Lore
Note: This page is work in progress, and may contain factual inaccuracies and improper formatting.
Girls' Frontline is a prequel set 30 years before the events of Codename: Bakery Girl, a game published in 2004 by MicaTeam. This page contains massive spoilers for both GF and Bakery Girl, so proceed with caution. In addition, the majority of the lore summarized here is taken from a translated excerpt of the official Girls' Frontline Confidential Files, which in turn were provided with Volume One of the Art of Girl's Frontline official artbook. Due to issues with translation accuracy, minor plot additions and retcons that have developed in the story in the time span between the release of the artbook and the present, the information found here may not be reliable and readers should exercise caution.
Contents
History
Pre-Infection
The world of Girls' Frontline takes place in an alternate history, where the Russian Empire accidentally stumbled upon an ancient alien ruin located deep in the Siberian taiga in the early 20th century. Although the alien technology found at the site was far beyond human comprehension at the time, the Russians managed to keep the existence of the ruin a secret and began to extract some of the alien artifacts. This inadvertently caused the reactor within the alien construct to destabilize, and ultimately led to the explosion known as the Tunguska event. Not long afterwards, the Bolshevik Revolution would topple the Empire, leaving the remaining alien constructs within the hands of Soviet Russia.
World War II would happen a few decades later, with the Allies triumphant against the Axis in both the Western and Pacific Theaters. Having emerged as the two reigning superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union eagerly took their war reparations. Much of the Axis's manufacturing and natural resources would end up in the hands of the US, but the Soviet Union secretly took control of all the alien technology that Germany possessed- including the alien research facility Urkunde 01. A Cold War soon breaks out between the United States and the Soviet Union, with the latter quickly gaining the upper hand in both nuclear arms technology as well as alien research. By 1950, the Soviets had begun the first concentrated effort to research and synthesize alien tech with Project Starfish. The United States finally discovers the existence of precursor ruins five years later, beginning their own research at a ruin named D-1.
Cold War
As research into alien technology ramps up, the first precursor corpse is found in the Beilan Island Ruins, located in the North China Sea near Shanghai. Named GAVIRUL, experiments and research into precursor biology begins nearly immediately. However, improper handling of the ruins leads to a rupture in some alien storage tanks. The results of this leak are almost immediately apparent as workers in the area quickly succumb to the effects of an otherworldly disease. Called Eurosky Low-Emission Infectious Disease (ELID), the mutations are quickly found to be caused by interaction between collapse fluid and human biology, and the entire site is closed down before ultimately being sealed off by the local government.
Beilan Island Incident
In 2030, an incident occurs at the Beilan Island containment site as a group of seven middle school students break into the ruins, and are attacked almost immediately by mutant ELID sufferers. A militia strike team is sent in to rescue the group, but the squad is quickly overwhelmed and forced to use explosives to ensure that the mutants don't break containment. The explosion destroys the entrance to the ruin and succeeds in wiping out the mutants, but exposes the facility to open air, ultimately resulting in a huge volume of collapse fluid contaminating Earth's atmosphere, spreading via trade winds and rendering a large portion of Earth's land uninhabitable. As a result, existing nations and superpowers were forced to reevaluate their circumstances and adapt quickly, resulting in the formation of entities such as the Pan-European Union and the New Soviet Union.
Inter-war Era
Thanks to the sudden reduction of the human population, work was quickly put into developing alternative ways of gathering resources and producing goods. Development into robotic workers and automatons becomes the most popular choice as research begins on reliable, cost-effective, and easily-adaptable machines. A company known as Leihart General Manufacturing took the lead in 2035 with the first frame robot design, capable of wireless control and 6 hours of battery life. Further development on the Leihart model was quickly taken up by a multitude of companies across the globe, and it wasn't long before the military forces of the new factions took an interest, with the first military contract arriving in 2037: an order for a frame-robot capable of replacing the crew of the Pan-European Union’s assault artillery vehicles. To fit the requirements, the resulting frame had to be flexible and humanoid in shape to adapt to the vehicles, and was fitted with a highly-adaptable AI from Leihart's initial prototypes. The first Doll had been developed.
Applications for the human-like dolls were quickly found in both military and civilian sectors across the continent, and a plethora of upgrades upon the original models were quickly developed by military and civilian companies alike. Among these were sensor upgrades, power management improvements, and improved AI. Before too long, the developments of these civilian companies had caught the attention of General Carter of the New Soviet Union, resulting in the consolidation of two major companies, Leihart and Szchelber, into the Important Operation Prototype Manufacturing Company, or IOP.
World War III
IOP and Sangvis Ferri
The head of this new company was none other than the lead developer of Leihart's groundbreaking design, a man known as Havel Witkin. Knowing that he had a huge amount of funding at his disposal, Witkin was in no hurry to immediately invest in large-scale production. Instead, he partnered with Sangvis Ferri Industrial Manufacturing Company Ltd. (SF), a popular Eastern European manufacturer, to begin work on more reliable AI patterns. While the partnership was massively beneficial for IOP, the onset of World War III and the subsequent huge demand for tactical doll soldiers put a halt to IOP's experimental designs. To compensate for the huge demand, a portion of IOP's manufacturing orders were filled out by SF.
As the war raged on, Sangvis Ferri’s own brand of military products grew more and more popular with European forces, with a reputation for rugged reliability. Based on older doll prototypes and designed with simple and sturdy AI systems, doll series such as the Jaeger platform rarely malfunctioned compared to their IOP counterparts, which were based on more complex AI systems that failed more often. Competition between the two companies grew fierce, but by 2049 Sangvis Ferri had won out on the majority of the deals while IOP made very little progress on improving their own models.
Fearing for the company's future prospects, Witkin set out to look for anything that could salvage the situation. His answer came in the form of an internet article, published by a Russian team known only as 90wish. 90wish's publications were showed prodigious technical ability and extremely high potential, but the group had seemingly vanished off the face of the earth after publishing their findings. An inquiry by Witkin revealed that the team had disagreed over the publication of the articles, resulting in two of its members having gone into hiding to escape from the threat of death. Using his contacts, Witkin quickly gathered information on the location of the members and hired a mercenary squad to safely retrieve them. Led by Berezovich Kryuger of the New Soviet Union’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, the squad was able to escort former 90wish members Persica and Lycoris back to IOP Headquarters despite taking heavy casualties.
After some negotiating, Witkin was able to arrange a deal between the two researchers and IOP, with Persica and Lyco setting themselves up under the guise of a small company known as Hermit to do R&D for the company. The pair quickly developed several technologies that allowed IOP to once again pull ahead of Sangvis Ferri with the ACD-series of T-Dolls. By the end of the war in 2051, IOP had produced nearly five times the dolls Sangvis Ferri had for the military, earning favorable reviews thanks to the dolls' reliability, efficiency, and agility.
Post-War
Grifon & Kryuger - Private Military Contractor
Though the war had ended, demand for dolls had not. War-torn cities and countrysides demanded protection, production, and reconstruction, all of which required manpower, and dolls were the cheapest form of manpower available. Private military corporations were the biggest supplies of protection, the most prominent of IOP's new PMC clients being Griffin and Kryuger Military Contractor and Security Consultancy Services. Founded by the same tactical commander who had delivered IOP's salvation to their doorstep, Weitkin quickly become good friends with its founder, Berezovich Kryuger, and allowed G&K to have direct contact with Hermit, providing the latter with a steady supply of data and performance feedback in exchange for support from Hermit’s top-of-the-line projects and models. Civilian-model T-Dolls were far cheaper than human soldiers and could be easily controlled, allowing for G&K to quickly rise through the ranks while Hermit kept up the pace with a vast series of improvements and upgrades to existing doll frames. Before too long, these new dolls became the source of much of IOP's income thanks to their clean, human-like appearance as well as their simulated emotion and personality software.
Despite their astounding success, Hermit wasn't immune to creative differences, as the two members quickly found themselves disagreeing over what direction to take. Persica favored continuing her research to create a second-generation of T-Dolls, while Lycoris believed the future lay in artificial intelligence rather than hardware upgrades. IOP supported Persica due to the success of their new models, resulting in Lyco's application for additional funds being declined. Demoralized and disgruntled, Lycoris quietly began to search for greener pastures, secretly meeting with Sangvis Ferri to negotiate for a better deal. Once an agreement had been reached, Sangvis Ferri reached out to Kryuger, contracting the PMC to once again escort the researcher. Kryuger agreed on the condition that G&K would be provided the results of Lycoris's new research, allowing for Lycoris to arrive safely at SF and begin his work.
16LAB
Confident that enough time had passed for 90wish to no longer be a threat, Persica took her new funding and went public with her identity, using her influence to recruit new researchers and technicians for her own laboratory. Finally given the manpower and funding to make her dream of a second generation of T-Dolls a reality, Persica set off to work, culminating in the creation of the Advanced Statistic Session Tool- colloquially known as the etching tool. Via imprinting, T-Dolls could link with their assigned weapon, allowing them extremely precise control of a firearm to the point where the gun would be effectively an extension of their own body. Imprinting software was published online as open-source material, allowing anyone with sufficient knowledge to create customized programming for their dolls. Using this development as a basis, 16LAB was able to further upgrade their software by creating a simple command structure for T-Dolls, the final product of which would be released as the dummy network. This design meant that while the first purchase of a doll mainframe would be more expensive, later purchases of dummies were cheaper and extremely cost-effective because they didn't need to come with their own AI hardware. Thanks to this powerful two-in-one package of upgrades, IOP quickly dominated the T-Doll market with their second-generation dolls.
The Fall of Sangvis Ferri
Butterfly Incident
While Persica was developing her second-generation technology, Lycoris worked with Sangvis Ferri to vastly upgrade the company's T-Dolls with better AI, building off of his experience with the dolls during the war. His greatest project was the development of a next-generation AI called Elisa, which utilized neural feedback and machine learning in pursuit of a doll that could follow orders perfectly. While Sangvis Ferri's dolls lacked IOP's modularity and adaptability with conventional firearms, they made up for it with more secure networks and the use of experimental particle weaponry, designed and tweaked over several iterations by Lycoris. Before he could finish development on Elisa, however, Sangvis Ferri was raided by an unknown group attempting to steal data on Elisa. Lycoris was fatally wounded in the ensuing firefight and activated his creation with his dying breath, however, the AI unexpectedly responded by taking control of the entirety of Sangvis Ferri's dolls and ordering them to terminate all human personnel, as well as any non-SF entities within the facility.
While the incident largely escaped public notice thanks to the relatively small size and remote location of the company, G&K was contracted by the New Soviet Union to contain the sudden doll rebellion. Although the area was small, G&K lacked human personnel and was forced to recruit additional commanders to lead their dolls in battle. The areas controlled by Sangvis Ferri were split up into multiple sectors, with a certain commander assigned to the defense of Strategic Area S09.
Present Day
Wanting insight into how the disaster at Sangvis Ferri occurred, Persica sent a team of elite experimental units led by a human commander to break into 90wish Safehouse 03, where Lycoris had kept his old AI research. As soon as the group of dolls left the safehouse, however, they were immediately ambushed by Sangvis forces. The team managed to barely escape thanks to support from a nearby squad of G&K dolls, but split up shortly afterwards to buy time for their leader, AR M4A1
M4A1 
, to safely escape. Out of options, Persica contracts G&K to retrieve the members of AR Team, however, the closest available G&K commander has only just started his first day of work...
See Also
References
- Codename: Bakery Girl Dialogue
- Girl’s Frontline Confidential Files - Original: https://www.bilibili.com/read/cv289050/
- Girl’s’ Frontline Confidential Files - Translation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IQJym0C6vVIx9UBBdrZKbcLZqiZu7scZALvHvZCSQyk/edit
- Moegirl Girls' Frontline Wiki: https://en.moegirl.org/Girls%27_Frontline:Synopsis
- In-game Dialogue: Chapter 0, 8, 9, 10, Deep Dive, Singularity, and Isomer
