〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Jen
AGE: 36
JOURNAL: mistojen
IM / EMAIL: mistojen#8486 / mistojen@gmail.com
PLURK: mistojen
RETURNING: Rikki Chadwick, Derek Hale

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Caleb Michaels
CHARACTER AGE: 17
SERIES: The Bright Sessions
CHRONOLOGY: Post-series
CLASS: Unregistered
HOUSING: Whatever works

BACKGROUND: Also known by Dr. Bright as Patient 11-A-7, Caleb Michaels is a 17-year-old running back about to finish his senior year in high school. He's still not sure what he wants to do when he graduates, but he thinks he might try to do something that can help other Atypicals.

Let's back up. Caleb Michaels is a Class A Atypical, which means that he's got psychic abilities. In his case, Caleb is an empath. Around the age of fifteen, Caleb started to notice something different about himself and his empathy started truly forming. At sixteen, he became overwhelmed by his classmates' feelings after a guy in his class started to bully another kid in his class. The bully's feelings mixed with the other student's feelings and Caleb's own about the situation culminated in his first blackout experience. He doesn't remember doing it, but he remembers feeling like he had to hit the bully. When he came back to after being pulled off the bully by a teacher, Caleb noticed pain in his fists and blood on them. Then, he noticed the bloody nose of his bullying classmate. Caleb had broken his nose.

After being sent to the principal and having his parents called, his parents decided that he needed to see a therapist for his presumed anger issues. That's when he met Dr. Bright and was the beginning of his life changing forever.

Through his work with Dr. Bright, Caleb learned to better parse through the emotions of others between mindfulness exercises and focusing on one person whose emotions were especially overwhelming to Caleb, a classmate named Adam who was depressed. Dr. Bright suggested to Caleb that he try befriending Adam, if the other boy's loneliness was so overwhelming to Caleb that he couldn't focus in class and Caleb reluctantly attempted to follow that advice. What eventually came from that was a friendship — the first real friend Caleb had ever bothered to make — that Caleb held very dear and which, eventually, blossomed into the first romantic relationship Caleb had ever had.

It took Caleb months to finally decide he wanted to attempt to go down the romantic path with Adam because it was difficult for Caleb to be able to distinguish his own feelings from Adam's - he knew that Adam was romantically interested in him, so was he also romantically interested in Adam or did he feel like that because Adam did?

Through Dr. Bright, Caleb learned that he's not alone and that there are plenty of Atypicals in the world. He and Adam became especially close with a mind reader named Chloe Turner. Through Chloe, they met Sam Barnes, a time-traveling Atypical and Frank who is a former marine and military-manufactured empath. Chloe started working with Frank, who was originally homeless when they met and suffering some pretty advanced PTSD, and between Chloe's assistance with his art and Caleb's understanding of the Atypical ability, Frank became more well-adjusted and was able to find a job. This further cemented Caleb's consideration of using his ability to help people.

Over time, Caleb learned that the reason Dr. Bright was so knowledgable about Atypicals is that she (along with Adam's aunt, as it turned out, and Adam's parents in a tangential way) used to work for an organization only referred to as "the AM" where they studied Atypicals, usually through experimentation, sometimes with voluntary participation and sometimes with involuntary participation. He later learned that Dr. Bright's brother, Mark, is also an Atypical and that his ability is that he can absorb other Atypicals' abilities by being in their proximity. Meeting Mark was the first time Caleb was ever able to be around someone who could really and truly understand how he felt all the time, being an empath. That alone, even, was helpful in Caleb's development.

An Atypical named Damien, also a patient of Dr. Bright, who had the ability to make people want whatever he wanted and who Caleb had only met in passing a couple of times before, showed up uninvited to Sam's safe house after having knocking Chloe out and making Frank tell him where the safe house was. For a long while, Caleb had been doing really well with his abilities, but that day, everyone was so angry with Damien for so many things and Damien threatened to kidnap Adam earlier in an attempt to get to Wadsworth, Adam's aunt who works at the AM, and Caleb had his first black out in a very long time. He beat Damien unconscious. Damien ended up in a coma. Caleb still carries that guilt with him, even though Damien was a bad guy, as far as Caleb was concerned.

At the end of the series, several episodes later, we learn that Caleb hasn't decided for sure what he wants to do with his life, yet, so while Adam goes off to Yale, he plans to intern with Dr. Bright and Sam as they embark upon a new endeavor at the AM in the wake of Wadsworth, who was promoted to work in DC. He wants to learn how to use his abilities to help people and he wants to be able to help other Atypicals like him.



PERSONALITY: Caleb's personality is a little harder than most for the average person to parse out because sometimes he gets lost in other people's emotions and is too busy reacting to or processing those to feel his own feelings. Since that sort of thing tends to have a heavy hand in a person's own personality, one has to really get to know Caleb to see him for who he actually is.

That said, Caleb is an incredibly caring person. Part of that is just that he is, in fact, an empath and it's hard not to have compassion for people when you can literally feel what they're feeling. Caleb genuinely wants to help people and was working with his therapist, Dr. Bright, to learn to control his ability in order to do exactly that, rather than simply enduring it as he had been up to that point.

In spite of the fact that he's a running back on the football team at school and that he's considered to be, by his classmates, "one of the cutest guys in school" and is marginally popular for both of those reasons, Caleb tends to keep to himself. He's quiet and reserved, largely because he's often trying to process emotions or parse out what he's feeling versus what the people around him are feeling. It's overwhelming for him to be in large groups, especially if there's any drinking involved, so he tends to avoid parties and school dances, if he can manage it.

When he cares about someone, he cares about them deeply. He's incredibly loyal and protective of the people he cares about, having in fact once nearly beaten to death another Atypical who threatened to kidnap Caleb's boyfriend, Adam. He beat Damien so badly that the other Atypical needed to be taken to the AM for semi-long term hospitalization.

For that, to this day, Caleb still feels an incredible amount of guilt, because most of that wasn't even his anger; it happened during a blackout caused by the overwhelming anger in the room coming from everyone else at the same time as Caleb had been feeling his own. For the most part, he's able to keep that sort of thing under control these days, but in extreme cases, he has to be very, very careful or else hope that someone else can put him forcefully in check by pulling him off the other person and getting his attention enough to draw him back into the present.

Caleb is the sort of person who doesn't really know how to make friends, but he does know how to be a teenager. He loves X-Box Live games with people because usually, they're not in the same room, so he can play without feeling their emotions and being distracted. He likes football. He likes girls. He likes boys.

He loves deeply, he's awkward and uncomfortable in his own skin, and he's generally a sweet guy, however short-tempered when it comes to his frustrations. More often than not, Caleb's frustrated to some degree, because it's hard not to be when you're experiencing the emotions of others so strongly that you can't even find your own in the mix.

POWER: Empathy - Caleb feels other people's feelings within himself. This is not simply emotions. Caleb can also feel tired, drunk, and other non-emotional sorts of feelings. The more people that surround him, the harder it is for him to identify his own feelings in the mix, but with help from his therapist, Dr. Bright, he's gotten much, much better at being able to control himself when he gets overwhelmed. ...there are, of course, always going to be exceptions to that control.

The closer he is to a person, the clearer their feelings become and the more precise he can be in identifying what those feelings are. Caleb sees people's feelings in a range of colors, as a way to sort them out in his own mind. His interpretation of those emotions tend to be especially creative: "light blue poking of Dr. Bright's curiosity"; "warm, orange concern"; "black sludge of something I can't explain, dripping through my ribs"; "bees of stress buzzing so hard, if I open my mouth to talk, I'm afraid a swarm will fly out and attack everyone."

FINAL NOTES: Here's some bonus material about Caleb, since none of the Wikis are complete. That said, here's Wikipedia's page on the show and the Bright Sessions fandom wiki page on Caleb.