CIVILIAN . SNOW, CALLUM

MALE

BISEXUAL

NINETEEN

DECEMBER 9TH 1992

BRITISH/AMERICAN - DUAL CITIZENSHIP

FLUENT ENGLISH, INTERNET SLANG, AND IDIOT. RUDIMENTARY MANDARIN CHINESE.

CAL, OCCASIONALLY CALLIE.

0.65
(+.50 with Allison C.)

CIVILIAN

N/A

N/A

09/23/13 By DANI

ROGUE

HAYDEN GREEN
COLIN COX
QUENTIN CHOU

VERY HIGH
TOMA from AMNESIA

Cal hails from an upper-middle class family residing in South Lyon, Michigan, but currently lives in an apartment in Los Angeles with one of his best friends, Bailey, and a pet pug. It used to have an actual name, but one day he found the Puggerpillar meme on the Internet and started calling it that. While the meme has since gotten old, the nickname certainly hasn't. The pug resided back at his house in Michigan until the end of his sophomore year, when he asked Brandon to bring Puggerpillar over when he visited. Since their apartment allows pets, he and his dear pug have been reunited.

Student at UCLA: Callum majors in Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology (B.S.), and if you ask him, it's B.S. all right. Nah, he likes it-- in fact, he likes it a lot. You never know when you're going to have to create biological weapons to ensure the safety of the human race. For science!

Museum Tour Guide: Alas, he's only doing this for the summer. Cal works as a tour guide at the California Science Museum, taking groups of students or tourists around the place and filling their minds with supposedly useful information. Being able to interact with extremely attractive people from time to time is a plus. He hasn't gotten anyone lost yet, though he did once try to trick a group of children into thinking that the dinosaur fossils all came alive at night. They were impressed; his supervisor wasn't. His state of employment constantly hangs in precarious limbo.

People notice him. He may not be the tallest, the most muscular, or the have the most unique features on the planet, but people notice him, and for good reason. A devilish grin and a confident gaze are most peoples' introduction to Cal, along with the occasional wink if he's feeling particularly cheeky on a given day, even if his clothes are often too baggy and his stance is often a little slouched. He has a toned, wiry build, and stands at 5'11" and a half-- he tells people six feet, but he's lying. This means that he is certainly not tall enough to hover over the masses, but not short enough that he will be trampled, and that's the way he likes it. Whether he'll admit it out loud he understands that first impressions count, and he doesn't want to be remembered for how he looks, but who he is and how he feels.

He'll claim that he has Mary-Sue eyes. Yes, he'll use those exact terms, stating that they are a myriad of rainbow colours that sparkle in the sun. He is no stranger to the Internet and its language after all, judging by the geeky T-shirts and designer bags that come from staying up for days on end with little to no sleep, and phrases like 'LOL' do slip into his everyday speech. But like most of the Internet, he is full of exaggerations. For one, his eyes are actually just a grayish-hazel, and his love for theatrics slips into his body language. When excited, Cal talks with his hands so much that one would fear being the subject of accidental collateral injury, and his facial expressions become comedic to say the least-- his mouth will hang open when he's surprised, he'll stick out his tongue and scrunch up his nose to show distaste, and when he's pretending to sulk he'll puff up his cheeks like a chipmunk. Note the lack of sadness among the aforementioned descriptions. Cal will do anything he can to not let that show. Ever.

Cal is a golden blonde, and on more than one occasion will make people palm their face and wonder if he adheres to the stereotype, based on his questionable sense of self-preservation. He has the scars to show for it: a slash mark on his right calf from a hiking incident (he'll say ninja duel), and a discoloured patch on his left elbow from a paintball gone awry (he'll say shark attack). If you glance closely his front teeth are a slightly different shade from the rest of his pearly whites, the implants the result of a rather unfortunate incident in his second year of college. This involved copious amounts of alcohol and his getting slightly overexcited regarding the results of The Voice. He'll claim that he's lucky his face isn't affected-- and it's quite a nice face, if he will say so himself, with a rather pleasing oval shape. He is no stranger to faux narcissism.

Yet what strikes most people about Cal is something that he is blissfully unaware of. There is an unsettling aura to him, the sense that despite his seeming friendliness and enjoyment of company, something is not quite right. He will look into your eyes when speaking, but there is something disconcerting about his gaze. He is restless, always moving, never able to sit still. Cal will wave his hands around and describe his breakfast burrito in great detail, but the very few that know where to look will easily see that he is hiding something, his bravado and theatrics a giant cover-up for something brewing beneath the surface. His mask is extremely hard to see through. But even upon first impression, it is certainly not infallible.

He's woven a million brocades.

He's a wreck and a mess of passion and emotion, of ideas and wisecracks and puzzle pieces that don't quite fit. On first impression you'll note that he's sarcastic and playful, that he'll make jokes at both your expense and his. He's certainly lively, but not overwhelmingly so. After all, when he first meets people, he holds some of that intense rambunctious energy back, and it is because he is friendly but not overwhelming that he finds it easy to get to know people, no matter the situation. He'll hit on a girl at a party, and bring her home for the night. He'll strike up conversations with random strangers on the street and decide whether it's worth it for him to keep them as friends. Cal's the ultimate extrovert- he despises the very idea of being left alone with his thoughts, and his claiming that he needs 'me time' usually means that he is in his room gaming with friends or watching a movie while texting. While his jabs and chatter mean that he isn't necessarily everyone's cup of tea, those people who like him tend to warm up to him fairly quickly, and he enjoys having many small circles of people to call friends.

And it's when he considers you a friend that he'll start to show just how much energy he has. He'll tell wild stories before laughing them off as jokes, will make wild declarations that he hopes to trick others into believing. He's more than willing to play practical jokes to see if people have a sense of humour, and on occasion has the tendency to go too far. Sensitivity isn't exactly his strong point, though if it is point out to him just how and why he hurt someone he won't be too proud to admit he was wrong. In fact he'll claim to have no pride, and no shame. He'll do anything for a joke and a laugh, make a fool out of himself or other people if it's going to make someone smile. Cal loves attention, whether the good kind or the bad. And if people on the street are staring and calling him a crazy kid, all the better. Those who he calls friends had better watch out-- he's more than willing to drag people into his crazy pranks and schemes, make them go with his plans and ideas that don't sound like they'll work.

He does have pride though, and so much of it. So much so that he won't admit that he has weaknesses, that he has problems, that his constant need to be around people is because he uses them to keep him distracted. Being alone for Cal means that he ends up dwelling on his thoughts, his issues, the things about himself that he doesn't know how to fix. The intense, unexplainable mood swings he gets when he's alone that make him wonder if he may be bipolar, especially because they sometimes come with long periods of lethargy and sudden sadness with no logical explanation to them. The fact that he too is human, that he can be hurt, that he pushes most people away before they get too close. He tells himself that he can cut others off easily, that he has so many friends that a lot of them are disposable, but the truth is that he treasures these relationships more than he will let on. Cal can definitely be manipulative, especially when he is either bored or trying to protect himself. He certainly isn't above sweet-talking someone or telling half-truths to hide aspects of his personality or history that he doesn't want people to see, or to get something that he wants.

Internally, he's a bundle of contradictions. He tells himself that people are only as happy as they allow themselves to be, but has hidden issues and sorrows that he doesn't know how to address. He tries to be cold but can't help but care for people, would drive a couple of hours to meet a new friend but tells himself that he's just using them for his entertainment. Cal's personal policy is that if the financial or emotional cost isn't more than he would gain out of a friendship, he'll do most favours for people. As a result, people never know where they stand with him. He can fool a stranger into thinking they're his new best friend. Someone else might have known him for years but start to realise just how distant he is. It isn't that he does not have close relationships, but rather that he feels that people should have to prove themselves to reach that status with him. And to get them to do so he's willing to test them, to shake people up, to bait people with situations to see if they are worthy of his trust. He's guarded and wary when it comes to others: you never know when someone will turn around and stab you in the back. Guilty until proven innocent is his modus operandi.

Yet despite all the farces, all the theatrics, and all the defences, deep down Cal is highly insecure. He imposes high standards upon himself, and beats himself up when he fails to achieve those goals. In fact, it is arguable that he uses his accomplishments to quantify his self-worth, plunges himself into his grades and friendships and internships to escape from his negative emotions. And as a result of his trying to be so many people, trying to do so many things, Cal has lost sight of who he is and what he really wants out of life. It's okay though, or so he tells himself. It's okay. After all, everyone exists solely for his entertainment. He knows enough people, has enough friends. He can afford to throw himself into constant motion. Someone will be out there when he's in need of company, ready to help fuel his next temporary high.

Shit happened, his brother died.

No, really. That's how he'll describe his life story to anybody that he opens up enough to, and it is the incident that has most profoundly shaped him-- the death of his eldest brother when he was in his freshman year of high school. But that's jumping too far ahead, and while Cal would much rather skip to the good part, he had fourteen years of humdrum and boredom to plough through. Born in St. Mary's Hospital in London, England, Callum was the third of six children. With two older brothers, a younger brother and two little sisters, his childhood had certainly been lively to say the least. He was an adventurous, curious boy, constantly getting in trouble for asking too many questions and pushing too many boundaries. He'd been the leader of a children's gang, the kid that led an army in uprisings against other classes to play practical jokes on them. He spoke out of turn and sassed his teachers, would dismantle class materials just for a bit of fun. He'd kiss the little girls and make them cry. His peers loved him; his teachers didn't. Or at least, that was what they told each other, even if many of them secretly did.



By the time he was in Year Four, almost everyone in his small public school in Surrey knew the name Callum Snow. His name was spoken with reverence, exasperation or disgust, or a mixture of the three. To say that he was notorious would have been the understatement of the year. His mother constantly fretted over her frequent visits to the headmaster's office, terrified that he would grow up to be a delinquent. His father on the other hand wasn't worried at all. He laughed it off as he petted his son on the head, claiming that Callum just took after the American side of the family. They'd all been troublemakers, and Callum was no exception to the rule. He'd straighten himself out, his father said, and as long as his little boy made good grades and wasn't doing anything malicious he didn't see why he couldn't bend the rules a little.



Callum continued with his mishaps and mayhem, getting into all sorts of trouble and scrapes. He got into trouble for trying to smuggle his class hamster home on a weekday, stating that he didn't want it to be lonely. He got lost on a school trip once because he was too busy chasing an ice-cream van. He had to be reminded by his teachers that he was not allowed to trade his friends for Pokémon cards. He made friends with the lunch ladies to get extra dessert for him and the girl he fancied at the time. However, when Callum was in Year Seven, his father's job took the family back to South Lyon, Michigan, and that was when his idyllic childhood slowly started to grind to a halt.



Fitting in at his new school had not been easy. The English school system has thirteen years instead of twelve, and Cal should have transitioned from Year Seven to the sixth grade. However, his teachers had decided he was intelligent enough to be put into the seventh, making him almost a year younger than most of his peers. Much as he was naturally friendly and charming, he was often teased for his accent, and not even the good-natured kind of teasing that he was often the perpetrator of back home in England. Standing up for himself became an almost daily ritual, and he quickly learned to snark them back. But as the new kid he was under constant scrutiny by the other children, and while he found friends he had had to stand up to people more than he would have cared to.



The mocking came to a halt when he managed to get onto his school's track team, and it was a relief to him that he didn't constantly have to defend the way he spoke, or the way he spelled. Besides, at that point, he'd learned to blend in with the others. He'd never let himself lose his accent, but he'd taught himself how to sound the way people sounded on television. Just similar enough to his classmates that he didn't get into any harm, but different enough from his peers that he stood out. It was too much trouble to speak the way he had once spoken, and that was when he developed his first persona, by referring to himself as Cal.



As an athlete, it wasn't too difficult for Cal to work his way back up the social scene. He'd always enjoyed surrounding himself with friends and being on the track team gave him a sense of camaraderie, and while he distanced himself from the bullies and the kids who'd tried to make his life miserable at the start he learned to be just friendly enough so he wouldn't get in trouble. He wasn't ringleader any more, but he was definitely one of the popular kids, and even as a freshman in high school, he was considered cool enough to be invited to a senior party along with his two older brothers. Naturally, they'd all accepted the invitation, even if the eldest, Allan, hadn't exactly been the fondest of partying himself. This was in June of Cal's freshman year, and Allan was back home from his first year of college. He'd known the guy throwing the party, and it had only been because he'd wanted to serve as a chaperone for Cal and Brandon that he'd agreed to go in the first place.



To this day, Cal isn't completely sure whose fault it was that Allan died. But he's quite certain that despite what Brandon thinks, Allan would never have let him drive if he had been completely drunk. That night is a bit of a blur for Cal, but he remembers another car charging towards them at top speed, and Brandon taking a risky turn. The news reports say that they swerved off the road and crashed into a large tree, but what he does know is that he was saved from much of the impact of the crash by Allan's body. His brother's final action had been to save his life.



Brandon had escaped the crash unscathed, and Cal had suffered only a few broken bones. But what they'd suffered was the aftershock their parents' having to handle losing their son. Their mother didn't take the news well at all. Allan had been her favourite, and upon losing him and learning about the circumstances, she'd immediately lashed out at Brandon, claiming that it was his fault that this had happened. Brandon had bore the brunt of the guilt despite Cal and his father's protests, and it was through this constant contention and fighting that the familial unit began to splinter. Unable to handle the remorse of what he had supposedly done, Brandon moved out of the house as soon as he could, deciding to start his own garage instead of going to college. All of a sudden Cal was left as the oldest son in the house, and he was often trapped as the middleman between two fighting parents, both of which constantly insisted that they were right.



He mourned Allan's death too, but refused to let himself do it for long. No, he had to ignore the increasing feelings of helplessness, the constant sadness that ebbed at the back of his mind, because he had other matters to handle. His mother suddenly became more overprotective than she had ever been. She'd always been a concerned parent, but after Allan's death, her questions had almost tripled. There was never a day where she wasn't asking about what Cal was doing, who he was seeing, and he was no longer allowed to go to parties at all. He had to be back at a certain time every day after school, no exceptions-- she just wanted to know that the boy she'd almost lost was safe, whether the boy felt like answering to her or not. This left Cal with only two options: to comply or to rebel. Naturally, the latter won out over the former, and screaming matches between him and his mother soon became commonplace. He could no longer see eye-to-eye with the woman, and neither could his father. In Cal's junior year his father was caught cheating on his mother with someone else, and his parents soon separated and underwent a long, arduous custody battle.



In a matter of a couple of years, the cheery, jovial atmosphere of the Snow family had completely disappeared. He could barely exchange words with his mother without getting into a fight, and his relationship with his younger brother David soured, the younger boy believing Cal to be self-centered and Cal believing David to be a doormat. In a way, they were both right. Cal spent most of his days out of the house at school activities or with friends, and when he was at home he was often on the computer, playing games or visiting forums. The Internet served as a solace from the negative emotions that he'd tried so desperately to block out, and while he was initially hesitant to do so he soon started to make friends on it, starting with a boy named Bailey Whelan who had lived all across the world, and a girl named Juliette Dubois who seemed to have walked the same road as he.



Cal was still popular in school of course, keeping his Internet friendships a secret from his athletic bros in fear of being mocked for being a nerd. Keeping in touch with the various personas he'd created was a precarious balance, but he knew that he could handle it. He'd been through worse before. Offline he was the jock that everyone knew and loved, and online he was one of the best gamers his guild had ever hoped for. To his brother he was the flippant rebel who he couldn't help but love and hate, and to his girlfriend at the time, he was the doting lover that brought light to her life. Little did she knew that Cal kept his true feelings under lock and key, that she knew close to nothing about who he really was. She didn't know that he had days where he woke up feeling completely worthless, and that he had a whole other life on the Internet that she would never even dream of hearing about. The relationship didn't last long; he had never really been all that interested in her, and casual hookups were more fun. He'd find romance some day, but today was not that day.



Meanwhile, his grades started to slip. Because much as he didn't want to think that he cared about the people he'd met on the Internet, Cal genuinely did, and talking to his online friends through the night meant that he didn't have to lie in bed alone with his thoughts. They were just names and faces and words and lines of text, but he was slowly starting to open up to them, even if very little. But no amount of caffeine could bring his functionality back up to where it would normally have been, and the lack of sleep didn't help. He was still running, though he was no longer one of the best on his team. Where he had once been making straight As, occasional Bs and Cs started to slip into his report card, and while he'd never admit it out loud it was starting to bother him. His teachers chalked it down to it being because of the death of his brother, but he knew the truth, even if he tried to ignore it-- just like he tried to ignore any feelings at the back of his mind that might have been negative.



By the end of his junior year his grades were nowhere near what they should have been, and he knew that he was falling into a vicious cycle. Oddly enough, it was a fight with his mother that made him realise that he needed to pull his socks up, and to start working hard at school-- he needed a scholarship if he was going to get out of the house, because at the rate things were going, she wasn't going to pay for him to leave the state. Which was why he started studying again, and attempted to fix his sleep pattern so he would be back on par with his running. His brother had attended the California Institute of Technology while he had been alive, and Cal applied there as well, hoping that he would be able to follow his brother's footsteps. However, his grades from his earlier years of high school weren't good enough to get him in, and he was fortunate to obtain a sports scholarship from the University of California, Los Angeles. His mother told him to stay closer to home, but at that point, Cal had had enough. Some arguing with his mother and guilt tripping of his father later, he'd managed to convince them that it was best for him to go, and they sent him off with their best wishes.



But this still wasn't good enough. Cal knew that it had been a complete stroke of luck that he'd managed to get any scholarship at all, and blamed himself for what he perceived to be failure. If he had had more self-control, he'd have been able to follow his brother's footsteps; if he had had more drive, perhaps he would have been able to be as great as Allan was. But it hadn't happened, it wouldn't happen, and he took comfort in the fact that he was going to be in the same school as Julie was, and in close proximity with Whale-boy. And when Cal was seventeen, he left the house with high hopes and dreams, determined to reinvent himself, to leave the mess he'd made of his high school and family life behind, to create a set of new personas that could carry him through his college years.



Cal has been at college for two years now, and is considerably better than he used to be. While he still uses parties and friendships and games to escape his negative emotions, he has managed to keep his grades up, and being close in physical proximity to his online friend circle means that he is near people who he actually holds close to him. Now that he's moved in with Bailey, his sudden bouts of sadness are less frequent, though they do occur from time to time. He's now got his emotions and his life under control, and he's managed to run away from the mistakes he made back in high school. He's managed to put those problems behind. He's happy, he's doing well, he's having fun.