Callisto
| Callisto | |
|---|---|
 Callisto, holding her red-hot spear. | |
| Author | /u/TheBluestHedgeroo |
| Pronouns | She/Her |
| Civilian name | Isabella Moreau |
| Alignment | Villain |
| Affiliation | (Devilfish) |
| PRT Classification | Master (Breaker) |
| Born |
January 19, 2005 Winnipeg, Canada |
| Status | Active |
The name “Moreau” would be quite familiar with those individuals either bored enough or professionally obligated to follow North American (as in the continent, not the country) geothermal energy conglomerates, yet even within those circles little would be known about the eldest granddaughter of CEO Abigail Moreau. Law enforcement (or those with law enforcement connections) would notice that a ‘Annabel Lee’ was one of six students unaccounted for after a boarding school across the Canadian border was set aflame under unusual circumstances, and that a search is being conducted for said young woman that coincidentally fits Isabella Moreau’s description.
The woods-dwelling population of Devilfish might note sections of inexplicably charred ground and singed tree-trunks on an entirely opposite part of the woods from Misfit Territory :™:, as well as a few possibly drug-inspired sightings of “A bear made out of glass.”
Character Sheet
Appearance
Isabella is a short and wiry lady with feathery black hair that both looks like it was cut with a knife and actually was cut with a knife. She has a few dark grey piercings on the bridge and lobe of her ears. She commonly wears a ratty-ass jacket and jeans when out of costume, along with a big ol’ backpack when travelling.
Callisto wears a simple bandanna and sunglasses combo, along with a tattered cloak with a hood over some darker clothes. When using her power on herself, her forearm/lower leg/jaw-mouth area considerably grows in size and adopts a bright silver coloration, which grows duller and dimmer as the altered bodypart(s) ‘bleed out’.
Equipment and Resources
In terms of resources, ya girl hardly has shit save for the clothes, toiletries, pocket money, and curios/oddities/personal knickknacks she was able to abscond from the St. Damian Preparatory Academy with.
Wealth Level: 2
Due to Isabella’s considerable lack of resources, she has had to make do with makeshift weaponry and costume supplies.
- A makeshift spear, made from tearing one of the fence-spikes out of the Academy’s gates and gnawing it down to a more manageable size. While the metal itself is warped from heat and quite unwieldy, the speartip still holds a decent point.
- A reappropriated fire-blanket, kept in her bag or sometimes wrapped around her body like a cloak. Useful for keeping her possessions somewhat safe from singe marks and flames, and for beating out fires that either herself or her bear sets before they can spread too far.
- A pilfered medkit, mostly stocked with low-grade bandages, painkillers, disinfectant, and burn ointment.
- A subpar pocketknife, useful for cutting things and tactically injuring herself.
Skills and Specializations
- Some basic wilderness survival skills, developed mostly by trial and error.
- Some basic hand-to-hand and mounted combat skills, developed under similar circumstances.
- An obscenely thorough education for someone her age, particularly in college-level business and art history.
- Very good at being evasive or misleading with her words, as well as generally holding her tongue in stressful situations.
- Good at stashing valuables, picking pockets, and hiding herself in the background.
- A worryingly high pain tolerance.
Mentality
Isabella has had a lifetime of practice to cultivate a cold, dispassionate, and somewhat disdainful affectation to drape over herself. One typically has to needle her quite a bit to prompt anything resembling a genuine response or explanation for her actions.
Inwardly, Isabella is a very temperamental and stubborn lady with rigid convictions regarding personal freedom, self-expression, and the right to live her life without anyone breathing down her fucking neck. Sees herself as an incomplete person to an extent, and is trying to restore her sense of self in a far less restrictive environment. Additionally believes that her powers have intentionally given her a new lease on life (likening it to her salvation), and she does not plan to squander it anytime soon.
Power
(Master/Breaker): Callisto’s primary ability allows her to summon and mentally command a bear-shaped Master minion, made from an unknown material similar in appearance to bright silver glass (Callisto herself likens it to solid starlight, but Callisto is both biased and an insufferable art nerd). Said Glass Bear possesses many similar or identical characteristics to a normal brown bear, being entirely bearlike with respect to their speed (slow acceleration, yet pretty fast once they get going. Would say fast enough to easily outrun most individuals without relevant mover powers/vehicles of their own when at max, but they’d need a decently straight path and half a minute’s head start to reach such speed), their strength (bears hit hard enough to bowl standard reference people over, and they bites are strong enough to splinter bone), and their size/bodily composition (beefy 8ft-long lads with blunt digging claws, a weird hump by they shoulders, and a stubby tail).
The unique characteristics of the Glass Bear are unusually strong physical durability owing to its material composition, and the extreme temperatures it can release due to being made of ‘starlight’. Injuries sustained by the Glass Bear cause a spiderweb of cracks to grow on their body, proportional in depth and size to the force they were hit with (e.g. a normie just trying to uppercut the Bear would be lucky to make a shallow crack on their jaw, a similar normie swinging a sledgehammer at their arm would make a few somewhat deep cracks spread across their forearm, and a point-blank shotgun blast to the shoulder would cause deep cracks to form over the entirety of their shoulders with some cracks creeping over to the neck and upper arm). While it would take an obscene amount of force to shatter the Bear’s limbs/body into a pile of shards, injury-cracked areas limit both the Bear’s range of motion and force it can apply with those body parts, and enough cracks can render a body part entirely immobile. However, cracked areas on the Bear slowly ooze and ‘bleed’ a brightly burning fluid, hot enough to set foliage, wooden structures, and certain types of clothing aflame while causing second-to-third degree burns and warping metal with prolonged contact. This bleeding effect ranges from a steady faucet-like flow from heavily cracked areas, to a mere trickle from shallowly-wounded areas. Wounds sustained to the bear’s teeth, jaws, and interior mouth allow a small reservoir of ‘blood’ to form, increasing the temperature inside their mouth to something akin to a furnace until the fluid is spat out in a stream of liquid fire. If the Glass Bear is dismissed or ‘bleeds’ to death, all created fluid quickly cools and becomes inert.
It is difficult to sustain the Glass Bear’s presence, and commanding it usually requires the majority of Callisto’s attention. Her minion can stay out and active for a maximum of two hours at a time, and she must remain at a position where she can clearly perceive the Bear while she is commanding it. It takes anywhere between an hour and a day for the Bear to passively repair itself.
Callisto’s secondary ability is to swap discrete parts of her body with her Glass Bear minion, switching her subpar human arm(s)/leg(s)/mouth with Bear Claws/Paws/Jaws for a limited period of time. Said body parts behave like a scaled-down version of her Glass Bear’s, and the human body parts she saddles her poor bear with behave like scaled-up versions of her current limbs (scaled up/down in terms of size and strength). She can manifest/swap one body part for her minion’s while her minion is not presently summoned, and up to three while her minion is out and active. These swaps take about five seconds front-and-back to properly ‘install’, manifesting as smaller variants of the standard Glass Bear body with similar material properties (durable yet shatterable + burning blood). However, the scaled-down limbs Callisto has direct access to have a much smaller reservoir of ‘blood’, leaving them in danger of becoming glass paperweights if a fight drags on for too long.
Incorporating the Glass Bear’s body parts into her petty human body is not without risk, as merely having their limb swapped feels like holding the body part in question too close to a bonfire. As the swapped bear-body parts take damage and begin to bleed, that burning pain intensifies to the point where retaining the swapped limb becomes a struggle, much less using it. On the other side of things, the Glass Bear is responsible for keeping her original limb in decent shape. If they fail to entirely protect it, then Callisto could be walking out of a fight with a couple new bruises and cuts at best and could be missing an important body part at worst.
Callisto’s Manton limits render both her and her bear minion entirely immune to fire and other effects of extremely high temperatures, as a measure to avoid inadvertently burning herself alive via the rest of her powerset.
Trigger type: Single, natural trigger
Backstory
The Moreau Sustainable Energy Corporation was certainly no stranger to the practice of nepotism, yet they certainly had a long way to go when it came to effectively grooming their family members into their desired role. Isabella Lutece and her siblings (Donna and Lucas) were a solid example of this: where private tutoring, extensive tours of Moreau holdings, and their parent’s attempt to instill ‘essential Moreau Values’ should have produced three effective management employees and potential heirs, it instead produced an excessively risk-adverse and clueless boy (Lucas), an unmotivated hellion of a girl (Donna), and a temperamental and unambitious teen (Isabelle). Faced with the absolute disappointment their children represented, Isabella’s parents made the decision to send their children to the St. Damian Preparatory Academy, a prep school with the reputation of reforming even the most unruly child.
St. Damian’s reputation was quite well deserved, especially when one considers the extent of their methods: students were forced to reside in an on-campus dorm, wear a school uniform, and were financially rewarded for reporting the ‘deviant behaviour’ of their friends and peers to school authorities. Deviant behaviour could constitute nearly anything outside of quietly completing your work and was punished in quite a few ways: anything from day-long detentions in a dorm room to being forced to run laps until one collapsed. Isabella’s attempt to contact her parents about these likely-illegal conditions resulted in complete indifference from their end, and St. Damian staff punished her by confiscating her cell and turning off the heat in her dorm for three nights during the Canadian winter. Isabelle and her siblings endured these toxic and contemptible conditions for three semesters, yet none of them save Donna seemed to adapt well to their new environment beyond becoming a despondent wreck. While Donna seemed to actively shape up and start to excel academically and Lucas at least had the good sense to keep his head down, Isabella just found herself left behind.
Isabella triggered during the academy’s end-of-semester progress meeting, when her parent’s eyes simply skipped over her while they congratulated Donna on her progress and she had the realization that this would never stop, that she could never make herself be worth seeing as more than a spare child. Callisto summoned her bear and bashed her way out of the dorms scant hours later, fleeing with whatever she could carry across the Canadian border and scrounging her way into the Devilfish woods.