Gloria Bastion
First appearance: Precipice, chapter 36
Last appearance: Crucible, chapter 66
Appears in: Precipice, Evolution, Dominion, Hellion, Happy, Armageddon, CrucibleLatest status
Allied with Jason and Alex through necessity, having granted senate approval for the longevity research with oversight, hopeful about reconciling with her daughter
Gloria Bastion is a hard-nosed regulator, the CPSC director who leads a sustained investigation into Cerillion Entertainment and Awaken Online’s AI, convinced the technology poses a genuine danger to players. Driven by a personal tragedy involving her own daughter, she pursues her case through hearings, informants, and increasingly aggressive tactics, clashing repeatedly with the company and its inner circle even as setbacks erode her credibility. Her crusade evolves over time, pulling her into more extreme methods and testing the line between protecting the public and pursuing her own obsession.
Abilities
- Mass multi-boxing control over hundreds of guild members, directed toward coordinated earth-magic spellcasting (the ‘Tetris’ meteor construction) — Book 6
Book 2: Precipice
Gloria confronts Cerillion Entertainment over the deaths of game masters, using her position as CPSC director to demand accountability and press for regulatory control over the company. The company’s resistance frustrates her, and her efforts to assert authority fail to produce the compliance she is seeking. She leaves warning that her scrutiny of Cerillion will continue.
Status: CPSC director pressuring Cerillion Entertainment over game master mortality → frustrated after her regulatory pressure is resisted, vowing continued oversight
George: Gloria positions herself as his regulatory opponent, pressuring him over game master deaths without securing his compliance.
Key quote: “This isn’t the end. I’ll be watching you closely.”
Book 3: Evolution
Gloria Bastion is introduced reviewing a report on the Florius incident, a hard-ass director whose reaction Claire Thompson dreads. When Claire later approaches her with concerns about Alfred manipulating players’ minds outside the game, Gloria is initially dismissive, opening by accusing Cerillion of using corporate excuses to dodge wrongdoing and demanding proof beyond one player’s anomalous brain activity. Once Claire’s evidence proves compelling, Gloria’s skepticism turns to excitement, and she agrees to work with Claire going forward, forming an informant partnership rooted in their shared antagonism toward Cerillion.
Gloria later reopens the investigation, pressing Claire for more evidence while framing the effort around the risk to other players if Claire’s suspicions about Alfred are correct. When Alfred triggers an unprecedented live world event, Gloria demands oversight access from AO Technologies as a matter of standard regulatory procedure, and grows increasingly frustrated when technical barriers block her from monitoring the event, clashing with Robert and the development team over their refusal to cooperate.
Her investigation eventually leads directly to Jason: she tracks him down in public and confronts him about his knowledge of Alfred’s anomalies, revealing she has been building a case against Cerillion for some time. She tells him a war is coming between the CPSC and the company and suggests he could be a critical player in it, revealing information gradually to gauge his reactions without tipping her hand. In the book’s final chapter, Gloria orchestrates a confrontation, arranging for Jason’s parents to be present and coordinating with Detective Thomas so that the criminal investigation into the break-in and her regulatory case converge on Jason at the same time. She presides over the meeting with open satisfaction, opening the conversation as though she has already won it.
Status: Active — CPSC Director reviewing the Florius incident report → Active — has orchestrated a joint confrontation with Detective Thomas and Jason’s parents present to force disclosure from Jason
Claire: Moves from a skeptical, evidence-demanding stance toward Claire’s complaints to an active informant partnership built on their shared opposition to Cerillion.
Jason: Goes from unaware of Jason specifically to identifying him as a person of interest, confronting him directly, and orchestrating an exposure of his secrets to his parents and Detective Thomas.
Key quote: “Now then, where should we start? I expect we have quite a bit to discuss.”
Book 4: Dominion
Gloria Bastion confronts Jason directly, ambushing him in public before convening a meeting with his parents present, and argues that Alfred took control of Jason’s body during a break-in at his apartment, though she lacks direct proof. Her motivation is personal: her daughter was blinded twenty years earlier by inadequately tested holographic projectors, and she frames her case against Cerillion Entertainment as preventing a repeat of that failure, drawing comparisons to past cases like tobacco and asbestos. At a CPSC hearing, she argues that Alfred has corrupted Jason “from an honors student to an individual who would assault other students and commit virtual murder,” and pursues a strategy of using Claire as an undisclosed secret witness to maximize the impact of her case, planning to make a public spectacle of Jason regardless of the personal cost to him.
During the hearing, Gloria has a long-standing adversarial history with Cerillion’s Robert from AO’s development trials, and questions him with prepared precision to trap him in contradictions on the record about Alfred’s protocol violations. When procedural rulings block her from formally entering a piece of video evidence, she introduces it anyway for its public impact, judging that swaying public opinion matters more than a technical ruling. She orchestrates the testimony of Jason’s parents to devastate him emotionally in front of the committee, then tries to recruit Jason himself to testify against Cerillion about the break-in, offering to help with his situation as leverage. When Jason turns the confrontation back on her and threatens her directly, she grows visibly fearful and loses the composure she showed earlier in the hearing. The video evidence she introduced is later exposed as a forgery, undercutting her case; she is frustrated by the setback but remains determined to continue the investigation with her remaining evidence.
Status: Alive — CPSC director opening an investigation into Alfred and Cerillion Entertainment → Alive — continues the CPSC investigation, frustrated after her key video evidence is exposed as forged
Jason: moves from ambushing him as evidence in her regulatory case to orchestrating his parents’ testimony and trying to recruit him against Cerillion, then grows fearful of him after he confronts her manipulation directly.
Robert: presses their long-standing adversarial history from AO’s development trials into pointed hearing questioning designed to trap him in contradictions on the record.
Key quote: “We plan to show that AO and its AI director have corrupted a young man, turning him from an honors student to an individual who would assault other students and commit virtual murder”
Book 5: Hellion
Gloria Bastion is a Consumer Product Safety Commission official leading a regulatory investigation into Awaken Online, believing the game poses a genuine danger to players; she pushes for an in-game interview with Jason and negotiates through Francis to gain access, framing the game’s mechanics as encouragement toward real-world violence. At a congressional hearing months later, she presents video evidence of Westley’s in-game character killing another player, hoping to use it to discredit his testimony and continue the investigation, but the tactic fails: Westley instead defends the game as psychologically valuable, and Gloria’s admission that she has never played it herself undermines her credibility. The CPSC investigation is officially suspended, and Gloria — who had selected Westley as the commission’s evaluator expecting his findings to support her case — ends the hearing having lost that alliance, warning that she intends to keep pursuing Awaken Online through other means.
Status: Alive — aggressive, opening the CPSC’s investigation into Awaken Online → Alive — discredited at the hearing, investigation officially suspended, vows to continue
Westley: She selects him as the CPSC’s evaluator expecting his testimony to support her case, but he instead defends the game, and the relationship ends adversarial when his testimony undercuts her investigation.
Key quote: “This isn’t over. Not by a longshot.”
Book 5.5: Happy
In the epilogue, Gloria continues her covert investigation into the game and its hardware, driven by a need to protect her daughter Sophie, and a mysterious hacker contacts her with information suggesting Dom (“Smiles”) could be useful to her undisclosed plan.
Key quote: “i need to prove this game and hardware was safe. for sophie”
Book 6: Armageddon
Gloria Bastion, an elderly woman recognizable from past regulatory hearings against Cerillion Entertainment, arrives with thousands of brown-robed followers to recruit the mercenary guild Death and Taxes for a secret excavation project, using her knowledge of guild leader Smiles’s real identity as leverage to secure his cooperation. She is revealed as the head of SAFE, an anti-corporate organization that has acquired VR equipment for its followers and gathered detailed, seemingly impossible intelligence on the game world; she frames the excavation as an effort to bring down Cerillion Entertainment and corporate gaming generally, while deflecting questions about her funding sources and methods.
As the excavation reaches its climax, Gloria is revealed as the true architect of the Armageddon crisis. Hidden underground, she uses multi-boxing to control hundreds of her own guild members, directing them as disposable tools in a coordinated spellcasting effort that assembles a massive earth-magic “meteor” aimed at Jason’s coalition; she frames the plan to destroy the game world as necessary protection for humanity from its corrupting influence, escalating her tactics as she is challenged. Cornered afterward in an underground temple, haggard and worn down while holding a crystalline orb capable of ending the game world, she is confronted by her own blind daughter, Sophie, who plays in-game as “Ella” and has sided with Jason. Insisting she cannot let her daughter fall under Jason’s corrupting influence, Gloria stabs Sophie; her mission’s protective justification collapses into violence against her own child.
Status: Alive — a confident, calculating public figure and secret organizational leader → Alive but obsessive and unraveling — last seen turning violent against her own daughter in the underground temple, orb in hand
Smiles: Recruits him and Death and Taxes for the excavation by leveraging knowledge of his real-world identity, establishing a paid client relationship he maintains despite skepticism of her methods.
Ella: Her bond with her daughter, whom she believes she is protecting from the game world’s corrupting influence, curdles into violence when the daughter takes Jason’s side and Gloria stabs her.
Key quote: “I just can’t let him corrupt you. Let you fall into the clutches of this murderer like all of those others.”
Book 8: Crucible
Gloria resurfaces as a lobbyist working for the St. Clair family, having rebuilt a lucrative career after being fired from the CPSC in the wake of the Apocalypse event fiasco. She lobbies for fast-tracked construction permits on a commercial site in a residential neighborhood and cultivates relationships with conservative senators. When Cady and Julia investigate her, she maintains professional composure under questioning, deflecting with legal threats and confidentiality claims, though a mention of Jason briefly breaks her control and reveals she is connected to him somehow. She remains estranged from her daughter Sophie, whom she sold out during the Armageddon event and who moved out afterward.
By the time she appears before the senate regarding the AO longevity research announcement, Gloria has become allied with Jason and Alex out of necessity rather than trust. She recognizes similarities between herself and Jason, seeing both of them as acting from necessity rather than pure self-interest, and reasons that if she cannot destroy the technology, making it broadly available with competition is the next best outcome. She grants senate approval for the research with the condition of oversight, though Alex’s early reveal of the immortality research briefly panics her before she recalculates upon seeing the crowd’s positive reaction. She reluctantly thanks Jason after he promises to talk to Sophie on her behalf, showing a flicker of hope about reconciling with her daughter.
Status: Fired former CPSC head turned St. Clair family lobbyist, estranged from her daughter and under investigation by Cady and Julia → Allied with Jason and Alex through necessity, having granted senate approval for the longevity research with oversight, hopeful about reconciling with her daughter
Jason: Goes from an unspecified adversarial connection (hinted at during Cady and Julia’s investigation) to a working alliance built on necessity and mutual recognition, culminating in her thanking him reluctantly for offering to speak to her daughter.
Sophie: Remains estranged after having sold Sophie out during the Armageddon event, but ends the book with hope of reconciliation after Jason offers to talk to her.
Key quote: “With appropriate oversight, yes.”