Callisto
Template:Infobox
Note: Callisto has not yet been introduced in-game. Biography unfinished and subject to minor changes.
Contents
Details
Real Name: Unknown
Aliases: Alexandra Gabler, Alex, Cal
Place of Birth: New York, New York
Citizenship: US
Relatives: None known.
Education: None on paper.
Relationship Status: Single
Occupation: Various
Team Affiliation: N/A
Biography
The Early Years
Callisto's single mother choked on her own vomit when she was three years old. She remembers very little of her earliest years in care - only a vague blur, a string of foster homes and concerned faces. A beautiful child, with big, light eyes and soft dark waves of hair, she charmed prospective parents, but she was an impossible child - willful, volatile and troublesome, constantly getting into scrapes and breaking toys, chairs, cots, escaping her room and frequently the house itself. By the time she was six years old her default sullen pout had set in and beautiful or not, people stopped fostering.
It was also when she was six years old that George the care worker took a special interest in her. The first time, she barely understood what was happening and was too shocked and confused to react at all. The second time, she broke his arm, and ran away.
Naturally she was found, and from then on she officially became a Problem Child, with all the extra attention, security and discipline that that entailed. She was prescribed medication for ADHD and her violent tendencies, and frequently left alone for days locked in her room to "calm down". Callisto didn't calm down. When she was eleven she ran away and this time she wasn't found.
Even Callisto doesn't remember exactly what happened over the next few years. She moved from gang to gang, pickpocketing, housebreaking, carjacking. By the time she was fourteen her sullen pout had apparently become appealing again and this time she took cash instead of breaking arms.
She took the name Callisto at sixteen, on her first night in a strip club after breaking into Callisto Pharmaceuticals company to steal drugs (they didn't, as it turned out, have anything with any street value). She thought it sounded cool, and it shortened well. To this day no one has told her who Callisto mythically was and she has never asked. No one remembers her real name, and she claims not to remember it herself.
The Morlocks
By the time she was seventeen the politics and equilibrium of the streets were changing. It had long been known and accepted by the homeless, the gangs, the squatters, that some of them were Different, but now that these "Mutants" were entering the consciousness of society at large they were being singled out, even here. Callisto knew she heard and saw things no one else could, was far stronger and faster than her frame should support, healed more quickly than any normal human being should - although following an idiotic teenaged brawl with another mutant, a white-haired girl of around her own age, she was left with a nasty scar across her right eye that she wore a patch over for several years, more out of affectation than any harm to the eye.
But Callisto was lucky - her mutations were easy to conceal, to pass off as luck or guesswork or trickery. Others weren't so fortunate. Though her years of hard learned survival senses screamed at her to look out for herself, just as she always had, her conscience wouldn't allow her to just stand by and watch these people - her people - be beaten and ostracized even here on the streets. They needed someone to pull them together, a leader. Hiding her reluctance, Callisto became just that. The Morlocks (she didn't pick the name, doesn't remember who did - thought it sounded cool) descended into the sewers and underground tunnels of New York and made their home there, slowly growing in size until they were a large collective, relying on each other to survive.
They had, however, caught someone's attention. The Morlock Massacre came as a complete shock to Callisto and her companions - it came from nowhere, utterly destroyed them, scattering the few survivors through the tunnels. Callisto, shot four times in the abdomen, near-death and deeply traumatised, dragged herself through the dark for days before she gained enough clarity of thought to leave the sewers.
Callisto was beaten. No amount of street vigilantism or crusading would match the sheer firepower and organisation of the opposition. Feeling her mortality in a way only the near-unkillable can, Callisto disappeared.
Watching and Waiting
The next six years or so were a depressing, repetitive run of small-time criminal activities, sex-work, and occasional bodyguarding and mechanics work, any legal occupation hampered by her lack of official existence. In latter years, however, a good number of other mutants operating in the city came to her attention.
Firstly, the white-haired woman who beat the hell out of her almost a decade ago on a more or less random encounter in the city. Callisto didn't know who the X-Men were or how exactly they operated, but with her instinctive ability to just Know other mutants, even in normal clothing/disguise, she'd been able to discern that Storm operated with a group of mutants who seem to work loosely with the city's authorities and help avert/deal with problems and emergencies. She didn't know how tight-knit or organised they were or how widely they operated, but she knew there was something going on there.
Furthermore, she knew nothing of X-Force or their activities, but following Storm she found the brownstone entirely inhabited by mutants, and from that made an assumption that there was at least some peripheral connection. Although her surveillance was casual at best, over a year or so she become aware of Remy and Ororo's relationship - which frankly struck her as perfectly appropriate: he slaughtered almost everyone she knew a few years before, and Ororo gave her the scar on her face.
She also learned during this time that Sarah Morlocke was alive and living in the building. Suppressing her initial instinct to go to her, she kept half an eye on her for over a year, relieved to know she was alive and eaten by guilt over running away from her back when the massacre happened, too scared of being rejected to reveal herself now.
Gene Nation
Plot details to come.
Physical Characteristics
Height: 5ft 8in
Weight: Heavier than she looks but nonetheless pretty light. She has a naturally slim and rather androgynous build.
Eyes: Green/Grey/Hazel
Hair: Dark Brown - choppy, "just-out-of-bed" and generally somewhere between jaw and shoulder length at its longest.
Other Features:
Piercings: Callisto used to wear various facial piercings, but has in recent years found that her body rejects foreign objects too quickly for them to last long. Sometimes she has usually self-inflicted surface piercings for fun, but they change as often as her clothing.
Tattoos: Tattooed around her left arm and down her left side, front and back, in a generically tribal sort of way that was cool when it was done and she just about pulls off now.
Scars: Scar on the right side of her face, passing over but not affecting her right eye, another smaller scar on her right upper-lip, and four scars from large gunshot wounds on her abdomen.
Powers
Callisto has super senses - incredibly acute hearing (speech a few rooms away, whispering through a wall), superhuman vision including night vision (due to this she's a little hypersensitive to bright light and makes more of a point than most of wearing shades in sunny weather), heightened senses of taste and smell, and superhuman reflexes (she could dodge a bullet but not a laser), balance and strength (car-lifting strength, not push-the-moon-out-of-orbit strength). She's fast and has lots of stamina but doesn't possess a superhuman running speed (about 20 miles per hour). As such she also can't leap the proverbial tall buildings, although she can jump as far as any Olympic athlete, and possesses a catlike grace such that she will nearly always land on her feet.
She also heals more quickly than a normal human being, but not to excessive regenerative extents - she could heal a break in record time but can't regrow a limb, and serious wounds will still scar. Her abilities would best (if embarrassingly) be compared to Buffy the Vampire Slayer at the height of her powers.
Though not a mutant power as such, as a result of her grace and heightened senses Callisto can learn new physical skills, whether sports, weapon use or fighting styles, at an almost supernatural speed. She learns the moves no faster than your average human being, but with her physical condition her body will do exactly what she wants it to first time, entirely circumventing the physical discipline aspect of training and leaving her with only the memory aspect to master. (It's worth noting that Callisto is currently only trained in knife fighting and street brawling.) In the unlikely event that it were to happen his would extend to the technical and muscle memory aspect of musical instruments also, although she wouldn't learn to read music any faster than your average human with a good ear.
Secondary power: As an extension to her super-senses, Callisto has a (currently subconscious) ability to find other mutants. She can't identify powers and can't find them on a map with her mind, but is naturally drawn towards them and just Knows somehow when she meets a mutant. This was of considerable help to her during the early days of the Morlocks and helps to explain why they naturally gravitated towards her as a leader.
Meta
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