Ellie Langford

Ellie Langford was a former Class IV Heavy Equipment Pilot for the Concordance Extraction Corporation who survived the Necromorph outbreak on Titan Station and the later catastrophe on Tau Volantis. After losing her work crew during the outbreak on the Sprawl, she was slow to trust anyone and at first relied on herself alone, before forming a close bond with the engineer Isaac Clarke that would carry her through the search for the true source of the Marker signal.

The outbreak on the Sprawl#

When the Necromorph outbreak spread through Titan Station, Ellie and her shift abandoned their duties and fought their way through the CEC Facility toward the Government Sector. Her group guided other workers away from the overrun areas, and in return those survivors urged the rest to find Ellie's route to safety. Their numbers fell steadily until only Ellie and a man named Kaleb remained. Injured and certain he could not go on, Kaleb chose to make a last stand with a Line Gun so that Ellie could escape.

Alone, Ellie struggled toward the Government Sector, not realizing it held the Site 12 Marker. Along the way she was attacked by a man who claimed to want to help and then tried to kill her, and she only narrowly escaped. While fending off a swarm of Slashers from behind a security gate, she was found by Isaac Clarke. He offered to work together, but she refused, calling any companion a liability, and warned him not to follow.

Joining Isaac#

Shortly after parting from Isaac, Ellie crossed paths with the survivor Nolan Stross. Despite her distrust of both men, she made contact to let Isaac know she had found him, and though she threatened to kill Stross, Isaac talked her out of it. Once she understood the mission the two were undertaking, the three agreed to band together to escape the Sprawl.

Their path to the Government Sector was cut when Director Hans Tiedemann used the Solar Array's beam to destroy a tram track. Isaac chose to enter the derelict Ishimura alone to activate its gravity tethers and pull the survivors toward the Titan Shard, leaving Ellie with Stross. As Isaac worked through the dead ship, Stross grew violent, finally overpowering Ellie and driving a screwdriver into her eye in an attempt to make her follow what he called the steps. Undaunted by the loss, she hunted Stross down with every intention of killing him, but he escaped, and she warned Isaac to stay on his guard.

Escape from Titan Station#

Isaac rejoined Ellie in the Titan Mines after Stross was dead. Now wearing a patch over her empty socket, she commandeered a massive mining drill and piloted it through swarms of Necromorphs and the spreading Corruption, driving it into the heart of the Government Sector and shattering Tiedemann's defenses. While searching for a way out, she found a docked gunship and began preparing it for escape. When Isaac reached her, he launched the gunship with only Ellie aboard, telling her he needed to save her because he had been unable to save Nicole Brennan.

Furious at his attempt at self-sacrifice, Ellie turned the gunship around and smashed it back through the roof of the Marker site to retrieve him. Isaac boarded, and the two escaped together as the site was consumed in the explosion that destroyed the Marker.

Between the outbreaks#

Some time after the Sprawl, Ellie and Isaac began a relationship and settled into an apartment on the New Horizons Lunar Colony. She purchased an artificial eye to replace the one she had lost, though she could not find one that matched her original color. Believing Isaac was trapped in his past, she repeatedly urged him to confront it, but he chose to bury it instead, and she finally ended the relationship and left, frustrated with his refusal to move forward.

At an unspecified time she met Robert Norton and John Carver and his wife Damara on Haven Prime. She befriended the Carvers and began a relationship with Norton. When Damara uncovered information about the Sovereign Colonies' experiments with the Markers, Ellie and Norton helped her in the effort to trace the artifacts to their source.

Tracing the Marker signal#

Ellie arrived on Uxor too late to reach Damara, who had been killed by the Unitologist Jacob Danik and turned into a Necromorph. Trying to hail her friend, she instead reached John Carver and explained the work she, Norton, and Damara had been pursuing in secret. She asked Carver to deliver a data stick Damara had hidden, and the two arranged to meet, with Norton and the USM Eudora arriving from orbit to extract them.

Carried by the Eudora, Ellie pressed on with Damara's mission. At Ptolemy Station the crew triangulated the master signal that the Markers received, then set out for Keyhole Station to acquire the equipment needed to reach it. In transit she worked to decrypt the rest of Damara's research and suggested contacting Isaac, only to be overruled by Norton, who feared the engineer's notoriety among the Unitologists would draw unwanted attention. When Keyhole Station came under attack by Necromorphs and Unitologists, Ellie was separated from Norton and Carver and crossed paths with the engineer Jennifer Santos and the Marker operative Austin Buckell. Rather than wait, she made the blind jump toward Tau Volantis with them, sharing a few last and apologetic words with Norton before she shocked out of the system.

Tau Volantis#

The jump succeeded, but Ellie soon lost contact with the Eudora. As her ship approached the ruined Sovereign Colonies flotilla in orbit, automated mines forced the group to abandon it and board the derelict CMS Roanoke. When Norton and Carver arrived with Isaac, Ellie was relieved to see them, and she explained that vital information lay in Admiral Marjorie Graves's quarters, where only Isaac could decode the writing on the walls. The reunion was uneasy, with Isaac pressing her about her relationship with Norton, but she stood by her decision to leave him and reminded everyone that mankind faced extinction without Isaac's help.

The descent to the planet tore their shuttle apart and scattered the group across the frozen surface. Through pursuing Necromorphs and the encroaching Circle of Unitologists, Ellie worked alongside Santos to study the corpse of the immense Necromorph called the Nexus and locate thousands of signals beneath the planet. As the survivors climbed toward the Machine that the scientist Earl Serrano had described, Norton secretly turned against them and betrayed the group to Danik, and Isaac was forced to kill him in self-defense. Ellie, who had loved Norton, was distraught at the news and at first refused to hear Isaac out, until she came to understand that Norton had meant to abandon the mission and kill Isaac to save himself.

The end of the mission#

As the survivors fought their way up the mountain, the Snow Beast attacked, and Carver cut the cargo cage's cable to save the rest, sending Santos plummeting to her death. Ellie pressed on with Carver and Isaac to the Rosetta Lab, where Isaac reassembled the alien remains and learned the truth of Convergence and of the Machine that held the Moon above the planet in check. When Danik seized the Codex needed to control the Machine, Ellie hacked a door to let Isaac and Carver escape, only to be trapped by a flood of decontamination gas. She urged the two onward, telling Isaac she loved him before Carver sealed the room.

Ellie survived through the ducts but was captured by the Unitologists, and Danik used her as leverage. Ready to die for the mission, she pleaded with Carver and Isaac to stop Convergence rather than save her. Carver instead gave Danik the Codex in exchange for her life, and Danik restarted Convergence before being killed by falling debris. With the Machine to be reactivated by hand, Carver and Isaac told Ellie to flee and warn Earth. Isaac gave her a torn photograph of himself, the two shared a kiss, and she boarded a Unitologist shuttle. From orbit she watched the Marker signal abruptly stop, set a course for Earth, and shocked out of the system, leaving the fate of the two men behind her uncertain.

Character#

Ellie was hardened by survival, wary of trusting others, and quick to call companionship a liability after watching her crew die one by one. Yet beneath that guardedness she was loyal and brave, willing to turn a gunship around in the face of an explosion rather than let Isaac sacrifice himself, and willing in turn to give her own life to see the mission through. She carried the loss of her eye and the deaths of those around her without breaking, and she remained the steady center that drew Isaac, Carver, and Norton together even as the search for the Markers pulled them apart. Of the companions who set out for Tau Volantis, she alone is known to have escaped.