Full name: Gordon Elliott Freeman
Species: Human
Date of birth: May 15, 1976
Place of birth: Seattle, Washington, Earth
Height: 6'2"
Weight: 182 lbs.
Eyes: Green
Hair: Brown
Adjusted Wolfe-DeKok Intelligence Index: 165

Date of IPO Induction: June 9, 2403
Divison of service: Special Assignment 173 (Tesladyne Action Science League)
Grade: Lensman
Test of Light administered: July 4, 2403
Other special qualifications/certifications:
- BS, Physics, Worcester-3 Polytechnic Institute
- MS, Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Ph.D., Physics, MIT
- Ph.D., Science, New Avalon Institute of Science
- Black Mesa Research Facility Crisis Response Certificate
- Black Mesa H.E.V. Operator
- Tesladyne Action Scientist Certificate

Other grades/titles:
- Chosen of Skuld

Description: Gordon Freeman is a human male who appears to be in his late twenties to early thirties. He has brown hair which he customarily wears short, a vandyke beard, and wears heavy black-framed eyeglasses. In the field, he is usually found wearing a power-articulated suit of armor, thermocoated in safety orange and grey, and marked with the logo of his Tesladyne field team, Lambda Section.

Notes: Gordon Freeman was a sophomore in high school when the 1991 Wedge Incident caused the destruction of the city of Worcester, Massachusetts, and a senior when the city was destroyed for the second time in the fledgling Wedge Defense Force's confrontation with GENOM Corporation. Intrigued by the strange happenings that area seemed to attract, and wanting to investigate them more closely, he carried out his undergraduate studies in the city's third incarnation, then went to nearby MIT in Cambridge for graduate school.

By the time he finished his Ph.D. in physics, First Contact with Salusia had catapulted Earth into a whole new era of galactic cooperation, and Dr. Gordon Freeman was part of the new generation of ambitious, eager young scientists looking to stake out the homeworld's place as a major intellectual player. Doing his post-graduate work at the Institute for Experimental Physics in Austria, which had become one of Earth's main hotspots for the newly opened field of hyperphysics, he attracted the attention of recruiters for a semi-governmental research company, the Black Mesa Research Corporation.

Among its many fields of research, BMRC was heavily involved in Earth's first attempts to reverse-engineer Corellian hyperspace motivator technology, which was much more efficient than the crude version of hyperdrive Earth's scientists (including researchers from Black Mesa) had devised in the years immediately preceding Contact. On May 16, 2003, an entity now believed to have been an agent of Loki sabotaged one of the Anomalous Materials team's experiments, causing a resonance cascade and subspace rupture of catastrophic proportions at their main research facility in New Mexico.

Freeman was at ground zero for the disastrous test, having played an integral role in the execution of the failed experiment (but, as a junior research associate, not its planning). Thrust unexpectedly into the dead center of a situation that was spiraling rapidly out of control, he found himself faced with two options: adapt or die.

Though he was not trained for such a career, the Black Mesa incident proved that Freeman was a natural-born action scientist - capable of surviving and succeeding against impossible odds, equally at home solving an interdimensional teleportation crisis, defeating heavily armed soldiers under orders to silence him, and bashing hostile aliens with a crowbar. In the end, he prevented the resonance cascade from escalating into a global disaster that would have cut short Earth's participation in galactic civilization before it had gotten properly underway.

Freeman's exploits also attracted the attention of the young Skuld Ravenhair, only recently invested as a full divinity. As goddess of technology and captain of the Valkyrie, Skuld was already becoming something of a patron spirit of action scientists, and when the incident ended with Freeman saving the Earth but trapping himself in a hostile parallel dimension in the process, she resolved to rescue him before he could be enslaved by the diabolical forces that had orchestrated the accident in the first place. Unfortunately, she had not yet fully mastered her divine power, and though the attempt succeeded, she inadvertently dispatched him 400 years into the future in the process.

An older, wiser Skuld was on hand to greet Freeman when he arrived in the year 2403, apologize for displacing him in time, and assure him that his efforts back in 2003 had not been in vain. He proved his adaptability once more by acclimating almost instantly to his new surroundings; within a month he had joined the Tesladyne Action Science League, committing his unique skills and experience to the IPO's ongoing struggle against Bad Science.

Gordon Freeman is an MIT-trained physicist who was one of Earth's earliest delvers into the higher fields of hyperscience and overtechnology, and since his arrival in the 25th century he has wasted no time in updating his knowledge base, earning a second doctorate in Science from NAIS. Though he has little formal military training and none at all in any formal martial art, he is a formidable combatant with an unorthodox, intuitive grasp of battlefield tactics and a strong general mastery of weapons, particularly those (like the Black Mesa τ Cannon) that are themselves products of weird science.

Though not a supergenius, Freeman is a solid and methodical researcher as well as an inspired tinkerer, capable of carrying out field repairs and modifications on a wide range of equipment. A strong proponent of the old Valkyrie adage that any tool is a weapon if you hold it right, he has been known to fight and win with anything from a severed power cable to a discarded saw blade. He's a natural survivor, apparently incapable of giving up and dying, with a vast capacity for absorbing pain and punishment as long as he has room to keep slogging forward.

Far from grimly enduring his travails, however, Freeman possesses an acerbic wit that often manifests itself as a stream of sarcastic quips, mock complaints, and wisecracks designed to keep up not only his own morale, but that of everyone around him. Often he will pretend to have been rendered severely neurotic, paranoid, and/or psychotic by his experiences, e.g. screaming "This was not approved by the committee! I'm not taking any questions! No comment! No comment! No comment!" while fighting his way through a sudden ambush of Chryssalid soldiers. This is a schtick he does so convincingly that those unfamiliar with his coping style, particularly new assignees to Lambda Section, sometimes come to doubt his sanity before something happens to make plain that it's an act.

Dr. Freeman possesses several unique pieces of equipment which he can be assumed to have with him on any field assignment. The most obvious of these is his unique powered survival suit, the H.E.V. Mark V. This is an updated version of the old ExoSalusia H.E.V. Mark IV he wore during the Black Mesa incident, custom-built for him out of the wreckage of his Mark IV by Tesladyne Heavy Industries and personally engineered by Nikola Tesla. Though not itself armed, and thus not categorized as a battle suit, the H.E.V. Mk V possesses some of the most advanced survival systems known today, and its information systems can interface with a wide range of weapons.

Freeman's signature weapon is the Cosmic Crowbar, a magic artifact forged for him - again, out of the remains of an item which he used to good effect during the Black Mesa incident, in this case an ordinary crowbar - by Skuld herself. Made of an alloy of its original steel and Asgardian uru, the Cosmic Crowbar is effectively indestructible and, in Freeman's hands, can smash just about anything. It shares several of its enchantments with such famed Asgardian weapons as Mjollnir, the hammer of Thor, including the ability to return to its owner when thrown or lost and a tendency to become unusable in the hands of those unworthy of its power.

Fig. A Dr. Freeman demonstrates the Cosmic Crowbar's crisis resolution capabilities. Photo by Chad Collier

In addition to the Cosmic Crowbar, Freeman is known to carry various more conventional weapons into potential hazard situations. He also rarely leaves his lab without taking along an invention formally designated the Zero-Point Energy Field Manipulator, affectionately known to everyone in the Action Science League as the Gravity Gun. This device does just what it says on the tin - generates a tuned tractor/pressor field by warping and controlling local gravitation. In skilled hands, such as Freeman's, the uses of this device in the field cannot be enumerated.

Current assignment: Gordon Freeman is the leader of the Tesladyne Action League's Lambda Section, a team of operatives specializing in hyperspatial anomalies and extraplanar incursions. He and his team undertake missions at the direction of Atomic Robo, Nikola Tesla, or occasionally the Office of the Chief Technologist.

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