#not until haley sees the light and writes at least three more Cawl books

[minweber]

Have been once again retreading what limited official Cawl content we have (cursed as I am to ever do so), and noticed how much of Cawl-like little shits Qvo iterations tend to be, once they had chance to run about for a bit.

In "To Speak as One", when Qvo-87 is having sort of a solo adventure, he appears both smartass and prone to theatrics in his scheming against the inquisitor - a downright Belisarius Cawl in miniature. Whereas Qvo-89, upon his awakening, is much more like Friedisch Adum Silip Qvo we meet in Cawl's flashbacks - a somewhat timid, pious man, a "straight man" and an exasperated witness to Cawl's antics.

This, of course, can be explained as a result of each iteration getting closer to the original, with Qvo-89 being a particularly close copy, as Cawl smugly notes. But at the same time it does not seem like that much of a radical breakthrough - Cawl navigates their initial conversation like one he already had dozens of times, suggesting that most iterations of Qvo at least start out this way.

Which, to me, suggests two, not necessarily contradictory explanations:

First one is that, not originally having the entirety of Friedisch's mind to save, Cawl had to "fill in the blanks" with something - his own ideas of what his friend was like, perhaps? And wouldn't it have been nice if poor Friedisch, ever so serious, always stressed and sweating the unimportant details, could, over time, learn to relax and enjoy himself a little?

But second is that Cawl's reconstruction of him has nothing to do with this. Friedisch Adum Silip Qvo was actually always like that. A man who acted indecisive and skittish as an unappreciated low ranking adept at the bottom of a paranoid, schism-torn priesthood in the middle of an apocalyptic civil war, suddenly finds himself as essentially immortal right-hand man to a messianic genius at the head of one of the most powerful human institutions in the galaxy. Wonder if it's going to help him shed some self-confidence issues and express himself more freely?

I guess what I am saying is that for every bit of "opposites attract" that defines Cawl and Qvo's relationship, there seems to be a non-insignificant bit of "birds of a feather" dynamic to tag along. That is to say, that they were two glorious little gremlin shits against the galaxy from the very beginning - one of them just had a little more self-preservation instinct about the whole thing.