Characters for Bastion.
The Kid
"We have to go... Please..."
"No matter what he's gonna face out there, it'll burn."
The hero of Bastion. Woke up late one day to find everything had been shattered after the Calamity rocked the world.
- Alternate Character Interpretation: In-universe. During a Mushroom Samba flashback, the narrator paints the Kid as a villain in everything he does, no matter how harmless.
- Badass Adorable: Despite his (presumably) young age and nickname "The Kid", he is an extremely Badass One-Man Army in battle.
- Badass Normal: He's just an ordinary human whose only method of self-defense is wielding mostly-ordinary weapons, and yet faces no trouble defeating anyone (and anything) he fights against with ease.
- Dark and Troubled Past: He went to fight to earn money for his mother, but when he returned, his mother had passed away and the money was gone.
- Death Seeker: The Rippling Walls were a terrible place to work, but the Kid struggled for his mother. And then she died before he even came back. He then applied for ANOTHER tour to the Walls. It should be noted that he's the first person to ever do so.
- Determinator: Monument's broken? Get the shards. Broken again? Get more. Re-winded time to get things right only to fail? Do it again.
- Heroic Mime: Occasionally people react to what he says, but you never hear him. Even at the point after Rucks's narration is done, you never hear his voice, although there is always a description of what he is asking people when he shows them items. Though it's also implied that he's not much of a talker to begin with.
- Heroic Self-Deprecation: During the Mushroom Samba in Jawson Bog, the Kid turns out to feel very guilty of the things he's done, with the narration calling him a thief and a murderer.
- Made of Iron: He survived two tours on the Rippling Walls, after all. And he brushes off constantly falling face-first onto pavement, crates, groups of enemies...
- Multi-Melee Master: Mixed with Multi-Ranged Master. The Kid can switch between several weapons, and he's a master of all of them. Justified, as he toured the Rippling Walls TWICE.
- One-Man Army: Solos all the monsters inhabiting what's left of the City and the Wilds, as well as what's left of the Ura army.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: He's the Kid. The other characters do know what his name is, Rucks just never gets around to telling us.
- Parental Abandonment: His father is missing and his mother died during his first tour of duty on the Walls.
- Scarf of Asskicking: Something that he always wears no matter the situation.
- Talking in Your Sleep: According to Rucks' narration in the Kid's Who Knows Where, he does this.
- Vague Age: His exact age is never given, and although he is referred to as a kid, he's at least of age to enlist with the Masons, and has completed two tours on the Rippling Walls.
Rucks
"Proper story’s supposed to start at the beginning. Ain’t so simple with this one."
"Now that's more like it."
The first survivor of the Calamity that the Kid finds. He serves as the narrator for the game.
- Anti-Villain: Or possibly just Unwitting Instigator of Doom. See "My Greatest Failure."
- Image Song: "The Pantheon (Ain't Gonna Catch You)"
, a bonus song on the game's soundtrack. - Lemony Narrator: His narration is very strongly colored by his own opinions, and he also makes several snarky remarks about situations the player might run into, like falling off the Bastion, or smashing every object in sight.
- Mission Control: He's the one that sends the Kid out to look for shards.
- My Greatest Failure: He belonged to the guild that designed the Calamity weapon; though he wasn't the one who set it off, he clearly feels responsibility for the Calamity. It's why he's so obsessed with fixing the Bastion to undo everything.
- Mysterious Past: We don't learn very much about who he was before the Calamity other than that he worked in various positions in the Caelondian hierarchy, culminating with the Mancers who ended up causing the Calamity. In fact, when the dreams of the Kid, Zulf, and Zia all reveal their pasts, the dream of Rucks only reveals that he wrote an alphabet book.
- Nay-Theist: Regularly snarks about the gods (especially when the Pantheon is involved.)
- Reasonable Authority Figure: While Rucks is very strongly inclined towards using the Bastion, he freely admits that he has no idea if it will work or not, and ultimately leaves the choice up to the Kid.
- Retired Badass: It's heavily implied that Rucks was once a member of the Triggers, an elite squad of Caelondian riflemen. Also, it's all but confirmed that he was quite the renaissance man in his youth.
- World Half Empty: His view on the Calamity. He wants to reset the world, and you can do so in his ending.
Zulf
"What do you say to a man who's seen too much?"
A man that the Kid finds in the Hanging Gardens. He is an Ura ambassador to Caelondia.
- Anti-Villain: He betrays the Bastion to the Ura after learning from Zia's father's diary that the Calamity was caused by the Caelondian government as a weapon against the Ura, and that Rucks was part of the team that built the weapon that caused it. However, he has no ill will against the Kid and asks Zia if she wants to come with him. And after everything he's been through, it's hard to blame him for breaking under the knowledge that it was all because of the Cael Mancers. And in the end, the Kid can (optionally) forgive him and save him from the Ura after they turn on him for bringing the Kid down upon their heads.
- Dark and Troubled Past: The worst in the game. Zulf's nearly a Cosmic Plaything.
- Despair Event Horizon: Was in the midst of one when the Kid showed up, waking up on the morning of his wedding party to find a world in ruins, everyone dead, and his to-be wife's ashes scattering at his touch. According to Rucks, he was just about to "throw it all away" before the Kid showed up.
- Face–Heel Turn: Goes to the Ura and convinces them to ransack the Bastion after finding out from Zia's father's journal that Rucks and the other Mancers created the the weapon that caused the Calamity.
- Friendly Enemy: To the Kid and Zia. He doesn't want to harm them, necessarily. He just wants to see the Bastion fall, and perhaps take vengeance on Rucks.
- Gentleman and a Scholar: And an important force in contributing to detente between his people and Caelondia before the Calamity.
- Heel–Face Turn: If you decide to rescue him from the Ura.
- Leitmotif: "Mother, I'm Here". Later combines with Zia's theme for the ending song.
- Maligned Mixed Marriage: For all that the setting plays up the Ura-Cael tensions, this is happily averted in the backstory. Zulf and his fiance don't seem to have run into any trouble for getting married from either direction. Unfortunately...
- Raised by Natives: Zulf, an Ura, was Happily Adopted by a Caelondian missionary who raised him as his own son and taught him how to be such a gentleman. Played With in that the missionary was visiting the Terminals then, so he wasn't a "native" — it's only later than Zulf takes a page from his adopted father's book, leaves his homeland, and moves to Caelondia, where he lives the rest of his life until he's found by the Kid.
- Real Men Cook: If Zulf is saved and the player then goes with the Evacuation Ending, he supersedes Zia as the cook for the group.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Raised by a Cael man, he moved to Caelondia and worked, with apparent success, to promote a peace based on mutual respect and coexistence. The Calamity breaks him and the awful truth about it and the futility of his past work breaks him again.
- Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: In the ending, the Kid finds Zulf in the process of being beaten to death by the Ura and can choose to either save him or leave him to his fate. However, presumably they were not trying to kill him simply for being a traitor to the Ura's enemies, but because his actions for the Ura ended up bringing the Kid down upon them in his mission to regain the Shard that they took.
- Smoking Is Cool: His pipe.
Zia
"Any moment I'd want to live again...happened after the Calamity. Not before."
"If I could be any place I wanted, I'd stay right here."
A young Ura girl the Kid encounters in Prosper Bluff.
- All the Other Reindeer: She is an Ura raised in Caelondia who knows next to nothing about her cultural heritage. It still wasn't enough to keep people from messing with her.
- Audience Surrogate: Of a sort. Turns out she's the one Rucks is narrating the story to.
- Break the Cutie: Her would-be boyfriend sold her and her father out to the authorities, saying they were Ura spies. This after more or less insulting her father indirectly and planting the idea of escaping to the Terminals in her head, which led to her arrest in the first place.
- Broken Bird: Bad things have happened to Zia.
- Category Traitor: While Zia willingly with with the Ura after their attack on the Bastion, at the end of the game she reveals that she tried to convince them to work with or at least forgive the Kid and Rucks; they responded by calling her a traitor, and she was starting to fear for her safety by the time the Kid rescued her.
- Dark and Troubled Past: As her Who Knows Where reveals, growing up an Ura in Caelondia exposed her to a lot of prejudice from her Cael peers, and the one Cael who she befriended betrayed her in the end.
- Elegant Classical Musician: A harp guitar.
- Foil: She wants to move forward in life while Rucks wants to rewind things, and they each represent the two endings.
- Leitmotif: "Build That Wall". Later combines with Zulf's theme for the ending song.
- Lethal Chef: A variation when the Kid uses her Stockpot in the Bastion. While the Kid seems happy enough to eat the food, it slams the door hard on its way out, as it functions as a portal to Who Knows Where, and Rucks comments on it when you keep hitting the outhouse.Rucks: Seems Zia's cooking got the best of him.
- Suddenly Voiced: While you do hear her voice when she sings, she also talks to you at the very end. Before that, Rucks voices what she says.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Specifically her father's journal, which Zulf reads. As she can't read the language, she had no reason to even suspect it.
- Applies earlier than that. Her actions before the Calamity forced her father to work with the Mancers to keep her from being arrested. In revenge, he modified the Calamity device to destroy Caelondia along with the Ura, causing the events of the game. She, of course, had no idea any of this would happen.
- World Half Full: Her opinion of the world after the Calamity. She represents the Evacuation choice.
