Am I now?

[cagedchoices]

#CAGEDCHOICES. an independent, selective & private roleplay blog for CALEB NICHOLS from the HBO television series WESTWORLD, featured in seasons 3 & 4. canon and personal headcanon-based portrayal written by mel (they/them, 31yrs, timezone PST).

LOW ACTIVITY / SLOW REPLY.

INBOX: 5

THREADS: 10

MOBILE-BOUND. My laptop is dead and I currently rely on a 9th-Gen Apple iPad & a Samsung A03 to do all my roleplay from. Your patience and accommodation is much appreciated!

a loose study in - the value of FREE WILL, questioning the nature of your own REALITY, what it means to be HUMAN, remembering your TRUE SELF, DEFYING CONTROL, taking back your own NARRATIVE & fighting for something to BELIEVE IN.

CARRD. MUSIC. PINTEREST. VIDEO.

HEADCANONS. MEMES. META. (MASTERLIST) VERSES. (MASTERLIST)

(BETA TEXT EDITOR + XKIT REWRITTEN)

BLOGROLL.

@betterknight - Maximus, Fallout (TV)

@lackenthusiasm - Norman MacLean, Fallout (TV)

— mobile header/pinned post psd (c) —

[killjoysanonymous]

@cagedchoices LIKED for a ONE-LINER !

"You know destiny is just a BULLSHIT word people use to feel better about their predicaments."

[cagedchoices]

“ Well you and I have got to be either the worst…or best…people in the world to make that call. Our lot in life was decided by the highest bidder. ” Caleb retorted with a half-hearted chuckle, stiffening against the driver’s seat of the duo's newly borrowed sedan as it blazed down the 10 toward the border of Arizona. Its vast desert backdrop was so different from the almost endless sprawl of civilization. Not the usual scene of congested Los Angeles traffic, that was for sure. (Although, truth was he hadn’t experienced that quite as many times as the average driver in L.A, either, and for good reason.)

Not so long ago, he was just another one of those people, the ones who still didn’t know or the ones who didn’t want to know because ignorance was bliss. The kind to put faith in the mystique of an inevitable fate where everything happened for a reason. Carrying that notion of whatever suffering one had to face in life was only temporary and would always be worth it in the end to come out stronger than any adversary. Or that anything wrong in life was solely his own fault if the alternative didn’t catch on. “ I’m just…not really sure which one’s which. ” And it so happened that nothing, none of that, was even real.

[calebnichols]

nobody asked but yes I am still a maeleb fan in 2026

[lousolversons]

Tessa Thompson as Charlotte Hale in S04E04 of WESTWORLD

[misselesava]

westworld ⇾ 1.05

[killjoysanonymous]

@cagedchoices LIKED for a ONE-LINER !

"You know I think you would have LIKED me before all of this-"

[cagedchoices]

“ What, you mean the body mod stuff? ” Caleb winced, posing the question as innocently as could be done. It was difficult to fathom Bloody Mary as anything other than who she already was. A med school dropout turned private surgeon, a close associate of Billy—though Caleb really didn’t know what the story was there—he only knew that Billy and his guys and anyone else with enough sense were all a little bit afraid of Mary. “ I don’t know, depends on what you were like I guess. ”

He sat in the same operating room Mary’s regular clients for body modification would normally undergo their procedures in, but this was strictly an emergency surgery, of the ‘sorry-to-crash-your-Monday-night-Mary-I-didn’t-know-where-else-to-go-and-you’re-on-speed-dial’ variety. A hospital bill would’ve put him out for the next year struggling to pay it off, not to mention someone out there was going to want to ask a few too many nosy questions about how exactly he had ended up in the ER with a 9mm bullet embedded deep in his shoulder if he went in there. It was easier to get Mary’s help provided she was willing to give it.

“ What were you like before? ”

[needle-drop]

Instrumental cover by Ramin Djawadi of “Enter Sandman” by Metallica in Westworld season 4 episode 3 (2022) dir. Hanelle M. Culpepper

[nogoodnessimproveme-archive]

Reblog this is your muse has straight up actually died

Optional: they’ve returned from the dead

[parvumchao]

Having heard the shuffling of feet and the distinct ( to him and only him ) stomp of someone in need of his services, Johnny stepped from the murkiness of the alley in which he'd been loitering. The dirty white cat in his arms mewed and he stroked its back before addressing the other.

"Y'wanna buy some drugs, guy?"

( @cagedchoices liked & got this idiot I'm sorry )

[cagedchoices]

"What, are you like, a cop?" Caleb squinted, taking Johnny's approach with skepticism. "Um. I'm not looking for any trouble... Who's your friend?" He gestured toward the cat, thankful for an abrupt, not-at-all subtle change of topic.

[westworldedits]

WESTWORLD Années folles

[cagedchoices]

oh my god it's really happening

[dragon-in-a-fez]

the thing about being "good with kids" is all it takes is literally just not trying to control and mould them with every interaction. it's just being a normal person and engaging with them through normal interactions like having conversations and playing games. it's just being genuine and friendly and not perceiving them as lumps of wet clay you are there to shape. "oh you're so good with kids" thanks it's because I think they are people

[christophernolan]

Westworld | 3x07 ‘Passed Pawn’

[televisiongifs]

The only thing wrong with the seven deadly sins is that there aren’t more of them.

— Thandiwe Newton as Maeve Millay in Westworld: Season One

[shesnake]

“Oh, honestly, when somebody offered me these things, I went off on binary conceptions of the world and said that there was no way I was swallowing some symbolic reduction of my life… and the woman with the pills laughed ‘cause I was missing the point.”

The Matrix Resurrections (2021) dir. Lana Wachowski

[cagedchoices]

☆☆☆☆ put this star into the inbox of your favorite blogs - it's time to spread positivity! ☆☆☆☆

dorotheAaaa! thank you so much! 🥹

[radiaking]

        As surprising as it is that Caleb would reveal so much to him so quick, if he really thinks about it, he understands. He hadn't been so different after all, once upon a time. Centuries ago, he'd been just as forthcoming and it hadn't earned him anything but trouble. Once bitten, twice shy—and he'd been bitten a whole helluva a lot more than twice.

        Is that why you... Cooper can only imagine what questions were to follow those words and he casts a sideways glance at the other with a quite breath of laughter. This time, there's no malice in it either, just amusement.

        Then, walking along a bit further, he chews his bottom lip, deciding whether to confide more...but his name? If he was around before the war and not far from him, would he recognize the name? Would it even occur to him that he's the Cooper Howard? Is it worth the risk?

        "You can call me John." No, it's not worth it. Not yet. But he can offer something else, tit for tat as it were. "And if one of them questions was if all them stories I got is why I'm like this—" He begins, but doesn't elaborate on exactly what this he means, he means all of it, being a ghoul, his demeanor, his pessimistic outlook. "—the answer's yes. The world may've been just as shit before the war but now all that rot is out in the open for everybody to see. After a while, you start to rot to." And by that he means he started to rot. Has been rotting for a while now.

[cagedchoices]

“John,” he commits the name to the face it belongs with, offering a nod of acceptance. There’s a weird, unstable and unpredictable energy to almost everything they’ve gone over so far that most definitely does not seem right, but for lack of a better word, the one that he settles on is, “Okay.”

“I don’t really know what I was gonna say. But I just stopped to think if I were in your shoes, and some guy I’d just met decided to ask why I looked like a rotting corpse, basically…I’d feel like that guy was kind of an asshole. Right?” Under normal circumstances, he might have a point. Here, though, it didn’t seem to matter too much. John the Ghoul was amused, not annoyed, answering a question the other guy chose not to follow through with.

“Like I said, used to live in that world. And I might’ve missed the last week it was still around, but I remember the plague and the…other resource wars. and the riots, and the raids, and the rationing. Civil alert tests…all that shit.” There had been no shortage of struggle with the decaying infrastructure of Middle America where the pre-war Nichols family was concerned.

The less said about the Euro-Middle Eastern War or the European Civil War, the better. Caleb hadn’t fought in the Sino-American War, but he could picture it probably wasn’t all too different from its predecessors either. The other problems that had affected him and his family the most as average American citizens — the automaton riots, the food and power ration stipulations, and his wife’s job as a nurse at a time when a highly contagious and deadly disease that had no cure was running rampant across the nation — had generally left him about as hypervigilant, if not more so at the time, than when he was a soldier.

“Couldn’t exactly afford to ignore most of it before the bombs, either…”