#my head feels like it's filled with slime and tv static and my throats scratchy

[jeanboyjean]

i think im getting sick 😭

[amongushq]

Welcome to Among Us, CHARIS! CASS CALLAGHAN ( with the faceclaim of ERIN MOMMSEN ) has found shelter in NEW ATHENS, where we hope HE will fit in nicely. Please make sure to check the “after applying” section of our navigation here!

Cass joining the camps right in the middle of the Second Titan War is a very cool spin on things indeed, especially regarding the entire city being asleep. How he hides his true feelings, especially regarding his aunt, was very well done in general. We got to see how he deflects questions about his personal life: with a laugh and some nervous tendencies. His mental illness, while undiagnosed, is still very real and impacts his daily life in a visible way. We always welcome good representation, so it was nice to see something as heavy as this treated correctly. Somehow his power of astral travel (again tied into canon events quite effectively) mimics his dissociation, which makes it a wildly interesting ability both for the possible interpersonal relationships it could bring, but also because maybe there's a key there for Cass to have more mastery over the ailment that controls his life -- a way for him to finally stop avoiding so much, and live his life. 

(We went with Erin Mommsen because Paul Jason Klein is too old (from 1988, while Cass is from 1994) ).

TW: mentions of depersonalization-derealization disorder (DPDR) under the cut.

AND YOU ARE…?

What is your full name, and when were you born?

“Hm?” Cass looked up from where he had his hands clasped together between his knees. “Oh! Uh, well my full name is  Cassander Alexis Callaghan,��� he placed a facetious emphasis on the consonants in the name, “but that’s a bit of a mouth-full isn’t it?” He laughed, but the city representative sitting across from him didn’t seem particularly amused. Cass cleared his throat and continued. “I usually just go by Cass or Cassie or sometimes just Callaghan. I was born on April 30, 1994 in West Virginia.”

Have you been claimed, or do you belong to a legacy? If yes, state your godly parent / heritage.

“Yeah, haha,” he rubbed the back of his neck abashedly, breaking eye contact. “I was claimed by Hypnos pretty much immediately upon arriving in NYC. It was sort of an ordeal actually. Right in the middle of the Battle of Manhattan.” He thought back to that august. He’d only been 15, but it was the third time he’d run away from home and the farthest he’d ever gotten. He’d been wandering the streets of New York City when it had happened. One minute everything had been fine, and the next, people had started dropping in the streets. Men and women of all ages were curling up on the concrete and drifting into deep and dreamless slumbers. One by one, drivers pulled over to the sides of the once busy streets, silenced their engines and rested weary heads on pillows of leather or tinted glass. He had felt it as well, the gentle fingers of rest curling quietly around his bones and a soft but insistent song thrumming in his ears. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep. What could it hurt, to rest? He’d not miss anything, really. He’d been on the road for so long,  he deserved to lie down and-

“I didn’t realize I’d walked in on an all out war,” he said, pulling himself from his memories. “I panicked, naturally, and called out until I found someone who wasn’t asleep.” It had been a patrol of demigods investigating the affair, and as he’d been the only conscious individual for miles, they’d taken him back to their base of operations to see Chiron. “I didn’t realize what I looked like until one of the archers pointed it out. Talk about a first impression.” He’d been glowing like like it was what he did for a living, and he’d been gifted with a flower crown of crimson poppies, as well. It was an aesthetic, at least.

“I suppose it was my father’s attempt to clear his name,” he thought aloud. A white flag to the Olympians proclaiming I, HYPNOS, DID NOT DO THIS. SEARCH ELSEWHERE FOR THE CULPRIT, he finished in his head. “Anyway, I did my best to aid the war effort, and I’ve been here ever since.”

Where are you currently based? Are you attending a Camp (Half-Blood / Jupiter), or are you living full-time in New Athens / New Rome? Is it a combination of both?

“More of a combo of both?” He tilted his head to the side, thinking. “I’ve been living in an apartment in New Athens for a while now, but I spend a lot of time at Camp Half-Blood teaching classes and hanging out with the kids. It’s more? Relaxed. And kids never have expectations to live up to, you know?”

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? ( If you’re applying for a canon character, are you diverging from book-canon? If so, how?)

“Oh! I guess I can, yeah. Let’s see…” He hadn’t been prepared for this, and as these interviews were most likely an attempt at flushing out the person who’d proverbially outed all of demigod-kind, he didn’t want to answer incorrectly. His fingers twitched nervously.

“I’m 23, but I’m not so much into being an adult, really. I make a decent living painting for the gallery and teaching a flexibility class down at the gym by the agora. You’d be surprised how many demigods can’t touch their toes.” He tried to order his leg to stop bouncing, but it didn’t work. The representative from the city was  staring great holes in his chest where he could almost feel them burning, and he was fighting the urge to slink out of his seat and onto the floor or maybe just die right there on the spot.

“I guess I’m pretty laid back; I don’t like to think too hard about things, really. I mostly just take things as they are. I think it’s kind of a waste of time to worry about glasses being half-full or half-empty or whether or not something could go wrong and just focus on being alive and at peace. It’s just unpleasant getting too worked up over things.” He cringed internally. That had been pretentious hadn’t it. Damn. Now he’d have to fight off embarrassment every time he passed this guy in the grocery store. Damn, damn, damn. He tried to think of something else to say, but his brain was starting to cloud up.

“I have ADHD,” he added, but nearly every demigod did. He didn’t imagine it was particularly defining and mentioning his anger management problems or dissociative tendencies in present company probably wasn’t the best idea. He’d never gotten a proper diagnosis because he’d been a minor, but the terms “Borderline” and “Dissociative” had been thrown around a bit. He quickly moved his mind away from that area. He’d been telling the truth about not wanting to think too hard about things, especially unpleasant things, and his time in and out of therapy certainly fell under the “unpleasant” category.

No, he’d skirt around that. He could’ve mentioned his family, but? He’d rather not think about them either. The only good thing that had come out of having a family at all was his cousin, Kari. He felt a pang of sadness twang in his stomach. He hadn’t seen her since he’d left home for the last time eight years ago. Her mother, Cassander’s aunt, had taken him in after his mother died. She’d always looked at him a bit like he’d crawled, covered in putrid slime, out of a seething pit and was tracking it all over her carpet. He tried to force his leg to stop twitching again, but was just as unsuccessful as before. “I guess that’s all, haha.”

What were you doing prior to The Recall?

Before the recall… He guessed it was pretty pathetic to admit, but he hadn’t been doing anything different than he was now. Most people he’d talked to had bemoaned having to leave jobs, friends, college courses, but he didn’t have any of those things before, and he didn’t now, either. If anything he was just upset New Athens was more crowded than before. “Oh, I dunno.. Just living my life I guess. Painting,” avoiding his family, “teaching at the gym,” avoiding his thoughts, “helping out around camp,” avoiding his past. Avoiding, avoiding, avoiding.

He knew a vague answer like that would be suspicious, but he was too emotionally exhausted to care. He was already starting to hear TV static he suspected wasn’t actually there, and he could see the wall of his apartment beginning to breathe rhythmically. He rubbed his eyes. “Well, if that’s all the info you need…” He trailed off, standing up, and the interviewer took the hint and packed up his things.

SHOWTIME!

Cassander sat quietly on the sofa in the hotel, one foot tucked underneath him, the other knee pressed up against his chest. The velvet of the upholstery was old and more scratchy than luxurious nowadays. He was sort of glowing, he thought, examining his hand. A silvery light shone out from between his slender fingers. They were shaking. He clenched his hand into a fist and drew it against his chest, as though he could somehow collapse into himself and pretend none of this was happening. He heard his cousin Kari’s voice in his head. “Breathe. Feel your lungs filling with air. This is you. This is your body. You are alive. You are present.” Grounding exercises had always just made him dissociate harder, but he’d never had the heart to tell her that. She was only trying to help. Even now, though, her gentle words drifting up through his memory were having a negative affect. He could feel himself dissolving, leaving his body far behind and drifting off into the unknown…

He was jerked back into reality by a group of teenagers marching down the hall in front of him, escorting an injured member of their party. He was a blond boy with a quiver belted at his hip, and he was sporting a gruesome compound fracture on his right shin. He couldn’t have been older than 14. Just then, two more teens entered the hallway intersection and walked into the room where Cass was sitting. They were older than him, a girl, heavily muscled with orange hair pulled back in a short ponytail and a boy, tall and thin with blonde hair hanging around his cheekbones. “I’m taking you to see Chiron,” the girl crossed her arms. It wasn’t a question. “Don’t worry, kiddo,” said the boy, smiling. “It’ll only take a minute.” Cass unfurled his legs from underneath himself and stood, following them down the long and winding halls of the hotel. His left foot was asleep.

It’d been almost eight years since that night, and Cass had made quite a life for himself in the budding city of New Athens. He blinked the sand from his eyes and shifted slightly from where he’d been napping in a patch of sunlight that shone down on the canvas sofa in his living room. The wind chimes hanging over his apartment balcony sounded gently, the sun catcher beside them throwing tiny shards of color all about the room, and he smiled and stretched his arms above his head, arching his back. His spine crackled loudly and he winced; He must’ve been out longer than intended. He’d been in Rome again, the Sistine Chapel this time. He supposed it wasn’t the most relevant location to his Grecian ancestry (or his Irish ancestry on his mother’s side), but he appreciated Michelangelo’s work too much to care. He spent a lot of time traveling these days, not that he’d physically been outside of New Athens for more than a few hours at a time in years. He hadn’t mastered mastered his gift for astral travel in time to help out much with the Battle of Manhattan, but he’d practically abused it during the Giant War, jumping in and out of Roman camps, or giving their generals frightful dreams with confusing meanings to throw them off. He wanted to feel bad about it after they joined forces, but he’d done such an admirable job, if he did say so himself, that it was a bit difficult to bemoan his actions.

Now, he mostly used his powers for sneaky trips to famous art museums or to sneak into movie premiers. If he could figure out how to bring someone along, he thought, perhaps he could make a few extra bucks sneaking demigods out of Camp (via the astral realm of course). The Recall made it impossible for anyone to physically leave camp, but… He technically wouldn’t be breaking that rule, and he imagined there were plenty of people within the city limits who’d shell out a few drachma to see the new Spider-man movie when it came out. Unfortunately, communal astral travel was not something he’d mastered. He’d have to get to work on that, but it was three PM on a Saturday afternoon, and it could very well wait until after he’d taken a real nap.