SST Laboratories Siege Automaton E54 ("Bastion")

March 2024
Potluck/Mini TDM - Amaterasu | Nimona | Vika

April 2024
Nimona
Siebren de Kuiper
Eddie Kaspbrak (backdated)

May 2024
Veterans' Poker Club

CHARACTER NAME: SST Laboratories Siege Automaton E54, aka "Bastion"
CHARACTER SERIES: Overwatch
CHARACTER PRONOUNS: Any pronouns, but they/them is optimal.
Canon mostly avoids pronouns with the occasional it/its; I favour they/them in narration because I don't feel like this writing decision was made thoughtfully, but unless the pronouns are being used as a pointed denial of their personhood Bastion is fine with it/its as well and sometimes I use that instead if it fits better in a sentence. ICly, he/him and she/her are also fine, and if you want to use a neopronoun you can do that too.

[OOC]

Backtagging: Yep. I'm gonna do it, I welcome you to do it too. I generally prefer backtagging threads over dropping them because they're old.
Threadhopping: If it's OK with the community we're RPing in then it's OK with me.
Fourthwalling: I'm confused about whether this question is asking whether I'm going to break the fourth wall or whether I'll play with people who break the fourth wall, and also about what kind of fourth-wall-breaking it's referring to. When it comes to stuff like acknowledging the existence of the players or that the scene is taking place in a DW thread, that's broadly fine but it ultimately depends on whether that works for the setting we're RPing in. Spoilers for their canon aren't going to drastically affect them, especially because they're mostly up to date with canon until Overwatch 2 comes out. When it comes to what Milliways calls canon-puncturing... they won't have an existential crisis about the existence of Overwatch the game/fictional franchise, at least not unless you go pretty deep into behind-the-scenes making-of stuff, but they'd be troubled and deeply weirded out by seeing their own animated cinematic.
Offensive subjects & triggers: Certain flavors of parental-figure-towards-child emotional abuse are a proceed-with-caution/soft limit/yellow light, I don't want to participate in scenarios that involve sexual violence, don't show me dog videos in the OOC chat (I mean expecting me personally to watch them, I have autoplay off), don't be dismissive of the general concept of nonbinary genders OOCly (if it's IC it's on your character, not you as a player).

[IC]

Magnus Archives fear associations: Slaughter, Web, Extinction

Hugging this character: Go for it. Maybe don't give them a surprise tackle-hug, but they don't mind affectionate physical contact in general. It might not be a physically pleasant experience to hug someone who's made of metal and has a bunch of hard corners though.
Kissing this character: I'm genuinely OOCly not sure if Bastion is interested in romance at all; if they are they're going to be very reserved and hesitant about it. They also don't have a mouth, so kissing back isn't really an option no matter how enthusiastic they are, you'd just get an affectionate headbutt.
Flirting with this character: See previous. On top of being at least semi-aromantic and possibly Full Aro, they don't know much about how forming a romantic bond works for humans, so stock romantic gestures (giving flowers etc) will probably fly over their head or confuse them rather than having the intended effect.
Fighting with this character: They don't really like fighting, and they don't need to spar to keep their combat performance adequate, but they'll fight if it's necessary or if the alternative is worse. (They will be extremely dubious if a friend of theirs suggests letting them practice fighting by sparring with Bastion, but could maybe be talked into it.)
Their heavily armored chassis means that:

• an unarmed attack by an unenhanced human is extremely unlikely to cause any meaningful damage
• bladed weapons are only dangerous if they hit a vulnerable spot (such as exposed wiring or one of their optics) or are wielded with enough force to pierce steel plating
• even some small-caliber firearms will bounce off their armor with minimal damage done

However, their armor doesn't protect them nearly as well against electrical attacks and is only marginally helpful against fire. Lasers and similar energy weapons tend to interact with it more like physical weaponry.

If presented with a danger to themself, their friends, or innocent bystanders in a way that doesn't activate their combat protocols immediately, they prefer to start by scaring the danger away or using a less lethal form of violence such as a punch from their manipulator arm, but they're also willing to shoot a dangerous person or animal if that doesn't work. With their gun arm, they're precise enough that they can shoot to miss as a warning without much risk of an accidental direct hit, and can usually land a shot on a specific broadly-defined area of the body. But as a product of less-than-perfectionistic quality control standards on the assembly line plus decades of entropy, the gun has too much scatter to hit a tiny moving target as a trick shot or reliably shoot a handgun/dagger-sized weapon out of someone's hand without hitting their arm instead.
Magic is something they have no canon experience with and no special protection against, and they also don't have any kind of overarching resistance to psychic powers or the Force or what have you.

Injuring this character (include limits and severity): Bastion can recover from nearly any injury that doesn't kill them in one hit as long as their processor, power supply system in their torso, and self-repair arm are intact, although they'll eventually succumb to attrition if they continue to take damage that exceeds what their self-repair abilities can keep up with. (Having said that, regenerating an entire limb with onboard nanobots if they can't simply stick it back on is a major burden for their self-repair system and power supply!) They experience notifications of damage as pain, but can't really be overwhelmed or incapacitated by pain the way flesh-and-blood creatures can. So from a player-level perspective you can pretty much go nuts as long as you don't blow their head off or blast them to smithereens.
An unanticipated near-lethal blow is likely to engage their combat protocols, however, so I'd appreciate an OOC forewarning about that.

Killing this character: Probably not, but it depends on the thread and the reason your character is trying to kill mine. It's fairly difficult to actually kill Bastion instead of just incapacitating them for a while unless you have anti-materiel weaponry or the equivalent in supernatural firepower, although sustained fire or well-placed shots from a lower-powered weapon would do the trick.

I would very much appreciate it if you didn't permakill Ganymede though. I'm not interested in playing that out! (Temporary killing is fine, I guess??)

Using telepathy/mind reading abilities on this character: As a player I'm comfortable with it, even encouraging if your character has the option since Bastion's physically incapable of pronouncing most spoken languages. If the source for their telepathic abilities has a very biological spin to it or is otherwise canonically limited to organic beings or to members of their own species, then it may not be able to connect to a robot's non-biological brain, but Bastion has sapience and consciousness as much as a human does -- it's just running on different hardware -- so telepathy with a more magical, metaphysical, spiritual, or just-plain-unexplained paranormal bent may well work fine.

They will, however, get upset with someone who uses telepathy to purposefully rummage around in their memories and the inner workings of their mind instead of just having a conversation through it. Having lived their early life in an environment where not even their own mind was private or under their sovereign control, they would really prefer not to have it searched, altered, or taken over without their consent again. They can't really do anything to stop a telepath from doing that unless the process of using psychic powers on them trips Bastion's networking security features; they'll just be upset.

Warnings: War and the associated gun-based violence (they do after all have guns built into their body) and combat PTSD, mainly, and abusive parents in an allegorical sort of sense. Animal death once in a while with regards to witnessing wild animals fighting or preying on each other, and sometimes having to use lethal force to protect Ganymede from predatory animals. Allegorical/fantastical ableism regarding the things a human can do that are difficult or impossible for Bastion might come up too.

Their canon backstory is that they were created to fight in a war between robots and humans. They'd seen combat before the specific battle where they were incapacitated by minor damage and left for dead, and 1) they have a human body count that's unlikely to be lower than the double digits, and while Bastion was produced late enough in the war that the civilians had been long since evacuated from most everywhere they were deployed to I can't guarantee they never killed someone who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and looked like an enemy combatant, and 2) their experiences had an effect on their psychological and emotional systems that's functionally near-identical to combat PTSD in a human. Of particular note is their combat programming, which forces them into a mental state where eliminating threats is their primary and oftentimes only concern -- a mental state that treats all humans with the physical capacity to wield a firearm as potential threats by default, even if they're not attacking -- and which is activated by a threat detection system that has been hypersensitized to the point of treating nearly anything that startles them and has something about it that resembles a weapon of war as an attack. They've reduced the severity of this problem enough that they can socialise with humans and even fight alongside them, but it's still in there.

Also I tend to write the AI factory that created them and commanded them during the war as a metaphor for an abusive, controlling parent whom they have now gotten away from mostly by luck rather than personal strength or cleverness, so there's that. (I haven't written any detailed Omnic Crisis-era scenes so far but it comes up in backstory discussion both IC and OOC.)

Get your own copy of the IC/OOC Permissions meme!

Bastion hates going offline. Low battery, maintenance mode, automatic suspension of higher functions for emergency self-repair, any of it; the vulnerability terrifies them no matter how safe the location, and most of their experiences with interruptions in their consciousness have come before or after something awful. (Waking up in the forest and seeing Ganymede was only half an exception; it was the best thing that had ever happened to them, but it had only been made possible because they had been dropped into a raging battle, immediately incapacitated, and left for dead.) They only agreed to let Torbjörn give them a tune-up on the condition that they would stay awake for it. Mostly immobilized and various degrees of disassembled, to avoid tearing anything loose, but awake. They had already agreed that he wasn't going to touch their processor or memory; it was hard to determine which of them was more dead-set against the idea of returning Bastion to factory settings, and Torbjörn was of the opinion that any kind of interference with their cognition could have that effect. (He had expressed it through a colorful metaphor rather than being so straightforward, but the meaning came across nonetheless.)

Being wired to a terminal to make sure all their motor control systems reboot correctly also gives them a rare opportunity to speak directly with him. All their joints are cleaned up and coming back online, moving with a kind of smoothness they haven't felt since they were first built, and all the dirt is polished off; Torbjörn doesn't look like he's finished, though. He's puttering around the workshop collecting an armload of spray paint, and seems to have no intention of reattaching their external plating just yet.

[ What are you doing? ] Bastion inputs to the terminal.

Torbjörn looks over at the sound of the new-message noise. "You need a new coat of paint."

[ Why? ]

"Because walkin' around in Omnic Crisis orange makes you look like you just stepped right off the battlefield ready to start a bloodbath."

[ I look like that anyway. Painting me a different color isn't going to disguise the fact that I'm a wartime E54 Bastion unit. Nobody's going to look at me and think, "That can't be a killing machine, it's blue!" ]

They look directly at him. He scowls back, turning away from the screen to meet their optic with his one functioning eye. "The point is, it's somethin' that says you've got someone keepin' an eye on you. Someone who wants to make sure people know you're different from the other tin cans and won't shoot them as soon as look at 'em."

[ Will it stop them from screaming and running away when they see me? ] They continue staring at him as they wait for him to read their message.

"I don't know. Should make 'em think twice before calling in the army, at least."

Bastion makes a descending, thoughtful whirr as they consider this. Then they respond: [ I'll take it if you let me transfer the remaining flowers to a vessel where I can take care of them. ]

Torbjörn pinches the bridge of his nose with his organic hand. "The bot wants to start a garden. That's what you care about? Not the color? Fine, I'll get you a flowerpot."