| abstract | - The silent main 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.
* Action Girl: See Badass below.
* Ambiguously Brown: Her face and body model had a Brazilian father and a Japanese mother.
* Badass: Just look at her moves in this trailer and try to claim otherwise. Then again, being put through 20 chambers of testing hell will make anyone into a chiseled badass.
* 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.
* Guile Hero
* Heroic Mime: GLaDOS even complains about her lack of response in the final chamber. 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."
* Word of God from writer Erik Wolpaw: "She just chooses not to, what with the robots all being dicks. Why give them the satisfaction?".
* "Why should Aperture Science accept you as a research volunteer, and would anyone file a police report if you went missing? HR Note: Subject refused to answer."
* I Was Told There Would Be Cake: There really was a cake. She never did get it, though.
* Late to the Party: In the first game, she goes through tests before she finds out what happened. In the second game, this time, she's really late.
* 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 badass 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.
* Mysterious Past: We never do find out exactly who Chell is. GLaDOS likes to claim she's an orphan, which is literally 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.
* No Last Name Given: 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's favourite barbs is to claim Chell was abandoned by her birth parents and later adopted.
* Phlebotinum Rebel
* Progressively Prettier: By the looks of her design in the second game, it seems to imply she found some moisturizer, make up, and a hair brush, and fixed those stray gray hairs of hers. Perhaps the Party Escort Bot fixed her up to look good for the party.
* Here she is in Portal 1, and in Portal 2 she looks like this. Wow!
* Required Secondary Gadgetry: 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 springs 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 her 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.
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* She can smash monitors in almost all the test chambers, and can even get an achievement for doing it eleven times.
* Stock Footage: 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.
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