikeups.tumblr.com/post/61256370232/please-tell-me-you-drew-a-graph-in-the-shape-of-a#axzz3G4RCauOV It could be a graph calculator]].
957** He was probably just being metaphorical. As a salesman-turned-science philanthropist (Of a sort), he probably likes using such odd language in an attempt to get on a customer's good side.
958[[/folder]]
959
960[[folder: Stalemate Booby Trap]]
961* Three questions about the Booby Trap at the end of the game: 1. How did Wheatley even think that he should booby trap the button? Knowing him, he should have forgotten about the whole thing after the transfer! 2: If you pause before the trap goes off, you'll notice it's made out the the bombs used in the fight. The bombs in the fight explode on contact, and these bombs didn't have anything holding them up, so how come these didn't just blow up while Wheatley was making the trap? 3: The Stalemate Button didn't appear to be damaged, so couldn't Chell have just ran over and pressed it? The doors has been blown off by the trap, she wasn't dead, and Wheatley didn't have any sort of way of stopping her!
962** Ok, in order: 1. It's mentioned somewhere up above in another folder, that since Wheatley was designed by brilliant minds, he's programmed to make the worst decisions possible rather than necessarily being stupid. He shows himself to be fairly intelligent earlier in the game, so there is some evidence for that. Anyway, booby trapping the stalemate button was the worst possible decision to make because that means [=GLaDOS=] can't be plugged in to save the facility, so it'll explode instead. 2. Who's to say those bombs can only explode on contact? If they did, they'd blow up everything they touched including the launchers that fired them. So it's likely they can also be set to proximity detonate. 3. Wheatley expected the bombs to kill her, as he screams at her in surprise when he sees that Chell survived. As for Chell, not running to the stalemate button (even if it did survive the blast) she was clearly wounded and likely wouldn't have been able to make it in time, hence shooting a portal at the moon.
963*** For 1. I didn't mean that. I meant, how would he even realize he should booby trap the button? He was probably too busy soaking in the power following the accidental fall of Chell and [=GLaDOS=], which would have been the ideal time to do it. Then he probably got the "itch" he mentions after the room where you first meet Frankenturrets and tried cheating the system by making Frankenturrets to solve the tests for him. He couldn't have done it while Chell and [=GLaDOS=] were progressing through his tests, as he was watching them progress through.
964*** Why would he forget about that? Even if someone is mad with power, they usually make sure that they protect what put them in power. I seriously doubt Wheatley would forget about the stalemate button, considering it put him in that position and can take him out of that position. Do you really think Wheatley can only do one thing at a time while in [=GLaDOS=]' body? For all we know, he did booby-trap the button immediately after punching [=GLaDOS=] and Chell into that pit, seeing as he clearly mellowed out after a while and got the itch to test then. Granted, at the time he likely had no reason to do so, but after they returned Wheatley had plenty of opportunities to set the trap (He rebuilt his entire lair to ensure he doesn't make the same mistakes as [=GLaDOS=], he could have done it at that point). He wasn't just watching Chell and [=GLaDOS=] progress through the chambers, he was also setting up the chambers and traps for them ahead of time, who's to say that's all he was doing. Hell he could have done it in the middle of his fight with Chell. You don't seem to understand how AIs work; even a moronic one like Wheatley is still capable of multitasking and seeing multiple perspectives at once, it really isn't that difficult for computers to do. If [=GLaDOS=] can do it, so can Wheatley.
965[[/folder]]
966
967[[folder:Offices in the elevator]]
968* Just after old Aperture Enrichment Sphere #6, you begin climbing back out of Aperture. One obstacle is an elevator shaft with a stuck elevator. And, for some reason, offices within the elevator shaft... Why are there offices in an elevator shaft, with windows looking out into said shaft?
969** Are you really questioning Aperture Science building practices? Their entire MO is doing everything in the most nonsensical and money-wasting manner possible. In-universe, it's possible that Aperture wanted their employees to get a look at all the famous people serving as test subjects, or to allow monitoring of test subjects without deviating them from their schedules.
970[[/folder]]
971
972[[folder:Daytime/Nighttime]]
973* At the very end, when you shoot your portal at [[spoiler: the moon,]] it's night out, but when [[spoiler: you're on the moon, North America is in sunlight which should mean that it's daytime at Aperture.]] Unless I'm wrong with how sunlight works, is this a mistake?
974** Probably falls under [[RuleOfCool Rule of Cool]]. Seeing Earth is an instantly recognizable [[WhamShot Wham Shot]] of "oh my God, we're on the surface of the ''moon''", and it doesn't work as well if the Earth is in shadow.
975** Consider the fact that a short while later, Chell is deposited on the surface in daylight, and that it's a relatively well-known fact that the moon can be seen during the day, and the evidence points to the night sky being the blooper.
976[[/folder]]
977
978[[folder:[=GLaDOS=] and her potato body]]
979* When you first find [=GLaDOS=] after you and her fall into the lower part of the facility, she is being pecked on by a crow. Except, why does she have any sense of touch in potato body to begin with? Yes, the fact that her normal core has sense of touch does require heavy use of the MST3KMantra, it doesn't make sense for her to be able to "feel" her potato parts.
980** For whatever Godforsaken reason that crossed Cave Johnson's lemon-addled brain, he made his AIs capable of feeling pain--probably through electrical signals that translated to the AI's neural network. Wheatley simply transferred that AI core (chip, matrix, what have you) into a potato battery, and he was certainly vengeful enough at that point to include the pain registry. So it's likely not so much the potato as the AI core itself, getting electric shocks from the bird pecking away that translate into pain signals.
981[[/folder]]
982
983[[folder:Time problems]]
984* So Aperture was perfectly fine on its own when [=GLaDOS=] was dead for years, but [[spoiler:put Wheatley in charge for 2 hours]] and everything goes to hell! If the reason for [[spoiler:the facility almost exploding when Wheatley was in charge]] was that "he made the bad decision to neglect the essential functions required to keep this facility from exploding", then how did [=GLaDOS=] maintain those functions while she was ''dead''?
985** One theory constantly tossed around is that the facility was going to explode anyway, and that Wheatley just sped that process up.
986** Perhaps there was autonomous functions that kept the facility from exploding, but Wheatley had the "great idea" to shut them off for one reason or another.
987** It's stated in Lab Rat that the main power grid was knocked offline when [=GLaDOS=] was destroyed, likely meaning that there was some sort of emergency shutoff that turned off the nuclear reactor powering the facility, and everything we see in Portal 2 prior to her reactivation is the "reserve grid" mentioned in Lab Rat. When [=GLaDOS=] is reactivated, she turns the reactor back on, and Wheatley does something to it during his reign that causes it to start going critical.
988[[/folder]]
989
990[[folder: Wheatley's normal voice]]
991* Why is Wheatley literally the only Aperture Science AI to not have any traces of synthesizers or computerization in his voice? Out-of-universe, he's supposed to sound like a fast-talking fool who's just making it up as he goes along, but in-universe, why should his voice sound completely human? Is it to invoke SimpletonVoice?
992** I didn't remember any synthesizer in the Adventure Sphere's voice, but I went back and listened and you're right--Rick (and the defective turrets) do have a faint but noticeable electronic buzz to their voices. The closest to Wheatley's voice is the Anger Sphere. Maybe they're trying to invoke [[HumanityIsInfectious Humanity is Infectious]], since he spends so much time watching over the smelly humans?
993[[/folder]]
994
995[[folder: How did Chell survive?]]
996Specifically, how did she survive Bring Your Daughter To Work Day? We know she was there, as evidenced by the fact that she has a potato there, and we know that [=GLaDOS=] floods the enrichment center with neurotoxin on the same day. The fact that Chell was a test subject also means that she was probably still in there when the center was flooded, otherwise why would she come back later? So how did she survive?
997** [=GLaDOS=] mentions the scientists putting the cores on her as an attempt to slow her down, and Wheatley is explicitly a core that was made, tested on her, and then discarded (as he's not in the first game.) So there has to have been a passage of time between [=GLaDOS=] being turned on for the first time and flooding the center and her taking complete control of the facility. Chell would just have to have escaped during Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, and come back as a test subject later when she was an adult and before [=GLaDOS=] took over (I think that there's an interview she has as a test subject that also supports this but it's been a while.) So, she clearly did come back. And for surviving that initial day, I guess she held her breath and ran.
998[[/folder]]
999
1000[[folder: Conversion gel in the non-test areas]]
1001* Basically what it says: why were walls in areas where a portal gun wasn't expected to be taken into painted with conversion gel? Other than "conversion gel wasn't introduced until the sequel so here they're just white walls that can accept portals" (which is fine if that's the only postulation).
1002** My assumption was that any smooth, flat, static surface could accept a portal. Painting the walls with conversion gel just makes it easier for an otherwise non-ideal surface to do so. (My headcanon is that those walls being moved that you have to shoot a laser through for one puzzle were covered in the gel; that's why the portals stuck even though you're not supposed to be able to put portals on moving surfaces.)
1003** To reinforce that point: Conversion gel and/or moon rocks are ''not'' necessary for portals to work. Aperture was testing portals in the 60s and they didn't figure out that moonrock-based gel is a great "portal conductor" until the 80s. Cave Johnson even calls Conversion Gel-based portals "these new portals", clearly meaning that portals on other materials are old tech. Most of the portalable walls you see in the Enrichment Center are just concrete or some similar material.
1004[[/folder]]
1005
1006[[folder: Where did all the gel pipes come from?]]
1007* So, after escaping Old Aperture, three gel pipes are connected to ones from the new facility, allowing gel to be transported into new test chambers. In Wheatley's tests and especially the endgame, gel pipes are almost EVERYWHERE. Even in places such as the Central Core chamber, which we've been in before. How come we didn't see any inactive gel pipes around before Chapter 6? I doubt Wheatley would start installing them, especially since they only become linked to the pumps after escaping Old Aperture.
1008** Well, the pipers in the modern facility aren't actually pipes meant for the gel. They are transport tubes that transports various things throughout the facility (which includes you and Wheatley at one point, and deadly neurotoxin, as [=GLaDOS=] tries to use it when she has you trapped). It could be possible the tubes may have previously been attached to the pipes in the older facility, much like how the newer facility was still attached to previous versions of it. Due to Chell activating the pumps for the gels, those tubes began to pump the gels upwards into the newer facility. So, the pipes were always attached to the new facility, it's just that no one ever thought that anyone would ever go down into the older sections of the facility to turn the pumps on. And eventually, the workers of the newer facility were unaware those pipes were connected, as well as the existence of previous facilities.
1009[[/folder]]
1010
1011[[folder: Portal Decompression]]
1012* When the Portal to the Moon is opened air is immediately sucked through just as it would as if this was an opened airlock on a pressured spaceship. This is an entire planet worth of air though so if the Portal wasn't closed it would have just kept being sucked through. But for how long? If the Portal had been left open how much of Earth's atmosphere would have been taken? All of it? How long would that take? What would have happened to all the air on the other side? Is that just lost to space? Could this one Portal have destroyed the world?
1013[[/folder]]
1014
1015[[folder: What makes Chell so special?]]
1016* Someone already asked how Chell survived Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, but how was Chell able to survive being put in stasis between games? Wheatley implies that she's the only one that hasn't died / been put into a permanent coma, but unlike a similar situation with Mei in ''Overwatch'', there's no reason given for how she's somehow still alive (no pun intended).
1017** Chell is primarily characterized by being excessively stubborn. Maybe this extends down to a cellular level so Chell's body is fundamentally more determined to remain alive.
1018** Just simple Protagonist-Based PlotArmor and AnthropicPrinciple, really. ''Someone'' has to survive to participate in the events of ''Portal 2'', otherwise there's no ''Portal 2'', and since Chell was the protagonist of the first game, might as well be her. In universe, she just got very lucky.
1019** Also, the developers played around with the idea of Wheatley having woken up many other subjects before Chell, except all others died along the way. This was ultimately not made canon, but I think it helps understand what the writers were initially planning the explanation to be.
1020[[/folder]]

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