Callisto (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
myfavoritemurder) wrote2023-08-20 09:51 am
myfavoritemurder) wrote2023-08-20 09:51 am
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singillatim
PLAYER INFO
Player Name: Iddy
• Player Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
Ihdreniel
• Player Age: 33
• Permissions: Here
CHARACTER INFO
• Character Name: Callisto
• Character Age: Mid-twenties
• Character Canon: Xena: Warrior Princess
• Canon Point: post-2x05, "Return of Callisto"
• Character 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 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.
• Character Personality:
— Positive Trait: 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.
— Positive Trait: She's very honest. This is not to say that she absolutely never lies or deceives people, but it's not her default, nor is it 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. This can be 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.
— Positive Trait: She's an excellent fighter and survivor, and - improbable as it may seem at first glance - she has some experience with strategy, leadership, and productive engagement with others. As violent and unpleasant as she can be, Callisto is 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. 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, she's twice now managed to build up a small army (maybe 15-20 men? it's never totally clear) that saw her as their leader and followed her orders, and she's pulled off several complex traps and plots despite her tendency towards impulsivity. 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 nevertheless, that doesn't negate the former's potential usefulness.)
— Negative Trait: 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.
— Negative Trait: 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).
— Negative Trait: 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 Xena's 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.
• Character Skills:
• Hand-to-hand combat
• Hunting and weaponry (old-school stuff like swordsmanship, knifework, etc.)
• General physical fitness (she's very in shape, strong, flexible, has excellent balance, etc.)
• Experience with living off the land and not being reliant on modern technology (she's from literal Ancient Greece, so this comes with the territory; the climate and environment will be foreign to her, but she's already very comfortable and familiar with things like foraging and hunting for her own food, making and mending her own clothes, living without electricity, etc.)
• Character Inventory:
— ITEM ONE: Her sword
— ITEM TWO: Her dagger
— ITEM THREE: Her really stupid armor
Callisto is used to a Mediterranean climate will not be arriving with any sort of outer layer suitable to the game's harsh and cold weather. Best of luck with that, girlie.
• Important Notes: N/A
• Writing Samples:
— SAMPLE ONE: Here (and here for some variation in thread tone)
— SAMPLE TWO: Here
Player Name: Iddy
• Player Contact:
• Player Age: 33
• Permissions: Here
CHARACTER INFO
• Character Name: Callisto
• Character Age: Mid-twenties
• Character Canon: Xena: Warrior Princess
• Canon Point: post-2x05, "Return of Callisto"
• Character 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 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.
• Character Personality:
— Positive Trait: 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.
— Positive Trait: She's very honest. This is not to say that she absolutely never lies or deceives people, but it's not her default, nor is it 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. This can be 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.
— Positive Trait: She's an excellent fighter and survivor, and - improbable as it may seem at first glance - she has some experience with strategy, leadership, and productive engagement with others. As violent and unpleasant as she can be, Callisto is 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. 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, she's twice now managed to build up a small army (maybe 15-20 men? it's never totally clear) that saw her as their leader and followed her orders, and she's pulled off several complex traps and plots despite her tendency towards impulsivity. 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 nevertheless, that doesn't negate the former's potential usefulness.)
— Negative Trait: 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.
— Negative Trait: 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).
— Negative Trait: 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 Xena's 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.
• Character Skills:
• Hand-to-hand combat
• Hunting and weaponry (old-school stuff like swordsmanship, knifework, etc.)
• General physical fitness (she's very in shape, strong, flexible, has excellent balance, etc.)
• Experience with living off the land and not being reliant on modern technology (she's from literal Ancient Greece, so this comes with the territory; the climate and environment will be foreign to her, but she's already very comfortable and familiar with things like foraging and hunting for her own food, making and mending her own clothes, living without electricity, etc.)
• Character Inventory:
— ITEM ONE: Her sword
— ITEM TWO: Her dagger
— ITEM THREE: Her really stupid armor
Callisto is used to a Mediterranean climate will not be arriving with any sort of outer layer suitable to the game's harsh and cold weather. Best of luck with that, girlie.
• Important Notes: N/A
• Writing Samples:
— SAMPLE ONE: Here (and here for some variation in thread tone)
— SAMPLE TWO: Here