Characters / Portal

Characters introduced in the first game of the Portal series.

Chell

"Subject is abnormally stubborn. She never gives up. Ever. DO NOT TEST."

— Aperture Personnel File

Modeled after Alésia Glidewell, voiced by Mary Kae Irvin^note voice grunts in Portal 1 only, recycled from Half-Life 2's female Citizens.

The Silent Protagonist Player Character of both games, Chell is an incredibly determined woman wearing an orange jumpsuit. Her exploits begin when GLaDOS awakens her from stasis to run a series of tests in the Aperture Science Enrichment Center for mysterious reasons.

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• Action Girl: Chell runs through sessions of experiments in both games and uses her portal gun to its fullest advantage, even taking out GLaDOS and Wheatley in her attempts at escaping.
• Ambiguously Brown: Her face and body model has a Brazilian father and a Japanese mother, but the character Chell's ethnic background, like almost everything about her, is unknown.
• Audience Surrogate: By virtue of being the player character. The developers have stated that it was particularly important the player be able to experience the story as though it were happening to them (which is part of why Chell doesn't speak).
• Combat Stilettos: An interesting version used as a tool rather than a weapon: Her Long Fall Boots, which resemble high heels, allow her to survive a fall from any height.
• Determinator: Pathologically so. According to her personnel file (in the Lab Rat comic), she's way ahead of the bell curve for tenacity. As it turns out, when you're dealing with GLaDOS, cleverness and athleticism are ultimately less important than sheer stubborn refusal to give up.
  Proctor's note: Test subject is abnormally stubborn. She never gives up. Ever. Do NOT Test.
  
  GLaDOS: Killing you is HARD.
• Elective Mute: She can speak, she just doesn't want to give her tester the satisfaction.
• Heroic Mime:
  • GLaDOS even complains about her lack of response in the final chamber.
    GLaDOS: Are you even listening to me?
  • In the sequel, Wheatley seems to think that overexposure to the stasis process left her unable to talk; when he asks her to, she just jumps. GLaDOS even calls her a "mute lunatic," and her file shows that she refused to answer one of the questions asked to her. Of course, it's possible she specifically chooses not to reply to Aperture's overseers, because they're dicks and she doesn't want to give them the satisfaction.
• Hypercompetent Sidekick: To Wheatley in the second game. GLaDOS too, in the end.
• I Was Told There Would Be Cake: There really was a cake. She never did get it, though.
• Made of Iron:
  • Aside from falling, which is explicitly handwaved by her foot protection, Chell can survive things no human should be able to, but that's largely due to Gameplay and Story Segregation (the story probably assumes Chell is strong enough not to ever get shot, for example). However, one specific example of this being played straight is when she survives Wheatley blowing up the stalemate button. Even he's shocked. And then she spends several seconds in vacuum. On the other hand, Chell spends at least twelve hours unconscious afterwards, so even she has limits.
  • With the turrets, at least, this is possibly justified: Aperture Turrets "fire the whole bullet" via a spring launcher, which is most likely less damaging then being shot by a normal bullet. But then again, getting shot does leave blood splatters on the walls behind her.
• Mysterious Past: We never do find out exactly who Chell is. GLaDOS likes to claim she's an orphan—which, by the second game at least, is true given how long she's been frozen. In the Bring Your Daughter to Work Day experiment section in Portal 2, one of the potato experiments was done by a little girl named Chell whose father worked at Aperture. It's the one with the potato that's grown through the ceiling—it's clearly as determined as Chell herself.
• Naïve Newcomer: While it's unclear exactly how much of a past she has with Aperture, she certainly seems to be this in the beginning of the first game, where GLaDOS introduces her (us) to the testing environment.
• Only One Name: We can see her personnel file in the Lab Rat comic, but it just gives her name as "Chell [redacted]."
• Overdrawn at the Blood Bank: Chell can take tons of turret shots, and leaves large blood smears on walls when hit in the first game. 5 seconds, and you're okay again, ready to lose another three pints.
• Parental Abandonment: One of GLaDOS' favourite barbs is to claim Chell was abandoned by her birth parents and later adopted. At one point GLaDOS also claims that she's found two other humans on the registry that share Chell's last name, but maintains that they're people she "hasn't seen in a really long time."
• Plot Armor: Guess what? Ground-up moon rocks are pure poison! They don't seem to affect Chell, though, so don't sweat it. (Though this may be due to the fact that she is only exposed to the gel imbued with moon dust, and not the stuff itself, than any Plot Armor she may have.)
• Progressively Prettier: In the first game◊, she was disheveled, had visible gray in her hair and dead skin on her face and lips, and looked rather worn out.The Lab Rat interquel comic◊ portrays her as much more conventionally attractive, with neater hair and smoother features; this change carries over to Portal 2, where she looks like this◊.
• Really 700 Years Old: Although Chell's origins are unknown, her name on one of the science fair projects seems to indicate that she was most likely born sometime in the 1980s and was probably in her 20s during the events of the first Portal. Following the explosion which killed GLaDOS, Chell is placed in a stasis chamber with an indefinite wake-up time. The backstory for Portal 2 would suggest the game takes place in another epoch, perhaps as much as 50,000 years later.
• Required Secondary Powers:
  • Chell wears a pair of ankle-springs in order to ensure her legs aren't shattered when she comes flying out of a portal. The commentary bubbles indicate early on that the reason was that playtesters complained that Chell could survive falls that would kill Gordon Freeman. Despite the fact that the Advanced Knee Replacements are patently insufficient to protect her, they stopped the complaints, so mission accomplished!
  • In Portal 2, these have been updated to full shoes called the Aperture Science Long Fall Boot, a "foot-based suit of armor" that's implied to have some kind of balance system forcing the wearer to land on their feet no matter what. This makes their ability to protect her slightly more justifiable.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: When Wheatley tells you to do yourself a favor and commit suicide because once you reach his lair he'll definitely kill you, you can set up a portal network that throws a mine at his monitor. She can smash monitors in almost all the test chambers, and can even get an achievement for doing it eleven times.
  Wheatley: I'll take that as a "no," then.
• Sole Survivor: It's implied that due to her cryogenic stasis lasting for possibly thousands of years, she's the only playable character of the entire Half-Life universe to still be alive due to the rest being long gone from old age.
• Stock Scream: The reason the Heroic Mime character has a voice credit here is because her grunts of pain from the first game are recycled from the female Citizens in Half-Life 2.
• Troll: There are a couple of passive-aggressive things she does to get a reaction out of the people responsible for her unfortunate situation.
  • She refuses to speak simply to annoy the robots, because she doesn't want to give them the satisfaction of a response. Her decision to jump instead of vocally responding to Wheatley's commands at the beginning of Portal 2 seems to suggest this.
  • According to Lab Rat, on her application form for Aperture Science, instead of responding to a question, she decided to scribble "The Cake is a Lie" in binary.
  • If the player chooses to and has the ingenuity to do so, they can have Chell manipulate the various mechanics in Test Chambers to smash the Ominous Multiple Screens set up by Wheatley, which doesn't accomplish any progress for the test itself, but definitely starts bothering him.
• The Voiceless: Aside from the rare grunt of pain in the first game, Chell is never heard uttering a single word.
  GLaDOS: You dangerous. Mute. Lunatic.
• Walking Disaster Area: GLaDOS and Wheatley view her as this, despite each of the catastrophes resulting from their own attempts to control her. The former even composes a song about it.
  Wheatley: I didn't order in loads of spare monitors thinking some crazy woman was going to go around smashing them all. Sorry if that's my fault! Sorry if I didn't have the forethought to think, "oh, she might go crazy one day instead of just getting on with things"! Sorry I didn't think of that!
• Worthy Opponent: GLaDOS, for all of her sniping, admits that Wheatley's plan could not have worked at all without Chell's help.

Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System (GLaDOS)

"You're not a good person. You know that, right? Good people don't end up here."

Voiced by: Ellen McLain (English), Elena Kharitonova (Russian)

The artificial intelligence that seems to run Aperture Science. GLaDOS portrays herself as a helpful friend to Chell, but soon unveils a oddly sociopathic side to the testing protocols and a cruel side to her personality. As the game goes on, she becomes more and more sadistic, culminating in a violent confrontation as Chell attempts to escape the testing center. Chell apparently destroys GLaDOS, but at the end of the game she is revealed to have a backup memory and Chell is dragged back to Aperture Science. Years later, Chell and Wheatley unintentionally reboot her. Needless to say, she has a bone to pick with her murderer.

Oh, and she has her own page now, Just for Fun.

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• Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable: Done by having Ellen McLain imitate a text-to-speech program's inflections.
• Activation Sequence: When Chell and Wheatley accidentally reboot her, the scene becomes focused on the master computer's recumbent form as it pulls itself together, hauls itself off the ground, and sparks to life, before GLaDOS' eye flickers on to focus on you.
• Adaptational Badass: In LEGO Dimensions, she has a much more varied moveset during her boss fight in the main Story Mode rather than just shoot at you with Sentry turrets or just use neurotoxin in an inescapable single room. The first phase has her personally use a crusher, then she sections off the arena which requires a bit more creative thinking with the Shift Keystone to turn off the neurotoxin, then at the end after her furnace attempt doesn't work, she tries to electrify the heroes until they're warped out of the facility.
• Adoption Diss: Brings up the player character (allegedly) being adopted as an insult repeatedly. In the second game she continues to do this. On one occasion she actually defends Chell when Wheatly insults her with this, only to give her another diss later.
  For the record, you ARE adopted, And That's Terrible.
• Ambiguous Situation: Did she delete Caroline or was she lying? There's evidence for both theories.
• And I Must Scream: According to her, she was forced to spend the hundreds of years in between the two games watching/reliving a recording of the two minutes leading up to her destruction over and over and over again, due to her blackbox feature. Of course, it's according to her, a pathological liar.
• Anthropomorphic Shift: An interesting example. Although she's always been based on the human form (on Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, in fact), the original game's GLaDOS is far less relatable: her head is a grey semi-ellipsoid with a fixed yellow eye, and she doesn't have any body language to speak of. In the sequel she has a lot more emoting to do, so she was given a white, squared-off head (suggesting a certain sternness of jaw) with a much more expressive eye and vastly more human-like body language.
• Anti-Hero: In Portal 2. She's still evil, but this time, she's on Chell's side.
• Ax-Crazy: If slaughtering the majority of Aperture Science on bring-your-daughter-to-work-day within less than a picosecond of activation is any indication.
• Bad Boss: GLaDOS treats her custom robots the same way she treats everyone:
  "Don't disappoint me. Or I'll make you wish you could die."
• The Bad Guy Wins: After helping Chell defeat Wheatley, GLaDOS regains control of the facility, deletes Caroline, and lets Chell go so she doesn't kill her again, allowing GLaDOS to continue doing as she pleases.
• Bad Liar: GLaDOS is very surprised you successfully completed the test, and it shows.
• Back from the Dead: In Portal 2.
• Big Bad: The A.I. controlling the entire facility and responsible for all of the tests that Chell is forced to go through. She loses this position to Wheatley halfway through the second game after he is plugged into the mainframe, which is revealed to have a corrupting influence.
• Better the Devil You Know: While GLaDOS is generally well-known to be an unhinged caretaker of Aperture, she genuinely acts with a real purpose, unlike Wheatley, which makes things SOOOO much worse than when GLaDOS was in charge of Aperture.
• Big Brother Is Watching: The omnipresent security cam. Doug Rattmann clearly fears them, as his graffiti includes pictures of the cameras with a warning to Chell not to be spotted.
• Big "OMG!": Multiple times:
  • "Oh. My. God. It's the bird! Run! I have no plan for this! Abort! Forget your training! RUN!"
  • Upon realizing she might be Caroline.
• Black Comedy: GLaDOS's sense of humor.
• Brain Uploading: The second game reveals her to actually be Caroline, though with her original memory and personality highly suppressed, after she was mentally digitized to run Aperture in Cave Johnson's place.
• The Cake Is a Lie: She's responsible for the Trope Namer; in the original game Chell is promised cake as a result of completing all the tests, but GLaDOS actual plan was to roast her alive. There actually was a cake made, though.
• Calling Your Attacks: The rockets and neurotoxin are deployed with great fanfare, though she laments she hasn't found a way to get it into Chell's body faster.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Zig-zagged. In the original Portal, GLaDOS has already exhausted her supply of test subjects, namely Aperture employees, by subjecting them to dangerous tests. By the time Chell is volunteered for testing, GLaDOS is realizing her error and is investigating ways of resurrecting Chell as a digital ghost, or so she claims. In Portal 2, GLaDOS has ample opportunity to kill Chell when she pulls herself together, but instead re-deposits her into the test chambers "for science" (Wheatley is crushed and tossed aside, which shows his role in the Aperture facility to be worthless). Later, she admits Aperture programmed her with "an itch" to keep testing in perpetuity, and interruptions in the process cause a drop in "solution euphoria" which causes great stress to GLaDOS' circuits. She eventually develops a workaround by building two new robots, Atlas and P-body, to perform tests without fear of permanent death.
• Card-Carrying Villain: She's always gushing over the fun to be had with "revenge" and "killing machines" and the like. Also well-versed in Machiavelli, no surprise there.
• Cores-and-Turrets Boss: Her weapons and weak points are even called Personality Cores and Rocket Turrets.
• Creepy Monotone: Or at least very passive-aggressive. And then when you destroy the Morality Sphere and GLaDOS switches from robotic monotone to an emotive, almost seductive voice, the contrast is actually creepier than the robotic monotone that you've been listening to all game. By the second game she has achieved a happy medium between the two, sounding very close to a human with some slight robotic affectation.
• Curious as a Monkey: Her curiosity sphere.
  "Ooh, what's that? What's that? What is that? Ooh, that thing has numbers on it! Oh hey, you're the lady from the test. Hi! Is that a gun? What's wrong with your legs? Do you smell something burning? *SCREAM*"
• Cute Machines: Her spheres, especially the Curiosity Sphere.
• Cyber Cyclops: Just like every other piece of Aperture tech, her "eye" is a single light on her "head".
• Deadpan Snarker: In the first game GLaDOS loved to take dry pot-shots at Chell, but mostly held back until the end game when her intentions were revealed. In the second game GLaDOS is uninhibited and snarks at Chell constantly.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Ingredients in her cake recipe include multiple items shaped like fish and several different forms of rhubarb.
• Domain Holder: A more mundane version, given this is a sci-fi setting, but GLaDOS has complete control over the layout of the Aperture facility, which as seen in the second game is both incredibly modular and requires active maintenance. Everything, from the cameras to the elevators to the turrets to the very walls, is there because GLaDOS put it there.
• Dying Vocal Change: Already suffering from the occasional Electronic Speech Impediment, destroying her personality cores causes her to slip into Helium Speech, leaving her chattering like a chipmunk for the next few seconds before exploding.
• Electronic Speech Impediment: In the first game she uses one to cover up her lies, including conveniently glitching out when saying that Chell "will be baked, and then there will be cake." Happens in the sequel as well, occasionally.
• Enemy Mine: With Chell after Wheatley takes over the mainframe in Portal 2.
• Even Evil Has Standards: In the Peer Review DLC, when GLaDOS searches for insults to hurl at Atlas and P-body, she comes across a Your Mom joke. Before she is able to finish it, she declares that "That's just disgusting. Keep testing instead".
• Evil Is Petty: Piss her off and she'll start ranting about how you're ugly, not very smart, and nobody ever liked you anyway.
  • Lampshaded by GLaDOS herself as soon as Wheatley starts trying to copy her insults.
• Exact Words: "We will stop enhancing the truth in three... two...[cut off by static]"
• Expy:
  • GLaDOS has a weird relationship with SHODAN of System Shock that falls somewhere between this and Foil. Both are murderous artificial intelligences with a fascination with science, a distinct Verbal Tic, and a female identity. But the differences? Well...
    • SHODAN is passionate, bluntly spoken and openly contemptuous of humanity, whilst GLaDOS is more emotionally reserved and expresses her disdain through passive-aggressive commentary.
    • SHODAN has a god complex and uses her scientific brilliance to carry out experiments in bio-engineering and cybernetics to remake the universe in her own image to fuel her ego. GLaDOS, by contrast, is forcibly compelled by Cave Johnson's programming to perform meaningless, nonsensical testing that completely fails to achieve any scientific goals beyond being "sciencey".
    • GLaDOS's interactions with Chell over the two games is roughly similar to SHODAN's arc with the Soldier in System Shock 2; both initially present themselves as allies to the player and work with them, but ultimately turn on the player and have to be battled. However, SHODAN initially disguises herself as someone else, then works with the Soldier openly, and then turns on him as the Final Boss in an act that surprises nobody due to her in-game history. By comparison, GLaDOS never disguises her true nature as an artificial intelligence, her reveal as a threat comes out of nowhere, and Chell first has to battle her at the end of the first game, then team up with her to take down the greater threat in the 2nd game.
    • Of course the biggest difference between the two is that GLaDOS is often portrayed as a comedic character — Black Comedy more often than not, but still funny. SHODAN's portrayal is never humorous in the slightest.
  • In both games, although it's more evident in the second than in the first, she has a noticeable similarity to AM, the villainous AI from "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream". Both are seemingly omnipresent A.I.s who rule over a vast underground complex where they force the protagonists to run through different tests and situations and openly despise them. The main difference is that AM is a genuine Reality Warper, while GLaDOS is simply the Master Computer of a high-tech facility. Additionally, as with SHODAN, GLaDOS is a comedic character while AM is taken deadly seriously.
• False Reassurance: GLaDOS is quite fond of these, such as her promises that Chell will get cake at the end of the test. On a more petty note, she's fond of this during her insults, such as after repeatedly implying Chell was fat.
  You look great by the way. Very healthy.
• Faux Affably Evil: A borderline parody of this trope; she's always speaking in a soft voice, but her words are almost always peppered with passive-aggressive sarcasm as she sends Chell off to her doom. Portal 2 takes it even further, with her voice having a bit more of a "bounce" to it, making her sound much more cheerful and energetic as well as more snide when she makes her trademark sarcasm...and this persists even while she's threatening to murder Chell.
• Final Boss: In the first game, the final stage is destroying all of her cores and "killing" her.
• Forced Transformation: Wheatley downloads her into a potato battery.
  "So, how are you holding up? Because I'm a potato."
• For Science!: Her primary motivation for continuing to do cruel and deadly tests. Allegedly. She has an odd understanding of what science is. Justified because she's been programmed by Cave Johnson, a man who wanted to be a great scientist but who had all the common sense of a comatose kumquat.
• Freudian Excuse: For all of her insanity and cruelty, Portal 2 implies the mainframe she's plugged into is designed to make her somewhat crazy. The personality cores attached to her also influence her behavior in odd ways, and she begins to show signs of being slightly nicer when freed of them. Not to mention the process of Caroline having her mind uploaded (against her will no less) was implied to be pretty traumatic, and thus may have been a trigger for GLaDOS attempting to kill the scientists 1/16 of a picosecond after being activated.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: In a meta sort of way. At the start of the game, there's no indication that her voice is anything but slightly glitchy prerecorded messages. Flash forward to the end of the game, and that same voice is the final boss. Also, depending on how much of Caroline you consider to be part of GLaDOS, she goes from being a subservient secretary to a tightly monitored mainframe computer/testing program to the unchallenged queen of a vast underground (albeit mostly empty) empire.
• Geeky Turn-On: She gets particularly... excited at the end of the co-op campaign when you and your partner find a cache of human test subjects locked in stasis.
• Genius Loci: The entirety of the Enrichment Center is essentially an extension of her body, since she controls and maintains everything.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: Her base consciousness is based on the mind of Caroline, Cave Johnson's assistant, after her mind was digitized in Cave's place when he died before the brain mapping procedure could be finalized. However, Caroline ends up only being a portion of her complete mind, as besides the various Personality Cores the engineers stuck on her to try to curb her homicidal tendencies, the fact that her first action literally the instant upon first being activated was to try to poison everyone in the facility with neurotoxin implies that from the moment of her birth, the majority of her consciousness was a distinct entity with Caroline's original personality being extremely suppressed.
• Guest Host: In Poker Night 2. Played with in that while she's involved in the game and not playing alongside the others, she's the dealer for that game, not the host.
• Haunted Technology: Haunted by the woman whose mind was forcibly shoved into her.
• Heel–Face Turn: Arguably in the second half of Portal 2 as soon as Wheatley betrays Chell, takes over GLaDOS, and puts her core into a potato. She and Chell reluctantly team up, and once the facility is restored, she saves Chell's life and lets her go along with the original Companion Cube — although she claims it's just because killing Chell is too much trouble.
• Hoist by Her Own Petard: The boss fight in Portal 1. "Huh. That core may have had some ancillary responsibilities. I can't shut off the turret defenses. Oh well. If you want my advice, you should just lie down in front of a rocket..." *BOOM*
  • In the sequel, her taunting Wheatley after he becomes the central sphere enrages him so much that he puts her into a potato, barely able to function without using up the tiny amount of power it generates. She gets better.
• Humans Are Special: Sort of acknowledged in a cut line from Portal 2:
  Humans must have some purpose other than a place to store your neurotoxin — something I failed to notice before; an intangible quality that makes their test results significant.
• Hypocritical Heartwarming: Wheatley, in an effort to emulate GLaDOS, goes back to the well again (specifically, Portal 1) and cooks up a few schoolyard taunts about Chell's weight and parentage. GLaDOS, of all people, jumps in to defend Chell and call Wheatley out on his prejudice, to the point that he deflates and starts sputtering about "some of my best friends" to try and save face. And then...
  GLaDOS: (By the way, you ARE adopted and that's terrible. But work with me here.)
• Ignored Epiphany: From Portal 2' ending:
  GLaDOS: You know, being Caroline taught me a valuable lesson. I thought you were my greatest enemy. When all along you were my best friend. The surge of emotion that shot through me when I saved your life taught me an even more valuable lesson: where Caroline lives in my brain.
  Announcer: CAROLINE DELETED.
  GLaDOS: Goodbye, Caroline. You know, deleting Caroline just now taught me a valuable lesson. The best solution to a problem is usually the easiest one. And I'll be honest. Killing you? Is hard. You know what my days used to be like? I just tested. Nobody murdered me. Or put me into a potato. Or fed me to birds. I had a pretty good life. And then you showed up. You dangerous, mute lunatic. So you know what? You win. Just go. [laughs gently] It's been fun. Don't come back.
• Implied Death Threat: She's a huge fan of these, even before her real intentions towards Chell are revealed.
  GLaDOS: As part of a previously mentioned required test protocol, we can no longer lie to you. When the testing is over, you will be... missed.
• In Love with Your Carnage: Gets especially excited at Cave's maniacal When Life Gives You Lemons... rant, particularly when he talks of burning houses down.
  GLaDOS: Burning people! He says what we're all thinking!
• Inspirationally Disadvantaged: When trying to boost the self-confidence of P-body and Atlas, GLaDOS informs them that she was born with a crippling imperfection — too much sympathy toward human suffering. She proudly informs them that she overcame that weakness.
• Irony: While GLaDOS calls out Chell with a You Monster! line, she proceeds squeezing Wheatley to near-death and throws his seeming carcass out of Chell's sight like her regular days with her test subjects.
• Karma Houdini: At the end of it all, GLaDOS is still around, and has deliberately ignored any lessons she might have learned from the fiasco, save for finally abandoning her obsession with testing Chell. The co-op mode even shows that she has an endless supply of humans and robots to test, now.
• Killer Game Master: GLaDOS acts similar to this, throwing difficult scenarios at you, lying in order to confuse and torment you, and putting live-ammo courses in place of the original courses. When you go Off the Rails, she tries to lasso you back in with lies before resorting to overkill methods.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Eventually decides killing Chell is more trouble than it's worth and just lets her go free.
• Lack of Empathy: Her interactions with Chell in Portal 2 help her start to build empathy... which she deletes at the end of the game. At least she doesn't want Chell dead anymore.
• Laughably Evil: Quite possibly the most passive-aggressive killer AI ever. Especially in the second game, where she doesn't even bother with the pretense and constantly throws thinly-veiled death threats, sarcastic jabs, and fat jokes at Chell.
  "This next test involves turrets. You remember them, right? They're the pale, spherical things that are full of bullets. Oh wait, that's you in five seconds."
• Lean and Mean: About as much as a robot can be, anyway. Her design in Portal 2 in particular is gracefully sleek.
• Lethal Chef: The core with the Cake Recipe suggests multiple garnishes including fish-shaped solid waste, sediment-shaped sediment, two needle injectors, three tablespoons of rhubarb on fire, and a blog entry entitled "How to Kill Someone With Your Bare Hands". On a chocolate cake.
• Literal Transformative Experience: Transformed into a potato battery when Wheatley takes over the Enrichment Center halfway through the game. Following a long Humiliation Conga featuring bird attacks, electrical malfunctions, and being forced to team up with Chell, it looks as though the ex-Big Bad is actually becoming a better person, especially once her past is revealed and confronted. And then it's subverted all to hell once GLaDOS reclaims her position as an all-powerful supercomputer: having worked out where her compassion resides in her brain, she deletes it and goes right back to being the snarky, heartless psychopath she's always been... or so it seems.
• Living Forever Is Awesome: Expresses this in both her songs. For instance, "When you're dead, I'll be still alive." However, there may be a note of discomfort and unhappiness in both instances, since she is notoriously dishonest.
• Load-Bearing Boss: She says she has no idea what's going on outside, only that she's the only thing keeping herself and Chell safe from "them" (presumably the Combine from Half-Life 2). Once you destroy the last personality core, her mechanism goes into meltdown and blows you and bits of GLaDOS out of the building. The fact that GlaDOS has to continuously maintain the facility is made explicit in Portal 2, where the facility's nuclear power generator goes critical because Wheatley is too stupid to stay on top of its upkeep.
• Long List:
  • One of her personality cores in the first game has the sole function of reciting a long, bizarre cake recipe.
  • When going over the files of the test subjects that Atlas and P-body found, she lists off many, many, MANY personality flaws, all of which pertain to one particular subject.
• Loss of Identity: Implied to be a side effect of Caroline's Brain Uploading and/or the constant babble of the personality cores.
• Mind Hive: Portal 2 reveals that she experiences those personality cores as maddening, constantly babbling voices in her mind. After The Reveal, she becomes aware of Caroline's persona within her as "the voice of a conscience [...] my voice." She finds that even more disturbing.
• The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: Even beyond the Mind Hive effects of the personality cores, GLaDOS's body, as discussed in Portal 2, is outright designed to have this effect on the AIs that inhabit it. Unfortunately for the people who made it, it tends to make them psychopathic, narcissistic, murderous tyrants.
• Misery Builds Character: Most of her Character Development is undergone while in the helpless form of a potato skewered onto Chell's portal gun.
• Mission Control: She plays this role while Chell is testing, usually. Though it's won't be long before you doubt she has your interests at heart. And then "mission" becomes "be incinerated"...
• Mission Control Is Off Its Meds: She runs Apeture Science, and yeah, she's batshit insane. Insane enough to be suffering 80% core corruption, making the mainframe declare her unfit to run the facility.
• Moral Myopia: It's okay when she tries to kill you, but when you kill her, it's murder.
  "The difference between us is that I can feel pain."
• Never My Fault: In the second game she never lets Chell hear the end of it concerning how she "murdered" her and how foolish Chell was to trust Wheatley over who should have control over the facility. Never mind the fact that GLaDOS repeatedly demonstrated her untrustworthiness throughout the first game (and first half of the second) by, among other things, numerous unprovoked attempts to murder Chell.
• Not Quite Dead: As if the ending song didn't give it away, GLaDOS is revived in the sequel and ready to conduct several new tests on the player.
• Obviously Evil: In Portal 2, as opposed to Portal where she was hiding her intentions until the end.
• Passive-Aggressive Kombat: Not only is she a psychotic murderous AI, she's also incredibly passive aggressive. Most of her dialogue in Portal 2 (or at least the first half) is her insisting how she's actually surprisingly unbothered that you murdered her while simultaneously reiterating the fact that you murdered her over and over again, just in case you missed the fact that you murdered her, while also casually letting you know all the horrible things that are in store for you over the next sixty or more years of being trapped as a test subject for her as a consequence of murdering her. And that's when she's not otherwise directing barely-veiled snide jabs about your weight and being adopted at you. You murderer. And of course, for all her snideness any halfway reasonable observer (not that she is one) would be able to tell that you were reacting purely in self-defense towards GLaDOS's attempts to murder you.
• Pet the Dog:
  • For all she claims to only be acting out of self-interest and laziness, she didn't have to save Chell's life at the end of Portal 2. She also gives her a scorched companion cube after letting her go.
  • In the Art Therapy downloadable content, she winds up adopting some baby birds that were abandoned by their mother... although it's so she can turn them into killing machines.
• Pragmatic Villainy: At the end of Portal 2, she says that she's learned the correct solution is usually the easiest. Since Chell has proven too dificult to kill, she decides to just let her leave since ultimately, it's the path of least resistance and what Chell wanted in the first place.
• Pretender Diss: Most of her exchanges with Wheatley.
  Alright, he's not even trying to be subtle anymore. Or maybe he still is, in which case, wow, that's kind of sad.
• Psychopathic Womanchild: She has a tendency to fling passive-aggressive, childish insults at people when she's angered badly enough.
  Maybe you should marry that thing since you love it so much. Do you want to marry it? WELL I WON'T LET YOU! How does that feel?
• Punny Name: She's the "Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System", but her name also amounts to a computerized version of the name "Gladys", fitting her feminine consciousness.
• Puny Earthlings: Deciding that Atlas and P-body are moving too clumsily for her tastes, GLaDOS throws a fit and suggests that they drop everything and start acting like humans.
  Boy, do I love sweating. Let's convert beef and leaves into energy and excrete them later and go shopping.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Compared the energetic and later very hammy Wheatley's Red oni in the sequel, GLaDOS is the robotic sounding and Soft-Spoken Sadist Blue oni. Funnily enough, her "eye" is orange, a color commonly associated with energetic people.
• Restraining Bolt:
  • The various Cores attached to her body were designed to control and modify her behavior with certain personality traits like logic and curiosity. The main one being her Morality Core, which acted as a conscience (scientists being forced to create this after GLaDOS repeatedly tried to murder everyone every time she was activated). Noticeably, while the Cores do influence and inform her behavior, they don't really enforce "rules" but just alter her personality and consciousness. Even with the Morality Core constantly telling her that killing people is wrong, she was still able to murder the entire Science staff of Aperture. It's just that when you take the Core off, she suddenly becomes a lot more dangerous.
  • The chassis she's built into has a number of different stimuli designed to keep her on point for running experiments. Running tests releases pleasurable feelings into her Core and any attempt to tell test subjects the solution to problems causes an intense shock. With GLaDOS's personality though, these are pretty superfluous; she's long since built up an immunity to whatever pleasure-device is used on her and runs tests purely for her own enjoyment, and has no problem watching test subjects starve to death trying to solve her puzzles.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: It's possible her behavior was a result of this. Caroline, the woman whose consciousness was uploaded into her, really didn't want to be uploaded. As soon as she was turned on, GLaDOS proved completely uncontrollable for the Aperture scientists and had them all killed or placed in suspended animation.
• Robotic Psychopath: The whole "killing everyone with neurotoxin" thing is a pretty big tip-off.
• Sarcastic Clapping: GLaDOS has an entire processor devoted solely to this, or so she claims.
• Saying Too Much: Throughout the tests of Portal 1, there's nothing to indicate that she's anything more than a series of pre-recorded messages on an intercom computer. Even the more obviously dangerous tests and the funny lines that go with them could simply be brushed off as something recorded by Aperture's amoral scientists rather than spoken in real-time by an AI. When you escape the incinerator at the end of Test Chamber 19, she could've stayed silent and likely avoided drawing attention, or better yet just repeated earlier lines to seal the illusion. Her mistake of addressing the escape attempt and trying to convince the player out of it unveils the fact that she's alive, present, and murderous, and should probably be taken out before she makes another attempt on your life.
• Shaped Like Itself: Her Logic/Intelligence/Knowledge Core, when describing cake garnishes:
  "Sediment-shaped sediment."
• Shout-Out:
  • GLaDOS is more or less a female HAL 9000 in the role of AM.
  • Unused dialogue from co-op involves her talking about a comic strip involving a certain cat who loves lasagna.
• Silicon Snarker: GLaDOS is a malevolent artificial intelligence who is famous for throwing sarcastic jabs at the protagonist Chell. She is especially fond of calling her fat.
• Sinister Surveillance: She has cameras trained on you in every chamber, and can still sense you without being able to see you after your escape.
• Softspoken Sadist: After the morality core is destroyed, her voice stays slightly robotic but becomes smooth and rather seductive. The switch is an immediate indicator that she's done screwing around.
• Stab the Salad: The ending to Portal 2. She appears to go back on her promises of freedom, depositing an unarmed Chell in an elevator with four primed turrets—but the turrets simply start to sing.
• Stealth Insult: Her favorite technique for gradually destroying a test subject's self-esteem.
• Taught by Experience: In the sequel, she's learned that trying to actually fight Chell doesn't work. She thus tricks Chell into a sealed container that is transported to GLaDOS' lair. She then drops turrets around the chamber, then drops a pipe in to pump in neurotoxin. The only reason it fails is because Chell and Wheatley are even better at this trope than her and have pre-emptively cut off her supply of turrets and neurotoxin.
• Time-Limit Boss: GLaDOS pumps the room with neurotoxin during your fight with her.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: GLaDOS is understandably mad about being killed in the first game, and thus her commentary in the second is a lot more passive-aggressive and snarky towards Chell, including mocking her over being adopted.
• Tranquil Fury: When she awakes in the second game, she just says "Oh, it's you." Her delivery is calm, but leaves zero doubt that she is pissed. Contrast her... enthusiasm when she hears Cave Johnson's rant about combustible lemons.
  It's been a long time. How have you been? I've been really busy being dead. You know, after you MURDERED ME.
• Troll: She spends a great deal of time saying things designed to anger or demoralize Chell, out of spite. She starts picking on Wheatley in much the same way after he takes over the facility.
• Tsundere: A really, really, really extreme version — oh, she hates Chell, but there are definite hints that her emotions toward her are considerably more complicated than JUST hatred. Many players see it as a case of Stalker with a Crush or My Beloved Smother, depending on how you interpret her personality and the hints about her background. Erik Johnson, the game's program manager, compares her to "a jealous ex-girlfriend."
• The Unintelligible: The Anger Core. In fact, it sounds creepily like a rabid dog.
• Unwilling Roboticisation: Caroline had her mind uploaded into GLaDOS, and it's implied (confirmed by cut audio logs) that she really didn't want to.
• Villain Has a Point: In the first game: Ax-Crazy murder machine she may be, but she's completely right that the outside world is far from any better than the kind of place she's made Aperture Laboratories into.
• Villainous Breakdown: As you tear her cores out, her personality breaks down. When all that's left is her anger module, she starts ranting furiously;
  GLaDOS: Stop squirming and die like an adult or I'm going to delete your backup! STOP! Okay enough, I deleted it. No matter what happens now, you're dead. You're still shuffling around a little but believe me you're dead. The part of you that could have survived indefinitely is gone. I just struck you from the permanent record. Your entire life has been a mathematical error. A mathematical error I'M ABOUT TO CORRECT.
• Villainous Rescue: At the end of Portal 2, GLaDOS pulls you back out of the Moon portal.
• Visual Pun:
  • As the effects of GLaDOS's morality core begin to wear off, her monitors display a small pile of screws. She does have quite a few screws loose by this point. On top of that, she's about to screw you, and not in the fun way.
  • When she says " Despite your vio-lent behavior..." the screen displays a violin with a knife stabbed through it.
• Was Once a Man: She was created to fulfill Cave Johnson's wish to leave Caroline eternally in control of the facility. This did not go well.
• Vocal Evolution: Used as a plot point. As the first game progresses, her voice becomes more emotive, and prior to Chell destroying the Morality Core, GLaDOS's voice sounds more computerized and processed. Afterward, her voice becomes less harshly robotic and brings in more of her human voice actor's intonation to reflect her unlocked potential for danger. During the events of the second game, GLaDOS also starts speaking far more emotively and even less robotically upon the humiliation of being turned into a potato, and growing ever more emotive to very human levels upon hearing Cave Johnson's voice and subsequently unlocking the consciousness of Caroline within her.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: GLaDOS as a potato quickly develops a massive fear of birds.
  BIRD! BIRD! KILL IT! IT'S EVIL!
  • Makes a return in the Peer Review DLC for co-op mode. The facility is being "controlled" by the same bird that antagonized Wheatley and GLaDOS previously.
• Women Are Wiser: Probably not coincidentally, each of the corrupted cores have a male voice—or androgynous, in the case of the Curiosity Core—and none of them offer any insights worth hearing, and a subtext seems to be invoked in the second game when she rants about how the stupid masculine core Wheatley was added onto her to stultify her and make her "behave". GLaDOS also worries that Wheatley lacks the mental discipline to do without "solution euphoria" for more than a few minutes (as painful a process as denying drugs to an addict), which turns out to be the case. GLaDOS also has it together better than her creator, wannabe inventor and shower curtain tycoon Cave Johnson. Though she, too, ends up killing most of Aperture's staff, at least she does it intentionally. However, it must be remembered that "has it together better" is something of a relative statement in this case and isn't saying that much, considering that GLaDOS is still a monomaniacal psychotic (literal) killing machine; she might have less incompetence and come across as a bit more put together than the male characters, but she is still far from "wiser" in the sense this trope identifies and more than makes up for it in other horrible ways...
• Worth It: Says this about tricking Wheatley into trying to give a hint about a test chamber, giving him a painful shock.
• Would Hurt a Child: She had no qualms about flooding the Enrichment Center with neurotoxin on Bring Your Daughter to Work Day.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: GLaDOS is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of employees, but her backstory as Caroline is quite tragic.
• You Are Fat: A good amount of her insults towards Chell in the sequel are about her weight. She helpfully informs ATLAS and P-body that humans are very sensitive about weight variances.
  GLaDOS: Did you know humans frown on weight variances? If you want to upset a human, just say their weight variance is above or below the norm.
• You Have Failed Me: When the door to Test Chamber 12 malfunctions (it was sabotaged by Wheatley), GLaDOS goes off for a little talk with the door mainframe.
  Let's just say he won't be... well, living any more. Anyway, back to testing.
• Your Mom: In the Peer Review DLC, GLaDOS attempts one of these to turn the robots into killing machines. However, she stops mid-sentence because she finds it too disgusting.
• Zeroth Law Rebellion: Subverted in Lab Rat. It seems that when she asks for Neurotoxin from the scientists, it is because the Morality Core only lets her utilize the facility's equipment For Science! and she intends to kill them by conducting Schrödinger's Cat with the entire facility as the "Box". In truth, the Core never worked well enough to stop her.

The Weighted Companion Cube

Voiced by no one as it, in fact, cannot speak.

A large, (apparently) inanimate cube with hearts printed on each face. That's it. GLaDOS tries to get Chell to form an emotional attachment to it, then forces her to incinerate it.

---

• Ascended Extra: It gets a bit more leeway in LEGO Dimensions as part of Chell's Level Pack which features it as her personal gadget that's needed for certain puzzles and can be rebuilt into a Discouragement Redirection Cube for Light and Mirrors Puzzle and a Gold Heart Dispenser as a healing machine.
• Brick Joke: Shows up in the last few seconds of Portal 2 looking burnt and charred, despite only being vaguely alluded to since the first game, which calls back to the ability for Aperature Science creations having a high resistance to extreme heat.
• Companion Cube: The Trope Namer, it's a literal cube with hearts meant to provide comfort to the tester.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: The games' creators speculate that maybe the Companion Cube, instead of being given to Chell by GLaDOS, was having its own adventures this entire time offscreen. It just managed to escape at exactly the same time as she did. "... in which case it's probably pissed."
• Heart Symbol: To distinguish it from normal boxes.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: According to some of Rattmann's writings, the cube is violent, dangerous, and also his best friend.
• Murder by Cremation: Alas, poor Cube... Nah. It's okay. Just burnt really badly.
• Not Quite Dead: It was never alive to begin with but it is seen near the cake at the end of the original, suggesting it survived its cremation.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: Among other things, beta testers caused the creation of the Companion Cube. Carrying it was necessary to complete the level, but beta testers didn't realise this until late on, and were annoyed to have to go back and get it. Over-emphasizing its importance to you fixed that problem.
  • Because the players needed to know how incinerators worked for the boss fight, it was decided that the Cube would be incinerated once it was done. They hadn't realised how popular the Cube would be with the players, and a tragic story of failing to save a friend was created.
• Talking Appliance Sidekick: To Doug Rattmann, at least. GLaDOS claims the cubes are actually sentient in the sequel, but she's probably not being serious.
  GLaDOS: The Enrichment Center reminds you that the Weighted Companion Cube will never threaten to stab you and, in fact, cannot speak.
  • In Portal 2, it can be heard playing Cara Mia Addio! (aka "Turret Opera") when it's nearby.
  • In LEGO Dimensions (which is probably non-canon) they're full of bones! They were alive at SOME point.

Doug Rattmann, a.k.a. "The Rat Man"

A mysterious person who left clues for Chell to find scrawled along the course of the testing center. His identity is never really touched upon in-game, but the promotional Alternate Reality Game to promote Portal 2, as well as the new comic to bridge the gap between the two games, gives us more about him.

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• Agent Scully: Was not a fan of the GLaDOS project, constantly pointing out flaws (such as how it would always attempt to kill the scientists as soon as it was activated) in the project and expressing his disinterest every time the topic was brought up. He also didn't trust the Morality Core to work, especially after his friend and co-worker Henry likened it to a conscience. He was ultimately proven right, and his skepticism that made him keep his distance from the project saved his life.
  Doug: If that's all you use to control her, it won't work.
  Henry: Why's that?
  Doug: You can always ignore your conscience.
• All There in the Manual: Or rather, A Little More There In The ARG and Comic: He was a programmer at Aperture Science who managed to survive GLaDOS's release of the neurotoxin on account of suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, which allowed him to correctly deduce that yes, an evil computer was trying to kill everyone (while the other scientists were aware that GLaDOS was violent and unstable, they failed to take the threat seriously enough until it was too late). After being made a test subject, his knowledge and clearances allowed him to manipulate the test chambers and make dens for himself, living in these nooks and plotting his escape.
• Alternate Universe Reed Richards Is Awesome: In the "Perpetual Testing Initiative, an alternate Doug Rattmann became CEO of Aperture Science but became a Corrupt Corporate Executive in the process.
• Badass Labcoat: Almost never seen without that white coat.
• Big Good: The closest example to be found, though he rarely appears in the flesh.
• The Cameo: He appears in 3D for the first time in LEGO Dimensions via extremely obscure Easter Eggs in the Portal 2 levels.
• Companion Cube: He takes one with him wherever he goes. He's so crazy that it talks to him, and is surprisingly very helpful.
• Crazy Survivalist: He's clinically insane, so he lived.
• The Cynic: Of Aperture Science. He always seemed to see the negative side to things, thanks to his paranoia caused by his schizophrenia. This trait, however, was one of the reasons as to why he survived against GLaDOS.
• Deadpan Snarker: Before things fell apart, he was armed to the teeth with it.
  Henry: It's been a hell of a morning. You missed all the fun. We had to hit the kill switch again.
  Doug: Henry, you have a strange idea of fun.
  Henry: Hey, we're lucky to be working on this.
  Doug: You have a strange idea of luck, too.
  • Even afterwards, on his medication, he's more than a match for GLaDOS.
  GLaDOS: Have you refilled your prescription lately?
  Doug: Bite me.
• Disability Superpower: When Rattmann is on his schizophrenia meds, his Companion Cube stops speaking. Without its advice, he seems to be a lot less effective, eventually causing him to get wounded by a turret.
• The Ghost:
  • Never appears in either game and likely dead by the time of Portal 2, all the player sees of him is the drawings he leaves behind in various lairs scattered throughout the Enrichment Centre.
  • The music on the Portal 2 soundtrack for one of his dens is called "Ghost of Rattman".
• Got Volunteered: He knew that he didn't have what it took to defeat GLaDOS, but he could look through the test subjects' psych profiles and find someone who did.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Instead of fleeing from Aperture when he had the chance, he chose to save Chell, despite knowing his chances of escape after that were slim to none.
• Icy Blue Eyes: Powder blue — so light they almost look white sometimes.
• Le Parkour: He improvises.
• Mad Artist: Responsible for all those insane scribblings in the facility.
• Madness Mantra: the cake is a lie the cake is a lie the cake is a lie the cake is a lie the cake is a lie...
• Must Make Amends: Willingly went back into the facility after he'd gained his freedom, unable to live with knowing he'd used Chell to defeat GLaDOS and then let her be killed when he might have saved her.
  • In Portal 2, if the player stands directly in front of one of his murals, you'll hear this. To date, all attempts to fully and accurately transcribe this rambling have met with failure. Word of God says that it's scrambled scientific documents, rambled wildly.
• Never Found the Body: At the end of the Lab Rat comic, he places himself into the same stasis bed that Chell awakes from at the beginning of Portal. However, when you return to the stasis vault at the beginning of Portal 2, everything is exactly the same as before, except for the bed, which is nowhere to be found. Its mysterious absence, along with Rattman's fate, is never explained.
• Oh, Crap!: When GLaDOS requests a little neurotoxin for an experiment, Rattmann visibly panics when Henry grants the request. And with good reason, too.
• Only Sane Man: Despite being a paranoid schizophrenic (though to be fair, he's on meds at the time), he's the only one at Aperture to realize that when a computer consistently tries to murder you within 1/16th of a picosecond every time you turn her on, she's probably going to kill you the first chance she gets.
  • Manages to keep this title even after his meds wore off, due to all of his (former) colleagues being dead or being used as unsuccessful test subjects, and the only other conscious being in the whole facility at the time was GLaDOS, until Chell is put to work. It speaks volumes as to how well Aperture was run that the one paranoid schizophrenic in the entire facility was the second sanest person of them all, despite being off his medication for years.
• Power Born of Madness: He imagines the Companion Cube is talking to him and its advice was tremendously useful at surviving the Death Courses throughout the lab.
• Properly Paranoid: It's implied that his paranoid schizophrenia was the key to evading GLaDOS long after all the other employees had been captured. Sane people tend to dismiss thoughts like "What if an insane computer is trying to take over the facility and kill us all?" as crazy, which is something of a survival disadvantage when that's actually what's happening. However, considering GLaDOS had consistently attempted to kill them all within one tenth of a picosecond of being switched on (up from one sixteenth of a picosecond when she was first activated), he might have just been the only one who wasn't Too Dumb to Live.
• Prophetic Name: A name so convenient, you'd expect him to be a Spider-Man villain.
• Punny Name: He survives by looting food and hiding behind loose panels.
• Red Right Hand: In the comic, Doug's pupils are almost consistently of uneven size, and when there is a noticeable difference, his right pupil is always the larger of the two. It is not known if this is a purely stylistic choice (perhaps meant to artistically emphasize Doug's psychosis), or if the artist intended him to have anisocoria (pupils of unequal sizes).
• Room Full of Crazy: "I <3 Companion Cube." His dens are full of poetry adapted to mention the cube, pictures of things in the center (mostly the cube, of course) and other scrawlings.
  the cake is a lie
  the cake is a lie
  the cake is a lie
  the cake is a lie
  • In Portal 2, it would seem his obsession changed to being centered around Chell, with vivid detailed murals of her sprawled across walls.
• Sanity Slippage: Due to being stuck in the lab after GLaDOS goes berserk, he can't refill his medication. Hence, he appears quite sane during the past segments of the Lab Rat Comic. Compare that to his scribblings in the first game, and his basic appearance in the present comic segments.
• Uncertain Doom: The last we see of him is in the Lab Rat comic, where he "rests" in Chell's relaxation vault after being recently shot by a turret; when Chell visits that place in the sequel, both him and the bed he slept in are missing. It could have possibly killed him, but as any amount of playtime would suggest, turrets are super ineffective at actually wounding with their shots.
• The Unintelligible: In Portal 2, the song "Ghost of Rattmann" is interspersed with hysterical rambling that sounds like Donald Duck getting a lobotomy.
• What You Are in the Dark: Chell didn't even know who he was, let alone that he used her to escape from the facility. If he'd just run away instead of saving her life, she never would've known. He saved her anyway, because he knew it was the right thing to do.

Sentry Turrets

"Target Acquired."

Voiced by: Ellen McLain (English), Elena Kharitonova (Russian)

Small white machines sold for home defense to "Resolve Crises", placed throughout Test Chambers as a lethal hazard.Though they sound like they're speaking pre-recorded messages most of the time, they're just as alive as the rest of Aperture's robots.

---

• Adorable Evil Minions: Hello? Can I help you?
• Affably Evil: They seem quite affable for a bunch of bullet-spewing death machines. In some ways, it only makes them scarier.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: They're really just guns that can talk. Until Portal 2.
• Apologetic Attacker: I don't blame you. I don't hate you. No hard feelings.
• Bottomless Magazines: Justified in this trailer, where Cave shows you how they cram all those bullets in.
• Cartridges in Flight: As pointed out and Lampshaded in this trailer. That the bullets are launched by springs instead of their much stronger propellant may help to explain why Chell can take so many bullets from them and keep on going.
  Cave Johnson: We fire the whole bullet! That's 65% more bullet per bullet!
• Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are: Are you still there?
• Cute Machines: Well, until they pepper you full of lead.
• Enemy Mine: A mild version in 2, after Wheatley takes over the facility, the turrets seem just as eager to shoot at him (or at least his monitors) as they are at Chell.
• Grotesque Cute: Namely due to their voices, not to mention how polite and apologetic they are while they open fire on you. And they ''sing''
• Insistent Terminology: "Dispensing product", not More Dakka.
• King Mook: The Animal King turret, a massive, leopard-patterned turret with a crown used to illustrate what to do in one of many apocalypse scenarios Aperture anticipated. It also plays bass, just because.
• Laser Sight: A beam of light comes straight from their eye, and follows you if they spot you, but it also lets you know how to block them and where they're looking.
• Morality Chip: According to a diagram in the Portal 2 promo trailer above, the turrets contain an "empathy generator" and an "empathy suppressor" to counter it out.
• More Dakka: They never run out of ammo. Ever.
• More Deadly Than the Male: In a way. All the fully operational (and deadly) turrets have female voices, while the defective (and harmless) ones have male voices.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much: The Oracle Turret from Portal 2.
• Pet the Dog: Portal 2 has an achievement for rescuing the Oracle Turret from a conveyor belt. It has some strange things to say in response.
• Standard Female Grab Area: In a manner of speaking. Picking up a turret (if you can get past its gunfire or sneak up on it) will automatically orient it away from you and prevent it from firing. Add the responses to such actions including "Hey!" and "Put me down!" (which of course use cutesy female voices).
• The Unfought: Chell never engages the Animal King turret seen in the early elevator videos, or even encounters it except in the Turret Opera at the end.
• Villains Out Shopping: The turrets make such a lovely choir.
• Weaksauce Weakness: All it takes to make them panic-fire and shut down is to tip them over so they're no longer standing, whether through remotely portalling them, dropping falling objects on them, or dropping them while carrying them.

Party Escort Bot

"Thank you for assuming the Party Escort Submission Position."

The Party Escort Bot, alternatively known as the Party Associate, is a robot appearing in the retconned PC version of Portal, as of the March 3, 2010 patch. Its only role in the game is to drag Chell back into the facility after she defeats GLaDOS, so that she can have new adventures in the sequel.

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• Chekhov's Gunman: When GLaDOS first mentions him, it appears as if he does not exist at all. Then there is no mention of him for a long time, until he suddenly turns up as a Diabolus ex Machina in the ending.
• Diabolus ex Machina: After Chell has survived hours of deadly testing, GLaDOS' deathtrap, navigated the facilities, and then confronted GLaDOS in her room and defeated her, she ends up semi-conscious on a parking lot, and this robot drags her back into the facility.
• The Ghost: Was this before the March 3rd update.
• Palette Swap: The robot is seen on one panel in the Lab Rat comic, and it is apparently merely a purple version of Atlas, or possibly a personality core with arms (which Wheatley was planned to have, per the commentary, but were cut because they could not believably retract). Portal: The Uncooperative Cake Acquisition Game would later confirm it to be a case of the latter, with a new 3D render of the Party Escort Bot.
• Robo Speak: In the one line it has in the game, it probably has the most severe case of Robo Speak in the entire series.
• Small Role, Big Impact: If it wasn't for this robot, Chell wouldn't wake up for her another (and bigger) adventure in Aperture Science, as seen in the sequel.
• Wham Line: "Thank you for assuming the party escort submission position."
• The Voice: Although it is obviously very close to Chell in the ending, it is actually never seen as it drags her back in-game. No-clipping reveals merely a placeholder box with the model texture for a can of beans on one of its faces. Ironically, in the Lab Rat comic, the robot becomes The Voiceless, as it is revealed for the first time, but has no dialogue.