Been meaning to asking this, but I was super dead this weekend. What's Astrid's relationship with her sense of self? Also, does she ever tell anyone she's a droid, or does she mask fully as a living being?
No worries. Hopefully you're feeling less dead lately.
Astrid sees her computer as her real self. Her body is a useful tool and she understands that organics see her as they do themselves, a mind and body integrated, but to her it's just the shell she needs to operate in the wider galaxy. She actually enjoys turning off her sensory connections and interacting as pure data on the HoloNet a lot more than living in her body. She feels constrained by it. It's not who she is. Droids having no rights in the galaxy makes it valuable to continue masking as a living being, though.
And on the mental side, she was memory wiped multiple times while still an active experiment. Every time she developed too much identity, Vindi would wipe her hard drive and recalibrate her personality. He needed a droid that acted as if it was alive, to suit the skin, but didn't want her to have an identity, or to assert any kind of ownership over the body. So her personality is in fragments at the beginning of her real story, where she starts to really interact with other people in the galaxy. She barely has a sense of herself. All she knows are results; the black and white of success and failure. That fills the void of a real personality and she clings to it for a long time.
Her interaction with (and eventual weird psychosexual obsession with Moralo Eval in my (still WIP) fanfiction is the beginning of Vindi truly letting her "degrade." He has no investment in her once he moves on to the Blue Shadow Virus. She's been denied the only thing she ever had to value: her creator's approval, succeeding at being what she was meant to be. From there, she's left alone to try and carve a deeper meaning to her own life. She has to get closer to real living beings. It takes her decades to create a fully formed and somewhat "normal" personality. She knows who she is, but she's held back by believing she can't ever be more than what her creator designed.
Astrid passes pretty well for a living being from a distance. Up close, or over a period of time, her disguise breaks down quickly. She wasn't meant to integrate, only to appear alive. Everything is superficial.
She doesn't imitate breathing. She can take gulps of air in and out as an emergency cooling method (her heat sinks and cooling measures are woefully lacking compared to the size of her power cells and main computer), but that's it. She doesn't smell like skin and fur, she smells like hot metal and bacta. Her motions are a little too smooth and quick, which she writes off as part of being an accomplished mercenary. And she needs to recharge every 72-ish hours, which requires going completely offline, during which she genuinely looks dead. Otherwise, she has incredibly fine muscle control and can produce micro-expressions that look natural.
She does, eventually, tell someone she's a droid. This is late in her timeline. Specifically my other OC Ayo, who becomes her most beloved partner, once she gives in to her own desires. Usually, she falls back on saying she's heavily cybernetic. Her backstory is that, to make herself a better mercenary, she stripped away the unnecessary functions of her body, like eating and breathing. She truly believes she would have done this anyway if she had been born organic. She wants to understand living beings, but doesn't desire to be like them.
