[ Interactions ]

Like most women, she's a collection of contradictions and cruelty too wicked to name and too soft to deny. She can, and will for the most part, come across as a relatively outgoing, friendly, and flirtatious girl, given to sighs and hair twirling as much as sinister smiles and sadistic laughter. Her charm, mostly as a matter of choice, is at its best a frail veneer, marked with impatience and a tendency to be quickly discarded in lieu of more physical forms of conversation.

Words, at least to her, just aren't nearly as reliable as her hands. The intangible nature of language makes it messy, cumbersome, teasing and tangling without guaranteeing delivery or substance, not at all like the body compelled to speak truthfully. Bones, if subjected to enough pressure, will always break, and skin, if cut, will always bleed, all within predictable cause and effect patterns, never deviating because it's the 'right thing to do' or suffering from ambiguous priorities. Celeste, believing this devoutly, naturally creates situations where she's more engaged by touch than mind. At the misfortune of others, she has absolutely zero compunctions regarding personal space, either her own or that of another, occasionally going so far as to crowd someone simply for the pleasure of their discomfort.

And sweet heaven do help the person who shows discomfort around her, or even more unforgivably, weakness. In one mood, she might simply paw at an annoyance, employing relatively harmless, if frightening, methods to elicit reaction. In another, much more common state of mind, she'll fancy the direct approach, a meeting of knives and tongues and possibly not in that order, delivering her judgment and punishment with a personal, intimate touch.

[ Mannerisms ]

If you get the impression she's not paying attention, chances are you're absolutely right. She's far from absentminded, just damn near impossible to keep entertained long and sincerely apathetic to manners, able and willing to physically ignore someone simply by moving them out of her line of vision. For the obvious security reasons, she doesn't disregard others half as much as it appears, nor does she feign her disinterest especially well. Without fail, she'll react to certain stimuli in eternally reliable ways, driven by instincts so ancient they require neither justification nor second-guessing, her reflexes unrelentingly responsive with or without her consent.

Another frequent idiosyncrasy of hers is to stop in the middle of a conversation, seeming to reflect on her words with the utmost thoughtfulness, long fingers tapping away at her chin or toying with her hair. In reality, she still infrequently misses strings of words and opts to review the visual footage internally before issuing any too-telling reply, covering her tracks by putting on a show of consideration. Although fundamentally unhinged, she's remarkably more methodical about her words, trained to value secrets over pride, and likely to choose silence or outright destruction over taking any chances on exposure.

[ Temperament ]

Something wicked this way comes. There is nothing that gets her higher than the satisfaction of resolved revenge. She lives for her anger, for her aimless, wholly destructive rage that knows so little discrimination it could almost be innocent, relishes and revels in the feeling of her opponent breaking down on every cylinder. It's not enough to simply crush the body, the mind too must be contended with, subjected to the psychological mud of humiliation and suffering until at last her enemy begs for relief, and at last she allows it.

Her cruelty runs deep, owing as much to experience as it does to nature. She almost considers pain an art form, a sort of high beacon of learning that surpasses all the books and stone structures of man. To study all of its forms, the way it contorts beauty and makes muscle shudder, to emulate all of its tiny responses! -- her sadism is at once scholastic and savage.

[ Battle ]

Her opinions are best, or at least most often, expressed through blades and bullets. Very little thought ever precedes her actions, relying on what to her is the most fundamental aspect of action, its perfect disregard to the flux of consciousness, to carry her through one moment to the next. No mercy, no restraint, and no reason for reason at all, she trusts in her body, following its whims intently, its impulses providing her the most exquisite maps.

Impulses often born of a visceral place. She has a particular love for maiming and dismembering her enemies, preferring her bare hands, and nothing short of disdain will be harbored when she must solicit tools or otherwise aid in completing her task. Freudian reasoning aside, Icarus habitually removes the eyes, ears, and tongues of her chosen victims, usually only taking one piece at a time and leaving the rest for the next occasion.

[ Education ]

By New Babylon’s standards, she's just slightly more learned than the average, which is to say, she's literate and occasionally knows what she's talking about. Books beyond use as bludgeoning objects have never interested her (in fact, if you should spy her with one, run), nor are likely to in any universe, yet she was nothing if not a devoted daughter. For most of her life, she ached to please her too-brilliant father, inadvertently acquiring something of an education through her desperate, often fruitless, attempts to entertain him.

[ Morality ]

None. Unequivocally, absolutely, utterly none. She is the living proof of hell's well paved roads, of the evil that can only rise from the best intent, and she is ever wary of falling for those notions. But then, she was never really given a choice how she would feel about morality. Her status as a criminal was determined long before she could comprehend crime and legality, simply existing as much illegal as it was demonized, a dirty, inhuman creature birthed from a glass womb -- if she were honest, she never learned how to be honest.

[ Motivations ]

Secrets and revenge. The first -- her secrets, her most cherished secrets, the only things she's ever held with sincerity, replacing any meaningful relationships and erasing new memories before they can matter, possessiveness in its highest form.

For her secrets are her things, intangible as they might be, and no one is allowed to look at them, to touch them, and most certainly not to take them. Ruthless as she is normally, she will be doubly so when it concerns those sensitive topics -- namely, her origin and her maker -- either of which would invite significant security threats in her native land. She's privy enough to know such concerns are no longer prevalent, but that doesn't negate their worth nor does it undo a lifetime spent viciously protecting them.

Then vengeance -- oh, of all the things she truly enjoys, it's this! -- that sweet, snappy answer to karma and cosmic crimes, the righting of wrongs, the taming of mutinous intentions, so completely ruling her from the moment to moment that she would surely stumble and fall without its familiar rage. Nothing grand or even all that impressive is required to incite her insatiable ire, something as innocuous as a verbal insult potentially being taken (or at least, punished) as gravely as the murder of a loved one.

Congenital Indifference to Pain: In a highly simplified explanation, she has never, and will never experience pain as being a distinct sensation, nor can she tell temperatures apart without extremes (for instance, she couldn't feel a stove heating up, but she'd know if she was touching fire).

Augmented Reptilian Brain: Where the normal animal has a choice between fight or flight, she was specifically designed around inhibiting flight instincts. Coupling the lack of pain with an absence of physiological fear, her aggression is greatly exacerbated, every fight -- no matter how dire or trivial -- only able to end in either victory or death for her. Unfortunately, manipulating such a fundamental piece of the brain was not without its unintended (but expected) side-effects, rending her additionally incapable of perceiving thirst or hunger.

Superior Reflexes and Athletic Ability: Celeste's designer didn't leave her wholly without, compensating for her broken instincts by significantly heightening her physical prowess, ranging from but not limited to: response time, endurance, agility, and speed far above the natural-born human.

Elevated Metabolism: Another means of easing the drawbacks imposed by her alterations, her cells divide much faster than nature would have them, fortifying her endurance and providing moderate healing abilities. She cannot regenerate by any means, but most surface wounds will fade within a few hours of uninterrupted rest, and broken bones will heal within a few weeks instead of months. This effect is not at all selective -- she'll take a bar shelf to get drunk for ten minutes and has, by this point, been tranquilized unsuccessfully so many times she needs a concussion to feel a little lightheaded.

Hand to Hand Combat: Mostly a combination of street taught arts and informal training, Icarus has been fighting for as long as she remembers, and she's damn sure going to die that way if she has any say in it. She's stronger than her size suggests, but not very, largely relying on the element of surprise and her enemy's hesitation to tip the balance when she's outmatched in skill.

Melee Weaponry: Should you meet Icarus without a knife, chances are that you've stumbled on a remarkable lookalike or a reverse world creature, the reality-bound version carrying at least two on a lazy day. Her preferences range vastly, not being all that consistent in any given situation, though she generally relies first on her custom gravity knife, provided by Kit Freytan, before turning to her spares.

Being the personable woman she is, she despises guns and avoids their use whenever possible, owning only one herself, scarcely touched in the years since inheriting it from her father. She fully recognizes the efficiency of firearms, and infrequently, the absolute necessity, but she still posits that mechanical weaponry is just too damn ugly to tolerate.

Acrobatics: If she had a softer temperament, Celeste probably would have become a dancer or performer instead. Naturally graceful and precise, she trains herself on new aerial tricks frequently, never missing an opportunity to show them off, whether it means vaulting from her hoverbike to a moving target or simply flaunting her flexibility in the bedroom.

Lipreading: For ten years and counting, she has elected to remain deaf, relying on lipreading to facilitate most face to face interaction. On the occasion she misses a word or vital cue, she has (and often exercises) the option to rewind her visual feed.

Field Medic: Daughter of a brilliant, albeit thoroughly mad, doctor as well as almost perpetually injured, Celeste doesn't have the most conventional methods of patching up, but she's got enough years behind her to make for a competent, if excessively rough, medic under fire.

Demolitions: Yet another skill osmotically acquired through her line of work, she's delivered and set off enough explosives to pass half the programming courses and earn a degree. For the first two years as a courier, demolitions, live in particular, were her forte -- she can't create them, nor would one say she really understands their mechanics, she's just thoroughly versed with their use.