Callisto

      Furiosa has come a long way towards taming this world, or at least making it less desperate in its wildness.  Most of the people who live here were grateful for the time to breathe and worked diligently to do as much to stabilize it as they could, but there's a ferocity in all of their souls.

      Callisto is calmer these days, but she's still not exactly safe, and the fire she lives and breathes and dies on still sparks up from her core.  There are miles upon miles of wasteland for her to walk when she's feeling particularly volatile, full of people still who are wastelands themselves and fair game if they attack a woman wearing decent armor and walking alone, so mostly they do okay.  Mostly she can live here with them, a goddess in the flesh, remembering what it is to be human while well aware that she's not anymore.

     She's come a long way towards being tamed herself, or at least less desperate in her wildness.  But there's ferocity in her soul and the people here encourage her, so sometimes - on the day Tiffany follows her here - Callisto takes a mob of them just outside the city walls and sets the air on alight in a towering, twisting, blazing tornado of an inferno for no other reason than because she can, and because these people - her new people - cheer her on when she does.

User Name/Nick: A.J.
User DW: wyrish
E-mail: surfaceshines @ gmail
Other Characters: None!

Character Name: Callisto
Series: Xena: Warrior Princess (and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys)
Age: Sometime in her late twenties or early thirties
From When?: I'd like to take her from after Xena traps her in a cave-in at the end of episode 3x11, even though it's not technically a death because she's a god by then. It is a "trapped for all eternity or at least until the plot needs her back" situation, which is as good as, and would leave her perfectly willing to accept the Admiral's offer to get out of her predicament. (For reapp, see notes below under Inmate justification and arrival.)

Inmate/Warden: The Most Inmate. Callisto is a dyed in the wool psychopath whose mission in life (and afterlife, and eternity, and whatever comes after that) is to destroy the life of the woman who killed her family when she was a child, who becomes so obsessed with this that she even tries to set up a situation where the both of them are immortal so they can battle for all of time. She kills without mercy or sometimes even thought, she switches sides the moment it suits her (or, honestly, she gets bored), she's willing to kill the entire world to get at one woman and to try and ease her own pain, and she attacks Xena's horse. Bad form, Callisto. Bad form. But she is capable of redemption: when Xena faces her in Tartarus after her first death, she calls on the soul of Callisto's mother who shames her with all that she's done, and the souls of all the people she's killed who drive her back into confinement through her guilt for having killed them. ETA: She made literally no progress on this last time so we're all good.
Arrival: Callisto will absolutely make a bargain with the Admiral, intending to double cross him and climb out of this new afterlife so she can continue her vengeance quest. Whoops. ETA: Callisto disappeared during the Bargeyard event last time she was in game. I'd like her to turn back up without any time having passed for her, if possible.

Abilities/Powers: As a human, Callisto devoted her life at a young age to training to be a match for Xena, the mighty warrior princess, and she more or less achieved that. Certainly she's a physical match, experienced in hand to hand fighting, sword fighting, fighting from horseback, fighting on ladders, fighting with nails, fighting with shrieks and warcries, fighting - ahem. She's also the only other person that appears regularly in canon that can catch and return throw Xena's chakram. So definitely pick her for your ultimate frisbee team.

As a god, she doesn't really seem to be the goddess OF anything, but of course she can now throw fireballs and blasts of energy from her hands at will. She's stronger than most humans, and doesn't worry about earthly things such as sleeping, eating, or brushing her hair. She can also teleport herself and at least one other person or person-sized thing at will, although apparently avalanches of rocks block this ability. She does not bleed and cannot be killed, but being hacked into pieces can seriously inconvenience her, and as she is a young goddess there is some (inconsistent) evidence that her powers can wear her down and weaken her if she uses them on too broad a scale or too often/for too long.

Upon arrival on the Barge, I'd like for her to retain the ability to create sparks of fire and lightning but not even enough to actually light an actual fire with; it's a frustration tactic mostly. Her immortality I'd also like to stay intact, as it's one of her many, many, many issues that need resolving, but she'd still have a hard time pulling pieces of herself back together and healing serious injuries quickly. Her teleportation can go entirely, her strength is back down around "fit human," and obviously her actual combat training and any tactical knowledge she has will remain intact.

Personality: Callisto is the very definition of twenty pounds of crazy in a five pound bag. She is a passionate, intelligent woman that has both been handed a lot of trauma in her life and taken that trauma in the worst way possible at every turn, starting with the horrific burning deaths of her mother, father, and sister and also everyone else in her entire village, and moving right up through being viewed as a pawn by Ares, the God of War. Much of what happens to her in her adult life is brought upon her by her own doing, but it's all built on a foundation of unmitigated, unresolved, and very painful trauma that she's fed and allowed to fester rather than had any clue how to begin to heal and recover. She's a woman that runs on anger and pain because it's all she has left to her, although she's caught in the cycle of one feeding the other feeding the other feeding the other.

Callisto was, at one time, a very driven, focused individual. Deciding the only way she would ever feel happiness again was to exact revenge upon Xena, she began training at a very young age to build herself up to be a physical match for the Warrior Princess, and clearly at least a decade of that hasn't eroded her conviction even a little. She is exactly who she decided to make herself into and along the way has become a formidable warlord in her own regard. She doesn't allow anyone close to her and will often kill them herself if they try or if they begin to. She has eyes only for her revenge, and when she loses her chance for that by, you know, dying, she claws her way back out of Tartarus to try again, and again, and again. She even goes so far as to try and maneuver both herself and Xena into a position of immortality so their battle can go on for all of eternity, because this vengeance and hatred is so important to her.

But this, too, exemplifies how afraid she is to lose this thing that has dictated her entire life. She hasn't healed from that childhood trauma at all and will often make comments about doing the people she kills the favor of granting them merciful oblivion, about being able to feel nothing but pain and anger, about not knowing what peace even is. At one point she agrees to work with Xena only if Xena basically makes a public statement of the massacre at Cirra, and in the aftermath where she was clearly hoping to feel something good about disgracing the Warrior Princess, she claims it changes nothing, she feels nothing. The longer she fights against Xena, the more damage she does to her and the more she fails to cause her the kind of pain Callisto herself feels, the more frayed and erratic her behavior becomes, and she was pretty much chaos on a roller coaster anyway. When she feels nothing particularly special after killing Xena's son and turning Gabrielle against her - effectively losing her mission in life - she becomes less and less motivated to do anything but destruct and self-destruct.

Whenever Xena isn't readily available to be plotting revenge on, Callisto's main motivation seems to be to keep herself either feeling something or from being bored. This often takes violent form but can also be simple curiosity or conversation or even something more productive - just don't be around when she gets bored with that because honestly, it will always come back around to some form of trying to cause pain and see how the person nearest her reacts to it. Mostly this is picking fights but if she has a knife in her hand, she'll do her best to twist it for her own amusement, too. She has no concept of loyalty - either to herself unless it's through fear, or for anyone else - and will make whatever mood interests or benefits her most in the moment. Her one self respecting trait seems to be that she refuses to accept being dismissed or used by anyone, although she will submit to both if it serves her ends at the time. She is not afraid to take her licks or do her own dirty work if that's what becomes necessary: no one else can hurt her more than she's already been hurt.

Which brings us to guilt and vulnerability: Callisto does feel some remorse for what she's done in the name of trying to soothe her own pain and build herself up to what she thinks is a worthy adversary for Xena. Much of it she simply blames on Xena, citing it as Xena's fault that she exists at all and therefore any damage she does on her way from point Trauma to point Vengeance is Xena's fault, not hers. But she was cornered back into Tartarus by the souls of her victim and she was absolutely wrecked by the soul of her mother shaming her for the things she's done, and it's likely that a large part of her constant switchback behavior and taking every new thing in her path head on with such gusto is an effort to avoid having to think. She is genuinely cheerful in her destruction, and that's where she wants to live for as long as she can, until she can dive headlong into dreamless, memoryless, existenceless oblivion - because if she has to think about herself and what she's become, if she has to consider that it had nothing to do with Xena after all, she might just lose her mind.

Barge Reactions: Literally all of the everything that happens on the Barge will be normal for her. Bodyswap? Been there. Afterlife and deals with gods? Done that. Musical episode? In her repertoire! She's even familiar with centaurs and Amazons and evil prophecy children. She's from a time when the Greek pantheon of gods were running crazy and is more than a little crazy herself, so she's down with it all. The technology will be the hardest thing for her to cope with, and people making fun of her (totally! functional!) armor. ETA: She'll remember her time on the Barge previously, as if she never left even though it's been almost two years for the other passengers.

Path to Redemption: Callisto, quite simply, needs to learn to let things go. This will not be a simple task, however, because she's built her life on what she genuinely feels is the one sacred, righteous, validating thing left to her: her hatred for Xena (and, secondarily, everyone). She let her fear, anger, guilt, and grief burn away everything else in her because it was the only way she could make the pain stop, only that was just a short term solution. She is fickle, cruel, apathetic, merciless, and both homicidal and suicidal, and through her own behavior proves her own opinions that nothing is permanent, no one can - or should - love her, there is nothing good about life, and never will be again. At this point in her arc she has fought her way to becoming a god only to realize that now she can't die and find peace, which has become her only driving force besides making Xena suffer. In short, she's a hot mess, there are a lot of dead ends with her, and no sane person would stick by her - which is exactly what someone would need to do in order to get through to her. It will require the patience of a saint OR the reasoning ability of the devil himself, and constant intervention over a prolonged period of time. She will not respect anyone at first - including herself - and will absolutely try to destroy any warden assigned to her if they keep putting themselves in front of her, but if they can outlast her, she will eventually start shifting tactics and may start admitting to the few slivers of vulnerability in her that still want to be loved and valued and may, someday, start to heal.

History: History! Hang on, it's a wild ride.

Sample Journal Entry: Test drive!
Sample RP: Moar test drive!

Special Notes: As sprinkled throughout the application, I'd like for Callisto to return to the Barge as if she's just freshly been pulled from the Bargeyard, memories intact and restrictions still in place from before. She'll remember her previous stint, with no time passage in between, just that it took her a bit longer to get here than it did everyone else.

First Kill - a soldier named Gelon in Kaenas's army, with his own sword
Amazon past - as told by mirror!Callisto; Amazonian mother's name Deiyasca

    It is not, after all, so unusual for Callisto to turn up in the middle of a fight, usually one she's caused or started.  She's built a reputation for herself as volatile to say the least, homicidal to be more accurate, unhinged to be uncharitable.  It is perhaps not so unexpected when a warlord and newly minted goddess is confined to such a small space as the Barge, but here they are.

    She didn't cause this particular riot in the halls.  The portal that let the creatures onto the ship is closed and gone now, but the passengers as one are still dealing with dispatching them - and it is bloody, difficult work no matter how its sliced.  Callisto is easy to find, hip deep in opponents, a sword much lighter than she's used to in her hands and shrieking her rage and her challenge without bothering with something so limiting as words.  This is what she was made for.  This is what she made herself into.

   It's why there might be some concern that when she dispatches the last of them with a spray of blood across her own front and whirls to search the area for more, she may not differentiate between passenger and invader.