how do you cry with inanimate eyes?

Name: Iddy
Age: 30
Contact: Ihdreniel

Character Name: Callisto
Canon: Xena: Warrior Princess
Canon Point: post-2x05, "Return of Callisto"
Appearance: Here, dumb bikini armor and all.
Age: Unknown; looks to be somewhere in her twenties. Literally the only indicator we have is that she's significantly younger than Xena, and Xena's age is similarly unknown. She's definitely over 16/a fully-grown adult, though.

Character snapshot:
Callisto is severely stunted, both emotionally and psychologically. The revenge fantasy that she's dedicated her life to is very much the kind of wish fulfillment that a grieving, angry, traumatized preteen might use to self-soothe, and even as she grew and should have ostensibly matured, she didn't: she become more determined and more entrenched and more obsessed instead, and now she has an adult's very real ability to see that childhood fantasy through, no matter the cost to herself or to others. She's self-centered and entirely preoccupied with her own pain, and like the extreme version of a playground bully or an upset child who lashes out and hits during a tantrum, she deals with being upset by trying to make everyone else hurt as much as she does - sometimes with deadly results.

World description:
Callisto comes from what is essentially fantasy ancient Greece, primarily inspired by the mythology of the era. Actual historical figures, places, and events do make the occasional appearance in the show, but they're always heavily fictionalized, and are often mildly anachronistic. In Callisto's Greece, the gods are real, magic is real, mythological beings of all stripes are real, and legends are literal rather than allegorical; all of these things are well-known and accepted facts, rather than anything assumed, theorized, or wondered about. By her canonpoint, she's died, which means she's no longer in the land of the living but rather stuck in the underworld - and for her, this means Tartarus, where the wickedest souls are sent.

History:
Callisto spent her childhood in the tiny peasant village of Cirra, where she lived with her parents and her sister. When she was still quite young, the army of a fearsome warlord named Xena rolled into town to loot and pillage. Though normally Xena made a point of sparing the lives of women and children, in Cirra an accidental fire broke out, quickly burning through the wood and straw buildings. Nearly the entire population of the village was wiped out, and Callisto was one of the only survivors, having lost her entire family.

By the time of her first appearance in canon, a now fully-grown Callisto has been completely consumed by a desire for revenge. Xena has since reformed, leaving behind her warlord ways, but Callisto has dedicated her entire life to training herself up as a warrior with the ultimate goal of tarnishing Xena's new and improved reputation, destroying her life, and then defeating her in combat. Having raised up an army of her own, she begins laying waste to villages using Xena's name, sparking rumors that Xena's heel-face turn was just an act. Xena finds her, defeats her, and throws her in prison, but this does nothing to deter Callisto. She eventually breaks out, recruits a new army, and continues her quest to make Xena's life miserable and bait her into battle. This time, their confrontation ends with them both falling into a patch of quicksand. Xena manages to save herself, but Callisto does not; she drowns in it, dies, and is sent to Tartarus for her crimes.

What are your character’s mental/emotional strengths?
She's fantastically tenacious and goal-oriented. Give her one that she genuinely cares about, and she'll stop at nothing to see it through. Distractions, pain, humiliation, and untold numbers of setbacks are nothing in the face of her determination, and if at first she doesn't succeed, she'll try and try and try again. She trained herself up from nothing, in an environment that likely laughed at an orphaned peasant girl trying to become a warrior. She sat in prison for months, just waiting for an opportunity to break out. She put up with a guard beating her because it gave her the chance to steal his knife. Failure may upset and frustrate her, but ultimately, it doesn't deter her.

She's willing to engage with people. Granted, her engagement is very often not nice, but she's not the type to sequester herself away from all human contact: she had enough of that in Tartarus. As violent and unpleasant as she can be, she's used to being around people, and what's more, she's used to working with them rather than going it completely alone; that will serve her well in an environment where at least some level of cooperation will likely be key.

She's very honest. This is not to say that she absolutely never lies or deceives people, but it's not her default, nor her preferred way of being. When she does lie, it's generally either done in service of what she sees as some greater truth, or at the behest of someone she's in a quid pro quo arrangement with. Typically, though, she's honest about what she's done, and what's been done to her; about what she thinks and feels; and about what she plans to do in the future. It's a nice balance to the unpredictability of her behavior: her volatility may be nerve-wracking, but if you flat-out ask her, "Callisto, do you feel like attacking anyone right now?", you're very likely to get a truthful answer.

What are your character’s mental/emotional weaknesses?
She's fantastically immature. Callisto's life was thrown completely off-course when she was a preteen, and it shows: she's terrible at regulating her emotions, exhibits extreme black and white thinking, and is about as self-absorbed as the average five-year-old. If anything, her emotional state has regressed rather than matured as she's grown.

She's capable of great cruelty. If she believes that it will hurt Xena, Callisto is all too happy to inflict pain and punishment on anyone, even innocent bystanders - and even in the exact same way that she herself was hurt in the past. If Xena isn't in the picture, then it's a toss-up: she won't automatically start trying to slaughter everyone in sight, but it often doesn't take much to get her to lash out, and for her, that can involve anything from sharp words to physical violence, depending on the slight and her mood. The fact that she knows all too well what it feels like to lose loved ones has never deterred her from this: if anything, inflicting the pain she feels onto others is part of the draw.

She's single-minded to a fault. This is the negative flip side to all that tenacity: because she's focused her entire life around the pursuit of one single goal, losing sight of it means losing everything. By her canonpoint, this has not actually happened to her yet, but its inevitability looms over her all the same. When she does finally realize that no amount of hurt rained down on Xena will heal her own psychological wounds, she doesn't take the chance to reassess her own approach to life - she's spent too long convincing herself that there's nothing else worth living for. Instead, she simply switches out one obsessive goal for another, becoming determined to end her own existence: not just wanting to die, because dying means living on in the afterlife, but wanting to find a way to destroy herself so completely and utterly that there's no consciousness left to live on. She has no idea how to branch out, give herself other footholds in life, or find other things to care about; she doesn't know how to find the middle ground between letting something consume her, and not caring about it at all.

What events or circumstances in your character’s past have impacted them the most?
The loss of her family. This is the big one; the one that eclipses everything else. Even so many years later, she's never found a way to move on from the tragedy, and is indeed offended by any assertion that she should, even for the sake of her own mental health. She thinks about it constantly, at one point telling Xena that she dreams about it every night, and if given the chance she'll talk about it constantly, too. She likes the idea of as many people as possible knowing about what happened, both because she wants Xena's crimes to be remembered and because she wants her own pain to be recognized.

Xena's redemption. This absolutely infuriates Callisto on multiple levels. For one, she sees it as Xena's way of avoiding justice and punishment, and for two, she can't stand the idea that anyone would see the woman who destroyed her life as a hero. She also believes that Xena the warlord was a more worthy rival, at one point lamenting that while there used to be a tinge of respect alongside all her hatred, she now views Xena as a "sentimental fool" whose "petty scruples are embarrassing".

Her own death. Though this happened not long before her canonpoint, it's a turning point for her in many respects. She doesn't fear death, and indeed, she seems pretty chill about the idea when she believes that Xena will be dying alongside her - but when Xena saves herself and Callisto is sent to Tartarus alone, she's faced with her biggest setback so far. Against all odds, she remains determined to keep up her quest for vengeance, whether that means waiting for Xena to die and seeking her out in the underworld or finding some way to return to the world of the living herself.

What impressions do others tend to have of your character and how do those impressions differ from who your character truly is?
Callisto is pretty much an open book: what you see is what you get. Her anger and her violence are obvious from the get-go, but she doesn't use any of that as a shield to hide her pain and trauma; she'll happily tell anyone who asks (as well as anyone who doesn't) all about the loss she experienced and the grief she still feels. Her revenge quest and her motivations for it are no big secret, and neither is the fact that she's in the process of being completely destroyed by it. To wit: people generally see her as a dangerous, unpredictable wildcard who's capable of untold amounts of cruelty, and they're absolutely right. They also see her as deeply unhappy, unable to move on and unwilling to try, and they're right about that, too.

What motivates your character?
Callisto has one singular aim in life, and that is to destroy Xena. This goal has many facets: she wants to defeat Xena in combat, and she also wants to destroy her reputation and make the world fear and hate her again, and she also wants to kill everyone Xena loves so that Xena's pain will mirror her own. She has literally no other aspirations for herself. She speaks multiple times about how accomplishing this will heal her soul and ease her pain, and though a part of her does genuinely seem to believe this, she very notably never makes plans for what she'll do afterwards - a strange choice for someone who thinks they'll come out of this healed and whole and ready to live anew. At one point, she even tells Ares: "When I’m done with [Xena], you can have what’s left [of me]. I won’t care." Those aren't the words of someone who's capable of envisioning a happy future for herself in anything but the most abstract of terms.

How does your character handle crisis or adversity?
Generally she keeps on trucking. Obstacles in her path are frustrating, and she's been known to react explosively to them, but they're not demoralizing. She doesn't really care about herself, so it's hard to deter her from a course of action with threats of danger, pain, or punishment - and while this isn't exactly healthy, it has allowed her to accomplish more than she would have if she were more easily discouraged.

Skills, abilities, and physical weaknesses:
Hand-to-hand combat. she's been obsessively training since she was a teenager.
Weaponry. She's thoroughly proficient with swords, throwing knives, and chakrams.
Horsemanship. She's an excellent rider, and well-versed in driving chariots.
General acrobatics and physical fitness. She's very in shape, strong, flexible, has excellent balance, etc.

Inventory:
Just the clothes on her back, a.k.a. her ridiculous armor.

What aspects of your character are you most interested in exploring in a horror setting?
I loooooove putting villainous/adversarial characters in situations where they have to work with people towards a common goal (in this case, surviving the town and its horrors, and trying to find a way home), and while she'll surely be a pain in the ass and earn herself plenty of negative and/or complicated CR, I'm hoping the shared extreme adverse conditions will lend well towards helping her find positive-leaning/influential CR she can attach to, as well. I'm also really interested in playing with the language barrier, and the CR dynamics that would be borne out of her not being able to immediately tell people "Hi, I'm Callisto :) My whole family was killed by Xena when I was a kid :) :) I hate her and I kill people because of it :) :) :)". She's a chronic oversharer, which can definitely be interesting in its own way, but her having to engage people without being able to do that right off the bat is an opportunity I wouldn't necessarily have elsewhere.

What is your character’s mental state upon entering the game?
NOT GREAT, FAM. She's grieving, traumatized, and severely depressed, and she has a seemingly endless well of rage inside her that she's all too willing to take out on the people around her. Using the game's rating system, I'd put her somewhere in the high sixties in terms of sanity. She absolutely has severe mental trauma that she hasn't dealt with even a little bit, and it causes her trouble on the regular. In terms of how she'd function in normal society, it would really depend on what that society was. As a citizen of a modern Earth city? She'd flounder, hard. As a resident of a quiet, peaceful village? Ditto. As a warlord leading an army (which, to be fair, is a perfectly valid career choice on her world)? She's set! But even then, her inability to see past her grudges still causes problems at times; both of the times her armies splintered, it was because she essentially abandoned them to chase Xena.

What unsettles and frightens your character? What sort of encounters would chip away at your character’s psychological stability?
Anything impersonal isn't likely to bug her in any lasting way; she often finds herself in scary situations, her sense of self-preservation is very low, and supernatural forces aren't anything new to her, so a hostile ghoulie wouldn't necessarily cause more long-term trauma than, say, dealing with a rampaging wild animal would. But on the flip side, anything that even tangentially invoked her family, the innocent child she used to be, or the harm she herself has done to others would work like a charm. Though she violently suppresses it, she is capable of feeling guilt, and being confronted by the ghosts of her victims canonically reduces her to a gibbering mess, as does being lovingly but firmly chastised by the ghost of her mother. Anything that shoved how empty and alone she is in her face would do the trick, too - it's not anything she doesn't already know, but outside reminders still hurt.

What horrifying events or genre elements would you like to see utilized in the game?
Physical injury/danger, unreality, slowly-creeping dread, paranoia, and bonds formed in the face of terror and adversity.

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