Bane

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Background

Powers & Abilities

Bane is an exceptional specimen on every level – extremely fit, strong and muscular, essentially fearless, formidably intelligent and with truly exceptional willpower.

He has trained himself to be at the peak of human capacities, both physically and mentally – using strange, unique meditative techniques inspired by visions. Though these approaches are unorthodox, they obviously worked for him.

Bane has been injected with vast quantities of a super-steroid derived from the strength-enhancing drug Venom, using surgically-implanted gateways to his brain. This chemical altered his body — stimulating his adrenal glands and developing the corpus callosum — and regular use was slowly warping his physique, gradually making him impossibly muscular.

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Bane can engage the superhumanly strong, tough and savage Killer Croc in hand-to-hand combat – and thrash him with his bare hands.

While Bane is a powerful and relentless combatant, he’s also a cautious strategist and knows that intelligence and having the initiative – not just strength – are the key to victory.

He’s also highly observant, a superior deductive thinker, and his powerful mind excels at detecting patterns, particularly when it comes to body language, behaviour and fighting strategies.

Bane reads men like most read an issue of Detective Comics – he could see with but a glance that Batman (Jean-Paul Valley) wasn’t Batman (Bruce Wayne), and after watching Wayne for a few minutes Bane intuitively realised that he was Batman.

Bane seems trained with all weapons, from shivs to sniper rifles and all the way to missile launchers. It is very likely that he had other Skills, Expertises, etc. than the ones listed in our game stats, but this writeup is based on what was actually demonstrated.

On several occasions in his life, Bane received visions or had intuitions that were accurate. He had a vision of his future self talking to him when he was 6, a vision of his child self after Valley beat him, and later intuitively knew that Bruce Wayne had become Batman again.

Early Bane is perhaps best understood as a warped version of Doc Savage, the clearest hint being his assistants.

…but the drugs like me

Bane sports a Venom dispenser, plugged into induction port surgically installed in his skull and brain.

The dispenser is a flat box installed on his upper back (presumably with straps around his shoulders or chest under the costume), 4 armoured cables plugging into his cranial ports, and an armoured cable linking to a control unit installed on the back of his left glove.

If the flow of Venom is cut, Bane’s strength is noticeably diminished – but remains practically superhuman. It is the long-term deprivation of Venom that will genuinely hurt him since his body and mind have grown dependent on it.

When he’s badly wounded, Bane can inject some extra Venom to compensate.

History

It was presumably in 1958 that a coup attempt took place in Santa Prisca, about halfway between Jamaica and Cuba. Emboldened by the events in Cuba, the people rose against the military dictatorship. After 3 days of fighting in the capital, the coup failed.

Captured rebels were tortured so they would name names, and numerous arrests were made.

A former monastery, the Pena Duro (“Hard stone” – presumably Santa Priscan Spanish is different than mainstream Spanish) was converted into a large prison to hold the insurgents, suspects, unlucky bystanders, unpopular persons denounced as convenient, and the like.

Bane’s father was condemned to life in absentia ; presumably he was one of the insurgents, perhaps one of the leaders. One assumes that the junta did not manage to capture him.

What is certain is that the woman pregnant with his child was found, and taken to Pena Duro. Santa Prisca’s antiquated law allowed for the condemnation of the father to be served by the child if he turned out to be male, and thus was Bane born to a life sentence.

Bane’s mother was imprisoned with him. The hapless farm girl couldn’t stand the imprisonment and wasted away, dying when her son was 6.

Stone cold

Bane thus spent his entire youth in a large prison in a Third World dictatorship, rife with violence and corruption. Early on he was kept with the protected population and with access to the infirmary, but that stopped when his mother died.

He quickly became a harsh, closed boy chiefly preoccupied by survival. Incongruously, he always carried around a teddy bear that was his sole possession.

Bane’s mum was denied a Christian burial and thrown in the sea to be eaten by sharks. Her son was thrown with the general population. Though most expected the boy to be raped, tortured and killed in short order, a number of prisoners were revolted to see a 6-year old in gen pop.

When a con nicknamed el Puerco tried to enslave the boy, a killer called Trogg intervened and beat up el Puerco. However, the boy fell from an elevated walkway during the fight and was nearly killed.

During a month-long coma, the boy had visions telling him that he would become a great warrior and a king among men if he could conquer his fears – embodied by a giant vampire bat. When he emerged from the coma, the boy had a mission – to prove that he was afraid of nothing.

Procuring a shiv, he murdered el Puerco in his cell. When the warden caught him, he called the boy “a bane to everything holy”, which became the kid’s name. Covered in blood, little Bane cursed the warden to Hell in the name of his mother. The rattled official had him thrown in Pena Duro’s special solitary, the cavidad oscuro.

The cavidad was not meant to be survivable – it was infested by rats and crabs, and filled with sea water every night. Motivated by hatred and the promise of a great future, the kid impossibly held on in the tiny cell, feeding on animals he’d kill with a stone or his hands and teeth.

He spent 11 years there, and was a young adult when the warden had him released.

Only the strong

Over 4,000 days of constant life-and-death struggle, Bane developed unique meditative techniques to fight isolation, boredom, hunger and fatigue. He became able to imagine himself fully immersed in fictional worlds of his creation, to the point of training himself in physical skills that he designed from scratch.

A recurrent theme of these deep reveries was fighting and killing the giant bat, his symbol of fear, to reaffirm his courage and determination. When he was escorted out of the cavidad and back into gen pop, Bane was a powerful athlete and strategist.

While Bane was in the cavidad, an American prisoner nicknamed Pajàro (“Bird”) sent tame birds with small messages to teach him to read in both Spanish and English.

Unbeknownst to Bane, he had become a cause célèbre within Pena Duro and prisoners saw him and his impossible survival as a symbol of their life. Three prisoners thus became Bane’s henchmen when he got out – Bird, Trogg and a convict nicknamed Zombie, who had known him since birth.

Thanks to his meditative techniques, Bane’s intellect had not atrophied from the isolation – he had an incredible intelligence and capacity to learn. Obtaining library privileges, Bane thus taught himself to read in 4 more languages and went through 3 books a day, having more publications smuggled in once he ran out.

While he built himself a superior education he continued to hone his mind and body through meditation and exercise.

Still driven by the vision he had at 6, he leveraged his legend within Pena Duro to become the king of general population there – fighting and killing all other pretenders.

Bane then set his sights on the outside. Bird, a Gothamite, told him about the city and about Batman. Bane was fascinated by the urban legends about Batman that Bird told him.

The feared vigilante was at once the embodiment of the vampire bat from his visions, and, in Bane’s prison-forged ethics, the toughest man out there, the one a newcomer had to break to assert domination.

Meanwhile, a drugs lord called the Beast bought the government of Santa Prisca to facilitate his operations. He disappeared after attempting a strange experiment in alchemy, and the government of the island fell apart, though that did not impact Pena Duro.

After a few months of chaos in 1988, a sort of government emerged – a loose coalition of foreign criminals interested in making the failed Santa Priscan state their base. Whichever crime lord was dominant at any point was just called el jefe del pais, without even attempting to pretend that he was a President.

Venom in his veins

The rapacious “government” had a medical lab built in Pena Duro and, circa 1990 or 1991, started selling prisoners to run medical experiments on.

One program ran into difficulties as the subjects died too soon, and requested men in better health. Seeing a way to get rid of Bane, the warden picked him to become a Guinea pig.

Bane was robust enough to survive the injections of an experimental form of the drug Venom – an improved concentrate. The program could finally make progress, and implants were installed in his skull so the drug could be injected straight into his brain.

Zombie, a former chemist for drugs lords, determined that he could produce this Venom variant on his own, and Bane launched the next phase of his plan. Using his meditative techniques he passed himself for dead, keeping his vital signs below the detection threshold.

His apparent corpse was thrown in the sea for the sharks to eat. Bane revived, killed a shark with his bare hands and came back to kidnap the warden.

The amorphous Santa Priscan government agreed to his demand to send an helicopter in exchange for the warden’s life and Bane, Zombie, Trogg and Bird flew out. Bane threw the warden to the sharks to avenge his mother.

After he left, the legend of Bane grew beyond Pena Duro and he became a symbol of pride, strength and freedom among all oppressed Santa Priscans.

The quartet went to Gotham, where Bird still had connections. Since Bane’s metabolism now needed the Venom derivative to work, Zombie synthesised a batch of it whilst Trogg built a compact dispenser hooked to Bane’s cranial ports.

Bane decided to follow the Gotham tradition as explained by Bird, and wore a costume. He kept it basic – combat boots, fatigues, muscle shirt and a luchador-style mask.

First we take Gotham

Bane and his 3 lieutenants started their campaign by slaughtering Jimmy “No-nose” Novak and entourage – for betraying Bird and sending him to Pena Duro years before. Bane then briefly confronted Batman, but chose not to fight him as he needed time to better understand his strange nemesis and the city he was to become the boss of.

Meanwhile, Killer Croc went on a rampage. Bird explained his track record to Bane, who decided that Croc was an excellent opponent to establish his presence.

Croc beat the inexperienced Baman (Jean-Paul Valley), who was standing in for Bruce Wayne, but Bane came in, easily thrashed Croc and broke his arm. With one look, Bane realised that Valley wasn’t Wayne and left.

Bane attempted to test the Batman further, as he could see that even the real one seemed oddly weakened. Seeing an opportunity when the Riddler defied Batman, Bane ambushed the Riddler and injected him with Venom against his will.

Batman managed to stop the amped Riddler twice – but even drugged, the Riddler wasn’t enough of a threat to allow Bane to take the full measure of his opponent. Bane’s lieutenants then brought him the plans of Arkham Assylum, knowing he’d want to make use of more psychopaths.

Approving of the idea, Bane raided a military arsenal with his henchmen, stealing hundreds of weapons. These weapons were used to attack Arkham Asylum in a precise fashion, freeing the inmates (starting with the Joker) and crippling the security forces therein. Crates of military weaponry were then parachuted to the prisoners.

While Batman was inside to free hostages, Bane and his lieutenants blew up the police with missile launchers, breaking the siege and allowing the entire population of Arkham Asylum to break free.

Knightfall

One of the freed villains, the Mad Hatter, deduced what was going on and managed to put a tracer on Bird’s falcon to track down the man behind the breakthrough.

However, the Mad Hatter wanted to focus on his main plan about Batman, and he just sent the psychotic murderer Film Freak, wearing a strength-enhancing hat, after whomever was behind the Arkham Asylum disaster. Bane killed Film Freak and resumed monitoring the city-wide crisis.

Bane wanted to break Batman so he could leave him alive as an object lesson about the power of Bane, and that necessitated a thoroughly exhausted and dispirited Batman. Batman nearly cracked and murdered the serial killer Zsasz, but police officer Renee Montoya stopped him.

Batman, who had been experiencing severe medical issues, found himself at the limit of his physical endurance surprisingly quickly.

Meanwhile Robin, who had been investigating Bane, was captured when Batman passed out and failed to back him up. Thankfully, Killer Croc had been tracking Bane down for a rematch and attacked at that point, possibly saving Robin’s life. Bane and Croc fought until rushing water in the sewers separated them.

The numerous rampaging, insane villains took a serious toll on Gotham, especially after the Joker started encouraging and facilitating their efforts. While Batman, Robin, Jean-Paul Valley and the GCPD were barely holding the line, Bane deduced that Batman was Bruce Wayne while comparing the body language of the two men.

After Batman narrowly saved the Mayor from the Joker and Scarecrow, Bane sent Trogg, Zombie and Bird as a last test. As they left, he invaded Wayne Manor and knocked out Alfred Pennyworth, then waited for an exhausted Batman to come home. Bane fought his designated nemesis in the Bat-Cave, defeated him and broke his back over his knee.

Lord of darkness

Batman was spirited away by his allies, in a critical state. Meanwhile, as the TV was relaying news of Bane’s victory over Batman, Bane and his lieutenants moved in to take over.

Though the underworld of Gotham had recently reached some measure of balance by negotiating turfs, Bane wanted it all and started making examples, gunning down crime bosses and having their lieutenants take over under his authority. All through the night, Bane and his lieutenants killed and terrorised Gotham’s lesser bosses and established dominance.

Within days, most street crime in Gotham was earning Bane 50 cents to the dollar – drug, smuggling, gambling, extortion, car theft, bank burglary, etc. He started moving on to the better-established mobs.

Bane also approached Catwoman and reached a rough understanding for future alliances – but sensed that she would never toe the line. Upon learning that a hitman was coming for him from Santa Prisca, he had the killer tricked into killing Catwoman to get rid of 2 problems at once.

The hit failed, and Catwoman left for Santa Prisca to eliminate whoever had sent a killer after her.

Meanwhile, Jean-Paul Valley had been given the Batman costume by Bruce Wayne. However, Valley started being taken over by The System, a complex set of hypnotic instructions within his subconscious that made him act with startling ruthlessness and fight like a man possessed.

As Batman, Valley started taking apart Bane’s new mob, and even Robin (Tim Drake) couldn’t rein him in. Valley also used The System to build a pair of vicious fighting gloves.

Batman (Valley) took out Zombie, Trogg and Bird. The 3 men were arrested, and Valley staged a breakout – knowing that their loyalty would lead them to assume that Bane was behind it. Shadowing the escaping henchmen, Batman located Bane and engaged in combat – but though the gloves gave him a literal edge, Bane was too strong and defeated the new Batman.

Losing himself in The System, Batman (Valley) doggedly came back, this time wearing special body armour, wielding special weaponry and using special fighting techniques.

After a brutal fight, Valley prevailed and narrowly stopped himself from killing the defeated Bane – though having dived so deeply into The System would have consequences on Valley’s psyche for years.

They tried to make me go to rehab

Badly wounded and robbed of his Venom concentrate, Bane was imprisoned in Blackgate. Deprived of Venom, Bane was left but a drooling, tortured mess under heavy medical monitoring – as his powerful physiology tried to cope with all the mutations and addictions induced by the drugs he had been injected with years before.

Bane was mostly catatonic, though on good days he could move slowly and stay upright.

Corrections authorities made sure that Bane and his 3 lieutenants were kept in 4 different penitentiaries, and surgically neutralised the injection ports in Bane’s skull.

Meanwhile, Catwoman investigated in Santa Prisca and discovered who the hitman was, which Santa Priscan crimelord had hired him, why the hitman had come after her instead of Bane, and who had betrayed her. The traitor was her aide Leopold, and she sent Leopold in Blackgate to tell Bane a story about his father.

Leopold told Catwoman’s lies to Bane, who despite being terribly weakened killed Leopold in retaliation – as Catwoman had intended.

More than a year later, Bane somehow sensed that Bruce Wayne had fully recovered. This intuition worked wonders on Bane’s recuperative powers. His body miraculously recovered from the effects of Venom, though the catatonia had wrecked his physique.

The fierce pain from withdrawal slowly receded — though unpredictable, crippling flares of suffering continued — and Bane received therapy from Dr. Flanders, Blackgate’s clinical psychologist.

Seeing how diminished Bane was, some prisoners started gunning for him to establish domination. The powerful KGBeast ambushed Bane, though the now-pudgy Santa Priscan narrowly survived the beating and was sent to the prison infirmary.

I said no, no, no

The pain helped Bane focus, and he realised that breaking Batman had earned him many admirers within Blackgate, such as Ratcatcher or Elmo Galvan. After ensuring that these men would help him, Bane killed a random convict so he would be sentenced to the isolation block. He was locked alone in a cell for 6 months.

Back to his roots, Bane resumed his meditative and physical exercises. Painfully, he finished flushing the deep hold of Venom from his body, withstood the pain attacks until they faded away, and rebuilt his musculature, fitness, reflexes, and aggression.

During that time Bane had a vision of himself as a child, who told him one word – inocente. In the wake of this vision, Bane saw how much of his actions had been the result of Venom addiction inducing a sort of ’roid rage, and mild insanity from having spend more than a decade in isolation.

When Bane got out of the cell, the guards were shocked to see that he was no longer a flabby, stooped, wounded con but was again a powerful giant with an extraordinary musculature. In short order, he found and ambushed the KGBeast, thrashing him to make it clear that Bane was back.

KGBeast, Ratcatcher and Elmo Galvan helped Bane in his daring escape plan, and the Santa Priscan escaped by swimming through a current considered too powerful for any man to overcome.

In prison, Bane had spotted a muscle freak with four cranial ports to inject Venom. Within hours of escaping, Bane donned a spare costume — sans Venom injectors — and tracked down a relative of the man with the cranial ports to learn more.

While wrecking the Venom traffic in Gotham, Bane ran into a doctor he recognised from Pena Duro, who told him that his father was alive.

As he finished off the Venom-using mob, Bane ended up fighting along with Batman. Though Batman made it clear that he would try to take him down, Bane maintained that he was innocent, and all the crimes he had committed were the result of iniquitous Santa Priscan laws and the drugs he had been forcibly injected with and physically warped his brain.

Batman accused Bane of being but a whiner and a shirker, but Bane trusted the vision he had in Blackgate.

The 2 men were separated by a collapsing building and Bane just left, not having anything special to do in Gotham. He started working on discovering who his father was, whether he was indeed still alive and how much of what Catwoman had Leopold tell him was lies.

Description

Bane is a giant of a man, with an incredible physique and extraordinarily broad shoulders. The back of his head is usually shaved because of the metallic ports installed there. When he injects Venom, it sometimes makes it look like his muscles are bulging to an even greater extend.

Bane acts calmly, dominantly and in control.

Personality

Bane is a superior strategist, whose plans impeccably click in place after extensive preparation and intelligence-gathering.

Bane came to Gotham because of all the tales Bird told him about the city. Since his values are those of a convict, Bane intends to prove that he’s the toughest man in town and then become the top dog, the boss of the city – owning it all.

This means taking down Batman, and in that respect Gotham is almost secondary. Having killed the bat-creatures of many imaginary worlds to conquer his fears, Bane now wants to kill the bat-creature of the real world – and he knows that this is Batman.

Under the influence of the Venom variant, Bane is in the throes of something vaguely similar to steroids rage. This gives him a need to conquer, to dominate, to see his enemies driven before him and hear the lamentations of their women, to be the big shot.

While he’s strong enough to be in control of this compulsion (which is thus not an Irrational Attraction in DC Heroes terms), this is something that has been welded onto his psyche by the drug, not his real self.

The Venom concentrate also reinforced the hold his visions and meditative techniques had on him – turning him from being the master of unique forms of consciousnesses into being an obsessed maniac, as the difference between the two was thin to start with.

Quotes

“This is strange. A creature cloaked in nightmare. A figure of terror in a city of terror. And yet you do not break the Sixth Commandment.”

“We start by hitting the violent wards here at the centre of the roundhouse… and we follow with a hit on main security… here. The first hit will be relatively light. Just enough to breach the roof and a few of the cells — but the second hit will be heavy, taking out security and sealing the corridor between administration and inmates.”

“Events will move swiftly from here. I want complete coverage of the Batman’s decline. I will need to decide the precise moment at which I should make my final move.”

“I am very curious about you. You aid the Batman in his fight against crime, eh ? And yet you are just a boy. I am just beginning to understand your mentor. But you are a wild card to me.”

“I appreciate youthful defiance. You struggle against your fear. I admire that.”

“I’ve known you since I lived in the hell of a dark hole thousands of miles from here. I’ve known you in my dreams. And I escaped from that hell – escaped from my dreams – for one reason only. To find you — and to break you.”

(Hurling a broken Batman down in the street) “I am Bane. THIS CITY IS MINE ! Batman is no more. I have destroyed him. I rule these streets ! I rule Gotham.”

“I was damned to my role. I was condemned before my first cries of life. The world is my prison. I will rule it or die.”

“No drugs. The pain is fine.”

“I will ask you some questions. If I am displeased with the answers, I will break you.”

“I am free of Venom. I am truly free for the first time in my life.”

By Sébastien Andrivet.

Source of Character: DC Universe.

Helper(s): Peter Piispanen, some illustrations from Rapsheet .

Writeup completed on the 21^st of June, 2011.