Cathryn

I did this for Cal in a DE a while back and saved it in a private post on his journal, so I am totally going to cheat and copy/paste that. It's not like any of it's really changed.


1. Cal is massively insecure. I could just stop there, because it informs pretty much everything he does. His spent his life before living with a family who did virtually nothing but pick on his faults and make up additional ones to attribute to him. As a result, Cal's sense of self-worth is not very strong - it's been slowly getting better in Milliways, where for the first time he's had quite a few real friends who genuinely care about him, but it's still far from healthy. And it can have really weird effects on how he interacts with people sometimes. Just ask poor Kate Barlow.

2. Cal is a former politician and member of a VERY socially elite family. This means that he himself is quite socially adept. He's good at chatting with strangers, he's good at guiding small talk, he's good at all that surface-y stuff that makes for a good party host or the kind of politician people who don't think too deeply like to vote for. He can also cover up what he's thinking and feeling on the turn of a dime, though this is more obvious to the kinds of people who tend to end up in Milliways than he'd like it to be. And if your pup has politician-y qualities, even if they're not in politics per se, Cal is going to pick up on it pretty quickly. He knows the signs.

3. But, he fails at expressing emotions. You know, the deeper positive stuff. Cal is never going to be comfortable with, or necessarily even able to, tell his friends how important they are to him. They're just gonna have to pick it up from his actions.

4. Cal hates lying. Everything wrong in his life before, as far as he's concerned, is because he lied, or someone else lied and he stood by and said nothing, which in his mind is just as bad. Now he does his level best to be completely truthful, even when it complicates a conversation unnecessarily or makes him look bad. Part of the difficulty he's had in adjusting to his new life on his new world is the cover story. He knows he can't exactly tell the truth in this instance, but he hates it anyway. He's gotten pretty used to it through sheer repetition (he's met a lot of new people since he got Penny; cute dog + good-looking guy = scarcely a moment to oneself when out and about), and he's not very happy about that, either.

5. Cal is is uncomfortable with male homosexuality, especially when the male in question appears to be interested in him. A lot of that is just your standard "ignorant straight guy" syndrome, plus being a product of his time (born in 1959, died in 1997, spent that life in the upper upper class where things are Just So), but not all of it. The deeper roots of it are related to his uncle's attraction to him (canon), which he learned of when he was seventeen (Millicanon), and never disappeared (canon). He used it to his advantage when situations seemed desperate enough that he had no other option, and much as he enjoyed the power that gave him over a man who made his life hell, its legacy is an overwhelming feeling of ick. He's spent a lot of time dealing with the complications of that relationship, but he's got a little ways to go yet. He does have a sexual friendship with Sam Linnfer, but it took him months to get to the point where he was comfortable with even admitting to his attraction to Sam, never mind acting on it, and that attraction itself has some vaguely questionable origins.