Appearance:
Name: Caroline ‘Callie’ Lidmann
Gender: Female
Sexuality: Bisexual, as far as she is able to tell.
Height: 165 cm
Weight: 63 kg
Age: 23
Nationality: British
Noble Arm Name & Appearance:
‘Charter’ Wielding Charter allows Callie to realign the fabric of the universe to join one space to another, effectively creating a two-way portal. She may only do this between places that she is able to visualise. Whenever she does so, Callie must anchor each end of the portal to an object in space in relation to which they will remain static; she frequently uses the ground, the Earth as a whole or some part of her body for this purpose. Creating a connection takes no energy but keeping it open does; the larger the portal is the more energy it will consume from Callie until she releases it. Distance, on the other hand, has no bearing on the energy required.
Sight Unbounded: Charter is far more capable than a spyglass of its apparent age or, indeed, any spyglass at all has any right to be: it has the potential for near-infinite magnification. Whereas Callie can by now manage this intuitively, anyone else attempting to do so would find the spyglass insanely sensitive to any adjustment. She also sometimes finds herself drawn to things are pertinent to her and her goals when seeing them through Charter, whether she knows how they are important or not.
Personality: Callie is determined and unrelenting by nature. Unlike many of this archetype, however, she doesn’t naturally chafe against authority to any great extent; she instead demands that she be accomplishing something in every waking moment, set by others or, if they do not, by herself. If that is achieved, she is an invaluable asset to any team – focussed, personable, unfailingly, effortlessly energetic and downright inspiring. If not, she can be impersonal, quick to anger and generally utterly horrible to be around. She is, needless to say, a little polarising.
Likes: Achieving short-term goals, feeling capable, learning, using her Noble Arm, dogs, Ribena.
Dislikes: Vagueness, duplicity and secrets among friends and teammates, purely utilitarian goods, cats, alcohol.
Fears: Being powerless, causing harm to those she cares about.
Bio:Callie Lidmann never knew her mother, who died in a terrorist attack caused by an Arms Master under the banner of a splinter faction of the IRA only a month after her birth, and instead grew up with her father, a designer of cameras used for aerial archaeology, and her stepmother, a military veteran, who married when she had just turned two. Her early life was uncomplicated and carefree and she, like most children, developed a profound curiosity about the world around her. Unlike most children, that curiosity never really went away; she dove into books and the internet, ran her own science experiments in the garden and begged her parents to take her to museums and art galleries where most of her peers wanted to go to theme parks and the cinema.
By her teenage years, Callie’s path seemed to be set; she was receiving ‘A*s’ and ‘A’s across the board in school and had her heart set on going into academia, even if she wasn’t entirely sure where yet. For many people in that situation, receiving a Noble Arm would change that entirely – and yet for Callie, summoning Charter for the first time while on a walk in the hills outside her home only kicked her plans into high gear. Perceiving the Arm’s abilities as obvious symbolism for her identity, she invested days in theory-crafting and experimenting to see just what she could do with it. Only a few weeks after she first manifested it, she was in contact with a major energy company to use her portal to generate electricity through perpetual motion; that, she thought with significant glee, would make her more than enough money to pursue education for as long as she wanted while simultaneously providing clean power for thousands. With this as her goal, Callie pressed on with school and, with her A-levels under her belt, began her preparations for university.
Unfortunately, this was the moment at which the energy company she’d been in contact with cancelled the deal. Despite having had extensive talks and already done a small interest piece for the BBC, the company in question was informed late by its lawyers that any accident resulting from Callie’s powers would leave it open to severe legal ramifications. The only way to alleviate this would be to have Callie herself in the building with the portal for every second that it was active, watching for anything to go wrong so she could dismiss it; that not being an option for somebody in full time education, the project was canned. Her dad and stepmum stepped in to fill the gap that this and the lack of a student loan had created – and ultimately succeeded – but the psychological damage was already done; Callie, having never really failed at anything on this scale before, was thrown totally off balance, her once-unshakeable motivation declining and her work’s quality fading with it.
To this difficulty her stepmother offered an unconventional solution: join the military, the one place where you weren’t
allowed to be demotivated. She’d honestly been a little concerned about Callie’s mental fortitude for several years and, knowing and exceedingly grateful for what service had done for her, she thought that her stepdaughter might benefit from something similar. There was extensive back and forth in the Lidmann household over that year’s course but, in the end, Callie was becoming more and more frustrated with herself and her lack of success and it became clear that, even if she could probably pull herself through university, she likely wasn’t going to enjoy or gain much from doing it.
As such, Callie found herself dropping out at the end of her first year at university and instead signing on as a sapper in the Corps of Royal Engineers, taking communications as her trade. She expected that she’d complete her four years of service and, her mind fortified, return to civilian life. Instead, she found herself far more fulfilled than anyone close to her could have predicted. Her choice of heading into the Engineers was in part based on her quickness of mind, in part because it had developed a strong Arms Masters community, and both of those certainly panned out well; more than that, though, with her actions planned out for her, she could commit to
doing in a way that she never really had before while still being able to bring her mind to bear within that and possessing enough free time for unstructured thought when she needed a break from the relentlessness of it all.
It was thrilling – thrilling to the extent that, after spending time with the ISAF in Afghanistan, Callie decided to stay on with the military. She was in the middle of debating whether to try for a leadership position or apply for the Special Reconnaissance Regiment when she was offered a place in Operation: Symbiosis. She took it. Quickly.
Current Goal: Aid the cause of and ingratiate herself with the members of Operation: Symbiosis.
Military Rank: Formerly Sapper, as of now undetermined.
Theme: Calm: youtube.com/watch?v=wzvV-ezvyu4 Battle: youtube.com/watch?v=wmdnpbmM4pc Culmination: Both at once! (To align, start playing the second approximately half a second before the first; recommended balance is to set the first at just under two-thirds the volume of the second.)
