Work Text:
When I was in high school, my mom was very well aware of how much I liked Portal 2. So for my birthday one year, she went to some game store and said "My daughter likes Portal 2, give me your Portal 2 stuff."
It was a good year.
One of those gifts was a Portal 2 PotatOS Science Kit, a piece of officially licensed merchandise by ThinkGeek, Inc. Basically, you could create a potato battery (potato not included) that looked like GLaDOS in her potato form. As soon as you finished putting it together, it would say GLaDOS' line that started with "OW! You stabbed me!" According to its Amazon page, it could play 17 audio clips, but I remember only getting it to play a few. I remember it once kind of glitched and kept saying "OW! OW! OW!" over and over, screaming in endless pain until I finally disassembled it. I messed around with it with my friends for little while and then got bored and put it away, leaving it to sit in its box in my drawer for years.
Over the winter break, I went home and found it again. I remembered that there was one thing that came with the kit that, lore-wise, is pretty interesting: Chell's potato battery poster from the part of the game where you found the remains of Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, but with a lot more text. As far as I know, this is only piece of Portal media where you can see things from Chell's perspective. Granted, this is from when Chell was a (hopefully) innocent child who had not yet experienced the trauma of the events in Portal and Portal 2. Since this is officially licensed, this bit of lore could be canon. I figured not many people here bought this kit and it looks like buying one would be pretty tough nowadays, plus I couldn't find a good picture of the poster online, so I thought I would share the text on the poster here in case people would find it interesting and could take inspiration from it when writing fanfics.
PROBLEM
My dad said somebody at the cafeteria ordered too many potatoes so everybody has to do a science project on potatoes now for Take Your Daughter to Work Day and lunch will be french fries. Mr. Johnson said we could use as Many potatoes as we liked for our projects but I'm only going to use one. I asked my dad if I could do a different project because I already did a potato Battery project in class last year and he said no, Mr. Johnson would get Mad.
HYPOTHESIS
Probably the potato will do the same thing it did last year for my class project, except mabe not because I had a new potato last time and this one is pretty old. My dad says his hypothesis is whoever ordered all the potatoes will probably Get fired
MATERIALS
One potato
A nail
A voltmeter
A piece of copper wire
A piece of steel wool
special ingredient from Dad's work
PROCEDURES
I did the same thing I did last time.
CONCLUSIONS
Last time my potato battery Produced 1.5 volts. This time it got 1.6, so I guess it doesn't Matter how old the potato is. The current from the potato battery didn't produce enough volts to power anything important. if I used more potatoes maybe I could have gotten more volts, but the one dad brought home smelled and I didn't want more.
by Chell
And there you have it! I tried to copy it exactly, misspelling and weird capitalizations and all. I can't quite tell how old Chell is supposed to be from the writing, but it's pretty clear she's in grade school. That's a point of discussion.
Chell being mute (or rather choosing not to talk) means that we the audience know precious little about her. That's why I find this glimpse into her personality, at least as it was when she was a (probably) normal child, so fascinating and wanted to share it. I hope you all enjoyed.