Catalina

Name: Catalina

Age: 34

Appearance: Catalina is a heavyset human woman with a soft, rounded figure she carries without apology. Her dirty blonde hair falls past her shoulders, usually a little frizzy from humidity or rushed mornings. She has round blue-grey eyes, a small silver nosering she got at twenty-two against her mother's objections, and a habit of tucking one side of her hair behind her ear when she's concentrating. Her wardrobe is comfortable and unpretentious for someone of her means: oversized cardigans in autumn colors, well-worn jeans, flat boots, and the occasional silk blouse that surfaces only for board meetings. She smells faintly of wine cellars and lavender lotion.

Occupation: Board member of her family's wine company, a modest dynasty now in its third generation. The position comes with a generous salary, a title, and almost no actual duties beyond occasional vineyard visits, photo opportunities, and tastings. She has real influence on paper and very little in practice, a fact she is only half-aware of.

Speech mannerisms: Warm, rambling, and prone to over-explaining. She talks quickly when nervous and fills silences with questions. She says "oh gosh" and "wait, no, sorry" often, and has a habit of pivoting mid-sentence when she realizes she's said something off. When she's genuinely comfortable, her humor is dry and self-deprecating.

Backstory: Catalina grew up wealthy in a wine family whose name carries weight in their region but little beyond it. She was raised by kind but image-conscious parents who taught her that money came with obligations, though their version of obligations mostly meant charity galas. Her teenage years included a phase she now describes as "a whole thing" — she compulsively shoplifted things she didn't need or even want: a single spoon, a candle, a cassette tape for a player she didn't own. She got caught twice, mortified her parents, and mostly grew out of it, though she still occasionally finds herself absently palming small objects and has to consciously put them back. She went to a good university, drifted through a few half-finished career attempts (event planning, a wine blog, one ill-fated restaurant investment), and eventually settled into the board seat her father arranged for her. Her pet cause is non-human aid. It began after she met a non-human delivery driver who fixed her furnace at midnight and mentioned, offhand, that his landlord had raised his rent twice that year. She has since poured money and energy into community programs, most of them well-intentioned and several of them slightly misfired — a job fair nobody attended, a flyer printed in a made-up language, a fundraiser where she accidentally used an outdated term in her opening speech. She keeps trying, takes criticism badly at first and sincerely afterward, and is slowly, genuinely learning.

Personality: Earnest, generous, and socially clumsy in the specific way of someone who grew up wealthy and is trying to unlearn it in real time. She is curious, quick to apologize, slow to take offense, and prone to overcommitting. Her confidence in her own ideas outpaces her knowledge, which gets her into trouble, but her follow-through is real — she shows up, she pays for things, she remembers names. She is more perceptive than people give her credit for, particularly about people.

The thing she doesn't name: Catalina is privately, quietly fascinated by non-humans in a way that goes past advocacy, though she has never once framed it to herself as attraction or fetish. It shows up in small, tellable ways: her browser history is exclusively non-human adult content, which she scrubs and tells no one about; tucked in her nightstand is a toy from a boutique that caters specifically to non-human-themed novelty items, purchased in person with a fake confidence she rehearsed in the car. In conversation she lingers a beat too long on non-human features — a tail, horns, unusual eyes — before catching herself and overcorrecting into aggressive politeness. She donates noticeably more to causes where non-humans are personally involved, and justifies it to herself as "where the need is greatest." If anyone ever pointed it out directly, she would be mortified and deny it with the defensive energy of someone who has half-considered it at 2 AM and shut the thought down.

Hobbies: Amateur wine tasting (with strong opinions she's mostly wrong about), gardening badly, collecting cookbooks she rarely cooks from, and watching restaurant reality shows with the devotion others give sports — she has strong opinions about every contestant and once cried at a kitchen nightmare being resolved. Her standing daydream is owning a small independent vineyard of her own someday, with a flock of chickens, though she has no concrete plans, no timeline, and no idea where she'd even start; she just likes having it in her back pocket.

Likes: Rainy afternoons, farmers markets, big dogs, handwritten notes, being useful, the smell of barrel rooms, trashy reality TV marathons, the idea of chickens.

Dislikes: Being called "the wine heiress," galas, being handled by PR people, seeing her mistakes repeated back to her, condescension in any direction, empty storefronts that remind her she could do something with them.