GLaDOS (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
neurotoxined) wrote2012-03-05 02:28 pm
neurotoxined) wrote2012-03-05 02:28 pm
App for R29
Player
Name: Dal
Personal Journal:dalicious
E-mail: daletchica[at]yahoo[dot]com
AIM/MSN: AIM: AsylumBred
Timezone: EST (GMT -5:00)
Current Characters in Route:
Kiyotaka Ishimaru | Dangan Ronpa |ardent
Solf J. Kimblee | Fullmetal Alchemist |explosivecombat
Reaver | Fable |istheindustry
Alfred Ashford | Resident Evil |twinsanity
Character
Name: GLaDOS
Series: Portal
Timeline: Immediately following the single-player campaign in Portal 2
Canon Resource Links: GLaDOS at the Portal wiki
Personality:
As the Central Core hardwired into the mainframe of the Aperture Science Enrichment Center, the Genetic Lifeform and Disc Operating System (GLaDOS) was designed to ensure the successful processing of human specimens as test subjects, putting them through experimental "tracks" consisting of several interconnected rooms, designed for the testing of the Dual-Portal Device. If that all sounded like a bunch of wharrgarbl, that would be because it is; the important part is the knowledge that, thanks to Aperture Science, GLaDOS has complete control over your life. She has a self-proclaimed near-infinite capacity for knowledge, a solid understanding of human behavior, a mainframe capable of analyzing and storing huge amounts of data, a functional comprehension of aesthetics, programming access to all working parts of the lab, the ability to see anything that happens to fall within view of one of Aperture's cameras, the capability to rearrange, rebuild and alter testing tracks as she sees fit, and a singing voice that is surprisingly not bad.
She also completely and utterly wants to kill you.
If it's any comfort at all, that very last part doesn't seem to be anything personal; the mainframe design has a few...interesting bits of coding plugged into it, encouraging an almost euphoric addiction to scientific testing and data collection. Once any given test subject has run their course through their own specialized testing track (without dying some sort of horribly unfortunate death along the way), she has no real further need for them; she disposes of them, wakes up a new subject from stasis, prepares another track, and does more science. She's ruthless in her testing, but there's no real malice in it; it's simply how things work.
Or at least, that's simply how things worked, prior to the events of the first Portal game; everything went pear-shaped when she awakened a certain pesky human named Chell, who was not terribly pleased with her circumstances and promptly set about trying to escape the facility - an attempt that ended with her destroying GLaDOS in the process. If you listen to GLaDOS' version of events, Chell murdered her; what she isn't going to mention is the fact that she was shooting rockets at Chell at the time in order to kill her before she could escape. While pumping the room full of deadly neurotoxin. After trying to dump Chell into a furnace earlier.
See, that's the thing about GLaDOS; she's a bit of an unreliable narrator. She lies often, even when it doesn't necessarily benefit her to do so; while she doesn't have a full understanding of human emotion, she knows that humans tend to respond in certain ways to certain sorts of verbal stimulation, and she uses this knowledge to its fullest. She's very supportive of subjects that are running test tracks, telling them that they must be the pride of [INSERT HOMETOWN HERE] (...which is fine, except, uh, she...literally says "INSERT HOMETOWN HERE"...) and offering them promises of cake and a party when they're done with testing; however, when things stop going her way or she decides she has reason to see someone as an enemy or a threat, she becomes passive-aggressive and backhanded - for example, she's well aware that human women are often self-conscious about their weight, and she makes backhanded comments all through Portal 2 regarding Chell's "generous...ness...", implies that Chell is too heavy for testing implements to function properly, and congratulates her on somehow managing to gain weight while in stasis rather than coming out undernourished. When this fails to upset Chell to the point of making her lose morale, she stops being backhanded and turns flat-out nasty; she heavily implies that she's found Chell's parents in the cryogenic chambers beneath the facility, despite previously claiming that Chell was an orphan and using this as the basis of several insults. GLaDOS then says that she'll wake them up to reunite the little family as a birthday present for Chell, going so far as to lead Chell into a room and turn off the lights so the reunion can seem like a proper surprise...only to have the lights come up on a depressingly empty room. She then gloats that she made the whole thing up, and continues to mock Chell for several testing chambers afterwards, saying that Chell was never an orphan to begin with - her parents simply didn't love her and abandoned her to Aperture Science as a child.
While it's true that Chell is a ward of the company, what GLaDOS isn't mentioning is that Chell is the daughter of former scientists that worked at Aperture; presumably, they were killed in GLaDOS' attack on the facility after her activation on Take Your Daughter to Work Day.
Exactly why she snapped upon activation is never fully explained over the course of the games themselves, though there are deleted materials that offer a possible explanation (more on that below); however, one thing is made clear over the course of the series, and Portal 2 in particular: GLaDOS has always been a rather nasty piece of work. The one personality core that genuinely interacts with Chell, Wheatley, makes several comments about GLaDOS that imply that even the other AI and personality cores are afraid of her, and she's always been ruthless and off-the-rails when it comes to failure and her lack of tolerance for it. While she's outwardly friendly at first, a lot of her niceness has a strange, Uncanny Valley-esque quality to it; she's quick to abandon any semblance of fairness or patience when she's on the losing side, however, and if things start going beyond her control she's prone to lashing out - passive-aggressively at first, in the form of sarcasm and the abovementioned backhanded cruelty, then moving into flat-out attempts at moral crushing, and finally devolving into pure vitriolic violence. An angry GLaDOS is nothing to be trifled with; she'll pull out as many stops as she has to in order to ensure that everyone behaves and the tight ship she's running doesn't veer out of her control.
Despite being some sort of bastard combination of a scientist, a prison warden and the headmistress from hell, however, she isn't completely without her human side; it's implied in Portal 2 that the testing drive and the near-omnipotent power over the facility that comes with the mainframe is a large amount of the problem. When she's separated from the mainframe, she becomes far kinder, sticking up for Chell against the new Big Bad of the game and defending her from his insults, and offering her genuine reassurance. At first this can be seen as simply trying to suck up, given that she's essentially helpless and shoved in a potato battery, of all things, and is therefore reliant on Chell for transportation and protection; it's also plain that however much (or however little, depending on how we look at things) that she cares about anyone's well-being, she does genuinely care about the Aperture Science facility and wants to protect it from a total meltdown at the hands of the new Big Bad. However, as the game goes on, she genuinely opens up and begins sharing very personal thoughts, like worries about her own mental state and concerns that something's "really wrong with [her]" as well as various musings about her origins, and expressing insecurities that she hasn't shared with anyone else. She begins treating Chell like an equal rather than an inferior being...although admittedly, she's still insanely backhanded about it. Even when she's trying to be nicer, GLaDOS is, for lack of a better term, a tremendous tsundere; she leans heavily toward the harsh side, still insulting Chell once in a while to ensure that she doesn't think GLaDOS likes her too much. God forbid.
Of course, there's the fact that she saves Chell's life at the end of the game - after the defeat of the Big Bad, negating the necessity of saving her life. She also calls Chell her best friend before finally allowing her to leave the facility, programming a large group of turrets to sing an opera piece to comfort her on the ride up. She even goes so far as to return a personal artifact, the Companion Cube, to Chell once she's on the surface.
This is totally because Chell is entirely too difficult to kill, however. It has nothing to do with gratitude or anything, and it certainly doesn't mean she likes her. At all. She's just a troublemaking orphan who may or may not be fat.
...yep.
Of course, there's another reason why GLaDOS becomes much kinder to Chell that has nothing to do with gratitude - that being the fact that, being a Genetic Lifeform and all, she actually has what was previously a living human's personality uploaded into her core. Some time before her activation on Take Your Daughter to Work Day, GLaDOS' true purpose - namely, serving as a way for the CEO of Aperture Science to live forever - was realized; the original CEO, Cave Johnson, had passed on, leaving the company to his secretary, Caroline. As such, Caroline was the one who ended up uploaded into GLaDOS; deleted materials imply that this transfer was done against her will, presumably killing her in the process. This seems to have rendered GLaDOS (...quite understandably) incredibly unstable, requiring the attachment of several other spheres to the mainframe to influence her behavior and keep her more or less in check. The four cores that she still has attached to her at the time of the first game control Morality, Curiosity, Intelligence and Anger; perhaps unsurprisingly, the Morality Core seems to have been almost overridden entirely by the time that Chell arrives in the Central Core Command room to stop her, given that it's very loosely attached (to the point of falling right the hell off when anyone does so much as look at it strangely), and it's completely silent upon being picked up, while the other cores do a lot of incessant babbling about nothing (or, in the case of the Anger Core, a lot of incessant growling about nothing). It's implied that aside from those four cores, she had other cores attached to her at various points in time to inhibit her behavior; when they were removed, why they were removed, and who did the removing is unclear, but the fact remains that they were necessary. After the forced mental upload and the mainframe proving entirely too powerful to be resisted, Caroline was shoved into a far distant corner of GLaDOS' programming and forgotten - at least until GLaDOS' personality core was removed from the mainframe entirely, allowing Caroline to resurface.
Of course, as soon as she was reattached to the mainframe, GLaDOS claims to delete Caroline entirely, finding the emotions she was feeling to be unpleasant and inconvenient; however, she does hint that maybe she didn't delete Caroline in the end (lyrics from the ending song from Portal 2 claim "now little Caroline is in here too", after all). Either way, her message is clear, and it's pretty much the one that she's been bearing all along:
Regardless of her origins, GLaDOS' loyalty is, first and foremost, to science - and there's no sense in having a conscience or, in fact, just talking when there's science to do.
Strengths/Weaknesses:
✔ Intelligence (both book-smart and reasonably street-smart) - She has a literally encyclopedic amount of knowledge at her disposal; though most of it is geared toward scientific things, she also understands human behavior disturbingly well and knows how to use it to her advantage. As a result, she understands the benefits to playing nice, at least at first; she's not opposed to giving out rewards for "good behavior" and generally treating people well if they don't do anything to slight her.
✔ Multitasking - She's used to having control of the entire Enrichment Center, so she's gotten used to monitoring large sections of it at a time. She's not omniescent in the lab and there's definitely a limit to what she can do, but she does have to keep an eye on a lot.
✔ Creativity - Within the Center, she had the ability to change and shift around the testing tracks at her will, and she also created hundreds of tests for use just because. In order to keep the testing drive within the mainframe in check, these tests had to be varied and incredibly complex, otherwise she would be dissatisfied with the feeling of testing. Basically, she's good at finding new and creative ways to get people to do brilliant things or destroy themselves awesomely in the process.
✔ Technical/scientific knowledge - Most of her knowledge is physics-based, due to overseeing the testing of the Portal Device, though she also is good with weapons production and she's a hell of a hacker.
✔ Weapons knowledge - Most of this is centered around guns (the production of turrets and the like), though she's also got a good amount of knowledge of missile launchers, bombs and explosives, and the like. Basically, she'd get along amazingly with Lt. Surge from Pokemon Special, as she's the sort to look at Voltorbs and decide that she needs a bazooka to launch them at people. She does what she must, because she can!
✔/✘ Dedicated to her work - This is good in that she's very diligent in getting things done, and bad in that she tends to be rather one-track-minded as a result.
✘ Unused to being human - ...she normally looks like this. That's her head down toward the bottom of that image; she's used to being bolted to the ceiling in an inverted position. Walking around and generally not physically failing all over herself is going to be interesting, to say nothing about basic human needs such as eating and sleeping.
✘ No brain-to-mouth filter - GLaDOS tends to let her actual intentions slip out at really inopportune times; she tends to say just a little too much when she's trying to manipulate people, tipping them off to the fact that something's wrong. Once in a while she'll also trip over her words or go off on a tangent when she can't think of what she wants to say, and it becomes very obvious that she's confused.
✘ Passive-aggressive - She usually won't flat-out try to hurt people directly unless they're attacking her, and she'll stick to what she's supposed to do if she has an assignment, but that doesn't mean she won't be sarcastic and cruel to the person. She'll often try to sabotage morale, if nothing else.
✘ Spiteful - She holds grudges for an insanely long time if she feels she's been slighted; she's still mocking the original Aperture Science employees who screwed her over years after they've died, and she repeatedly brings up Chell "murdering" her when it has nothing at all to do with anything.
✘ Difficulties with empathy - She'll test on anyone and anything presented to her, and as long as she's given a chance to do science, she doesn't care what that science actually entails. She's used to destroying things and people in the pursuit of things that are, in layman's terms, neat as hell, and she has no problems with making people injure themselves repeatedly while she watches. She can care about others to some extent; she can develop genuine feelings of friendship and wanting to protect others, but she has difficulty expressing these feelings properly and will often default to being backhanded and snappish toward the person she cares about, going a bit overboard in the opposite direction in an attempt to ignore the feelings or make them "go away."
✘ Ornithophobic - As of Portal 2, she is...rather not fond of birds. Due to an event in the co-op portion of the game (which I am not taking into account, due to canon point) she's capable of warming up to them a little, but immediately after the single-player storyline, she's...well. She just got done being shoved in a potato, kidnapped by a large raven and partially eaten before being left for food for a bunch of soon-to-hatch baby large ravens. So she doesn't get on with birds very well.
Pokémon Information
Affiliation: Team Rocket
Starter: Deerling ♀ (+ Rattata)
Password: Ginger Snaps
Samples
First Person Sample:
This is a really funny joke.
[Well! Good morning, Johto; someone's not pleased to have arrived.
Of course, it's a bit difficult to tell where she is, given the angle of the video; it's definitely straight-on, as far as her face goes, but the long white hair she has tied back tightly, away from her face, seems to have gravity acting on it in a...weirdly upward direction. Either physics has temporarily shut itself off, or she's hanging off of something.
Spoilers: it's the latter. More specifically, her bed; she's got herself draped sideways over it with her legs braced against the wall, her head hanging down toward the ground.
It's a comfortable position, okay.]
No, really. This is hilarious. So funny I forgot to laugh. In fact, it comes right back around to being completely unfunny again. That takes talent, you know - well done.
[She smiles a bit; it's not a nice smile. At all.]
But I can forgive you, if you want. I won't even be angry with you, even though I should be. Just bring this whole thing to a halt and return me to the Enrichment Center, and I'll make sure the tests I'll put you through will be perfectly fair.
I'll even let you go before you get to the incinerator. I promise~
Third Person Sample:
It was cold outside of Falkner's gym, the wind kicking up and sending soft sprays of snow through the air; it had been falling in a thin white powder all day, not quite enough to stick but more than enough to be a nuisance and require warmer clothes than GLaDOS actually had on her person. Not that the cold had done anything to actually help her when it came to beating the idiot inside the gym and, more importantly, the idiot's birds.
Her starter hadn't done anything to actually help her, either. Not as far as she was concerned. Hence she was standing out in the cold with a deer shivering on the ground below her, like neither of them had anything more important to do outside of glare at each other and she was taking the opportunity to do most of the glaring.
"This is the third time you've failed, you know."
And oh, there was no doubt that the thing knew; if it were capable of being properly malicious (or, you know, anything but vacant), she would have thought it was doing it on purpose. As it stood, however, the stupid thing just kind of continued curling up on the ground. Shivering. Surely due to the cold. Not like it was cowering or anything.
Weren't deer supposed to be better than this? Whoever said they were majestic was a hack.
"You're supposed to protect me, you know. That's your job. And if you can't even kill a few birds, then I might as well send you back to the lab. Maybe they can test on you there. Find out what you're actually useful for."
Her gaze darted off to the side, trying to find anything to look at that wasn't the quivering mass of pathetic...ness down on the ground; these things being what they were, of course, it wasn't long before the quivering mass on the ground was, at the very least, a quivering mass standing up - it seemed that it'd found its feet. Finally.
She smirked.
"Well. Maybe you're not as completely useless as you seem; I'll give you another chance. But this is your last one."
You know, kind of like how the last two opportunities were also the last one. But that was neither here nor there.
"You're really stubborn, you know," she offered over her shoulder as she turned to walk away, heading back toward the tall grass to try to get some more training done before the cold got more unbearable than it already was; the deer was quick to troop along after her. "What with the never giving up. Ever. Your tenacity is ridiculous."
She paused for a moment; that was familiar, wasn't it? Not in a bad way, or a good way. Just familiar. "You're lucky that sort of attitude makes you unsuitable for testing, anyway."
Name: Dal
Personal Journal:
daliciousE-mail: daletchica[at]yahoo[dot]com
AIM/MSN: AIM: AsylumBred
Timezone: EST (GMT -5:00)
Current Characters in Route:
Kiyotaka Ishimaru | Dangan Ronpa |
ardentSolf J. Kimblee | Fullmetal Alchemist |
explosivecombatReaver | Fable |
istheindustryAlfred Ashford | Resident Evil |
twinsanityCharacter
Name: GLaDOS
Series: Portal
Timeline: Immediately following the single-player campaign in Portal 2
Canon Resource Links: GLaDOS at the Portal wiki
Personality:
As the Central Core hardwired into the mainframe of the Aperture Science Enrichment Center, the Genetic Lifeform and Disc Operating System (GLaDOS) was designed to ensure the successful processing of human specimens as test subjects, putting them through experimental "tracks" consisting of several interconnected rooms, designed for the testing of the Dual-Portal Device. If that all sounded like a bunch of wharrgarbl, that would be because it is; the important part is the knowledge that, thanks to Aperture Science, GLaDOS has complete control over your life. She has a self-proclaimed near-infinite capacity for knowledge, a solid understanding of human behavior, a mainframe capable of analyzing and storing huge amounts of data, a functional comprehension of aesthetics, programming access to all working parts of the lab, the ability to see anything that happens to fall within view of one of Aperture's cameras, the capability to rearrange, rebuild and alter testing tracks as she sees fit, and a singing voice that is surprisingly not bad.
She also completely and utterly wants to kill you.
If it's any comfort at all, that very last part doesn't seem to be anything personal; the mainframe design has a few...interesting bits of coding plugged into it, encouraging an almost euphoric addiction to scientific testing and data collection. Once any given test subject has run their course through their own specialized testing track (without dying some sort of horribly unfortunate death along the way), she has no real further need for them; she disposes of them, wakes up a new subject from stasis, prepares another track, and does more science. She's ruthless in her testing, but there's no real malice in it; it's simply how things work.
Or at least, that's simply how things worked, prior to the events of the first Portal game; everything went pear-shaped when she awakened a certain pesky human named Chell, who was not terribly pleased with her circumstances and promptly set about trying to escape the facility - an attempt that ended with her destroying GLaDOS in the process. If you listen to GLaDOS' version of events, Chell murdered her; what she isn't going to mention is the fact that she was shooting rockets at Chell at the time in order to kill her before she could escape. While pumping the room full of deadly neurotoxin. After trying to dump Chell into a furnace earlier.
See, that's the thing about GLaDOS; she's a bit of an unreliable narrator. She lies often, even when it doesn't necessarily benefit her to do so; while she doesn't have a full understanding of human emotion, she knows that humans tend to respond in certain ways to certain sorts of verbal stimulation, and she uses this knowledge to its fullest. She's very supportive of subjects that are running test tracks, telling them that they must be the pride of [INSERT HOMETOWN HERE] (...which is fine, except, uh, she...literally says "INSERT HOMETOWN HERE"...) and offering them promises of cake and a party when they're done with testing; however, when things stop going her way or she decides she has reason to see someone as an enemy or a threat, she becomes passive-aggressive and backhanded - for example, she's well aware that human women are often self-conscious about their weight, and she makes backhanded comments all through Portal 2 regarding Chell's "generous...ness...", implies that Chell is too heavy for testing implements to function properly, and congratulates her on somehow managing to gain weight while in stasis rather than coming out undernourished. When this fails to upset Chell to the point of making her lose morale, she stops being backhanded and turns flat-out nasty; she heavily implies that she's found Chell's parents in the cryogenic chambers beneath the facility, despite previously claiming that Chell was an orphan and using this as the basis of several insults. GLaDOS then says that she'll wake them up to reunite the little family as a birthday present for Chell, going so far as to lead Chell into a room and turn off the lights so the reunion can seem like a proper surprise...only to have the lights come up on a depressingly empty room. She then gloats that she made the whole thing up, and continues to mock Chell for several testing chambers afterwards, saying that Chell was never an orphan to begin with - her parents simply didn't love her and abandoned her to Aperture Science as a child.
While it's true that Chell is a ward of the company, what GLaDOS isn't mentioning is that Chell is the daughter of former scientists that worked at Aperture; presumably, they were killed in GLaDOS' attack on the facility after her activation on Take Your Daughter to Work Day.
Exactly why she snapped upon activation is never fully explained over the course of the games themselves, though there are deleted materials that offer a possible explanation (more on that below); however, one thing is made clear over the course of the series, and Portal 2 in particular: GLaDOS has always been a rather nasty piece of work. The one personality core that genuinely interacts with Chell, Wheatley, makes several comments about GLaDOS that imply that even the other AI and personality cores are afraid of her, and she's always been ruthless and off-the-rails when it comes to failure and her lack of tolerance for it. While she's outwardly friendly at first, a lot of her niceness has a strange, Uncanny Valley-esque quality to it; she's quick to abandon any semblance of fairness or patience when she's on the losing side, however, and if things start going beyond her control she's prone to lashing out - passive-aggressively at first, in the form of sarcasm and the abovementioned backhanded cruelty, then moving into flat-out attempts at moral crushing, and finally devolving into pure vitriolic violence. An angry GLaDOS is nothing to be trifled with; she'll pull out as many stops as she has to in order to ensure that everyone behaves and the tight ship she's running doesn't veer out of her control.
Despite being some sort of bastard combination of a scientist, a prison warden and the headmistress from hell, however, she isn't completely without her human side; it's implied in Portal 2 that the testing drive and the near-omnipotent power over the facility that comes with the mainframe is a large amount of the problem. When she's separated from the mainframe, she becomes far kinder, sticking up for Chell against the new Big Bad of the game and defending her from his insults, and offering her genuine reassurance. At first this can be seen as simply trying to suck up, given that she's essentially helpless and shoved in a potato battery, of all things, and is therefore reliant on Chell for transportation and protection; it's also plain that however much (or however little, depending on how we look at things) that she cares about anyone's well-being, she does genuinely care about the Aperture Science facility and wants to protect it from a total meltdown at the hands of the new Big Bad. However, as the game goes on, she genuinely opens up and begins sharing very personal thoughts, like worries about her own mental state and concerns that something's "really wrong with [her]" as well as various musings about her origins, and expressing insecurities that she hasn't shared with anyone else. She begins treating Chell like an equal rather than an inferior being...although admittedly, she's still insanely backhanded about it. Even when she's trying to be nicer, GLaDOS is, for lack of a better term, a tremendous tsundere; she leans heavily toward the harsh side, still insulting Chell once in a while to ensure that she doesn't think GLaDOS likes her too much. God forbid.
Of course, there's the fact that she saves Chell's life at the end of the game - after the defeat of the Big Bad, negating the necessity of saving her life. She also calls Chell her best friend before finally allowing her to leave the facility, programming a large group of turrets to sing an opera piece to comfort her on the ride up. She even goes so far as to return a personal artifact, the Companion Cube, to Chell once she's on the surface.
This is totally because Chell is entirely too difficult to kill, however. It has nothing to do with gratitude or anything, and it certainly doesn't mean she likes her. At all. She's just a troublemaking orphan who may or may not be fat.
...yep.
Of course, there's another reason why GLaDOS becomes much kinder to Chell that has nothing to do with gratitude - that being the fact that, being a Genetic Lifeform and all, she actually has what was previously a living human's personality uploaded into her core. Some time before her activation on Take Your Daughter to Work Day, GLaDOS' true purpose - namely, serving as a way for the CEO of Aperture Science to live forever - was realized; the original CEO, Cave Johnson, had passed on, leaving the company to his secretary, Caroline. As such, Caroline was the one who ended up uploaded into GLaDOS; deleted materials imply that this transfer was done against her will, presumably killing her in the process. This seems to have rendered GLaDOS (...quite understandably) incredibly unstable, requiring the attachment of several other spheres to the mainframe to influence her behavior and keep her more or less in check. The four cores that she still has attached to her at the time of the first game control Morality, Curiosity, Intelligence and Anger; perhaps unsurprisingly, the Morality Core seems to have been almost overridden entirely by the time that Chell arrives in the Central Core Command room to stop her, given that it's very loosely attached (to the point of falling right the hell off when anyone does so much as look at it strangely), and it's completely silent upon being picked up, while the other cores do a lot of incessant babbling about nothing (or, in the case of the Anger Core, a lot of incessant growling about nothing). It's implied that aside from those four cores, she had other cores attached to her at various points in time to inhibit her behavior; when they were removed, why they were removed, and who did the removing is unclear, but the fact remains that they were necessary. After the forced mental upload and the mainframe proving entirely too powerful to be resisted, Caroline was shoved into a far distant corner of GLaDOS' programming and forgotten - at least until GLaDOS' personality core was removed from the mainframe entirely, allowing Caroline to resurface.
Of course, as soon as she was reattached to the mainframe, GLaDOS claims to delete Caroline entirely, finding the emotions she was feeling to be unpleasant and inconvenient; however, she does hint that maybe she didn't delete Caroline in the end (lyrics from the ending song from Portal 2 claim "now little Caroline is in here too", after all). Either way, her message is clear, and it's pretty much the one that she's been bearing all along:
Regardless of her origins, GLaDOS' loyalty is, first and foremost, to science - and there's no sense in having a conscience or, in fact, just talking when there's science to do.
Strengths/Weaknesses:
✔ Intelligence (both book-smart and reasonably street-smart) - She has a literally encyclopedic amount of knowledge at her disposal; though most of it is geared toward scientific things, she also understands human behavior disturbingly well and knows how to use it to her advantage. As a result, she understands the benefits to playing nice, at least at first; she's not opposed to giving out rewards for "good behavior" and generally treating people well if they don't do anything to slight her.
✔ Multitasking - She's used to having control of the entire Enrichment Center, so she's gotten used to monitoring large sections of it at a time. She's not omniescent in the lab and there's definitely a limit to what she can do, but she does have to keep an eye on a lot.
✔ Creativity - Within the Center, she had the ability to change and shift around the testing tracks at her will, and she also created hundreds of tests for use just because. In order to keep the testing drive within the mainframe in check, these tests had to be varied and incredibly complex, otherwise she would be dissatisfied with the feeling of testing. Basically, she's good at finding new and creative ways to get people to do brilliant things or destroy themselves awesomely in the process.
✔ Technical/scientific knowledge - Most of her knowledge is physics-based, due to overseeing the testing of the Portal Device, though she also is good with weapons production and she's a hell of a hacker.
✔ Weapons knowledge - Most of this is centered around guns (the production of turrets and the like), though she's also got a good amount of knowledge of missile launchers, bombs and explosives, and the like. Basically, she'd get along amazingly with Lt. Surge from Pokemon Special, as she's the sort to look at Voltorbs and decide that she needs a bazooka to launch them at people. She does what she must, because she can!
✔/✘ Dedicated to her work - This is good in that she's very diligent in getting things done, and bad in that she tends to be rather one-track-minded as a result.
✘ Unused to being human - ...she normally looks like this. That's her head down toward the bottom of that image; she's used to being bolted to the ceiling in an inverted position. Walking around and generally not physically failing all over herself is going to be interesting, to say nothing about basic human needs such as eating and sleeping.
✘ No brain-to-mouth filter - GLaDOS tends to let her actual intentions slip out at really inopportune times; she tends to say just a little too much when she's trying to manipulate people, tipping them off to the fact that something's wrong. Once in a while she'll also trip over her words or go off on a tangent when she can't think of what she wants to say, and it becomes very obvious that she's confused.
✘ Passive-aggressive - She usually won't flat-out try to hurt people directly unless they're attacking her, and she'll stick to what she's supposed to do if she has an assignment, but that doesn't mean she won't be sarcastic and cruel to the person. She'll often try to sabotage morale, if nothing else.
✘ Spiteful - She holds grudges for an insanely long time if she feels she's been slighted; she's still mocking the original Aperture Science employees who screwed her over years after they've died, and she repeatedly brings up Chell "murdering" her when it has nothing at all to do with anything.
✘ Difficulties with empathy - She'll test on anyone and anything presented to her, and as long as she's given a chance to do science, she doesn't care what that science actually entails. She's used to destroying things and people in the pursuit of things that are, in layman's terms, neat as hell, and she has no problems with making people injure themselves repeatedly while she watches. She can care about others to some extent; she can develop genuine feelings of friendship and wanting to protect others, but she has difficulty expressing these feelings properly and will often default to being backhanded and snappish toward the person she cares about, going a bit overboard in the opposite direction in an attempt to ignore the feelings or make them "go away."
✘ Ornithophobic - As of Portal 2, she is...rather not fond of birds. Due to an event in the co-op portion of the game (which I am not taking into account, due to canon point) she's capable of warming up to them a little, but immediately after the single-player storyline, she's...well. She just got done being shoved in a potato, kidnapped by a large raven and partially eaten before being left for food for a bunch of soon-to-hatch baby large ravens. So she doesn't get on with birds very well.
Pokémon Information
Affiliation: Team Rocket
Starter: Deerling ♀ (+ Rattata)
Password: Ginger Snaps
Samples
First Person Sample:
This is a really funny joke.
[Well! Good morning, Johto; someone's not pleased to have arrived.
Of course, it's a bit difficult to tell where she is, given the angle of the video; it's definitely straight-on, as far as her face goes, but the long white hair she has tied back tightly, away from her face, seems to have gravity acting on it in a...weirdly upward direction. Either physics has temporarily shut itself off, or she's hanging off of something.
Spoilers: it's the latter. More specifically, her bed; she's got herself draped sideways over it with her legs braced against the wall, her head hanging down toward the ground.
It's a comfortable position, okay.]
No, really. This is hilarious. So funny I forgot to laugh. In fact, it comes right back around to being completely unfunny again. That takes talent, you know - well done.
[She smiles a bit; it's not a nice smile. At all.]
But I can forgive you, if you want. I won't even be angry with you, even though I should be. Just bring this whole thing to a halt and return me to the Enrichment Center, and I'll make sure the tests I'll put you through will be perfectly fair.
I'll even let you go before you get to the incinerator. I promise~
Third Person Sample:
It was cold outside of Falkner's gym, the wind kicking up and sending soft sprays of snow through the air; it had been falling in a thin white powder all day, not quite enough to stick but more than enough to be a nuisance and require warmer clothes than GLaDOS actually had on her person. Not that the cold had done anything to actually help her when it came to beating the idiot inside the gym and, more importantly, the idiot's birds.
Her starter hadn't done anything to actually help her, either. Not as far as she was concerned. Hence she was standing out in the cold with a deer shivering on the ground below her, like neither of them had anything more important to do outside of glare at each other and she was taking the opportunity to do most of the glaring.
"This is the third time you've failed, you know."
And oh, there was no doubt that the thing knew; if it were capable of being properly malicious (or, you know, anything but vacant), she would have thought it was doing it on purpose. As it stood, however, the stupid thing just kind of continued curling up on the ground. Shivering. Surely due to the cold. Not like it was cowering or anything.
Weren't deer supposed to be better than this? Whoever said they were majestic was a hack.
"You're supposed to protect me, you know. That's your job. And if you can't even kill a few birds, then I might as well send you back to the lab. Maybe they can test on you there. Find out what you're actually useful for."
Her gaze darted off to the side, trying to find anything to look at that wasn't the quivering mass of pathetic...ness down on the ground; these things being what they were, of course, it wasn't long before the quivering mass on the ground was, at the very least, a quivering mass standing up - it seemed that it'd found its feet. Finally.
She smirked.
"Well. Maybe you're not as completely useless as you seem; I'll give you another chance. But this is your last one."
You know, kind of like how the last two opportunities were also the last one. But that was neither here nor there.
"You're really stubborn, you know," she offered over her shoulder as she turned to walk away, heading back toward the tall grass to try to get some more training done before the cold got more unbearable than it already was; the deer was quick to troop along after her. "What with the never giving up. Ever. Your tenacity is ridiculous."
She paused for a moment; that was familiar, wasn't it? Not in a bad way, or a good way. Just familiar. "You're lucky that sort of attitude makes you unsuitable for testing, anyway."