Natalia Castillo

NATALIA CASTILLO

OOC
Member name: Tilly
How you found us: A link on another site!
Other characters: N/A
Activity level: At least every day!
Code word: Verified by Bee.

Basics
Full name: Natalia Marie Castillo
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Divine Parent: Aphrodite
Powers:

Appearance changes: This is her most developed ability for sure. She mostly uses this for caricatures and pranks in stead of making herself more beautiful.
Enhanced social skills: It’s tough to tell if this is just a natural part of Nat’s personality or not, but she suspects that it isn’t. She’s always very aware of others’ wants and needs when it comes to social situations.
Charmspeak: Not very strong, though. She really doesn’t like using it, though, so it’s pretty underdeveloped.

Personality
General personality:

Natalia is someone who is still rather growing into herself, both as a demigod and just as a person in general. Her personality can seem somewhat unstable to people who don’t know her well— her moods are famously capricious. It seems to be up to a coin toss whether she’ll like you or find you completely dull the first time you meet, but she tends to think a lot of first impressions. If she does like you, she’s easy to talk to, probably mostly thanks to the enhanced social skills she inherited from her mother. When she feels like it, she can be very good company; she’s good at telling when to talk and when not to, what to say to comfort or calm. She’s also unfailingly loyal to the people who she feels earn her trust.

Unfortunately, though, she doesn’t always use her powers for good— she’s a notorious prankster, and tends to use all of the advantages she’s gotten from being a child of Aphrodite to use in these gags. Rather than make herself more beautiful, she uses her ability to change her appearance to morph her features in outlandish and sometimes even frightening expressions, and her social skills and charmspeak for similarly sneaky things. She has a definite sense of humor, and is always aiming to amuse both herself and others. She's got a sharp tongue, too, and is always quick with a sharp retort or sarcasm-laden quip.

Beneath a somewhat flashy exterior, though, is a young woman who fears that she is essentially different from everyone she meets. Even among other demigods, she feels that she doesn’t fit in, particularly with her “family”. She places little value on appearances, and tends to stereotype her siblings as being superficial and boring just as badly as others do. She tends to feel more at home with children of Hermes or Apollo. In fact, it’s easy for her to fit in with many different kinds of people— the difficulty tends to come with the fact that she wants so badly to feel like she belongs that she can tend to lose sight of who exactly she is in her quest to feel accepted. She has no strong sense of “self”; all she knows is that whoever she is right now, she doesn’t like that person very much. She struggles with a great deal of self-loathing and inferiority, but it doesn’t show. She’s always quick to cover it up with a mischievous smile and then perhaps a disturbingly accurate face morph to the likeness of Steve Buscemi.

Likes: Pranks, people with good senses of humor, running, alcohol, exploring different hobbies, adrenaline, math & science (wait what who said that one, math and science are for nerds!)
Dislikes: French, most of the Aphrodite cabin, being alone for too long, condescension, people with no sense of humor or adventure, waiting for anything.
Fatal flaw: She can easily be manipulated into doing things for others’ approval.

History
Claimed?: Yes.
Camp experience: One year.
Mortal parent: Gabriel Castillo, her father.
Other relatives: Five half-siblings, two aunts, and a step mom.
History:

Even before Natalia came along, the Castillo household had always been somewhat… tense. Despite being a kind, charming man, practically everyone in the family had long suspected Gabriel of infidelity, and when he showed up one day with a baby girl from an apparent fling so many months ago, it was only really a confirmation of what everyone knew already. Still, Gabe and his wife stayed together, for convenience and the sake of their already large family.

As for Natalia, she grew up always feeling different from the rest of her siblings. Not only was she the youngest, she was living proof of her father’s betrayal of the family. Her stepmother did her best to raise her well, but even from a young age, Natalia knew that she didn’t “belong”. She did reasonably well in elementary school, but quickly became something of a slacker in middle school, more concerned with popularity than anything else. She was always good with people, and she figured that if she couldn’t have acceptance from her family, she would at least get it from friends in school.

As she grew older, her acting out only increased. She skated by in classes with average grades despite being absent often, mostly by copying friends’ work or her own inherent skill for bullshitting her way through things. Still, even when she became popular, she couldn’t shake a feeling of unease that ran deeper than your average teenage angst. In fact, she noticed things that were weird about her body— not just regular puberty stuff, thank you very much. She could distort her features when she wanted with a little effort and concentration. It scared her— people weren’t supposed to be able to do that! She kept it a secret, though, afraid of being thought of as even more of a weirdo and an outcast by her family.

One day, though, her stepmother caught her in the midst of a stunningly accurate impression of Oprah, far too accurate for it to be just makeup trickery. Eventually, her father came out with the truth about her mother, about the possibility of sending her to a camp that he’d been informed of. In the beginning, Natalia wasn’t happy with the news; all she had ever wanted in her life was to be accepted by her family, to be loved and to fit in. How could she do that when she was at a camp full of freaks like her?

Camp Half Blood, though, proved to be a positive thing once she gave it a chance. She liked staying in the unclaimed kids cabin, liked being with a bunch of misfits like her. However, her abilities in changing her appearance were too advanced for her to go unclaimed for long; after one particularly elaborate prank a day or so in that involved changing her appearance to look like some famous celebrity that one kid was particularly fond of, she was claimed on the spot.

From there, she was whisked to the Aphrodite cabin, and she became somewhat disillusioned with the whole “demigod” thing after that. She had always been rather low on self-esteem and unconcerned with beauty, and didn’t feel like she meshed well with the other Aphrodite kids. She did like being able to finally express her abilities to their fullest, talk with other kids who knew a little about what life had been like for her, trying out different games and talents to see what suited her. She has been at Half Blood for approximately a year now, and has finally begun to feel like she’s found her place.