 Good evening. Today is November 14th, 2021, the 20th anniversary of the PS2-exclusive co-op campaign Half-Life Decay. To celebrate this, another creator named Purple Colonel and I are going to be covering the game's two female leads. He's already covered Gina Cross over on his channel, so allow me to now give you the scoop on the most obscure protagonist in the Half-Life series. Dr. Colette Green is the second character you take control of in Half-Life Decay. Donned in her own Maroon HEV suit, she's a 31-year-old woman with a PhD in electrical engineering and robotics, and an insatiable lust for blood. See, Colette has a tendency to laugh during her rampages, which makes her seem a little unhinged in comparison to the calm and collected Gina Cross. In fact, her flashes of excitement while killing zombies are oddly reminiscent of the Mad Monk Father Grigori from the second game. And speaking of the second game, if we have a look at Half-Life's PS2 user manual, which is where most information about Colette comes from, we can see she had a work relationship with Dr. Isaac Kleiner. According to this schedule, Kleiner was set to train Colette on handling anomalous materials like Gordon does only two days before the residence cascade occurred. This training session was postponed until June, however, and thus obviously didn't happen due to the nuclear annihilation of the facility. Kleiner's presence in this game's plot adds more ambiguity to the conundrum of whether the Gearbox games are canon to the series as a whole, but that's honestly a topic deserving of its own video. With all of that exposition out of the way, what does Colette do, and what impact does it have on the greater story of the Black Mace incident? Well, during the incident, Colette is not only present in the Sector C anomalous materials lab with Gordon, but is directly below the test chamber during his experiment, and even personally responsible for initiating the anti-mass spectrometer to run at 105%. After the residence cascade occurs, Colette teams up with Gina to fight aliens and escort Dr. Richard Keller to the surface, where he contacts the military to ask for help. Of course, they all quickly find out that the military's idea of helping is slaughtering all Black Mace employees, and realize that they're on their own to try and end the alien invasion. Keller hatches a plan to try to close the dimensional breach, which he describes as a resonance reversal, then sends Colette and Gina to the Black Mace air control building to prepare a satellite for Gordon to launch. Yeah, that's right, Black Mace has an air control building in a runway. I'm going to be honest, I always found this game's ending sequence to be explained pretty poorly, and despite having played through it a couple of times and scouring through the overwiki while writing this video, I still don't feel like I have a thorough understanding of how Gina and Colette's actions during the latter half of Decay meaningfully impact the rest of the incident or the game's greater story. But the gist I've gotten is that in this closing chapter, Gina and Colette attempt to close the portal that's letting Xen creatures in. This attempt fails as the Nylon holds the portal open. However, their efforts did apparently weaken the Rift enough to slow the invasion, and if it weren't for that, the death tally at the facility would have likely been much higher. But I mean, if their goal was to close the Rift, they failed. So I don't know why Dr. Keller says otherwise. I've noticed a lot of talk about how Corporal Shepard is a forgotten Half-Life protagonist who was unjustly neglected by Valve. But quite frankly, Colette makes Shepard look like a star of the series. This weird ending sequence with Keller is the last we ever see of Colette, and it takes place during the Half-Life 1 chapter on a rail or maybe apprehension. That's less than halfway through the Black Mace incident. At this point, there's still 12 chapters worth of time left in the original Half-Life. And while we do find Gina's corpse in opposing force, as covered in Purple Colonel's video, we still have no official media to give any clue as to what happened to Colette after Decay's ending. However, we do have off-hand Twitter commentary from one of the most unpopular developers in the video game industry. Gearbox lead Randy Pitchford, who worked on all the Half-Life expansions including Decay, was asked about Colette's fate on Twitter in 2018, and all he had to say was, I think she might be in G-Man's freezer with Shepard. If that's the case, then she's actually got it worse than Adrian. Let me explain. Since the HEV suits voice is that of Gina's, Colette would not only be stuck in an empty Black Void for Eternity, but would also be haunted by the disembodied voice of her dead best friend. But if you think about it, though, Colette being in Stasis is probably the most positive outcome fans could ask for. It would be nice to think that she escaped the facility like Rosenberg and Calhoun did, but by the time Decay ends and Colette escapes the harmonic reflux she's stuck in, those two are already driving out of the facility in their little Black Mace SUV. It's hard to believe she would be able to fight her way out before the nuke dropped. And if she couldn't escape the facility in time, then there's only two places she could have gone. In G-Man's freezer, as Pitchford suggested, or in Zen, which doesn't bode very well given the fate of her friend. Now I wouldn't want to end this video on a sad note, so how about some trivia? Colette is voiced by Lanny Manella, at least I hope that's how you pronounce her name, a veteran voice actress who has starred in hundreds of games. She's provided voices for characters in Super Smash Bros, Super Mario Bros, Fire Emblem, Sonic the Hedgehog, Professor Layton, Skyrim, Amnesia, Soul Calibur, Mortal Kombat, Borderlands, and many more. I find it strange that an all-star voice actor like her was chosen for such a minute, forgettable role in arguably the most obscure game in the series. And how about fan-made stuff? I dug around on ModDB to see if anyone had made an attempt to flesh out Colette's story after the events of Decay in a mod, and to my surprise they have. The first one I found was called Half-Life Emissions and it was abandoned in May 2012, go figure. The second one, Half-Life Recovery however, had its most recent update post on April 30th, 2020 with the lead dev active as of July of this year. Man, this one looks really nice. You can tell this guy knows his way around the Gold Source engine. So go check the ModDB page out if you like what you see. However, unless Valve pulls a rabbit out of their hat, it looks like this last scene of Colette on the floor is as far as her official story goes. So that's all I've got on the most obscure protagonist in Half-Life. Uh, Richter, I think you're forgetting someone? No, no, no, no. Colette is the most obscure protagonist. Who the hell could possibly be more... Oh my God, that's right. There's a playable character more obscure than Colette. Two of them actually. If you earn an A grade on every mission in Decay, you unlock a chapter called Zen Attacks in which you play as two Vortigaunts named X8973 and R4913. And they're not important to the story at all, but who fucking cares? You got to play as an alien. These two vorts are sent back to Earth during the Resonance Cascade by the Nile with the task of taking back two Zen crystals from the Black Mesa facility. And the mission starts them beating the shit out of a couple of soldiers in Black Ops units in the parking garage you see at the end of Opposing Force. These guys can't use guns, obviously, but they can use their claws and even do their signature charged electric attack. It's a shame of full campaign where you play as one of these vorts was never officially produced. But a majority of these mechanics were recycled for the 2003 Half-Life 1 mod, Point of View. So if you played this and want more FPS Vortigaunt action, I'd highly recommend that. Anyways, while these Vortigaunts do dethrone Colette as the least known playable characters in the series, she does remain the least known playable human protagonist. And since these Vortigaunts serve Zen, it's hard to make a case that anything they're doing here is morally good. So if nothing else, Colette is still Half-Life's most obscure hero. And no tricks, no japes, that's all I've got for this video. Thank you for watching. Follow me on Twitter.