Welcome to Gaia! ::

hell hath no fury like a spotted girl scorned.


Name : Xochitl, pronouced "Soh-cheel".

Meaning: Flower. Yes, Shiva went there. No, Xo doesn't want to talk about it.

Nickname: Surprise! It's Xo. It's less of a nickname than a last resort used in desperation by those that are sort of baffled by the barrage of inexplicable consonants in her full name. Although the "Xo" sound in "Xochitl" is more of a weird cross between the typical English speakers' "ss" and "sh" and "zz" noises, Xo, phonetically, is "Zo".

In less dignified news, Shi calls her Spot, Riven long ago dubbed her Orange, Nate refers to her as Fangy on particularly bitey occasions, and Aadil insists upon calling her Crayola.

Height: 4'7"

Weight: 79 lbs

Style: Eclectic, mindless, colorful, baffling, senseless, tacky, and generally... well-worn. Much like the kid herself. Xo dresses like an epileptic rainbow who shops at Goodwill, or a little bit like a really poor Lady Gaga, with less broad pop-culture commentary and more just wearing weird s**t on her head. She has a hand-me-down, cornerless look to her that children from poor households tend to develop, though she is relatively unaware of this. She is fond of pretty things (pretty to whom being the question) and is not above festooning herself with strand on top of strand of cheap beads, paper chains, and just about anything she can force a needle through and put on a string, if the occasion calls for it. Occasions often consist of afternoons in her room cutting things out of paper.

Xo received an old sewing machine from their closest neighbor and has discovered that she really enjoys making her own things to wear, whether or not we would call them "clothes", exactly.

Xo also usually wears a set of ace bandages wrapped around her legs from ankle to maybe mid-thigh. She spents a lot of her time waist-deep in weeds, but her skin is unusually sensitive on her legs and arms and reacts badly - thus, the bandages stop the rash, and, by extension, the bitching. Habitually, Xo goes barefoot. As a result she has soles of teflon and has been known to pick thumbtacks out of her feet nearly two hours after they went in, much to everyone's horror but her own.

Age: Kid.

Language: Xo's foremost language is Nahuatl, the ancient language of the Aztecs - till relatively recently, it was the only language she spoke. This made for a lot of awkward social situations, and since she has grown she has begun to put in an effort toward improving her English. (It is doubtful that she was actually incapable of speaking English during the time she abstained. She makes it abundantly clear that she feels the language is indelicate and inferior and hard on the sinuses.)

If you speak to Xo long enough, it becomes obvious that she doesn't think in English. Her initial impulse in thought and speech is always Nahuatl. Occasionally during conversation she will hesitate slightly in order to gather her thoughts and properly translate what it is she wants to say, and she has a tendency to cease speaking comprehensibly altogether when she is irritated. This is sort of a vicious cycle - the less she can express herself, the more pissed off she gets, until she's a sort of incoherent cyclone of sputtering and impenetrable hate, at which point it's probably best to either leave or give her something to chew on. Nate generally keeps jerky on his person for just this reason. It works.

When Xo speaks Nahuatl the only one she knows who understands exactly what she is saying is Naolin, who once also spoke exclusively the same. Shiva made the investment long ago in a hard-found pocket-dictionary of Nahuatl, which still, against all odds, survives in some unlikely pockets of Mexico. Alas, she was to be largely disappointed: much of what Xo speaks wanders just close enough to modern Nahuatl to be merely frustrating. It is clear that the language has not traversed the centuries unchanged, and what Xo has running through her head is both very, very old, and a little grammatically stunted.

Xo does have an accent, very mild in her every-day speech, that grows considerably more pronounced when she is excited or worked up or upset, which is, you know, like, maybe eighty percent of the time. She has constant issues with colloquialism and figures of speech, though occasionally her screwups are more eloquent than not.

Defining features: To address the immediately obvious, Xo hasn't got hair. Instead, she has an unruly mass of feathers, which have grown down to the middle of her shoulders. The feathers have a prismatic, irridescent quality and shift in color with the light around them in a riotous rainbow gradient, "like gasoline in a puddle", as Shiva, ever ready with the compliments, put it. Her feathers are large, but very soft - they're the size of primaries, but have the buoyant texture of down, and as a result they're almost impossible to keep in check. Xo generally keeps them tied off with string in low pigtails that hang to her collarbones in an effort to keep it out of her face. Sometimes it works.

Xo's skin is a rich gold color with orange undertones. The thick three-finger-spots of a jaguar line her entire body save her face, the soft parts of her arms and legs, and her stomach. She has the curved ears and long, expressive tail of a jaguar, both of which are covered in a very fine peachfuzz texture of short, thick fur, like suede.

Her eyes are a pale yellow-gold, her pupils are slitted. Her eyes are more serpentine than feline - the pupils of a jaguar are round - and her stare is sharp and intimidating whether she wants it to be or not. She has an interesting pattern of curving swirls complementing the corners of her eyes that do not coincide with the pattern of her skin.

She has sharp, elongated canines that often lend even her genuine smiles a bit of a sinister air, and a gold-colored forked tongue that makes her raspberries truly things that must be experienced to be believed.

Personality: Smug. Petulant. Defiant. Absolutely aggravating. Cheerfully disagreeable and merrily antagonizing. Something of a real terror at times, actually.

Xo is a creature of extremes by nature. She is capable of both extreme idolatry and blind hatred, sometimes with regards to the same person, sometimes within the same hour. She is the trying sort of child who will ask uncomfortable questions regarding the facts of life with a face of unadulterated innocence purely as a method of revenge - and also the trying sort of child who already knows the answers to said uncomfortable questions, generally from stealing and carefully studying the Wrong Sorts of Books with wind-blown women and sleepy looking men embracing on the covers, and maybe bookmarking the really icky parts for future reference. She is easily set off, infamously easy to insult, and unfortunately very difficult to placate once she is riled. Since she often cannot seem to justify an emotion in the first place, she can seem nigh well impossible to please.

The strangeness of her household's composition, combined with her Guardian Shiva's completely inability to perform as a traditional parent, have helped to create in Xo an unsually independent, albeit attention-craving, little girl who is reasonably capable of caring for herself in daily life. Xo can cook simple meals, mend her clothes, and follow a simple grocery list at the local store. Whether she will do it with grace is another matter entirely, and she performs these menial tasks with the bitter dignity of a deposed queen living in poverty. She has a dry sense of humor that doesn't always suit her.

Xo demands deference. She has a fixation with respect and/or the lack thereof being displayed toward her at any given time. Beneath all of her snark and sauce there is a little girl who is cripplingly, astonishingly insecure. She is one of those unfortunate people who must constantly view themselves through the eyes of those around her in order to form their own self-image. Xo must incessantly seek approval and (not always positive) attention in order to feel anything about herself at all. She takes herself extremely seriously - miserably seriously - and her attitude is generally some flavor of "put upon".

Favorite foods: Xo, as an extremely active little girl, is generally disinterested in food apart from its role as something to be placed into her stomach to make it stop growling. Virtually the sole exception to this rule is chocolate: not white, not milk, but the really vile barely-sweetened baking kind. She goes crazy for it, and craves it madly. It's baffling, the stuff really is horrendous.

It has been suggested that, true to her feline and serpentine nature, Xo is actually unable to properly taste sweets. This could account for her love of very bitter chocolate and indifference to the rest; she thusly probably does not crave it for the sweetness but for the phenylethylamine, and for the unconscious sentimental value.

Physical issues:Extremely sensitive skin, occasional bouts of clumsiness. Her teeth, extremely sharp and prominent since birth, pose as much of a problem to herself as to anyone she still is inclined to bite on very rare occasions. She inflicts many a nick or cut on her own skin, and till recently it wasn't unusual for her to have bloody hands. The inside of her mouth has always been a mess. Though she's not shy about expressing her outrage or fear regarding general injury, she never seems especially bothered by what her own teeth do.

Having grown up in this way, Xo is capable of quite amiably doing some rather horrible things to herself - such as piercing her own ears with a pin and a mug of ice cubes - without much of a flinch, whereas a pinch or an accidental toe-stomp from any other individual may illicit a barrage of howls until the proper apology is extracted.

Abilities (obviously only to be acknowledged as they are learned ICly):

Innate Truth: Xo has a bit of a strange idiosyncrasy here: she can't quite be lied to. This is not to say that she can read minds - she can't - but when she is told or shown something with an element of untruth to it, somewhere in the back of her mind, she will know it, in an itchy touch-and-go sort of way. Most inconveniently for her, this ability is not something she can control, and she has absolutely no capacity for the suspension of disbelief; this means that she cannot really enjoy things like cartoons, or stuffed animals, or bedtime stories the same way other children can, as she invariably sees things only in a strictly literal sense.

Screaming: Anybody who doesn't consider this exactly an ability clearly has not had the benefit of listening to Xo during one of her more ambitious tantrums.

Bad Habits: Lying, tantrums, screaming, biting, and scratching. Xo also still has an unfortunately tendency to hiss during particularly trying situations, although she is slowly but surely growing out of this.

Click to view a larger version.


..Good thing she came strapped down. It's Xo, who arrived as a befanged, forked-tongued little horror, albeit one that still manages to be cute, despite her best efforts. She's a whirlwind of bites and scratches and with a yowl the likes of which have never been heard within the walls of the HQ. Hell hath no fury, as they say.



Xo's feathers developed quite a bit as she aged, especially in the color department. Needy, fussy, and tempermental, she became an imperious little terror once she learned how to walk.

In the beginning..


some spoilers follow.


Before the sun had ever begun to set upon the people of the Mexica, the two great brothers, the dark and the light, held a great battle for the will of the believers. The belching of volcanoes and the rage of the great waves were shadowed in the cataclysms that occurred then, but in the end, whatever the means, dark Tezcatlipoca was left standing above his brother, Quetzalcoatl of light and life, and he, the Jaguar, banished the Feathered-Serpent to the East.

Quetzalcoatl left his people, but promised his return, shining from the east like the rising of the sun.

Without the opposing force of his brother to temper him, Tezcatlipoca did not choose to control the will of the people, but instead retired into hiding, worshipped only by a select few, a dark sect.

Into the void left by the two great ones stepped an opportunist, Huitzilopoctli - a war God, a being of blood, the warrior bird. It was he who took the people's faith, who drank the blood of the sacrificed and urged on the boldness of the warriors for ages upon ages, while the memory of the reign of the great brothers grew dim.

And there came a time, as there does in all great societies, when the people became distanced from the gods, when the common folk could no longer see or hear them, when their belief grew to an abstract.

It was at this time that Quetzalcoatl made his return, and the people, distracted, never noticed.

He was older, wiser, enlightened by his exile, and took the same route as his brother, quietly retiring into obscurity for the time.

But his return was not lost upon Huitzilopochtli, who grew uneasy at the idea of being unseated after so long. He came to one of the few humans to whom he could still be seen - a girl, a young priestess called Hatsutsil, a vain, lazy, beautiful thing - and, granting her access to the God's realm, bade her seduce the God Quetzalcoatl, that he might be more vulnerable.

Within Hatsutsil, pride, like a goldfish, flashed a sudden fin.

Quetzalcoatl was wary, but the girl was a skilled liar and a beautiful one, and the God soon fell to her charm, never suspecting she was under the command of the war God.

After time time, pleased with her easy success, Huitzilopoctli wondered why Hatsutsil should not have a similar reaction with his other enemy, Tezcatlipoca, and immediately bade her perform the same process on him, thereby distracting both of his significant worries at once. Hatsutsil agreed, as she knew she must, but unwillingly, for she had begun to reciprocate the life God's love, and she feared the dark Tezcatlipoca, and the wrath that should surely be her due if she were to be found out.

But she accomplished what she was asked, and found herself the terrified secret consort of the two bitterest enemies among the gods.

What would have befallen her remains a mystery, for it was then, in the year 1518, that Hernan Cortes and his men landed upon the beaches of Mexico.

Pre-Xo:

Shiva and Nate, partners who go way back, are on the run from their old employer, Harold Khogar. He unfortunately happens to be the more-than-slightly-paranoid head of one of the most infamous black-market crime rings in the northeast United States, dealing primarily in the procurement and trade of historical artifacts. Also unfortunately, he wants them dead.

When Shiva is contacted one day by the young president of a rival organization, a man named John Guildersleeve, she hesitantly agrees to work for him, under the condition that she and Nate are granted more security against the wrath of Khogar. As a result, she and Nate find themselves sent to Mexico City on their first real mission in years; they are to raid a recent archaeological dig and procure for Guildersleeve the treasure that has been unearthed in a previously unknown underground temple.

However, upon coming into contact with said treasure - a strange slab of stone engraved with complex carvings and embedded with a rare raw emerald of vast proportions - Shiva finds herself no longer entirely under her own control, touched by the strange magic of the stone. Falling further and further from her senses and self, she refuses to relinquish the stone to Guildersleeve, and flees the country, effectively kidnapping the item. She returns to her makeshift home in a local storage unit and remains there in the dark, spiraling into a hazed madness. This lasts nearly two weeks and may have continued indefinitely, if not for Nate, who, pressured by threats from Guildersleeve, divulges her whereabouts out of concern for her safety, and his own.

Guildersleeve's hitmen accompany Nate to the storage unit, where they find Shiva in a half-conscious, feral disarray, and attempt to take the stone from her. Shiva, in her near insanity, makes an effort to give them what they want - the emerald - and pops it from its base with the tip of a butterknife, upon which gem and rock both disintegrate, Shiva is possessed entirely by a violent, roving spirit thus released, and Guildersleeve's men vacate in terror.

With Anen's subsequent arrival and help, the spirit is coaxed from Shiva's body, and Xochitl is reborn.

Childhood:

Finding herself burdened with a strange toothy child, Shiva names the baby Xochitl, in reference to the poem that'd been inscribed upon the stone from which she came, and subsequently seeks residency in a more child-appropriate environment: namely, a large converted hangar on the property of a farming friend of hers, which was once used to house several small bi-planes.

In the meantime, Xo, while in the process of meeting more of her kind, made the acquaintance of another Fa'e of Aztec origin, a little boy named Naolin, who strangely arouses a certain degree of aggression in the child.

Naolin, more concretely connected to his past than Xo could ever hope to be, comes into close contact with some refugees of the faith crisis, who in turn discover Xo's confusing presence. Naolin and Xo both are kidnapped by one of these spirits, a strange being Nao considers his underling and loyal supporter, and brought to what remains of the divine plane of the gods of the Mexica: a ghostly image of an ancient city lost to plague and battle.

It is from here, the children are told, that they will be able to journey to Mictlan, the underworld, and reclaim what is theirs. Neither child quite understands the situation in which they have been placed, but both are acquiescent and eager to be praised, and the strange surroundings spark old memories and feelings in the both of them that can't be ignored.

It is in the bloody world of Mictlan, ruled by a senile old God and his comatose wife, that Xo, separated from Nao, encounters an old relic, an enormous mirror, that shows her for the first time exactly what she is. With this epiphany, she is able to grow.

Currently:

Nate in particular has unearthed some troubling news regarding the night Xo was found. Mexican newspapers, which he was perusing for an office case, reported the mysterious deaths of seven American archaeologists. The Mexican officials on the case attributed the deaths to trapped underground gases released during their excavating process. There is no mention of the incident in any American press release.

With a little effort, Nate found that this site in particular was the one he and Shiva had been paid to raid - the night before the discovery of said bodies.

Not only this, but, while running research on that particular date after this find, Nate discovered that there were several deaths in Mexico City discovered simultaneously - unexplanable deaths attributed finally to the heatwave. Shiva has insisted that multiple unexplainable deaths are not at all uncommon in a place like Mexico City, but Nate remains uncertain.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Nate and Shiva, Xo has made a new friend - a "woman" who calls herself Pokol, and has introduced herself as a servant of the gods from which Xo was derived.

Pokol, another remnant of the old age and a demi-god who survived the crisis by taking on the life of a human woman, professes her loyalty, but still makes Xo rather uneasy, for her unsettling mannerisms, her lack of empathy, and her unblinking stare. Regardless, Xo staunchly considers the woman a true friend, as she is the only one aside from Nao who speaks Nahuatl or understands anything about Xo's double life, which is comfort enough to make up for Pokol's shortcomings.

TBC...

Toddler quest - See page 4:



Kid quest - See page 8:

Nothing remains
but flowers and sad songs
In Tlatelolco and Mexico
Where once there were
Warriors and wise men

<center></center>