Casey Patterson is a cannonball. Over 6' of pure energy, he stops moving only to sleep. When he's in a good place he's talkative, sociable, and considers every person around him to be his best friend — even if he thinks your name is "Overalls Bro!". The world is his playground. Easy to influence and manipulate, the only incentive he needs to do anything is "It's going to be so sick, just wait."

SOCIAL CIRCLES.
Casey is drawn to people who are confident and driven, those who give the undeniable impression that they know they're going places, and they're going to do it. He tries to surround himself with people that benefit him: popular people make Casey more popular; skilled social climbers can mobilize some stored-away gossip as blackmail to help him in an altercation; prefects defend him in a conflict, even when he's in the wrong and the one who started it. More superficial relationships are all based on FUN: party animals, dancers, and those who enjoy manipulating others into fighting for their own entertainment. If you're boring and can't do anything socially for Casey, you bore him and he usually couldn't care less about you.

Sometimes he makes an exception to this rule and pays attention to someone he otherwise wouldn't — usually because he thinks it will get him positive attention.

VALIDATION.
Although reluctant to show it, Casey craves approval and validation from the people he respects. He places his self-worth on whether or not they seem to deem him capable of being someone better than he already is. If these people—most often people in places he perceives as powerful, like prefects and the occasional teacher—encourage him, he begins to believe he's capable of being a better person, whether that means studying more, helping out underclassmen, or simply not fighting as much. If he thinks that their opinion of him has been lowered, however, he becomes antagonistic and combative and seeks their attention by acting out.

CONFIDENCE.
Casey Patterson can seem like confidence personified: he's athletic, popular, and generally regarded as a (very) attractive person. He's the cheer captain and a dancer who plays Dungeons & Dragons without a thought to whether or not it will endanger his considerable social capital. He's confident about most things, but it's those in which he has no confidence that weigh most heavily on how he behaves in public. First, he thinks he's unintelligent. He would argue that his historically low marks and how he has always struggled in traditional classroom settings reflect this. To date, the only person at Gooseberry that's managed to convince him that he's capable of more was Cricket Quayle, and although he improved a lot under her tutelage (in both grades and self-respect), it wasn't a permanent change — and now that she's gone Casey thinks he only did better because Cricket was there to hold his hand, and that without her he's back to square one. Suggestions that he's of less-than-average intelligence, or that he may not know something he should, are met with contention.

Casey also worries that people find him uninteresting, a trait he ties back to the matter of intelligence — and he'd rather be dead than be boring. He tries to distract people from his apparent inability to hold an interesting conversation by throwing himself into the other things he thinks people keep him around for... namely his promiscuity. Already a fan of kissing, grinding, and everything else a good-time boy could enjoy, he engages in a lot of loose behaviours as his way of giving people things that he assumes they want, and to distract them from trying to form deeper relationships with him.

BEING A GOOD PERSON.
As Casey depends on his friends to validate his potential, being a pal he respects can be an exhausting position. He's come to realize that people at Gooseberry seem to like him more if he's not vying for dominance. He has decided that this is Good, and this has been confirmed by people people he respects (like Cricket); however, while he's a follower with a mostly good heart, he doesn't like feeling like a follower because that means he's not the one in control. He often tries to do the right thing but, if he feels like he's at a disadvantage, it's easy for him to revert back to his old ways by acting out, usually by started a fight (with fists or words, he's not picky).

TEMPER.
The good news is that Casey is easy to read. He doesn't mask his emotions well, making it easy to tell is he's still in a good mood, and thus agreeable, or if he's slipping into bad boy territory. At his worst, his energy and impulsive streak clash to create a reckless, flighty, and hostile boy. His temper will be quick to flare and his self-absorbed nature allows for only tunnel vision; reasoning with him at this point is extremely difficult and rarely successful. After a conflict—whether verbal or physical—he refuses to apologize because he insists he was in the right; if forced to apologize (ex. by a staff member who threatens some aspect of his livelihood), it will be short and insincere. There are times when he feels a genuine need to apologize — they are rare and peculiar, and only happen to a few of the people closest to him. In those cases, he returns to normal without acknowledgement of the fact that he feels bad, but becomes the slightest bit quieter, more sheepish, and compliant, but only in private.

CONFLICTS.
Casey is never wrong. If such an unbelievable thing is ever suggested, he tries to twist the facts of the story until he becomes the pitiable victim, worthy of sympathy and friendship, and his adversary has been vilified. If he can't, he'll target his adversary and push their buttons until they push back. He isn't afraid of a fight and he's not likely to back down from one.

LOYALTY.
While his close friends can expect him to defend them in the same ways (whether they want him to or not), Casey isn't generally a loyal person. The friends he grew up with in Seattle mostly operated as he does now—selfishly—and as a result he has a poor understanding of what friendship actually means. The idea that someone could like him just because, and not because of what he could provide in return for their attention and affection, has been an alien concept in most of his relationships. If he needs to save face and the first opportunity he sees is to throw a friend under the bus, he'll do it; it's difficult to think of a scenario where he would sacrifice himself for someone else. Cultivating a relationship where Casey feels appreciated for himself takes a lot of one-on-one time, a lot of understanding, and a lot of patience on both sides. These are three things Casey doesn't readily give.

(To reduce the size of this section, FAMILY BACKGROUND has been moved to an addendum. It's not necessary. TL;DR: Parents met at work, founded their own pretentiously-named start-up, and fell in love.)

CHILDHOOD.
Casey grew up in an upper middle class house in an upper middle class neighbourhood. His parents had steady and generous incomes, but they also prioritized saving for their five children's educations and extracurriculars. He had alright relationships with his siblings: there were enough of them to always have somebody to play with, somebody to fight with, and somebody to defend him. As the middle of five, Casey sometimes became preoccupied with refereeing all of his siblings — not to keep the peace but to maintain an atmosphere he found 'fun.'

Niall acted as a 'house-grandpa' for Casey's entire childhood. He helped Casey's parents wrangle all five children around their busy work schedules, simultaneously playing the roles of nanny, cook, and babysitter. He enjoyed being surrounded by children again and is as much a parent to Casey as Dara and Amélie.

Dara and Amélie figured that his controlling nature was a way of dispelling pent-up energy, so they put him in gymnastics classes as a young child. Gymnastics led Casey to dancing, and to contemporary dance.

EARLY SCHOOLING
Casey attended Lake Union Preparatory, where he was at best a mediocre student who preferred hands-on assignments, and spent his book-heavy classes drawing on peers' notes and shooting spitballs at their heads. He aspired to be the top dog but only succeeded in being a second-rate bully, a cronie for the real leader of the playground. Incapable of being a cunning or vengeful bully, he was more an energetic boy with a sense of humour that bordered on too far. The children he considered his friends were more cruel than Casey, bad influences who taught him that the fastest road to fun was at the expense of others.

GOOSEBERRY: FRESHMAN YEAR.