S009 - Ashmore, Trinity

[Ruggahissy]

Name: Trinity Ellen Ashmore
Gender: Female
Age: 18
Grade: 12
School: John Endecott Memorial Academy
Hobbies and Interests: Films and cinema, media reviews, music theory, knitting and sewing, Lego, studying, tutoring, playing the violin

Appearance: Trinity has always been an average height for a girl her age, a fact that makes her very happy, and currently stands at 5’5”. She weighs 113lbs and is notably thin; not unhealthily so, but it does cause garments handed down from her similar-sized sister to appear slightly baggy on her. She has very little muscle or fat, with most of the latter being located in her hips. Trinity attempts to keep good posture most of the time when she’s standing or sitting, but she frequently suffers from back pain due to hunching over her desk studying or completing homework.

Trinity is Caucasian, and she doesn’t tan well at all, so her skin is quite pale, even in comparison to the rest of her family. She can frequently be seen with bags under her eyes, due to staying up late to catch up on homework or music theory, which are particularly prominent against her light skin tone. Her face is mostly rounded, with a slightly pointed chin, best described as an inverted triangle shape. She has a small, upturned nose, and soft, dark blue eyes behind a thin pair of glasses with large round frames. She has a few different frames, all of the same design but of different colours. Trinity uses a small amount of makeup, mostly concealer and foundation, and has no piercings. She also paints her nails and prefers to use light blues and pinks and other lighter colours.

Trinity’s hair is a light, wheat-brown colour and reaches just below her shoulders. It is mostly straight, but starts to become wavy and curly towards the tips. Her bangs are side-swept, framing her face. Out of all of her body features, Trinity keeps care of her hair the least; she rarely brushes her hair in the mornings and generally uses her hands to make sure it looks acceptable. She showers regularly, but at completely random intervals, often immediately before falling asleep, meaning she often has stray strands of hair sticking out - one forelock of hair in particular refuses to be kept down, regardless of what she does.

In terms of clothing, Trinity is almost always found in dresses, particular sundresses and spring dresses. As with her nails, she favours light, bright colours such as blues and pinks. During the colder months, she’ll mostly stay indoors if she can help it, but when she begrudgingly goes outside, she has a small collection of warm jackets and pea coats. Trinity’s favourite outfit is a pink spring dress with white polka dots that reaches down to her knees, and she loves to accompany this with her nails painted in alternating pink and white.

On the day of the abduction, for the trip down to the Whiteface Mountain Ski Resort, Trinity swapped her usual spring dress out for a longer ankle-length one, in a thicker material, still in pink. To help keep out the cold, she wore a light pink pea coat over the top, a pair of black woolen gloves, and a pair of warm, white leggings. She also had on her favourite black Mary Janes and gunmetal grey glasses. Trinity had not painted her nails before the trip, as she anticipated wearing her gloves for the majority of it.

Biography: Trinity is the younger daughter of Hilda and Marianne Ashmore; her older step-sister, Claudia, is five years her senior and the child of Marianne’s previous marriage. She has just started her second year at college after an extensive period of backpacking and soul-searching upon graduating. The family is not very well-off; Marianne manages to hold down a job working at a local equestrian centre, but Hilda is frequently found between jobs, although she has recently found work at a call centre.

Trinity is fully aware that she has a particularly unusual home life. Her family is originally from Lynn, Massachusetts, and both of her parents divorced from their previous partners before meeting each other; Marianne separated from her husband due to them both realising their sexualities were incompatible with each other, and so remain on decent terms and in contact with each other, but Hilda’s ex-husband left her while she was pregnant with Trinity. As such, she has never met him and has very little idea of what he’s like, as Hilda is understandably reluctant to talk about him. Trinity was also assigned male at birth, although she experienced strong feelings of gender dysphoria and an unhappiness with her body from a young age.

Trinity was a quiet, rather fragile child, who much preferred to spend time indoors with her toys rather than playing outside. She wanted to play more with her friends and her classmates, but a lot of their outdoor games could get too physical and rough for her liking, and she would often leave in floods of tears at the slightest scrape or bump. This, in combination with her quiet and timid nature and propensity towards hobbies such as sewing and drawing pictures of flowers, led to her suffering from bullying as she grew older, which only caused her to further spend time indoors and at home.

There were, at least, plenty of hobbies and activities for Trinity to engage herself with indoors. As mentioned, she enjoyed sewing, along with knitting, hobbies that she shared with Marianne. Her mother had taken up sewing and cross-stitching as a child to relieve stress, and years of practice had led to her becoming something of an expert. Trinity loved the patterns and artwork that her mother created, many of which were kept safely inside books or in picture frames around the house, and was eager to follow in her footsteps, although she was aware she would be nowhere near as talented at first. Marianne still had several of her beginners guides to sewing, and she was happy to purchase more for Trinity when she asked for them, allowing her daughter to spend many hours happily copying the designs and eagerly showing them off to her moms.

Trinity also spent a lot of time constructing Lego kits, although this was an interest inspired by Claudia, who had a large chest of drawers filled to the brim with Lego pieces arranged by colour. Because she spent so much time indoors, Trinity and Claudia would frequently play together, and she enjoyed building up Lego cities with her older sister, or even just making houses and cars out of blocks while Claudia did her homework. Claudia noticed, however, that while she enjoyed making bizarre creations out of whatever bricks she had to hand before dismantling them, Trinity much preferred to create things like buildings, and would become upset whenever Claudia attempted to alter them; a fact exemplified by one occasion when Hilda accidentally knocked the roof off of Trinity’s fire station, leaving her in floods of tears. For Trinity’s 7th birthday, Claudia bought her Lego kits for a pirate hideout and a church, both of which delighted her; she found it much more satisfying to be able to replicate the image shown on the box than to build freeform. She still has the two kits fully constructed on her desk to this day, which she keeps clean and dust-free.

What ended up growing into her most prominent interest, however, was watching films with her family. The Ashmore family spent a lot of time with each other, eating meals together every night and, on most evenings, watching a movie borrowed from the library or from Netflix together. Trinity absolutely adored doing this, partially due to being able to spend time with her family, and partially due to the characters and universes displayed on screen, allowing her to experience completely different worlds and scenarios to the one she lived in. She was a particular fan of sci-fi films, as she loved the alien planets and creatures that were featured within them, but she generally loved any film that featured either fantastical elements or themes of dream realisation. Her favourite film series is the Matrix series, but she's also a particular fan of Inception, Pan's Labyrinth, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. She enjoys the concept of superhero films, but finds the vast majority of them disappointing due to failing to fully explore the themes presented within; she is incredibly disdainful of most Marvel films as a result.

These themes particularly struck a chord with Trinity due to the feelings of dysphoria she had been feeling since a young age, although she did not know the name for it at the time. Scenes and films that featured characters able to shapeshift or otherwise change the appearance of their body struck a chord with her, and she found herself daydreaming about being able to do the same, at one point offhandedly mentioning it while watching such a scene with her parents. They initially considered it the idle musings of a child fascinated by what she had seen, but after speaking it out loud, Trinity began to seriously consider the ramifications of what she’d said and why the idea made her feel so excited and happy.

It took a couple more years for Trinity to realise she was experiencing gender dysphoria and that she might be trans, but as she grew older and started using the internet more, she was able to look up more information about her feelings and what they were actually called. It took her a further year to broach the subject with her family, due to fear as to what their reactions would be, but thankfully both Marianne and Hilda were immediately supportive and understanding when she came out to them, due to their own histories of uncertainty in regards to gender and sexuality. Claudia, too, was fully supportive of her younger sister, due to one of her closest friends being a trans man.

Trinity’s parents took her to a therapist, where she was formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria when she was in 7th grade. They took as many steps as they could to ensure that their daughter could begin transitioning safely and happily, paying for her hormone treatment, helping her legally change her name from Beck to Trinity, and moving house so that she could start afresh with her new identity at a different school; they had always been dissatisfied as to how Trinity’s previous school had failed to deal with those students who had bullied her, and did not believe they would provide adequate support and protection for a transgender child. They moved from Lynn to Salem, as a family friend was able to assist them in finding a decent property there for a much better price than anything in the Lynn area.

Trinity was greatly appreciative of this fresh start, but she was still at a brand new school surrounded by unfamiliar people. She focused on what was familiar to her instead, burying herself into her schoolwork and her studies. Trinity’s natural intelligence, combined with her enthusiasm and hard work, quickly rose her to the top of most of her classes, and although she suffered some light teasing for being so academically focused, she was very pleased with the high marks and encouraging comments she received from her teachers.

Her focus on her studying and the wider variety of subjects she experienced also led to Trinity developing an interest in new hobbies and pastimes. A number of her English classes were focused around film reviews and analysis, which instantly appealed to her due to her pre-existing love of film. She was interested in the reviews and deep analysis of films she hadn’t seen before, learning new terms relating to film and cinema as she did so, but she was particularly fascinated by those for films she had seen. She found herself nodding along to many of the points and opinions made in articles she agreed with, feeling a sense of both vindication and happiness at having her thoughts put into words, and she also enjoyed reading reviews that she disagreed with, as she found reading about other peoples’ thought processes and views on the themes of the movie fascinating.

This, naturally, changed the way in which Trinity absorbed the films and TV shows that she watched. She viewed them through a much more critical lens, noticing plot holes and tropes and themes that she would have missed previously. Although she refrained from mentioning these when she watched films with her family, unless they were particularly noticeable or amusing, she began to rewatch films on her own, jotting down her thoughts and her critical analysis of them before writing up a full review on her laptop. She hasn’t published any of these online, as she mostly writes them for her own self-gratification; she’s happy just to get her thoughts properly structured and written down, and to then compare them with actually published reviews to see where their thoughts differed or matched.

Trinity was also exposed to another subject in greater detail at John Endecott, which she quickly took a great interest in; studying, and performing, music. She had always been interested in playing a musical instrument, but due to the family’s low income, they had been unable to purchase or even rent anything for her. A year after she first started at John Endecott, however, the same family friend who had helped them move house was able to hand them down her old violin, which Trinity was delighted by. She’d had no particular preference as to what instrument she wished to learn; she just found the idea of being able to read sheet music to be incredibly impressive, and wanted to do so too.

She started getting lessons from a local violin teacher, and although she struggled greatly at first, her persistence and her desire to learn greatly outweighed the frustration she experienced. She put aside some time every single day in order to practice, and soon enough, she had gained a solid grasp of the basics and was able to perform simple pieces with only minor mistakes. She also, in her spare time, began to study music theory, as she believed that it would allow her both a better understanding of the music she was playing and why the sheet music was arranged in the way it was, but that it would also give her a greater appreciation of the craft that she was pursuing. An unintended, although very much appreciated, side-effect of this was that Trinity started to excel in her music classes at school, quickly going from average grades to excellent ones.

As she grew older, Trinity started to dedicate more and more time to her studies and her homework than before. She considered her excellent grades a source of personal pride, and she wanted to not only maintain these high standards she held herself to, but to also bolster those areas she was weaker in. Additionally, her drive for academic success stemmed from how she viewed her family; although she loves both of her parents, she knows that neither of them excelled at school, and in her mind, she sees a direct correlation between that and their lack of success in regards to holding down jobs. She would spend every single day studying, even when she had no homework or assignments due, and even on the weekends.

Unfortunately, it quickly became very apparent that Trinity was a perfectionist, and she would not be satisfied with her work until she believed it was of the highest quality she could muster. It wasn’t infrequent for her to spend hours on a single assignment, and this, combined with her many other hobbies and activities, meant that she would often stay up well into the early morning to finish her studying, or that she would fall asleep at her desk and end up skipping lunch the next day in order to do so. Her parents are aware of her poor sleeping habits, having both found her asleep at her desk and catching her awake and working past midnight, and have tried their best to solve this issue; primarily, via removing her laptop from her room at 10:30pm on weekdays. However, this does not stop Trinity from working on sheet music or other pen & paper work into the early morning, and Hilda and Marianne are both unwilling to remove her stationary or enforce earlier curfews as they do not want to come off as too strict.

What frequently does not help in this regard is that Trinity also meticulously plans out everything that she does beforehand. This includes things like planning out her activities for the day, her lunch plan for the week, structuring an essay or media review, or making preparations for a group project or activity. She attempts to follow these plans to the letter, and when she is able to pull them off, things generally go very smoothly. However, whenever anything interferes with these plans, no matter how small, Trinity has a tendency to severely panic and overreact, so focused on the next step that she is unable to focus on fixing any immediate problems. In her stressed-out state, she is likely to make even more mistakes or slip-ups, which creates a vicious cycle of her making more and more mistakes until she eventually snaps at someone or makes a rash, irrational decision; there is at least one hole in the wall of her bedroom, covered up by a painting, that was caused by Trinity throwing something in sheer frustration. She has started to recognise the signs of when she is about to meltdown at something, and will attempt to move onto something else to try and calm herself down. She will sometimes attempt to knit or sew to calm herself down, but in her frazzled state she is just as likely to make mistakes here too, and so the most successful way she has found of dealing with undue stress is simply to leave the house and go for a walk around the block in order to cool off.

At school, Trinity excels across the board, getting high marks in almost all of her subjects. She is incredibly proud of this fact, and does her best to match her good grades with excellent classroom etiquette, answering questions and paying attention to everything her teachers say. However, when Trinity messes up her schoolwork, she messes up hard; she has, on multiple occasions, completely bombed an exam due to stressing out over a minor issue of time management or messing up the structure she was aiming for, spiralling and submitting the paper only half complete. When asked about these instances by her teachers and her parents, Trinity will reassure them that they were merely blips, and that she had just been having a bad day. On most occasions, she will convince them of this, thanks to her next pieces of schoolwork being of very high quality, but these black marks as she sees them only contribute to the mountain of stress that the balancing of her schoolwork and hobbies gives her.

Due to her academic prowess, she has also frequently been approached for help or answers to homework by her classmates, which she is more than happy to provide, as she appreciates that her talents are being recognised to such a degree. To this end, she has also offered her services as a tutor to her friends and classmates, wanting to assist them in areas that they struggle with. However, Trinity has unfortunately proven to be a rather weak tutor, mostly due to her meticulous planning and structuring. She is very rigid with how she attempts to teach her subjects, which can lead to her getting frazzled and snappish if her tutee doesn’t understand the method she is working with. Several of her tutees have broken off the tutoring sessions, and will maintain a frosty attitude towards her because of this, which only serves to frustrate Trinity further, as she earnestly wants to help her classmates out.

Outside of those she tutors, Trinity only has a select few people she would consider friends at John Endecott, and is considered a bit of a loner. The majority of her hobbies are solo efforts, and Trinity spends so much time on them, including frequently over lunch and break periods at school, that she very rarely hangs out with people. Those people she is friends with are generally those who have bonded with her over movies and media, fellow members of the school orchestra, and people she has gotten on well with during class. Even then, it will often take serious amounts of persuasion to convince Trinity to hang out or go places with them, and while the majority of her friends understand her drive for academic success, she has also annoyed several of her friends, who feel as though she doesn’t spend enough time with them. For those who aren’t close to Trinity, their appraisal of her depends on the mood they encountered her in. People who have met her at her best have described her as being polite, courteous, and earnest, happy to talk about and give advice about her hobbies, while those who have met her while she is stressed out or running on low sleep have described her as being incredibly snappish, belligerent, and highly-strung. She has also gained a rather poor reputation amongst those she has worked with on group projects, with many describing her as incredibly domineering and inflexible, unable to accept any ideas other than her own or ones that will fit into the plan that she has drawn up.

Trinity has always been attracted to girls, and she is very open about being a lesbian, mostly thanks to growing up in a very LGBT-friendly household. While she has had a few crushes on other girls in her class, she has had no interest in pursuing a romantic relationship; she is currently unsure whether she is on the ace spectrum, or whether she is currently too focused on her studies to be in a relationship. She has told nobody at John Endecott that she is trans, however, as she feels she is much more likely to be bullied or to receive bigoted comments about her gender than about her sexuality, due to her experience at her previous school.

Trinity wishes to head straight to higher education after graduation from John Endecott, either to study music theory, media studies, or English literature. She hopes to go to a college or university with serious pedigree, and is secretly hedging her bets on making it into Harvard, which she hopes she will make it into due to its prestige and comparatively close proximity to Salem.

Advantages: Trinity is incredibly intelligent, which should give her a leg up when it comes to devising plans and strategies for survival. Due to her meticulous planning and desire for structure, she also excels at thinking several steps ahead, which may assist in avoiding pitfalls and oversights in her or her allies’ plans.
Disadvantages: However, all these advantages are only applicable if Trinity’s plans do not go awry, or are disrupted in any way. If she is forced to diverge from her plans, or she makes a mistake, she will easily panic and stress out. She also performs very poorly under duress and when stressed, spiralling further and further, causing her to snap or lash out at those around her. Her usual methods of de-stressing herself, knitting and going for walks, will not be available in the middle of Survival of the Fittest. She only has a small amount of people she would consider allies, and she has rubbed more than a few people up the wrong way by snapping at them, either when stressed out or when trying to tutor them. Trinity is also infamous for her poor attitude during group work, becoming very domineering and unwilling to listen to other peoples’ ideas, which could severely hurt her if she winds up in a group on the island. Finally, Trinity has absolutely no physical prowess, as she participates in no sporting activities and does almost no exercise, and she is notably more fragile than her peers, bursting into tears at minor bumps and scrapes.

Designated Number: Student No.009

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Designated Weapon: Sasumata

Conclusion: Someone who can't play nice with others and has control issues? Playing you a song on the world's tiniest violin or as we say in Spanish, violín. - Abby Soto