More AU ideas, based on this lovely pic and talking with @taakopines!
• Following the cascade, Breen realized letting Black Mesa occur was a grave mistake. To this day, he suffers massive amounts of guilt for allowing the G-Man to deliver the crystal sample. Raising Alyx is in part a form of personal atonement for his role in the incident
• He was also one of the last to escape the facility. Eli initially planned to take little Alyx with him until the G-Man plucked her and offered her to Breen as a form of collateral, which would be repaid in twenty years’ time. Breen then hid Alyx away and later told her that her parents died in Black Mesa
• Eli, in turn, nursed two decades’ worth of resentment against Breen. In his POV, it’s Breen who committed the greater evil by pushing for the experiment; he, however, was only being practical when he agreed to buffer some of the damage the Combine would have inflicted upon the rest of the world. He believes that by resisting him, Breen is teaching his daughter to be cruel for no real reason
• Underneath her tough demeanor, Alyx struggles with feeling more like a responsibility than a daughter to her adoptive dad. While she’s grateful someone took her in, she knows Breen wasn’t emotionally equipped to be a father. He eventually grew to love her, but he struggles in showing it
• Meanwhile, Eli touts himself as a fatherly figure who can best protect people from the horrors of the ravaged outside world. When you’re deposited in City 17 for the first time, you may be disoriented, as there are few signs of an alien invasion having taken place twenty years ago
• From the outside looking in, City 17 is a pleasant, clean, suburban locale portrayed in broadcasts as a bastion of safety and community. Think relatively well-kept buildings, parks, flowers, and minimum alien architecture. Citizens smile at you as they amble around… Perhaps a bit too much, now that you think about it.
• The Combine’s influence is either disguised or kept well out of the public eye. The perimeter surrounding City 17’s particle barriers is an utter shithole, however
• Alyx often infiltrates the civilian populace in disguise. You can tell her apart from the crowd because she’s the only one complaining under her breath about Administrator Vance’s “sappy Kumbaya crap.” Following her to the elevator alerts her to the fact that you’re not quite fully assimilated; after a bit of suspicion, she takes you to Breen’s lab
• Barney works undercover as a CP to gain intel; however, he reports to Kleiner instead of the Resistance
• As stated before, Kleiner is a neutral party who belongs to neither Combine nor Resistance. He and a group of survivors—which includes Keller, Simmons, Rosenberg and Barney—are still working on his teleport. But because Alyx hasn’t contributed to his project, his progress lags much more behind schedule than in HL2
• The Resistance is as grassroots as it was in HL2, but smaller and based in a single building that serves as Black Mesa East. The underground refugee network doesn’t exist for various reasons. One is that security under Eli’s administration is deceptively airtight; another, citizens may be too complacent to leave
• Breen struggles to recruit rebels due to his brusque nature and the narrative (which Eli gladly pushes) that Black Mesa was his fault. Citizens prefer to live a comfortable existence that’s slowly killing them rather than be confronted with a harsh reality that would otherwise set them free
• As a result, Alyx has to resort to drastic tactics, such as kidnapping drugged people and forcibly detoxing them. At one point, she drags Dr. Kleiner to BME in the hopes he’d reconcile with his former boss
• Eli obtains Judith Mossman’s undying allegiance by playing on the resentments she harbors against Black Mesa, Gordon Freeman, and Breen. He extends sympathy toward her feelings of rejection and offers her what she wants, a position of importance, in exchange for her services.
• Needless to say, that makes Mossman a recurring antagonist and an absolute pain in your ass. As director to Overwatch and its various branches, she has unparalleled access to surveillance and will dispatch execution squads after you and your allies as soon as you touch down someplace important. While hunting you down, she destroys Kleiner’s lab and razes BME to cinders.
• Alyx’s refusal of Eli’s offer angers him. He holds her hostage and drags her off to the dark fusion reactor to be teleported with him to the borderworld, where he plans to ingratiate her to the G-Man (and thus secure her allegiance).
• Mossman seals the office doors, preventing you from pursuing Eli. In order to reach the dark fusion reactor and save Alyx, you must first fight her as the penultimate boss
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