Clio

A perfectionist, Clio is the kind of person to lay awake at night thinking about every single mistake she made during the day. She holds herself to a rigid standard and expects others to do the same. Rather blunt and oftentimes mean, she would call herself an honest person, even if her idea of honesty involves knowing when to redact information rather than speak it plain. Her trust is not easy to earn, but it is even harder to reacquire should you betray it. Can be quick to critique others, often in not a very constructive way. Argumentative, in the way that you can just tell this bitch was in debate club.

Preferring to work alone, she has a habit of rejecting help or even taking jobs from people so that she can handle it herself. Having raised herself, she's on the better side of cooking and cleaning but also indulges in the joys of easy trash meals, mostly for when drunk or hungover. When she moved away at the soonest possible opportunity, she indulged in the rebellious teenage part of her that she never got to express. Drinks and smokes as a means to 'survive adulthood.' She has had many a strongly worded email to her family about how she's tarnishing the name.

She has a habit of hiding after perceiving that she's made a noticeable mistake.

Very high strung. Difficult to find relaxed. Reacts badly to being touched. A very private person, overall. Her personal space is extraordinarily messy.

Enjoys talking about her interests, despite all that. Rumour has it that she has a particularly warm smile if you can wrestle it out of her.

When someone is born as a scandal, it frames the rest of their life rather well.

Clio's father wanted a son. An inheritor, a legacy, a miniature Merlot. He would tolerate a daughter, however unideal that was, but not when the child looks nothing them. Unfaithful, cheater, adultery, these were the words that he could already imagine swimming through his reputation and poisoning it. It might not have ever crossed anyone's mind if he'd just have kept it to himself. Isadora tried in response to his accusations, calling her a blessing, claiming their daughter had been touched by an angel. Alas, even were it true...

In a marriage that was not tied for love but power, there wasn't much left salvaging except reputation.

The frame it put her life in was a portrait in which Clio was not included. Born to wealthy politicians, she would later find it fortunate that it was so.

A childhood she would rather scrap than expose.

Still, there was an image to maintain. There was an immense pressure to do well in school. History was the subject that grabbed her. The mistakes that people make, even when written down, are ones that people are doomed to repeat. She wondered, constantly, whether the power of knowledge would be enough to break a cycle. Do the people who write it down hide parts? A perfect representation, with perfect clarity, she decided that humanity would still find a way to be divided on it. Wrestling with the issue and how it interconnected with the shattered family behind closed doors could have broken her, could have let her think it best to hide it all and pretend.

That picture perfect outer image -- they would all pretend if she let it happen.

It was still worth trying, though.

She moved away. She was accepted to a nice school, despite the incidents in highschool. She studied. She worked. She felt that sweet taste of freedom. All the while, too aware that to climb on that mountain of wealth, her parents had suppressed and destroyed the lives of lower income families. Blood money, as far as she was concerned. They created a monopoly of political power; created bills that benefitted only them, only people like them. Cover-ups, conspiracies, the walls were too thin and she knew too much -- knowing her family, knowing their tempers, she planned for the worst.

On the precipice of receiving a Master's degree, Clio created a queue of sorts. Planning ahead, in the event that something happened, she was going to leak everything she knew and kill the Avventura name.

The desire to live, the chance to after all this time? That was just a happy accident.

The day after she was spirited away to Aether, it went live.

So don't say I didn't try.

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