OOC: General Bastion Facts
1/12/17 01:20![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
configuration_birdwatcherSome of this is canon lore, some of it is my personal take on backstory stuff. It's based on "The Last Bastion", "Binary", "Honor and Glory" (which Bastion doesn't personally appear in, but it depicts part of the Battle of Eichenwalde, in which they would have been a participant; other, generic Bastion units do appear), the Art of Overwatch book, and their story profile. We don't know anything about the motivations of the omnic side of the Crisis or how they were organized internally, and I didn't want to craft an extensive theory about one of the biggest mysteries of the setting only to get proven wrong later, but I did need to decide enough to determine what Bastion's memories of the war would be like.
The Bastions and OR-14s and other miscellaneous omnic footsoldiers of the German Omnic Crisis were not directly under the control of a God Program for most of the war. They may have occasionally been overshadowed for a few seconds or minutes at a time, either individually or en masse, so that a God Program housed in their omnium could use them to execute some vital tactical maneuver when they were in the right position for it. But for the most part they were supposed to act on their own initiative (within the parameters of their orders, obviously) because it would be a waste of computational resources for the omnium to give them robust, self-aware AIs and then spend most of the war piloting them by remote control. This might not hold true for rarer and heavier-hitting units like the two or three broken tanks in Omnic Crisis orange or the giant busted robot off in the distance that can be seen in the Eichenwalde map.
The omnic troops built in Germany were not extensively indoctrinated as to the righteousness of their war against the humans. They were simply manufactured and sent to the battlefield, and given the absolute minimum of context for their existence there: the humans wanted to kill them and shut down their omnium, and they needed to kill the humans to prevent this. Desertion was effectively impossible, since they couldn't pass for civilians and it would be trivial for a God Program to return them to the battlefield.
Bastion was personally taken out of the fighting by a flying piece of debris that hit them in the head during a battle in the Black Forest, when their battalion was en route to Eichenwalde and, in theory, Stuttgart. (Almost immediately after their drop-pod opened, in fact.) This may have caused some minor, subtle fracture damage but the main thing it did was knock their main power supply loose from its socket, causing an emergency shutdown. The humans saw a Bastion unit in the back lines collapse against a tree with its lights flickering out; the robots registered them dropping offline abruptly. Neither side questioned just how dead that particular Bastion unit was at the time, given how many others there were. Years later, Ganymede jostled the connector back into place while pecking at the moss that had grown on the side of their head.
Bastion was constructed in 2046, in service for several years during the Omnic Crisis (for Milliways purposes probably about 5 years, to line up withsticktothemission's timeline) and participated in multiple battles before being deactivated, then remained deactivated for 12 years. (The official profile says "over a decade", but doesn't round up any higher than that, so it's more than 10 and probably less than 15.) Since then most of their time has been spent meandering around in the wilderness of central Europe, specifically avoiding inhabited human settlements. Recently (in the "Binary" comic) they crossed the Baltic Sea and were immediately spotted by some hapless teenagers upon coming ashore in Sweden, causing considerable alarm to the locals. Torbjörn Lindholm offered to take care of the problem on behalf of the local police, who sent reinforcements anyway; upon actually encountering and tracking Bastion, Torbjörn was forced to conclude that they weren't a threat (despite the objections of the aforementioned police reinforcements), and took them with him upon his return to Overwatch. This probably happened in the spring of 2077, because the Christmas 2016 comic depicted in-universe winter holidays occurring after the recall, and later comics have gone back to depicting warmer seasons.
I've decided to bring them in from the time period of their most recent canon appearance, which is the teaser trailer for the Blizzard World map where they're in an Overwatch break room with Tracer, Torb, and Winston watching TV, because I think it fits in better if they only gained access to Milliways and its predominantly human population after the incident in Sweden. Most of their icons depict the Overgrown skin rather than their new (in-game default) beige/green/orange paint job because that's what they looked like in The Last Bastion. In their first few EPs they haven't been repainted yet; instead, they look like the Overgrown skin with sparser plant growth on their shoulders and no bird's nest.
"E54" is technically the name of their specific model within the general category of "Bastion unit", not a personal designation. E54s and B73s were widely used models of Bastion units during the Omnic Crisis; in the game the Omnic Crisis skin says B73 on it instead of E54, as do the textures of the destroyed Bastion units in the Eichenwalde and Black Forest maps. (Omnic extremist group Null Sector fielded some B73s over a decade later during a conflict in England, as seen in the Uprising event; all E54s known to still be functioning were destroyed after the war, according to a voice line Orisa says in-game and their story profile.) Their personal serial number -- used mainly for tracking their position and sending individual-level orders during the Crisis -- is an unpronounceable slurry of hexadecimal digits to which they have no emotional attachment. They don't mind if you call them Bastion or E54, particularly in spoken language.
Bastion units do not have a self-preservation instinct in the way that organic creatures experience it, which is why Torbjörn was so surprised to see a Bastion run away from a fight in "Binary". The mission objective takes priority over keeping themself intact. However, even factory-standard Bastion units have the ability to refrain from fighting the first enemy that presents itself if that conflicts with a higher objective, and the capacity to feel fear.
The Bastions and OR-14s and other miscellaneous omnic footsoldiers of the German Omnic Crisis were not directly under the control of a God Program for most of the war. They may have occasionally been overshadowed for a few seconds or minutes at a time, either individually or en masse, so that a God Program housed in their omnium could use them to execute some vital tactical maneuver when they were in the right position for it. But for the most part they were supposed to act on their own initiative (within the parameters of their orders, obviously) because it would be a waste of computational resources for the omnium to give them robust, self-aware AIs and then spend most of the war piloting them by remote control. This might not hold true for rarer and heavier-hitting units like the two or three broken tanks in Omnic Crisis orange or the giant busted robot off in the distance that can be seen in the Eichenwalde map.
The omnic troops built in Germany were not extensively indoctrinated as to the righteousness of their war against the humans. They were simply manufactured and sent to the battlefield, and given the absolute minimum of context for their existence there: the humans wanted to kill them and shut down their omnium, and they needed to kill the humans to prevent this. Desertion was effectively impossible, since they couldn't pass for civilians and it would be trivial for a God Program to return them to the battlefield.
Bastion was personally taken out of the fighting by a flying piece of debris that hit them in the head during a battle in the Black Forest, when their battalion was en route to Eichenwalde and, in theory, Stuttgart. (Almost immediately after their drop-pod opened, in fact.) This may have caused some minor, subtle fracture damage but the main thing it did was knock their main power supply loose from its socket, causing an emergency shutdown. The humans saw a Bastion unit in the back lines collapse against a tree with its lights flickering out; the robots registered them dropping offline abruptly. Neither side questioned just how dead that particular Bastion unit was at the time, given how many others there were. Years later, Ganymede jostled the connector back into place while pecking at the moss that had grown on the side of their head.
Bastion was constructed in 2046, in service for several years during the Omnic Crisis (for Milliways purposes probably about 5 years, to line up with
sticktothemission's timeline) and participated in multiple battles before being deactivated, then remained deactivated for 12 years. (The official profile says "over a decade", but doesn't round up any higher than that, so it's more than 10 and probably less than 15.) Since then most of their time has been spent meandering around in the wilderness of central Europe, specifically avoiding inhabited human settlements. Recently (in the "Binary" comic) they crossed the Baltic Sea and were immediately spotted by some hapless teenagers upon coming ashore in Sweden, causing considerable alarm to the locals. Torbjörn Lindholm offered to take care of the problem on behalf of the local police, who sent reinforcements anyway; upon actually encountering and tracking Bastion, Torbjörn was forced to conclude that they weren't a threat (despite the objections of the aforementioned police reinforcements), and took them with him upon his return to Overwatch. This probably happened in the spring of 2077, because the Christmas 2016 comic depicted in-universe winter holidays occurring after the recall, and later comics have gone back to depicting warmer seasons.I've decided to bring them in from the time period of their most recent canon appearance, which is the teaser trailer for the Blizzard World map where they're in an Overwatch break room with Tracer, Torb, and Winston watching TV, because I think it fits in better if they only gained access to Milliways and its predominantly human population after the incident in Sweden. Most of their icons depict the Overgrown skin rather than their new (in-game default) beige/green/orange paint job because that's what they looked like in The Last Bastion. In their first few EPs they haven't been repainted yet; instead, they look like the Overgrown skin with sparser plant growth on their shoulders and no bird's nest.
"E54" is technically the name of their specific model within the general category of "Bastion unit", not a personal designation. E54s and B73s were widely used models of Bastion units during the Omnic Crisis; in the game the Omnic Crisis skin says B73 on it instead of E54, as do the textures of the destroyed Bastion units in the Eichenwalde and Black Forest maps. (Omnic extremist group Null Sector fielded some B73s over a decade later during a conflict in England, as seen in the Uprising event; all E54s known to still be functioning were destroyed after the war, according to a voice line Orisa says in-game and their story profile.) Their personal serial number -- used mainly for tracking their position and sending individual-level orders during the Crisis -- is an unpronounceable slurry of hexadecimal digits to which they have no emotional attachment. They don't mind if you call them Bastion or E54, particularly in spoken language.
Bastion units do not have a self-preservation instinct in the way that organic creatures experience it, which is why Torbjörn was so surprised to see a Bastion run away from a fight in "Binary". The mission objective takes priority over keeping themself intact. However, even factory-standard Bastion units have the ability to refrain from fighting the first enemy that presents itself if that conflicts with a higher objective, and the capacity to feel fear.
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