#lab rat portal

[mulletsg]

doug

[cozmic-ash]

just two days since the mainframe went down and I'm still messed up

room feels like a meat freezer I dangle in like cold cuts

--

I've actually had the sketch for this for like a year but I was recently exposed to Sleep Token and I LITERALLY CAN'T STOP listening to this song which makes me think Doug Thoughts (tm) so

semi-annual Rattmann portrait :)

I very much had this old piece from 2012 in my head while I was doing the new one, even though they're very different (in, uh, several ways lmao). Maybe kind of a spiritual successor, as seems to be a common thing I end up doing with these portraits

[birdbrained-on-mars]

okay guys I read lab rat

So the robot dragged her back in - cool. Got it.

But now I have new questions. So the uhh..the guy. I don't know his name. Was he an previous employee? Is he the one who was drawing on the walls and leaving the cans and water buckets and stuff around behind panels? He's schizophrenic, right? And he imagines the companion cube with a voice (I'm very attached to the companion cubes too. And the frankenturrets) Why does he have a companion cube? Does GlaDOS really know him or would she just recognize him as an assistant to thr main scientist? Is GlaDOS trying to hunt him down or anything? Why did GlaDOS flood the place with neurotoxin? Everyone seemed to be pretty on her side. Why did one turret to the leg kill him but forty three to Chell's organs don't? Did he die or am i remembering that wrong? Why did Chell look so weirdly glamorized?

so I finished portal 1 today (yeah I played 2 before one - it didn't really make a big difference or anything). It ended just with our character laying on the parking lot or something. My main question is :

How the hell did she get back into Aperture Laboratories?? Why did she go back in if she did so willingly?? And it's not like we were a new person. In Want You Gone, she says "remember when you tried to kill me twice?" So that means we're the same person.

What's going on? Is there actually any real explanation?

is our character named Chell

[all-over-apertures-walls]

I still can't get over how in the lab rat valve artists wiggled Rattman's skinny noodle body around like a rag doll and put him in places and positions and this stickman was soooo expressive in those

I mean uhh. Let's just take a look, ok?

Adorable bright miserable boy

[mythicalwater]

the Rat Man

[thatoneidiort]

Switched swapped things up a bit and this is what came out

(Chell is caroline, wheatley is cave, atlas is chell, p body is wheatley, cave is a lemon, defective turret is p body, turret is atlas, caroline is doug, doug is defective turret, glados is turret.)

[aperture-hag]

I like to think that Doug Rattmann was acquainted with Caroline before her ascension into GLaDOS. Maybe Doug greatly admired many of the positive traits she presented. Maybe he idolized her for her masterful knowledge of Aperture’s inter-workings, her pragmatism, and her devotion to making sure her facility was operational at its highest capacity. 

So when his Companion Cube starts speaking to him, urging him to do what it takes to navigate Aperture and stay alive, it's Caroline's voice he hears.

She's his Companion Caroline.

[archie-the-menace]

I- Hm.

What have I done to this man.

[shr00mie-rat]

I depend on you

Based on that trend from tiktok on which I also posted the drawing on (high quality-ish ver and original image under cut)

[internetskiff]

Its important to note that while GLaDOS is completely capable of outright killing people, she seems to very often resort to excusing it as some kind of experiment, lying either to her victims or perhaps even herself. You have to REALLY set her off for her to drop all pretense and get completely murderous with you. Viewing it from that perspective, its really interesting that she used the "Schrodinger's Cat" thought experiment as an excuse to gain access to some neurotoxin, because.. When you think about it, she didn't even lie in this case. The scientists never considered that while traditionally the experiment involves a literal box with a cat inside of it, Aperture can easily serve as a "box" with plenty of employees that can easily serve as the "cats". From an outsider's perspective, she has actually perfectly recreated the exact conditions of the thought experiment - with no employees ever leaving, and the company going completely radio silent, an outside observer perceives Aperture's staff as simultaneously alive and dead. And the raging Resonance Cascade on the surface means that, at least for a good while, there won't be a single soul that could open up the "box" and break the illusion.

[nuttersincorporated]

Portal Timeline Including Fan Content (accurate to the best of my ability)

1944 Cave Johnson buys a salt mine and starts Aperture Science Innovators

1950’s Aperture’s heyday! Astronauts, war heroes and Olympians come to Aperture to help advance science

1952 Testing on Repulsion Gel begins

Portal Stories: Mel; Mel arrives at Aperture and goes into long term relaxation

1953 The first quantum tunnelling portal technology is created

1968 Aperture is investigated by the US Senate over missing astronauts.

1971 Testing begins on Propulsion Gel

Aperture now promises to give $60 to anyone desperate enough to volunteer for testing

1981 Cave Johnson buys moonrock, finds it makes a good portal surface and turns it into Conversion Gel. He also finds that he’s allergic to moon rock and develops cancer (Fun fact! Moon dust does give people allergic like reactions. We don’t know how toxic it is)

1982 Cave starts looking for a way to live forever through technology. He says that if he dies before it’s finished, his assistant Caroline is to be put in charge of Aperture whether she wants to or not. If they need to, he tells them to put her in his machine – once it’s finished – and make her immortal.

Aperture starts to have AI staff.

The human staff are now forced to be test subjects.

Portal: Revolution; One of the scientists working on brain mapping technology is Emilia Conly.

1986 Aperture finds out Black Mesa is working on portal technology. In response, Aperture starts properly working on developing GLaDOS

1987 Cave dies

Late 1980’s or early 1990’s Aperture Desk Job; A personality core called Grady and a human Aperture employee test toilets. They make toilet turrets and meet a version of Cave who survived death by becoming a giant robot head.

Robot-head-Cave begs for death but can’t be killed. He falls into the bowels of Aperture where he will live forever. Grady and the human Aperture employee go into witness protection.

1990’s Caroline is forced into having her mind uploaded into GLaDOS

GLaDOS tries to kill everyone

The scientists attach personality cores on her, to try and control her

Extrusion tunnels are invented

2000’s GLaDOS kills almost all the scientists and begins perpetual testing

Portal Reloaded; An AI learns that GLaDOS will be defeated at some point in the future. They wake test subject 4509 and gets her to test with the triple portal gun, in the hope that she’ll be able to change the future

GLaDOS makes the Lazer Redirection Cubes

Lab Rat; Doug Rattmann puts Chell at the top of the testing list

Portal 1; you know how it goes

Between Portal and Portal 2

With no humans or central core to tell them what to do, some of the AIs start to do their own thing

Aperture starts to fall apart

Portal Reloaded; Test subject 4509 and the time aware AI appear, solve tests and go back in time.

Test subject 4509 escapes and probably dies almost immediately

Betty Help; Betty wants to help everyone

Portal: Revolution; Aperture continues to decay. A cleaning core called Stirling decided to reactive GLaDOS by getting a test subject to use the Spire. The Spire doesn’t work as intended, things get teleported about and the test subject ends up deep underground.

Emilia Conly has a copy of her memory and personality uploaded into a core. Emilia and the test subject stop Stirling and they end up on the moon.

The Underground; Due to the shenanigans in Portal Revolution, another one of Cave’s try-to-cheat-death machines is activated. A version of Cave finds himself in the Mainframe.

The Mainframe instructs some Aperture AIs to set up a sifting system for cores. Cores the Mainframe likes get added to the Mainframe. Cores he doesn’t like get turned into Party Escort Robots.

Portal Stories: Mel; Virgil falls into old Aperture. He wakes up Mel and gets her to help him get back up. The two inadvertently triggering AEGIS. AEGIS sees them as a threat and try to kill them.

AEGIS shakes Aperture while trying to kill Virgil and Mel. This scares Wheatley who starts waking test subjects and spending them to find the portal gun. He wakes six test subjects (Doug Rattmann is possibly one of them) and assumes they die when he can no longer see them.

Mel beats AEGIS and Virgil helps her escapes to freedom. As AEGIS shuts down, it wakes Chell.

Wheatley knocks on Chell’s door

Portal 2! If you’ve read this far, you know the plot of Portal 2 and you don’t need me to summaries it

Portal 2 Co-op

Aperture Tag: The Paint Gun Testing Initiative; Nigel – a personality core designed by GLaDOS – gets a test subject to test with a Paint Gun. The Paint Gun shoots repulsion and propulsion gel. The test subject tests and does maintenance by deactivating the Aperture Laboratories Stability Stable Energy Reactor (ALSSER).

Meet the Cores; various Aperture cores are doing their own thing around the facility. Aperture seem to be falling apart again

Edit: Since the multiverse is a thing in Portal canon, anything that doesn’t fit properly can be treated as if it happens in another universe. VALVe has said that Aperture Desk Job can be treated like an AU but might also become fully canon at some point.

There’s a good chance that The Underground is set after Portal 2 rather than between the main games. This means that GLaDOS and the Mainframe could conceivably have a showdown at some point which would be fun to see (I might write a fanfic about this at some point).

[mulletsg]

i'm going to kick him in the head REALLY hard

Bluesky post here.

[dr-sunshine-apologist]

Now, I only want you gone

[birdbrained-on-mars]

your boy made the portal cake today. There was sprinkles everywhere and it's not perfect but at least the cake isn't a lie

Also the first time I've ever made cake :D

[all-over-apertures-walls]

I mean yeah ratguy is all skinny and scrawny etc but drawing him I should remember that he must actually have really good muscles in his legs. All that running around with a huge metal cube is hell of a cardio

Look at him go

[mad0katsuki]

It’s fun that the only man I’m into from portal it’s literally the only one who is barely mentioned in the game, is used in the ARG and the ONLY moment he totally appears is in a comic

I we need more Rattmann appreciation