I once read a book about mages who lived forever and it posed two problems

1) The cost to be immortal was often steep or tedious. Either sacrifice a village of people or perform an expensive ritual every month that required more and more ingredients.

2) Psychological toll. Retaining memories for more than a life time is difficult for a mortal human brain. So the older you are the more incomprehensible you become. Gilgamesh appears in the books and is absolutely destroyed mentally.

So this made me think: what if immortality meant perfect bodily stasis. Including the brain.

When you become immortal, whatever issues you have become the base line AND your neuropathways are fixed. You can no longer LEARN and you struggle to remember new things.

Imagine it, you meet this immortal lady who talks as if she's a hundred years old. Her office is filled with journals, rolodexs and address books cover her desk. There's a board on the wall where she has written the year and president. Every time you ask her a question she references a small book of notes and then turns to the massive wall of card catalog drawers. Often she jokes about how fortunate she is she was a librarian before the change.

#worldbuilding #writingprompt #HeadCannon

Portal 2's Co Op, assuming it's Canon, has notable effects on any potential Half Life 3.

You launch War Drones. It's played as a one off joke, but, her facility is allegedly ~1 Massachusetts Large. And she repaired it back to almost new in a couple hours.

Invading Aperture is a thing you can not pull off.

"But Aperture has no real reason to care about the Combine though!" I can hear you asking, but actually, she does. The people she gains at the end of the CoOp are pretty much all dead within a week, if I recall my lore correctly, and she released Chell. And clearly Atlas and P-Body aren't quite cutting it any more.

She's going to start making noise (The drones we released during CoOp), attracting the Combine to her relatively small above ground facilities. They're going to try to enter. And they will.

The first time, they'll be met by Atlas & P-Body and some turrets, and stripped of their technology for Glados to Study.

After that, for the most part, Combine entering the building will be high speed Emancipation Grilled, and sent for testing. Glados of course puts up the persona of this being a resistance base, a big one, aggravating the Combine all the time so they send more soldiers.

At some point she reveals the portal gun, and the combine of course freak out - Lets be real, it's miles ahead of what they or Black Mesa ever developed.

They call in reinforcements from other dimensions, and Glados, being a smart cookie, takes advantage, capturing yet more alien tech, learning from it, and reverse engineers her way to Xen.

And at that point it's all over. She can grab anybody, from any universe, for testing.

Heard of the Portal 2 Perpetual Testing Initiative?
The Lore?

She has contact with parallel Apertures, but more importantly, parallel universes full of test subjects.

I submit that the players in this mode are in fact Combine, at least at first. Until they're all dead.

#Portal #Portal2 #HalfLife #HalfLife2 #HalfLife3 #Valve #Steam #HeadCannon #GameTheory #Glados #Games

Random hot take:

C-3PO must be a droid you can buy, as a kit.

#starwars #c3po #headcannon