Callie Betto

This character is currently unplayed, but is open for applications. If you are interested in applying for this character, you can contact the mods at x_moderators @ googlegroups . com and you can find the application form here.

PHASE 1

Callie Betto
Portrayed by Karen Gillan
Codename:	None
Affiliations:	Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters - Student
Birthdate:	24 August, 1992
Journal:	x_dryad
Player:	Available for applications.

The wounds of Genosha healing, Callie has returned to live with her father to further recover in her own time and space.

Details

Character Journal: x_dryad

Real Name: Calliope Ann Betto

Codename: n/a

Aliases: Callie, Mutate 557

First Appearance: 23 June 2008

Date of Birth: 24 August, 1992

Place of Birth: Burlington, VT

Citizenship: American

Relatives: Giancarlo (father), Elizabeth (mother, deceased)

Education: Senior

Relationship Status: Single

Occupation: Student

Team Affiliation: formerly New Mutants

Biography

Childhood

Born in Burlington, Vermont to Giancarlo Betto and his wife Elizabeth, Callie was a seemingly normal child. As both of her parents were mutants, it was almost assured that she herself would be one as well. This speculation was confirmed at her birth when Callie's skin was hued pink.

Giancarlo was a famous mutant landscaper, so while she was growing up, Callie was never ashamed to be a mutant. She never thought it made her any different from her peers, especially because she hadn’t manifested her powers. She attended the private school where her mom taught music, and was generally accepted despite her unusual appearance. She had a few close friends, and was generally liked by all. Being rather studious, Callie spent a good deal of time reading outside in her free time. When her father was home he would teach her the essentials of wilderness survival in addition to exposing her to a myriad of other outdoor activities.

As she entered puberty, both she and her parents wondered which of their powers she had inherited; Elizabeth was a low-level telepath and Giancarlo was chlorokinetic. One day when she was eleven, after what had been a frightfully long and harsh winter Callie and Elizabeth were out in the garden planting flowers. Usually by this time the flowers had bloomed, and as Callie willed it so they did. Callie’s father was particularly proud of his daughter after this point and took it upon himself to help her learn to control her powers. He minimized his traveling for work, and only traveled within the country so he could spend more time with his daughter.

Then tragedy struck the Betto household the summer in which Callie was set to turn 14. Elizabeth had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. For the next year the doctors tried to treat her, but nothing they did seemed to help, it was already too invasive and had been caught too late. Shortly before Callie’s fifteenth birthday her mother died, and Giancarlo moved to Milan with his daughter to be with his parents.

Living At The X-Mansion

Shortly following Elizabeth’s death, Callie began to demonstrate loss of control over her powers. Either they would not work, or they would cause exponential growth. Assuming that this was a temporary expression of grief, Giancarlo thought nothing of it. That is until late April/early May when he realized that this problem had escalated to her not being able to do anything with her powers and decided to send his daughter to Westchester to see if the group there could help.

The months that followed were relatively quiet for her, especially compared to her classmates. After helping out with the floods in Iowa, Callie began to settle into her new life; focusing on her school work and making friends with her fellow classmates. She contracted chicken pox shortly before the first New Mutant excursion, and was kept in the mansion during the attack on New York City. While initially feeling guilt over her absence with the team, she found that her staying behind to be beneficial with helping others upon their return.

The months that followed were full of ups and downs for the young mutant. She focused heavily on her school work and on developing friendships with the people around her. The departure of her roommate Cessily Kincaid was a rather low point, mostly due to the circumstances leading up to it. When she began finding the metallic girl to be sleeping in a bucket, she knew it was time for her to get help.

The arrival of some new teachers and students before the holidays began enabling Callie to break out of her shell, and focus on something other than school. With Jean-Paul Beaubier, she began climbing again in anticipation for her Christmas holiday trip to Croatia with her father. And Julian Keller's arrival found the two becoming fast friends.

After her holiday at home in Italy, Callie's father dropped a bomb: she would not be returning to the school. He felt that the events in New York, coupled with the ambush and subsequent fight involving some of the mansion's residents meant that it was unsafe for his little girl to be there. He had already lost his wife, he said, he was not about to lose his daughter. Needless to say Callie was upset with this decision as she had made many friends at the school. However, her father's word was law, so there was nothing she could do about it.

While waiting for everything to be worked out with her former school so that she may return, Clarice popped over for a visit. The two girls spent the day shopping around Milan and later went out dancing. After a pipe bomb explosion in the disco, the two were knocked unconscious and subsequently faced a very weird and scary situation. After escaping on their own, they were able to make their way back to Giancarlo's house. And after a fight with her father, Callie was allowed to return to Xavier's once more.

The new year didn't quite get off on a good foot as later that month, Callie found herself to be an unwilling contestant in the weirdest reality television show concept ever. After making it through the series of obstacles to the end she face some crazy dude, denied his advances to be a superhero, and helped rescue her friends from the holding cells he had put them in.

After that, things began looking up once again. She was cast as a fairy in the local joint-high school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. But when a tricky prankster started sabotaging the show, she and the other Xavier's kids went to work to capture him. Then when two of the leads caught their braces together kissing, she and Karolina were able to convince the Deans to help them perform their final dress rehearsal. After the final performance, there was yet another surprise in store as Giancarlo showed up unannounced. Callie was delighted to see her father, but was plagued with pains of sadness in remembering how her mother could not be there.

When her new roommate Doreen Green arrived, Callie was less than excited. On the verge of a breakdown due to the actual squirrel living in her room, Callie fled to Jean-Paul's until Easter, at which time she was able to escape the mansion with her father. After she returned, Jean-Paul convinced Callie to talk to Doreen, and the two girls were able to work out a suitable arrangement. Callie even bought Monkey Joe a bed, to help him have a place of his own. When Doreen had her feral breakdown on her birthday, Callie found herself carrying around the squirrel, and bonding with him over their shared worry over the young girl.

Regaining her Powers

After spending almost a year at the mansion, Callie began to regain her powers. The first instance happened while she was gardening with Julian. He asked her what the plant in front of her was, and she was unconsciously able to make a flower bloom. After that, she experimented with her abilities, with sporadic success. She found that her mood greatly impacted her abilities, and that when she was stressed was the worst times for her. She realized that her emotions had a huge impact on her abilities once more when she visited her mother's grave that Mother's Day. After an emotionally trying week, the visit to Vermont instilled a sense of peace on Callie, and she was able to cause a dandelion to grow on her mother's tomb.

As great as all this was, Callie needed to make sure that she could actually control her powers, and not just when her mood was good. When a train wreck resulted in a cabin of passengers being trapped in by poison ivy, Kyle sought out Callie to help clear the vines. Unsure of her abilities, Callie stepped up and found herself reversing the ivy's growth, but not without exhausting her. She was out of practice, and continued to try and work on her abilities as much as possible.

Ever the nerd, Callie decided to make productive use of her summer and enrolled to take summer classes at NYU. While there, she was alerted to an exhibit by a mutant artist being put on. Intrigued, she decided to visit, dragging Julian in tow. However, when a mutant unexpectedly manifested, she ended up with the most shocking surprise of all: gaining Marie's powers and putting Julian in a coma. The experience shook her to the core, opening her eyes to what many of her classmates and other residents of the mansion were subjected to with their powers. She had always considered herself to be a mutant, but finally came to the realization that what it means to be a mutant is not a qualitative measure and instead commonality is derived from the differences experienced by everyone with a mutation.

The rest of the summer, when the rest of the study body was off having adventures in the woods an in California, Callie set off on her great adventure on the Asian continent with her father. Upon her return, she was approached by both Dori and Catseye about boy advice, the latter of whom asked about being a "couple." This prompted her to try and figure out where exactly she and Fred stood, but nothing was resolved. But when he fell into a coma, Callie found herself withdrawing from the rest of the school, partly because she felt responsible for the accident because of a fight they had the day prior, and partly to avoid questions. With the discovery of a new species of plant gave her an opportunity to research with the New York Botanical Gardens, she has been given an additional venue to separate herself from her classmates. She began to feel more like her old self, however, after she learned of her Early Decision acceptance to Columbia University. Of course, the return of Fred (and his unexpected retrieval of her from the airport) helped bring back in full her cheery deposition as the two began dating, although very briefly.

Departure, Return, and Change

In February 2010, Callie left the school to work with Alvorecer Novo, while finishing up High School via correspondence. Because of her mutation, she worked primarily on agricultural initiatives, to help the communities become self-sufficient, but she helped out in other areas as needed. And in August she returned to New York to start her university studies. After her first year, she and Amara decided to become roommates and move to District X. There, she became involved with the local Girl Scout troop, and surpassed all cookie selling goals with the help of Wade and Doug. Later, Terry moved in, and the two redheads began a game of "that's not my hair in the drain".

That all changed, however, when she was teleported away from a protest at the Genoshan consulate, and became a prisoner of the Genoshan government. There, she was turned into a Mutate, and forced to use her powers against her friends. Badly shaken by the experience, and embarrassed by her lack of hair, she hid away in her apartment, avoiding the world, while Amara and Terry moved out, until Fred came and whisked her back to the mansion where she slowly settled in and began the process of healing. Time and the support of friends led her out of her depression and made her ready to enjoy life once more.

An incident with Molly in December 2013, however, which precipitated Molly's trauma-induced memory loss, plus the mansion's tendency to be the nexus of all kinds of drama, unsettled Callie and returned her to previous doubts. She eventually left the mansion and returned to live with her father for a time, to recover at her own pace and away from others who might be damaged by her presence.

Physical Characteristics

Height: 5’10

Weight: 150lbs

Eyes: Green

Hair: Red

Other Features: Pink skin, pointy elf-like ears, one piercing in each ear

Powers

Chlorokinesis- Callie’s power is twofold:

Plant communication: Callie has the ability to communicate with plants much like a telepath can with people. It is not a particularly strong connection in that she must actively be maintaining a link (ie a plant cannot simply call out telepathically to her mind) for communication to occur. It is for this reason that she rarely uses the power, and tends to forget about it at times. When a plant communicates, it is not like humans nor animals because plants do not have emotions. They cannot express fear, excitement, happiness, etc. Instead, Callie would explain plants as “speaking” in senses. For example, if a plant needed water Callie would receive wetness. She wouldn’t feel wet, but because she knows what wetness is from prior experience she would be able to understand. The same holds true for when she speaks to them. She can only focus on one “thought” at a time; usually the ones she understands. When she doesn’t understand (for example if the plant is being killed off by a certain chemical that she wouldn’t respond to) she can sometimes offer vague explanations about the general state of the plant, or she has no idea what’s going on.

Plant control: Callie can accelerate, decelerate, or reverse plant growth. She can control plants within a twenty foot radius. The type of growth that occurs depends on each plant. Smaller, less complex plants grow very quickly (for example vines, weeds, flowers, etc.) while larger plants, such as trees, she only controls a section of. She can cause a branch of a tree to bend at an angle from the tree, whether that be parallel to the ground or perpendicular to it, as well as causing leaves, flowers, and fruit to grow. Growing a full tree is possible with much time and concentration, and certainly not in one sitting.

Equipment

Nothing special.

Trivia

Named for the instrument

Fluent in Italian and English

Is a veritable neat freak

Drives a Blue SmartCar named Virgil

External Links

xp_communications posts

xp_logs posts

Phase 1 Comms

x_students posts

x_grads

Plots

2008

Red X Mission: Rising Waters

2009

Papa Don't Preach

So You Want To Be A Superhero

Midsummer's Nightmare

Red X Mission: Dangerous Load

Mutation Sternutation

Modern Nature

2011

Mortimer Toynbee's Electric Funkedelic Boogaloo

2012

For Free Trade

Stemming the Tide

Savrola

Onwards to Victory

The Dawn of Liberation

Auld Lang Syne

Meta

Player: Available for Applications

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Player Icon Base: Karen Gillan

Meta Trivia

Played by Cat from June 2008 to February 2010, then brought back in March 2011. Cat left X-Project in October 2014.