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apocalypsehowcomm
Nov. 7th, 2021 11:47 amCharacter Name: Callisto
Age: Unknown; looks to be somewhere in her twenties.
Canon: Xena: Warrior Princess
Canon point: post-2x05, "Return of Callisto"
History:
There's a wiki here, but I generally like writing my own histories!
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 and defeats her, but feeling at least in part responsible for the woman Callisto grew up to be, balks at the idea of turning her over to the angry mob baying for her blood. She even toys with the idea of setting Callisto free and giving her a chance to reform herself, an idea that Callisto emphatically rejects. Xena ends up finding a middle ground: she won't set her free, but she won't throw her to the hounds, either. She'll take her to the town jail, guard her, and make sure she's given a fair trial.
A mob led by the father of one of Callisto's victims sets fire to the jail Callisto is being held in, and true to her word, Xena moves to let her out of her cell and spare her from the flames. Unwilling to be satisfied with any end to this that lets Xena look noble and virtuous, Callisto fights her off even as she tries to help her, and then flees, kidnapping Xena's friend Gabrielle as she leaves town on horseback. Once again, Xena tracks her down, saves Gabrielle, and sees Callisto back behind bars, where she stays for a good long while. Her time in prison is marked by brutality and cruelty from both ends: the guards treat the prisoners like animals, and Callisto in turn cripples three of them, leading them to confine her to a metal chair in her cell, strapping her down at her head, wrists, and ankles. Eventually she manages to slip a knife out of one of their belts, which she uses to pick open both her restraints and her cell. She kills all the guards, then sets the other prisoners free, recruiting those who are strong enough to fight and killing those who aren't. She jumps right back into causing mayhem, killing Gabrielle's husband in the process. This time, the ensuing confrontation ends with both Callisto and Xena falling into a patch of quicksand. Xena manages to save herself, but Callisto does not, and Xena declines to help her; Callisto drowns in it, dies, and is sent to Tartarus for her crimes.
Her canonpoint is after her first death and trip to Tartarus, but before she strikes up a partnership with Ares, God of War.
Personality:
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 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 faith in it means losing everything. By her canonpoint, this has not actually happened to her yet, but its inevitability looms over her all the same, and there are strong indicators of it even before she finally hits rock bottom. When she dies for the first time, it's because both she and Xena are sinking into quicksand, and at first she's fine with this: she sounds upbeat and almost excited when she says that dying together means they'll get to spend eternity fighting each other in Tartarus. It's only when Xena manages to pull herself out of the sand and save herself that she starts begging for her life: she doesn't fear or hate death, but she fears and hates the empty void that she knows awaits her if she loses her grip on the singular thing that she feels gives her purpose and meaning, because she has literally no other aspirations for herself. She speaks multiple times about how destroying Xena 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. And indeed, 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.
She's fantastically immature. Callisto's life was thrown completely off-course when she was a kid, 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. The revenge fantasy that she's dedicated her life to is very much the kind of wish fulfillment that a grieving, angry, traumatized child 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 hurt by trying to make everyone else hurt as much as she does - sometimes with deadly results. I compare her to a child not to minimize her monstrous actions or to hint that it would be wrong to hold her responsible for them like the adult that she is, but to emphasize that treating her like a tantruming child probably is the best way to deescalate her when she's in that state (though someone who was too open or obvious about doing so would earn her ire; even horrifically immature people don't like being patronized).
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. Rather than trying to make herself seem unflappably tough and invulnerable, she'll speak willingly and openly about how much she loved her family and how much losing them hurt her, and when talking about them visibly affects her emotionally (as it nearly always does), she never makes any effort to steel her expression, wipe away her tears, or appear stoic. When she talks about how she feels nothing, she does so not in a effort to make herself look badass and unaffected, but in an effort to express just how deeply damaged she knows she is. At one point after capturing her for the first time, a guilt-wracked Xena considers letting her go and giving her a chance to change her ways. Callisto could easily have played along and gained her freedom, but she refused, preferring to face an angry mob of her victims over even temporarily downplaying her own anger and thirst for vengeance.
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. Her goal of destroying Xena 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. These last two aspects involve not only killing Xena's friends and family, who have done nothing to Callisto, but also involve destroying entire villages in Xena's name. 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 has such profound personal experience with pain and grief has never deterred her from this: if anything, she wants so badly for her feelings to be recognized and understood that inflicting similar trauma onto others is part of the draw.
Suitability:
Callisto is volatile on a good day, but she's capable of pulling herself together enough to get things done; she did succeed in her goal to train herself into a fighter of Xena's caliber, and she's twice now managed to build up a small army (maybe 15-20 men? it's never totally clear) that sees her as their leader and follows her orders. Past her canonpoint, she also shows that she's at least nominally capable of being a lackey as well as a leader: she willingly lets powerful gods use her as a battering ram against their enemies because they promise to help her with her own goals in return, and she could easily do the same with ADI and/or an Entity if she believed there was something in it for her (i.e. a way to either get back home to Xena, or a way to drag Xena to Gloucester - she's not picky). Those trying to work with her would get the benefits of someone who's decently intelligent, fantastically determined and goal-oriented, and willing to personally face untold amounts of danger and adversity in order to get the job done. On the flip side, they'd also have to deal with her erratic mood swings, general immaturity and childishness, and complete willingness to treat friend and foe alike poorly. No one could be blamed if they decided that the former isn't worth the latter, but she's at least not the type to high-tail it out of town and try to start her life anew elsewhere. Fuck that. Gloucester is where the action is happening, and though she'll likely be a pain in the ass about it, Gloucester is where she'll stay.
Powers/Abilities:
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.
She develops a whole host of ridiculously OP powers later on in canon, but at this canonpoint, she's a 100% standard human.
Entity Affinity:
As Callisto has no supernatural abilities, she won't come in with a patron, but there are several options that she might eventually be drawn to or that might eventually be drawn to her!
The Buried. She drowned/suffocated in quicksand and then spent a while being tortured in the depths of Tartarus, neither of which were particularly fun experiences for her. Being trapped, caged, and stuck (both physically and metaphorically) is also a recurring motif for her throughout the series, and later on in canon, she's buried alive more than once.
The Corruption. Her obsessive fixation on Xena might very well be a ping here. She hates her wholeheartedly and wants nothing less than her complete and utter destruction, but she's also darkly fascinated with her, reveling in the idea of being rivals for eternity and seeming to take pride in knowing her well ("Oh, Xena, Xena; I can call your every move!", she says at one point; "I've missed you, Xena," she says at another). She also repeatedly seeks out contact with her, goading and taunting and bantering in a way she doesn't really do with anyone else, and she ultimately wants to live rent-free in Xena's head just as much as Xena lives in hers.
The Desolation. Probably the most obvious choice for her! She feels her own pain very deeply, and has made no progress whatsoever on processing it in a healthy way; additionally, she willingly and gleefully inflicts it onto others. The loss of her family (in a fire, no less!) is the driving motivation behind everything she does, and she actively resists forming bonds with others: because she's massively depressed and feels dead inside, and because she struggles to care about anything beyond her laser-focused revenge quest, but also because she knows exactly how painful it is to love and then to lose.
The End. Not a fear for her, but it's definitely worth noting that "the demise of the self and decay into nothingness" ends up being a goal of hers later on in the series, and she could easily become drawn to this Entity on that basis.
The Hunt. "[O]bsession with pursuing a goal, chasing after something that can never be reached, and destroying yourself and everything you know and love in the process" is essentially her entire character arc to a T.
The Lonely. Callisto is not actively, consciously lonely, and she doesn't seek out emotional bonds with others (beyond her obsession with Xena, which I believe she absolutely does see as a bond), but she is cut off, isolated, and alone due to her own actions, and this takes its toll on her. It would doubly do so in a Xena-less setting, where she'd be out the emotional high of rivalry and point of frequent (albeit extremely unhealthy) human contact.
Inventory:
The clothes on her back (a.k.a. her ridiculous armor), her sword, and her dagger.
Samples:
log thread
log thread
log thread
I don't have any network/dialogue-only threads as the last game I had her in didn't have a network, but hopefully these also have enough dialogue included to cover that requirement!
