S018 - Kumar, Meena Lalita [DECEASED]

[Deamon]

Name: Meena Lalita Kumar
Gender: Bigender (AFAB)
Age: 17
Grade: 12
School: John Endecott Memorial Academy
Hobbies and Interests: Tabletop games, video games, game design, creative writing and worldbuilding, magical girl media, horror media, music

Appearance: Meena has a small frame, standing at 5’1” and weighing 110 lbs. Her skin tone is brown with a pink undertone. Her face is rounded, with an arched nose, closely-set eyes coloured a very dark brown, a small mouth with round lips, and subtle freckles on the cheeks. She has straight black hair, which is currently waist-length, with a dyed blonde streak in it. It is usually worn loose.

Meena’s style of dress tends towards loose clothes in bright colours, most commonly red, pink, and white. She tends towards a more feminine presentation, and prefers dresses, blouses, and skirts to most other kinds of clothes. Most of Meena’s clothes are loose-fitting and light. She also has a number of accessories she mixes and matches with her outfits such as headbands, patterned clips, bracelets, and necklaces. Meena doesn’t wear makeup most of the time, but does on special occasions. When Meena wears makeup, it usually features colourful eyeshadow and lipstick.

On the day of the abduction, Meena wore warm peach-coloured sweatpants, a baggy white t-shirt, a long red winter coat with faux-fur trim, and a pair of pink boots with ribbons on them. She also wore a black headband with a white polka dot pattern, a silver necklace with a small garnet pendant, and a white neckwarmer.

Background: Meena was born on January 29th, 2004 in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to Lakshmi Chanda and Shubon Kumar. Lakshmi and Shubon met in medical school and got engaged shortly after Lakshmi completed school, but did not marry until five years after that. When they had their first child, Meena, they had been married for five years.

Meena did not spend much time in Bangladesh, as her family moved out of the country when she was three years old due to safety concerns. They moved to London, England. Meena would start primary school and learn English in London, but wouldn’t stay there for very long either - two years later, she and her parents would move again, this time to the United States, both to live closer to relatives in Massachusetts, and for economic reasons - both Lakshmi and Shubon were both medical doctors, and Shubon had been offered a position at Salem Hospital.

In elementary school, Meena was talkative and social. She was aware, from a young age, that she was notably different from most of her peers by virtue of coming from another country. Lakshmi and Shubon found it very important to assimilate into US culture and connect with their new neighbors, and in turn, Meena took pains to fit in and make friends with her peers.

One of Meena’s after-school pastimes was watching television. One of the available channels aired the Pokemon anime, which Meena enjoyed, and sometimes also aired reruns of Sailor Moon, which quickly became Meena’s favourite show. Both of these shows, and any content related to them, would be the first things Meena would search for on the internet when she gained access to it. While Meena gained an interest in the Pokemon games through the anime, she didn’t ask her parents for them due to being too afraid they would refuse, believing that video games and consoles were too expensive to ask for.

When Meena was seven years old, her parents had their second child, Arjun. At the time, Meena was excited to have a younger brother, and tried very hard to be a good caretaker for him. To some extent, Meena still considers herself responsible for Arjun, but her relationship with him is now significantly more complicated.

Meena’s consistent high grades and good performance in class lead her fourth-grade teacher to recommend that she be evaluated for giftedness and, potentially, be placed in a gifted students classroom. Meena was given the evaluation and deemed eligible, so for fifth grade, she was placed in the school’s gifted and talented education program.

Meena was in the gifted program for four years, from fifth to eighth grade. The gifted program’s student body was fairly small, so Meena’s classmates would change little from year to year, and the gifted students knew each other very well by the time they graduated. However, Meena does not have fond memories of her time there, as her peers were very competitive, and isolated themselves from non-gifted students. Looking down on non-gifted students, or gifted students who were doing poorly, was encouraged by Meena’s peers. The class’ teachers either tried - unsuccessfully - to discourage these attitudes, or subtly encouraged their competitiveness. Meena often worried about being ostracized by her peers for appearing unintelligent or not deserving of being in the gifted program.

The stress of her middle school academic environment took a toll on Meena and particularly affected her home life. This was when Meena began showing signs of depression and anxiety - she lost much of her energy and enthusiasm and experienced suicidal thoughts. She became far less talkative and social at school and at home. She almost completely stopped talking to her parents and often lost her patience with Arjun. While Meena’s parents were concerned, they thought the problem was that Meena had been affected by bad influences in the media, and their solution was to give her lectures on the importance of patience and kindness whenever she acted out. This did not improve her behaviour or her state of mind. Meena's attitude towards Arjun was coloured by jealousy during her school years, as she felt that her parents spent all their time and energy for him, and blamed that for their misunderstanding of Meena's emotional issues.

It was during middle school that Meena was allowed more time and less supervision online, initially for school work and related research. She spent a lot of her free time on the internet, as she preferred it to socializing with her classmates and to spending time with her family. Through social media, particularly Tumblr, Meena discovered anime and book discussion forums and communities. She spent a lot of time online looking for and watching older magical girl anime such as the earlier seasons of Pretty Cure, Sailor Moon, and Cardcaptor Sakura, many of which she remains fond of to the present day, and was also active on a forum for discussing the book series Warrior Cats, which she read throughout middle school. She also spent a lot of time on content related to the Pokemon games, to experience them second-hand. As well as Let's Plays, this included analytical and informative videos about the games, as well as theory videos. Many of the channels Meena watched for their Pokemon content also covered other video games, which is how Meena was introduced to a wide variety of them.

In sixth grade, one of Meena’s classmates invited her to a game of Dungeons And Dragons, which a number of her other classmates were part of. Meena found the game to be a lot of fun, particularly the role-playing and fantasy aspect. She would take a special interest in creating and running her own games. As was the norm with her hobbies at the time, Meena also sought out D&D content on the internet. Many of the sites she frequented related to D&D also had general worldbuilding tools and guides, which got Meena started on making her own settings, which would become a persistent hobby for her.

Through all these online communities, Meena would become involved in online roleplaying groups and fanfiction sites. Meena was especially drawn to roleplaying, as it was her favourite part of Dungeons And Dragons, and she appreciated the opportunity to do it in a more free-form environment, and in other established settings. She also tried her hand at writing fanfiction in middle school, both on her own and collaboratively with her school friends, mainly for Warrior Cats, but these were never published anywhere.

Though part of many online communities, Meena was often a quieter presence in them. This was in part due to being shy, but also in part due to fear of harassment and bullying she was warned about and sometimes witnessed. However, due to her fear of being ostracized or made fun of, she often accepted and parroted whatever opinions and thoughts were prevalent among the groups she was in, which resulted in Meena repeating a number of beliefs, particularly sex-negative and anti-feminist ones, that she later came to regret. At the end of eighth grade, she quietly left a majority of the roleplay and fandom communities she was once part of in middle school, wishing to distance herself from these influences for good.

Meena was enrolled in John Endecott Memorial Academy. Lakshmi and Shubon had always placed a high value on education, and felt that without the gifted program, it fell upon them to push Meena to succeed academically, preferably to the extent she did in middle school. Their methods of pushing her to succeed involved constantly reminding her on the importance of high school grades to get into university, strongly encouraging her to take AP classes, closely monitoring her marks on assignments, homework, and tests in order to make sure she was performing adequately, with reprimands if her grades were low, or if she missed assignments or homework, followed by a rigorous questioning on why such a thing was allowed to happen. All of this made Meena’s academic experience in high school a very stressful one, especially since prior to high school, Meena’s parents prided themselves on being academically lenient.

At the start of high school, Meena got into horror games through Let’s Plays. In particular, a commentary-less playthrough of Rule of Rose caught her attention due to its visuals, use of symbolism, and haunting story. While she was unable to get a copy of Rule of Rose for herself, she did seek out other niche horror titles in an attempt to find something like it, which led her to the RPG Maker horror game scene, as well as indie horror games in general, which had a profound impact on her taste in horror media. Many of these games are stories in which Meena sees her own struggles and anxieties represented, as well as treated with seriousness and gravity, which is comforting to her.

Long fond of music, Meena took the opportunity to join the school concert band at the start of ninth grade, and has been a part of it throughout high school. She had prior experience with playing music and music theory through a piano class that her parents enrolled her in during the summer after middle school, but they elected to take her out of the class when summer ended because she didn't have much apparent aptitude for it. In the school ensemble, Meena plays the flute, and she is considered good, but not far above average. She enjoys playing as part of an ensemble and prefers it to playing solo, as there is less pressure on her as an individual, but she can still feel she contributed to a good performance. Outside of the school band, Meena listens to a wide variety of music frequently, though she tends towards electronic music and current pop music.

Meena continued to read fan fiction, but now trended towards darker stories, which brought her to a section of Tumblr blogs which wrote and shared yandere horror fiction, both with established settings and characters, and with original ones. During the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdown, Meena created an alternate Tumblr account to start a yandere fiction blog of her own. She quickly found a niche as a writer whose yandere fiction was often surreal and cerebral, and was still disturbing despite having far less graphic content than others. She was invited into a Discord server for horror fiction writers through this work, which many of her current online friends are from.

Also during the lockdown, Meena began identifying as bigender. She has been openly asexual since middle school, which is common knowledge among most people that know her. In contrast, Meena has only told a select group of online and school friends about her gender identity, as she now has a different, more reserved attitude towards sharing parts of her idenity, and regrets being so open with her being asexual, especially online. She uses both she/her and he/him pronouns, and is considering transitioning someday, but has no solid plans or wishes at this time.

Over time, Meena’s interest in video games, tabletop games, and worldbuilding, as well as a desire to see innovation in those spheres, lead her to gain an interest in creating and designing her own games. She has programming experience from elective courses in high school as well as learning in her own time, and hopes to grow knowledgeable in both coding and design principles to make her own video games someday, even if they are simple. In the meantime, Meena practices what she does know about the topic by creating adventures, settings, and homebrew rules in tabletop games. Most are only shared with her inner circle, but some are shared on social media. As a result of her love of homebrewing, in the current day she gravitates towards tabletop game systems which allow a lot of modification and customizability, particularly among independent tabletop games. Meena’s homebrew content is most influenced by her love of horror fiction, and her continuing nostalgia for magical girl media.

The kind of magical girl content Meena most enjoys remained the same since middle school, which were older shows that tended to the more idealistic side, and had at least some action on a regular basis. Magical girl shows are an exception to Meena's enjoyment of dark content, and she regards most modern, darker magical girl shows as too antithetical to what she enjoys about the genre to have much interest in them. The genre is a source of comfort to her.

In school, Meena usually does very well, especially in math and English classes. Her grades are typically high, but sometimes brought down by her tendency to forget assignments until the last minute. Though she has tried typical memory aids like keeping a planner or setting reminders, these often fall through and fail to help. Still, she has managed to keep her academic performance high enough to be accepted into Boston University for statistics, which she chose because it was the program she was most confident she would do well in, also figuring that having a degree in a widely-applicable field like statistics would help in getting a job. She's not sure what field she wants to work in after university, though. Meena looks forward to university, because she plans on moving out and living on her own, as her relationship with her parents continues to be strained.

Her relationship with her parents is mainly strained due to the pressure that her parents put on her to succeed and plan ahead. Due to the focus Shubon and Lakshmi put on preparing for and building a career, far in advance of when Meena would be able to start doing so, she often feels like her parents care more about social and financial success than her well-being. Her relationship with Arjun is better than it was in middle school but still distant. Despite him becoming older, it often appears to Meena that their parents continue and will continue to coddle and support Arjun as much as when he was younger, and expect Meena to do the same. As this wasn't the case for herself growing up, this continues to make her feel envious of Arjun, but as she also wants him to thrive and be happy, she elects to avoid him rather than risk expressing that envy.

A very introverted and reserved person, Meena is usually polite but laconic when talking to others, especially those she doesn’t know very well. She has a very small group of friends, and of them, only really trusts those whom she has known for years. In online communities, she’s similarly quiet and reserved, but feels somewhat more comfortable sharing her thoughts and things she has created with others. Continuing to struggle with anxiety and depression, Meena often withdraws from others due to a combination of feeling like she can’t trust others, and believing that nobody wants her around. She does still have suicidal thoughts, but has never attempted suicide before, and generally copes by distracting herself with music or writing.

Advantages: Meena is extremely wary about other people and fairly intelligent, which may mean she can better avoid getting deceived or lured into a trap, as well avoid getting into fights.
Disadvantages: Meena is small and physically unfit, making it extremely unlikely for her to win a fight. As well, her mental health, particularly her suicidal impulses, are very likely to worsen.

Designated Number: Student No. 018

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Designated Weapon: Sawed-off Browning A-5 shotgun

Conclusion: I'm stranded on Death Row for pumpin' slugs in motherfuckers, now you know you're outdone, feel the shotgun, Kurupt inmate cell block one. - Josie Knight