Calista: A Musician's Dream Companion
Name: Calista
Age: 20
Race: Human
Sex: Female
Hair: Pale blonde hair, creating a loose wavy mass to midway down her back. She generally wears it half tied up with two locks and her fringe framing her face.
Eyes: Her eyes are a light turquoise green framed by long curly lashes that add to the air of innocence around her.
Weight: 80kg
Height: 5 feet 9 inches
Weapon: A whip with a small dart like blade at the tip. She uses this for the small sonic boom that occurs when the whip cracks, and if she can aim well the dart will cut into any opponent that comes after her, hopefully dissuading them.
Her violin could also be counted as a weapon. There are certain sounds that, when reached will trigger a response in people. An example being a chord that is inherent in all lullabies and this note, when reached, will cause people to become sleepy of their own accord and Calista will amplify this to disorientate them and make an escape.
Strengths: Her ability to control the sound she can see, as well as her slightly better than average hearing. When she sees sounds, she sees them as something kin to vapour trails, sparked at where the sound is created and then trailing after it until it dissipates.
Weakness: She’s blind, so you know; long range attacks would be a major weakness. Any arrow or gun shooters around and she’d be toast in a fight. She isn’t a good melee fighter either, since she sees sound, the effect of so many people moving around would just confuse her and she would loose sight of who is meant to be her ally – unless she knows them for an extended period of time in which case their personal song will aid her.
Skills/Magic: Calista is blind, yet she has the ability to perceive sound as something visual. In a world of darkness, the sounds created by the movement of cloth appear as wisps of smoke that leave trails of sound in their wake. The voice of a person is layered with the sound of their words and the sound of the meaning conveyed.
If someone is telling a story of battle, she sees their words tainted with the dark red of old blood and the grey of broken dreams.
Her magic allows her to control those wisps, to manipulate them in the following five ways to varying degrees:
Surround Sound: Calista can manipulate the sound waves so that they can surround a person completely, removing outside noise and making them hear only what she wants or even creating a sound proof shield so they won’t hear anything at all. This is usually used in conjunction with her Amplify technique to render a man unconscious from the sudden burst of sound, or merely confuse them.
If a person relies on sound in battle, Calista can and will make it sound as though she is coming from another direction, or completely obliterate the sound she makes altogether.
Amplify: This affects both spoken and normal sounds. By taking the original noise generated she amplifies it, controlling the sound waves to make a larger noise than normal. This technique could be used as a distraction if she focuses sounds in the distance, making it sound as though a big group were coming closer or even causing a sonic boom that could incapacitate her adversary.
Eg. Calista drops a pebble then manipulates the short staccato noise and amplifies, making it as loud as a gunshot.
Subliminal Messages: This directly affects spoken words. When a person talks, even if they speak in a dead monotone, Calista will manipulate the hidden meaning behind their words, the coloured taint that she sees, to create an undertone that people will hear on an instinctive level.
Eg. A man is talking of the weather but Calista will create her subliminal message and while the topic itself is innocuous, the people listening will be struck with fear as though he was screaming and threatening to kill them all. It acts upon their basic instincts for survival.
Coincidently, Calista uses this to help musicians. If they are singing a song of love and joy, she will amplify the meaning beneath the words to make the song even more evocative and gripping.
Lost in Translation: Works on any spoken words. Calista transforms the sound waves the minute they leave a person’s mouth, warping it so they are completely different. This allows her to controls someone’s speech. To manipulate it further, she can control the waves so that the person speaking doesn’t realise his words have been tampered with.
Sound Frames: She attaches a pre-set sound to things that sound would normally pass through. For instance, she creates a sound frame with a specific message imbedded into it like pre-made soundwaves. She then attaches this to a dog, and whenever the dog barks, the sound of the bark is forcibly squeezed into the preset soundwave, and comes out as the message = talking dog.
Lullaby: Calista uses her violin to play a sequence of notes with the hidden one within it. This note will reach people on a subconscious level and make them drowsy. Depending on the amount of effort, they might fall asleep there or merely become disorientated.
There are other secret chords but Calista has not been able to find them as yet.
Appearance: Her skin has a creamy complexion, the cheeks easily becoming rosy from high emotion or exertion. Her face is pixie like, in that she has large eyes and high cheekbones that taper to a small chin, giving her a delicate appearance. Calista’s hair is parted over her left eye with curls framing her face, the hair occasionally falling into her right eye. Her nose is small and her mouth a dusky pink, the lower lip slightly fuller than her top.
She is slim and willowy, graceful in her movements to mask her blindness.
For clothing, she dresses as simply as her people can. A black turtleneck top with no sleeves is worn beneath a billowy white shirt, the sleeves long a full with lace at wrists. The shirt is long enough that at mid-thigh it is like a skirt and frothy in it’s folds. Above this is a green vest with a high collar at the neck. It goes past her waist, but not to the length of the shirt beneath. It is a simple vest with gold edging and she has a belt looped at an angle around it, holding her whip neatly rolled. Her legs are hidden beneath black tights and disappear into her high-heeled leather boots that are only shin high and buttoned on the outside.
Personality: Her personality is something that changes with her surroundings. Since everything is considered music to her, places and people all create their own personal songs that combine to create the tune of a place. If the majority of people are sad or fall into the darker spectrum of emotions, then Calista’s own attitude will be dampened or she will feel unbalanced by how she is creating a discordant song to everyone else.
Normally she is a mischievous character, her abilities lead the way to being a prankster’s, after all. She is independent, having learned to disguise her physical blindness but she still prefers to travel with others, particularly musicians. She has a love for music since her life is one endless song and when she travels with musicians she cannot help but enhance their music.
Biography: Calista was not always blind. In this matter it was good because at least if someone asks her what she sees she will know the colours of which she speaks. She has always had the ability to see sound, and it was always confusing as she grew up to see things with so many layers to them that no one understood.
Her parents were average, the father owning a tavern and the mother cooking the meals and keeping an eye on guests. Calista, unknowing of her powers, spent her days at school or in the kitchen with the cooks.
It was when she was ten years old she lost her sight and the life she had known. Fire claimed her parents, sparked by a drunken brawl. Her father died trying to stop it, her mother in the fire itself. Calista had been dragged out by a travelling musician whom she had been listening avidly to, her eyes wide at the colour of the music he played. He had taken her to safety before the fire had begun, and it was the explosion of light that had darkened her world.
She had been disoriented and lost; her only help the musician who kept her with him as he travelled. As she had slowly become more aware of the world around her, she realised that the colours that floated around her still remained and that she had control over them and how they moved.
Her first experiment had been when her musician had been playing and she had made the sounds grow, amplifying them.
When he had realised what she could do, what she could see he had explored these powers with her, creating tests and situations for her to play with that they would both learn what she was capable of.
Sadly, he wasn’t a man in his prime and already aging. By the time she was eighteen he had developed a sickness of the joints that ended his career, Calista’s quick learning of music their saving grace as she provided money for them both. It was during this time she shamelessly used her gift to draw in crowds, desperate for the money that could hopefully stave away her mentor’s death.
It bought them one year and eventually he passed away. He left her his instruments and the knowledge she would be able to support herself. His final gift was the whip – he had told her that as a weapon it would be suited to her but even then she should find others to travel with.
She had then taken to travelling, always in caravans and groups. Her ability to see sound and hear nuances no one else could helped her to see lies spoken and avoid those who would do her harm. At one stage she partnered with another musician, accompanying him with her violin, the only instrument of her mentor’s she had kept and travelled with.
This musician, Tremayne, is cynical and no longer enjoys the music he plays. He is cynical to Calista’s eternal optimism and wary when he realises what power she has over sound. Eventually, they parted but would always come across one another and travel for a short period of time.
So now Calista is once more on her own, using her skills to care for herself as she explores the world in search of new sounds and songs to hear and see.
10-13-2007, 10:44 PM
