Connie Toda

[Namira]

Name: Connie Toda
Gender: Female
Age: 18
Grade: 12th
School: John Endecott Memorial Academy
Hobbies and Interests: Horror, True crime, cryptids and unsolved mysteries, writing and storytelling, pro wrestling

Appearance: Connie is 5’8" and weighs 162 lbs, which she mostly carries around the hips and thighs as well as a pretty solid abdomen. She is of Japanese descent, and has fairly dark tan skin. Her complexion is very good, but only due to the skincare regimens that she puts herself through daily, as she has a tendency to break out in spots otherwise. Her eyes are brown. She has a round and slightly chubby face, and a small, short nose. She wears very light or no makeup, choosing only brands she knows do not cause her skin to react, and uses simple black eyeliner. Connie is fond of dyeing her hair bright colours, usually blonde, silver, or even white, though she finds this tends to go grey quite quickly. Her hair isn’t very long, and her preference is to let it sit in fluffy spikes.

Connie dresses plainly, cycling through various stretch-fit jeans or canvas pants and t-shirts from a variety of sources, including horror references and joshi. She usually wears a jacket or hoodie over her shirt, and dislikes showing too much skin, as she feels self conscious. Her most noticeable article of clothing is a long black duster that she found in a thrift store, although she only wears it when it gets cold. On the day of the abduction, Connie was wearing a green zip hoodie, a black facemask, black jeans, white sneakers which were battered to the point of near destruction, and a Stardom t-shirt.

Biography: Connie was born in Columbia, Missouri, and is the second of four children to Kazuhira and Tamara. Kazuhira is a third generation Japanese-American, while Tamara is the daughter of a second generation Japanese-American and a parent of mixed European heritage. Connie’s older sibling is Megumi (23), and her younger siblings are Hideo (12) and Marty (9). Tamara is a surgeon, while Kazuhira works as a personal trainer.

In her early years, Connie spent a lot of time around her older sister due to the relative closeness of their ages. Megumi saw this as a responsibility, acting the protective big sister, but Connie very much did not enjoy it, feeling like she was always getting bossed around, especially when Megumi hit preteen age and started telling her what to do more frequently. Connie much preferred doing her own thing and working out puzzles and challenges for herself rather than being stuck with what Megumi wanted to do and Megumi always getting impatient and spoiling the solutions. Although as a young child Connie tended to shout at Megumi for this, their parents had zero tolerance for squabbles, and Connie found them to be unreceptive to her being upset. As a result, Connie learned to either hide what she was doing from her sister, or otherwise pretend that she was interested in something else while actually having fun with her real goal. Thankfully for Connie, Megumi eventually stopped doing this, although she did continue to pull the big sister card to try and beat Connie in arguments.

School was a reasonable experience for Connie, who neither excelled nor struggled in any of her subjects. She enjoyed literature the most, since the stories were much more interesting than anything else, but her enthusiasm didn’t translate into stronger grades thanks to a propensity to wander off topic. She found math very dull, and would exasperate her teachers by using the word problems to write extra sentences and turn them into stories. Connie would still generally get the answers right, but often ran out of time to actually finish her worksheets. For their part, her parents would gently remind her that she needed to complete the work that was assigned, and her dad made sure to mop up anything that she had actually missed. During this time, Connie’s two younger brothers came along, and although she often played with them and occasionally helped look after them, she kept a little bit of distance because she didn’t want to be overbearing like Megumi had been to her.

When Connie was ten, her mother received and accepted an offer to work for Salem Hospital in a position that had slightly more seniority and to get away from some colleagues she’d developed a poor relationship with. The move also put the family closer to Kazuhira’s parents in Boston, which was a big component of persuading him to go along with the move. For Connie’s part, she was very unhappy indeed, and as was her habit, started avoiding everyone and generally sulking about the entire situation, to the extent that she nearly failed to say goodbye to all of her friends. Her parents were too preoccupied wrangling the move, two young children, and a belligerent teenager to pay much mind to Connie, causing her to freely descend into moping.

After a couple of months in Salem, Connie was broken out of her rut when she was left with her uncle for an afternoon and met her cousin, Jubei, who was thirteen at the time. Jubei, who didn’t have many friends, was happy to have somebody new to talk to, and started to show off his various interests to Connie. Though Connie wasn’t enthused by soccer or real time strategy, what really caught her attention was Jubei bringing up clips of professional wrestling on his computer, specifically joshi wrestling from Japan. Connie was struck by the showmanship and athleticism of the women and deeply intrigued; she and Jubei spent the rest of the visit watching together. Although Connie remained quite withdrawn for another few months, having an outlet and a friend helped her to stop moping around.

One benefit to living in Salem was the town’s history. Connie didn’t properly understand the full breadth of what the witch trials were, but as soon as she heard about there being accusations of witchcraft and magic in Salem’s history, a chord was struck in Connie’s imagination. Initially just engaged with typical Halloween style scares, Connie unexpectedly bonded with her mom over horror movies and scary tales. Tamara shared with her some movie and book recommendations from her own youth, trying to steer away from anything particularly graphic, although a curious Connie did manage to stumble upon a few slasher films rather outside of her age range, such as the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street series. Connie found the gore more gross than she did scary, and enjoyed much more when films were suspenseful and foreboding than bloody. Even still, Connie swiftly fell in love with the horror genre, and she attempts to watch any new interesting horror movie that she hears about, whether through trying to sneak into a cinema, get a download, or hop onto the family netflix. She also enjoys reading horror stories, but finds that it is difficult for a book or post to capture the same depth of atmosphere as TV or film.

As she entered middle school, Connie’s grades started to pick up in average as she developed her enthusiasm in English and history but stopped fooling around as much in math, not that she liked it any more than before. Her mood also became generally better thanks to starting to develop some new friendships; Connie grew more into her own personality as a joker and a storyteller with the odd dose of deadpan edginess or comments about gore. Connie wasn’t and isn’t especially edgy in of herself, but is desensitised to a fair number of topics and just gets a kick out of being transgressive every so often. At home, Connie would happily chat about most things with both of her parents, and they took an active interest in her schoolwork, especially the positive reception she received with any of her creative writing. She cared for her brothers, but also had a tricky time connecting with them, because her interests were so different from theirs.

Connie’s appetite for horror led her easily enough online towards communities that discussed and shared true crime stories, videos and podcasts, which soon spilled over into general unsolved mysteries and the existence of cryptids. Connie finds true crime fascinating from the perspective of knowing that the majority of the events are genuinely real, if perhaps embellished, and although she does not believe in cryptids or extraterrestrials, she likes to ponder what truly could have happened in the mysteries without answers. Regardless of whether there is a supernatural origin to any of the events that have taken place, Connie feels that the truth of the types of unexplained disappearances and strange deaths she learns about must still be very interesting indeed. Connie likes to keep podcasts or videos running in the background while she is doing other things, just to have familiar noise underlying her. She is particularly fond of youtube channels like Bedtime Stories, which do not sensationalise the events and treat the subject matter sensitively, or otherwise fictional channels, which focus on being creepy without actually focusing on real events.

Connie continued to hang out with Jubei as she got older, and they both watched wrestling together, still keeping largely to joshi such as Stardom, although Connie did also grow invested in lucha libre, particularly Lucha Underground, which wove together wrestling and a narrative in a manner that really gripped her. They also watched some puroresu, but Connie tended to prefer the matches with a sense of humour or comedy gimmicks to ultra serious forty minute matches, which lost her attention span. Her favourite wrestler is Mayu Iwatani. Jubei encouraged Connie to come with him to attend a wrestling school in Boston, and although hesitant at first, Connie agreed. She has taken some youth classes in the training, and finds that she does enjoy trying to put into practice what she loves watching, though she’s not really sure how seriously she wants to take the lessons. In particular, while some similarly aged trainees are chomping at the bit to start participating in wrestling shows, Connie is nervous about the idea of wrestling, wondering if she would not be more comfortable just talking on the microphone.

The pandemic was a mixed bag for Connie. It did not inhibit her interests very much; although she could not go to training, she could still watch matches, and horror media was still being produced. Indeed, the extra time at home gave Connie the opportunity to sit around and commit more of her story ideas to paper and start trying to flesh out more longform creative work. She even tried her hand at voicing some horror stories and creepypasta style tales written by others. However, the stress of trying to learn from home, being confined with two very energetic younger brothers, a dad who couldn’t work, and a mom in the thick of the highest of risks was far too much for Connie, and after the first couple of months of lockdown, her creativity and grades dropped harshly. For a while, she was not even able to see Jubei or Megumi, let alone any of her friends, and this left her listless and withdrawn. Connie’s mom eventually contracted Covid, as did Hideo and Connie herself. Hideo’s case was fortunately mild, and Tamara’s left her in bed for several weeks, but was non life-threatening. Connie had a sustained chesty cough, and was briefly hospitalised, but allowed to leave after two nights. Nonetheless, it was a thoroughly miserable experience for her as she was required to isolate away from the family and spent over a month almost entirely restricted to her own room while sick. The lost time combined with her lack of motivation resulted in Connie’s schoolwork suffering so badly that she was in danger of failing all her classes. It was only a series of extensions, academic appeals, and intense tutoring from her father that enabled her to bounce back and scrape through for the year.

The country’s recovery from the pandemic was a source of great relief to Connie as she could finally break out of yet another rut. She feels strongly about vaccination and mask wearing, and has very little patience for opposing views, particularly as she lumps in those taking that position with other hostile political and personal beliefs. Connie has resumed hanging out with friends again, and is making the most of the opportunity to regale them with the latest and greatest scary stories; especially at night. At age 18, she has built upon her middle school tendencies of making edgy comments and refined her timing towards deadpan moments or throwing others off their stride. She sticks more towards casual references to violence, blood, and horror tropes than anything else, since she finds other areas can swiftly grow distasteful. Otherwise, she simply doesn't see much issue with chatting about fictional or at least impersonal events, even if they are shocking or disturbing; they did not affect her personally, after all, and interesting is interesting. She does not reduce this tendency with new people, and friends have been known to make guesses at how long Connie will hang out with someone new before suddenly dropping a creepy remark. On the other hand, Connie's relaxed approach towards socialising does lend itself towards befriending others with her easygoing and gregarious nature, albeit she has lost friends soon after making them on several occasions once the full force of her personality came to bear. Connie has never seen an issue with this and doesn't intend to change; she considers herself authentic and if that puts anyone off, they were never going to be friends in the long term anyway.

Connie, with help from her father, now also back in work, has managed to restore her grades to something close to where they had been before, and is glad to be back on track academically. She is close to her parents, and still watches horror movies with her mom when she gets the chance, but has fairly mundane sibling relationships. Connie’s desire not to be overbearing towards her younger brothers has led itself to a bit of a distance between them, and while she’ll chat with Megumi on family calls, Connie doesn’t go out of her way to interact with her. Connie is at a little bit of a loss about what she’d like to do after she graduates. While she has been accepted to attend college in Boston, she mostly applied through expectation from her parents, and isn’t even sure what subject she would choose to major in. She finds her creative work fun, but possibly too niche to make a career out of, and doesn’t necessarily like the idea of trying to play to an audience’s tastes rather than doing her own thing.

Advantages: Connie is friendly and personable when she wants to be, which could help keep her on the good side of other students. Although hardly experienced with real violence, Connie has enough familiarity with the macabre that, between this and her dark sense of humour, she may be able to mitigate the effects of the situation on her mental state.
Disadvantages: Connie tends to react to setbacks by sulking or withdrawing in on herself, which is not likely to produce effective results during SOTF. Some people know of her as a bit of an oddball without a great filter, or alternatively a girl who is constantly talking about creepy things, which might make others assume that she is up to no good or even cost her the trust of her friends.

[VoltTurtle]

Heya Nami! I'm the staffer that grabbed Connie. She's looking good already, with only a few minor fixes and an addition needed before she's ready to go.

Connie is 5’8’ and

Should be 5'8".

enthusiasm in english and

English should be capitalized.

Connie is friendly and personable when she wants to be, which could help keep her on the good side of other students.

Some people know of her as a bit of an oddball without a great filter, or alternatively a girl who is constantly talking about creepy things, which might make others assume that she is up to no good or even cost her the trust of her friends.

These bits don't really connect to Connie's biography. What might help here is adding an extra paragraph discussing Connie's personality/outlook and her social status at school. Up to you how to approach it though!

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Post back here when you have that done and I'll give her another look in round 2! :3

[Namira]

Amended spelling.

Added some minor details about makeup and trashed shoes in appearance.

Elaborated on her personality to make clear it's not just middle school connie who could be edgy.

[VoltTurtle]

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