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- ❄ Name | Callum Andino
❄ Nicknames | Cal, Andino or Andi (by Marines)
❄ Age | Twenty-Nine
❄ Gender | Male
❄ Height | 6'1"
❄ Weight | 223lbs
❄ Physique | A little on the burly side (borderline bara)
❄ Scars/Tattoos | Some scarring from shrapnel on his body, and quite a few tattoos (mainly a large tiger chest piece).
❄ Eye Color | Yellowish brown
❄ Hair Color | Dark brown
❄ Species | Demi-god
❄ Ethnicity | Greek and Italian
❄ Orientation | Homosexual
❄ Occupation | Marine Recruiter/Certified plumber
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- Gruff, a bit of a jokester, and surprisingly patient. Callum is the type of guy who will laugh in the face of an enemy and/or make light of a sticky situation. He takes risks and refuses to live a life of fear, which also made him kind of like a "yes man." (This was prevalent when he let an Aphrodite daughter coax him into an intimate moment.) At least he knows how to say "no" when absolutely necessary!
- ❄ Likes
- •Drinking with battle buddies
•Anything HOOAH
•Egg sandwiches
❄ Dislikes
- •Anything rare. Gotta be blackened
•People who talk to you like you're dumb
•Being stereotyped
❄ Hopes | To be able to retire as a Marine recruiter, since his injury took him out of the field. And to keep Cyrille around as long as he can.
❄ Fears | Losing the budding relationship he worked hard to build with Cyrille. It's still new to him, and he doesn't want to lose the broken warrior.
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- ❄ Bio | Life wasn’t so bad for Callum. His mom was a badass Army woman who attracted Ares’ attention after she won the Purple Heart medal for her bravery in the Gulf War. She’d been a POW and never complained, even managing to take down a whole operation during her escape—with only one leg. And she was proud to have brought a new son into the world, one of quite a few Callum was. She got a prosthetic leg during her pregnancy, and used the off time to train herself with it.
Rys Andino’s stories to her little tyke inspired him, and her determination to prove to everyone that a woman could do anything a man could, even when injured, was what helped shaped him to be the caring man he is today. He joined the marine corps after high school in her honor, instead of going to college like some of his brothers and sisters at Camp Half-blood planned. Rys took him to the camp whenever she had to be deployed, because she refused to leave him with anyone else despite her having had a big family. Ares told her of the place when she’d first learned of her pregnancy, and she knew he would be safest there and learn from the best, so to summer camp he went quite a bit.
And the stories he could tell of quests in his early years would have peeps on the edge of their seats! He was lucky to get to go on them during Rys’ long deployments, when he had to stay at camp for couple years straight. The best was, ironically, the awkward trio of himself, one of the top Hephaestus kids named Byron, and an Aphrodite daughter who thought she was the main scene (and who also happened to have a major crush on Callum). That was, subsequently, the year he discovered that he definitely didn’t like girls like that, and he wished he could take back the moment he let her charm him in a warehouse. Worst first kiss, ever. But she ended up hooking up with Byron by the end of the quest, and they solved the prophecy’s riddle at the last moment. It was a good experience for Callum, and contributed to his final decision to join the military.
Callum loved adventure and the thrill of battle, as any child of Ares tended to like. He was sad to leave all his new friends and family behind, but he felt weird about remaining at the camp as a new adult, anyway, so he left for training after the summer’s passing. And he spent quite a while in the Marine Corps. Of course he told his mother about his decision, and wished he could’ve seen her before he left for basic, but the woman was always away on her own adventures. But her letter supporting his decision was all he needed to keep him going, and he couldn’t wait for the next ride.
While he originally intended to make a career as a Marine, his group’s HMMVW rolled over an IED on their way to the next base during one of the missions and left him heavily injured. He was lucky to have made it out alive considering the rest of his crew perished from the explosion. Callum had the amazing recovery agent known as Ambrosia, or the food of the gods. But he couldn’t consume too much as a demigod, and there was no helping the slipped disk in his back. He could get around just fine, but it made standing for too long rather difficult, so he had to sit often. His new limitation meant he could no longer continue his infantry career path, so he decided to change gears and end his contract at only six years.
Instead, Callum got a place in his hometown and looked into becoming a DoD civilian, or switching up his MOS to be a recruiter. He couldn’t see himself doing any other type of job, so his best bet was to change up tactics. Callum had to spend a good chunk of time studying to retake the the ASVAB, because he wasn’t the brightest kid on the block—he was like the stereotypical “crayon-eating” Marine—but he was able to manage with just a disabled veterans check for a while before he earned his recruiter title and re-upped for a two year Marine reserve contract.
And it was during his first year of being a recruiter that he felt truly alone for the first time in his life. He knew basically no one in his mom’s Colorado hometown and it showed. He liked being a recruiter, but they mostly dealt with high school or college kids (he lived in the Fort Collins and college town area), so making friends with them was too weird for Callum now at the age of twenty-seven. So he tried to meet people at bars, but the type of people who frequented the local ones didn’t make for good company to him.
He yearned for a partner. Not someone like his past Marine boo from the squad he lead, either, but someone more creative or refreshing to be around. So, despite having barely been given opportunities to speak to his dad a whole lot, Callum threw back a fireball shot and chanced a prayer to Ares for some advice or friendly help finding a guy. And well, Ares may have hooked up with his mother, but the god still dated the freaking goddess of love and beauty on the regular, so would such a small request really hurt? Callum lead multiple operations during his time in Afghanistan and came out victorious—he even humbly gave all the glory to Ares!—so he thought it was only fair to ask for a little something.
That little something came to him in the form of a dream the moment he passed out from too many downed shots. He was shown the outside of what he understood to be The Lotus Casino, then taken inside to all of the busy goings-on of the casino. The vision panned past all the general excitement to focus on a tall, lone man with longish grey hair at a bar. Callum had no idea how long the man had been there, but his attire suggested quite a while. He was someone who clearly needed to step out for some fresh air, and Callum was smart enough to know when a god was giving him a sign. Whether it was from Aphrodite or Ares, Callum couldn’t entirely tell, but he accepted any call to action, no matter how small (and especially when it came in the form of a hot guy-in-distress).
“Do you trust me?” he’d said to the man after his road trip to the Casino, one hand extended to him.
T’was amazing the man—now known as Cyrille—took the olive branch he boldly offered to begin with but there they were, two years later and still living in Fort Collins township. Lucky for Cyrille, Callum was a patient man, because having to help integrate someone born in the Saxons period to 21st century society was no easy feat! But his hard work paid off a year-and-a-half later when their friendly relationship bloomed into something more, and Callum couldn’t have been happier.
Now, six months later, Callum was busy debating a potential marriage and if that was something Cyrille would be interested in, when the call to action rang yet again.
What kind of son of Ares would he be if he left the baby demigods to struggle alone?
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- ❄ Hobbies
- •Dirt biking/Off-roading and Hiking
•Showing Cyrille movies/teaching him new modern things
•Volunteering whenever there are disasters
❄ Faceclaim | Unknown
❄ Theme | ""
❄ Left Unmentioned | Tanned skin (because for whatever reason, I didn't add a skin-tone section lmao). He just tans real easily, especially from all the years in the field as an infantryman.
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