G018 - Mahelona, Beryl [DECEASED]

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DECEASED

Name: Beryl Furushima Cunningham Mahelona
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Grade: 12
School: George Hunter High School
Hobbies and Interests: Spirituality, Rifling and Gun Culture, Outdoorsmanship, Basketball, Music Production and Songwriting, Animal Caretaking, Gardening and Horticulture, Science and Medicine.

Appearance: Beryl Mahelona is 6’1”, she has a classic Pacific Islander tan complexion. She has an athletic, rectangular body, and weighs 195 lb, mostly in well developed and defined lean muscles especially of her legs, back, and abs.

Beryl has a slightly angular face with a defined chin. Her facial complexion is healthy. She has slightly chubby cheeks. Her eyes are a dull grayish-green, and she has thick unkempt eyebrows. She wears oversize round-rim glasses with thin frames. She has a small button nose. She has thick light brown lips with a prominent cupid’s bow. Her hair is thick, slightly wavy, it grows down to her waist; she keeps it generally free of tangles and healthy, though it is naturally resilient to long-term styling.

Due to height constraints her wardrobe is rather small and she can often be seen repeating clothes week to week. She wears monocolor t-shirts and blouses, hoodies, and jeans and skirts, she’s also willing to mix and match with her exercise gear, for example wearing a tee and athletic shorts as her uniform to school sometimes. She’ll always be wearing some manner of necklace with a spiritual connotation such as animal bone, crystal effects, or beads. She ties a constantly changing variety of colored hairbands around her fingers, which she uses as a fun reminder system to help with her memory.

Beryl has a soft and bright, somewhat nasal voice. Her accent is neutral and does not sound local. She notably tends to take her time when pausing to breathe, so the cadence of her sentences can be slow. She is bilingual and can speak Hawaiian conversationally.

On the day of the abduction Beryl wore a black long sleeve hoodie on top of a white camisole, and a grey knee length skirt. She wore tall athletic socks and red tall-tongue sneakers with white soles. She had three green colored bands on her left ring finger, a blue band on her left index, a red band and an orange band on her right pinkie, and a blue band on her right index. She brought her glasses, wore a rose quartz necklace, and several mahogany obsidian bead bracelets draped solely on her right arm.

Biography: Beryl Mahelona was born to Kekoa Furushima Mahelona and Sofia Cunningham, December 1st, 2000, in Honolulu Hawaii. Sofia was a headstrong geologist, daughter of Isaac Cunningham, a retired researcher and team leader for Pfizer involved with the development of several of their blockbuster drugs. Kekoa had worked in the U. of Hawaii Manoa’s custodial team and they’d met while Sofia had been working with her thesis. On the week before her thesis defense Kekoa and Sofia called in Isaac from his home in Chattanooga to help take care of still weeks old Beryl while Sofia prepared. On the day of the thesis defense proper Kekoa and Sofia were rammed by a drunk driver while driving into the campus. Sofia was declared dead by arriving paramedics, Kekoa died three hours later from internal injuries, comatose with Isaac at his bedside.

Issac adopted Beryl and brought her home to Chattanooga where his wife Francisca was waiting. They took very good care of Beryl, after a period of infant fussiness and grief she settled down, she maintains no memories of her biological parents. She only knows about them through stories told to her by Isaac from a young age.

Sofia had been a reluctant mother, but with high hopes for her daughter's intelligence and independence matching her own. Kekoa had told Isaac when asking for his blessing that he believed in Sofia's vision for their child totally, but hoped Beryl would perhaps inherit some of his artistic spirit. Beryl inherited from Isaac many relics: photos, letters, Sofia’s handwritten dense and technical notes from school, Kekoa’s artistic sketches: of the couple, their future daughter, gorgeous Hawaiian landscapes, and miscellaneous vibrant abstracts. She accepts their being gone, but her desire to somehow grow a real connection with what she feels of their lingering spirits and to live up to their hopes and dreams for her is the basis of her self-developed spirituality.

Isaac was a rich man, and his love of travel and knowledge meant young Beryl had plenty to read. Beryl was a bright and happy young child. Isaac encouraged her with his plentiful knowledge and experience. He was sometimes strict with her about retaining information where she was otherwise prone to be distracted, as his vision of Beryl’s upbringing generally echoed that of Sofia’s vision of Beryl being fierce and independent. Francisca was a softer sort, and even though Isaac insisted Beryl not attend preschool she won that argument for a few years, saying Beryl would be helped by socialization.

When she was old enough Isaac and Francisca would have her help in the garden, and Beryl’s memories of the scents of flowers and the earth still compel her to feel at home working in gardens. She also has nostalgic recollection of how their adopted husky puppy, Rosalind, would destroy their hard work on the garden by ripping up flowers, to young Beryl’s delight. She developed an instinct for animal caretaking, with Isaac's help and his textbooks. Beryl loved animals for their innocence and how she could learn about them from her books: dogs, cats, squirrels, lizards, worms, anything. For both plants and animals alike Beryl sensed kindred spirits, as part of her budding spiritual instincts. For a time when she was four she would try and avoid stepping on small things, ants, worms, flowers, the like. Once, she was upset that she’d accidentally crushed a butterfly while playing with Rosalind. Francisca and Isaac both comforted her, and Isaac particularly told her that sometimes life ended and that it was natural and beautiful, and Beryl would take that lesson to heart as best as she knew how at such a young age.

When Beryl attended Kindergarten, her precocious knowledge in the sciences and her strong imagination and friendliness won her good relationships with her peers and teacher. She was especially active on the playground and loved expending her youthful energy running and jumping around with friends, and she showed a knack for coordination one might expect of a ballet dancer or gymnast. Francisca noted she was already dancing somewhat like a ballet dancer to Issac's classical CDs, and she had plans of enrolling Beryl in a dance class or gymnastics.

However, these plans did not come to be as Francisca’s health began to take a turn for the worse and she was increasingly bedridden. Isaac, believing it important to toughen up Beryl some with the sober reality of real life, made no attempt to sugar coat what was happening. Beryl was regularly at Francisca’s side, and made up a number of silly childish spells and chants that made Francisca smile. Francisca died during Beryl’s last weeks of Kindergarten.

Isaac tried to use the experience as a healthy way to teach Beryl about grief and loss. Beryl was shocked and understandably upset for some time, but her grandfather’s firm demeanor guided her through the troubled time. Anglican as a youth, Isaac brought Beryl to church for some time so she could explore religion for herself. He had no intent that she practice, as he hadn't practiced himself after his youth, but he was hopeful she'd be able to make up her own mind with careful exposure. In the end Beryl left the Church, finding the ideas fascinating but the practice boring and stifled. Beryl still developed a curiosity for spirituality, the idea of an afterlife where she could meet her lost loved ones again comforting her. Her love of nature instinctively led her to wonder if there was more lurking beneath the surface, especially as it reminded her of her father's artistic talents for capturing nature in stills. Even simply exploring her own home’s garden, playing with Rosalind, chasing butterflies, the comfort she felt was great, and she felt profound kinship. By the age of six she began to ‘speak’ with the spirits in the world around her. Isaac encouraged her patiently, touched by Beryl’s attentions to his deceased daughter in particular.

Before Beryl began first grade, Isaac made the decision to follow through with his own plans- what he firmly believed Sofia would have endorsed and done as well- of homeschooling her. Isaac's intellect and fervor made him a strong teacher in the sciences and mathematics and Beryl’s knowledge and comprehension was advanced for her age. Beryl stayed in Chattanooga until her second grade years.

They would move to Hawaii, specifically to Kailua, on the other side of a mountain tunnel from Honolulu. Isaac had been recruited by a family friend- Sofia’s old college roommate- to provide off-the books consulting for a research startup. Beryl agreed to move when asked, excited by the prospect of adventure, as long as she got to decide how they’d grow the garden in their new home and they brought Rosalind. Beryl spent that summer doing much with her novice knowledge of horticulture, to her delight. If she forgot anything, as she sometimes did, Isaac would trust her to fix her mistakes, which motivated her to be responsible. She would even get to help out at the greenhouses Isaac was setting up in the mountains as part of his job, doing some planting, potting, watering, and soil testing, which she delighted in, especially as adults praised her for her effort and intelligence. She enjoyed this summer of her life greatly.

Beryl’s third grade year, on the other hand, introduced some problems. As strangers integration was harder, especially with Isaac now busier and less capable of socializing with his adult contemporaries, indeed he was often out of the house when not teaching Beryl and thus babysitters were a constant presence. Among her peers her outgoingness was less well received, culture barriers abound, and her peers thought Beryl’s tendency to ramble about subjects they hadn’t been taught yet and ‘spirits’ was creepy and snobbish. She was rejected often and only had few friends. She was bothered, but when she told Isaac he merely assured her she could ignore negative attention. She was stubbornly determined to prove herself so she deferred to his judgement and embraced being a social pariah. More often than not she found she had no playdates and had to entertain herself, playing with Rosalind, reading and studying, and watching television, developing a lifelong nostalgia for the cartoons of her youth.

On their spare weekends, perhaps in a ploy to distract Beryl from her social difficulties, Isaac introduced Beryl to guns. The loud and violent stimulation was scary at first but she got used to it, then got curious and eventually begged her Grandpa to let her try. As early as the age of eight, nine, she was shooting, with plenty of supervision from Isaac. Being so young she was doted on by adults present, forming fond memories of an abundance of father-like figures. She and her grandpa were invited hunting at first, but she balked at the idea and Isaac respected her strong feelings on animal violence by refusing to go himself. A competitive drive to improve herself woke in her for the first time, she aimed to develop her accuracy, though she was no prodigy for her age she developed marksmanship at a decent clip.

Beryl’s academic skills advanced at a quick pace under Isaac's teaching, she remained a full quantifiable grade level ahead of her average peer by age, and then some. She enjoyed the structure of having plenty of breaks to wander off and do her own thing. This instilled in her a certain distractibility, while she is intelligent and good at research she was never used to more rigid school structure experiences due to her formative upbringing. She would meander often, from activity to activity, to keep herself alert and engaged, and she had atrocious organizational skills. From a young age she was naturally forgetful but her bad habits would worsen that tendency with time.

Isaac brought Beryl wherever he could to give her experiences, and the two were well traveled for a time. Beryl’s experiences in life naturally lent her to cultivating outdoorsmanship, and she enjoyed activities out in the wild such as navigation, bird watching, and sketching samples of flora. Sometimes she would go camping entirely alone, to immerse herself in the little trafficked regions of Hawaii’s wilderness. She considered these meditative experiences where she could discuss her life and inspirations, academic and artistic, with the spirits around her. Beryl began to develop something of a liking for adrenaline, as Isaac wasn’t the sort to go easy on Beryl, and Beryl delighted in the hands off training, finding she learned better with a little danger. One summer she learned skiing, the next winter she picked up snowboarding, and surfing the next summer. She never found expertise, but she was inspired by following in the footsteps of her phenomenally active and fit grandpa.

Beryl’s thirteenth birthday was heralded with a surprise from Isaac. He gifted her a Tikka T3 bolt-action rifle, and revealed that with his project in Hawaii wrapped up he was willing to allow Beryl complete autonomy in deciding where the next phase of their life would lead, expecting her to start taking up more and more duties as co-head of household as she matured. Armed with this power Beryl was quick to say they return to Chattanooga. On some level she deeply missed the strong connections she’d made with playdates from her old home, it had been a happier and simpler time she’d lost, and she felt a spiritual draw back in that direction. She and her grandfather returned to Chattanooga in her 8th grade year. Beryl was still homeschooled. Her grandfather was beginning to pursue a pedagogy of encouraging Beryl to have more self-direction and forge her own path, and get out of the house more.

Armed with these encouragements to freedom and with a stronger support group formed by reconnecting with some old friends, Beryl elected to expand her extracurricular engagements. Puberty didn’t affect her perception of her body much, but she did begin to enjoy physical strength matching her love of athletic endeavors, she felt a strong drive to be more competitive and performance oriented. Thus, she engaged herself in basketball, yoga, and swimming in the local center. She especially loved basketball and had a natural affinity for it between her athleticism and her height already being impressive for her age. She felt awkward around teammates, there was jealousy from them over her aptitude, and furthermore her loner streak in elementary school had left her with odd quirks and a lack of charm. Feeling the peer pressure Beryl elected to suppress things like well-meaning criticisms of teammate performances, stayed out of arguments and drama and even let others blame her for things to keep the peace. She was almost kicked off the team once when she let herself be wrongly accused of petty theft, but remained silent and didn’t defend herself. Such generally nice and agreeable behavior seemed to make her more acceptable to people and make them amiable to her quirks, and she adopted it as a public persona she quickly learned to embrace.

She also expanded her interest in Isaac's musical collection, and started listening to more music and radio in general. She listened to everything, from classical to underground European electronica to Top 40 pop, she enjoyed it all on both a practical and philosophical level, as her maturing spirituality and perception of herself broadened her perspective and opened her naturally already very accepting mind. Isaac helped her out by buying her a number of musical devices as her skills developed. She slowly built her own ‘studio’ with a keyboard, guitars, amps, and though late in developing the skills she learned relatively fast, she could play competently and sort of sight read by her high school years. Her best instruments would be the bass guitar and keyboards, and she had a knack for composing drony riffs reminiscent of grunge outfits or bands like Catherine Wheel.

She started to develop her own extensive canon, adding her own works to Isaac’s library, creatively freewheeling based on her emotional connections to the world, her desire to fit in and live up to the connections she felt to her parent’s spirits. Hypocrisy and dichotomy would never bother her much, she easily reconciled her material wants with her spiritual wants, her scientific understanding with her spiritual understanding, though an outsider would probably consider her justifications flimsy, dubious, and evasive.

Isaac surprised Beryl on her 14th birthday with the news that he’d allow her to go into a public high school if she so chose. He had been impressed with the passion Beryl had taken to all of her new hobbies in her busy year, and he decided that the schooling system, while still inadequate, would be conducive to nurturing her budding talents. She decided to enroll in George Hunter that very year.

She enjoyed the benefit of being in easy classes below her level that she didn’t need to invest much effort into, so she had plenty of free time to sink into extracurriculars. She was able to attend a science fair with Mrs. Zhang’s prompting and guidance and produced a decent statistical experiment concerning blood typing that got her to state level. She joined clubs like chess, robotics, debate, so on, though few interested her long term as she found she was more passive and less free to go wild with her ambitions in group settings. Sports interested her, she joined the Girl’s Jr. Varsity Basketball team in the winter and was a stand out small forward. Socially she maintained her learned methodology of being more meek and friendly, and always being helpful and keeping her ears open to the often unfamiliar interests of her peers- mainstream or otherwise- so as to stay inoffensive. Sometimes people sometimes took advantage of her easy-going, easily overpowered nature, or bullied her for her still readily apparent oddities. She took it in her stride.

A few games into basketball season Beryl felt faint and weak, and suddenly dozed off for a few minutes during half-time intermission but the game moved on, they won, and Beryl ignored what had happened. Two or so days later while jamming to music and playing with Rosalind in their living room Beryl collapsed, conscious but with suddenly extremely weak muscles. Isaac was at home and rushed to her side, getting her to a hospital. She had to miss a basketball game and several days of class for extensive specialized medical testing, which determined she had narcolepsy with cataplexy.

Beryl’s life significantly changed following the diagnosis. She drew unwanted attention with semi-frequent fits of cataplexy or sleep attacks. Her basketball season ground to an abrupt halt, for her safety due to the uncertain nature of her diagnosis she stayed on the bench for most of the season and Beryl had reason to believe through eavesdropping that her teammates had some resentment for her beneath their outward sympathy. She quit the team after the season ended, and despite her desires to stay active in competitive sports she could never again trust herself with such activities due to the safety risks and general embarrassment.

Beryl and Isaac were both on some level devastated even if neither was inclined to let it show. Beryl had lost some degree of the foundations of her autonomy and spirituality, now she would often need supervision from friends or family to be safe from the potential of injury due to an attack, and thus had the range of daily activities available to her more limited. Emotionally she became more withdrawn as one common thing that seemed to proceed attacks was heightened emotional states. Her natural tendency to be evasive deepened, and she protected herself with a polite smile and even more whimsical, doormat like behavior, becoming a caricature of herself in some respects. Conflict became increasingly difficult for her to stomach, as the anxiety often welled up with the uncertain lurch of an oncoming cataplexy attack, so her willingness to tolerate mental incongruities continued to grow.

Beryl replaced basketball with less anxiety-inducing and less-demanding gym time, as she was still determined to stay fit and healthy even if she no longer considered herself trustworthy on the field. Armed with more time around the house she started to write more music, adopting songwriting with a very abstract, whimsical, spiritual sort of bend. In general her artistic expression became very detailed and freewheeling. She sketched, made music, and practiced her spirituality via things like meditation, yoga, and rituals to a common creative rhythm she built for herself, a core aesthetic of escapism and childishness inspired by her still strong love and remembrance of her parents and grandmother, her love of cartoons and animals and her myriad influences due to her open-mindedness. However despite the light-heartedness of her style she is still very driven and competitive, silently comparing herself to peers and pushing herself.

She joined a band in her junior year- or rather, started one with friends and didn’t protest when it was appropriated by others, who would also become friends shortly thereafter. They play to this day, Beryl playing a role as the band’s lead guitarist and a mix engineer. The band’s more gloomy and sombre tones are askew from her own sensibilities, though she maintains her open mind and does as she is told happily, and she had begun to develop an artistic sensibility for the macabre, albeit filtered through her own cartoonish perspectives on art.

With most of her friends her open mindedness wins her points as she tends to be easily introduced to things they are into, thus absorbing pop culture. She has a whole host of things she dabbles in as a result, and her artistry and spirituality have benefited, especially as friends have introduced her to a wide variety of bands and influences ranging from the occult and the Lovecraftian to the sci-fi dystopian and noisecore. In school she flits into and out of clubs. Her open-mindedness means she casually develops many liberal and radical ideas, she quietly supports far left politics as an abstract whole and experiments with her uncertain sexuality. That said she maintains her broad spectrum of conflicting knowledge, and she doesn’t reject people on the basis of politics. Many in GHHS consider her a sweetheart and she's been fairly romantically successful.

Beryl’s interest in animals has her volunteering regularly in her free time, her most relaxed extracurricular engagement where her textbook knowledge has put her under consideration for extra training and duties. She knows many of the animals in the shelter by name and considers it a personal mission to find as many of them homes as she can, though her lack of social charm can hinder this at times. She dotes on the pets of friends, and is a go to for veterinarian advice in a pinch.

Beryl is a regular at the range in Chattanooga, with an above average accuracy for her age. She finds at this point that the noise of a gun firing- with earplugs in, of course- is even calming more than it is stressful, as she is so used to it. She remains a competent outdoorsman. One of her fondest intimate relationships was her sophomore romantic dealings with Sierra Cook, and the two were regulars in the Chattanooga wilderness. Beryl's practical talents are in the fundamentals of survival such as shelter building and identifying helpful herbs due to her horticultural experience, besides this her relationship with nature remains one of artistic and spiritual inspiration.

In her senior year she is in advanced sciences such as AP Physics and Biology and goes to the local community college to continue her math education. Her recent amusements in her wheeling into and out of clubs have been robotics club and Academic Decathlon, where she has been assisting in competitions. She has also been trying to start a yoga club, but her meandering and random schedule tendencies have made this effort so far wasted.

She has submitted a science fair every year since freshman year, and does her own field work when possible, staying outside of the house for days to collect samples from nature with supervision from Isaac or her more so-inclined friends. She is academically a well rounded student, a bright girl who consistently ranks in the top percentile of all her classes. She has improved from her junior year, where she would sometimes see grades slip to B's due to regularly letting homework projects slip from mind. She developed of one of her more unusual fashion statements: her hairband based memory system, where colors tied to specific locations on her fingers help jog her memories in a fun and thus more easily memorable way than more mundane things like schedules.

Beryl is friendly, known for being easy and hard to talk to at once for her love of meandering and obtuse conversation. Her friends know her to be very helpful in the most experimental of ways, but they also know she can sometimes be unreliable, forgetting key points, sometimes becoming difficult to locate when her flights of whimsy change her schedules dramatically. She wears her quirks openly on her sleeve, preferring not to deal with the stress of trying to repress her own jovial nature, and taking negative attention as it comes with an open mind.

This outward nonchalance has however, become somewhat deceptive as time has deepened the general malaise she feels with how her narcolepsy fundamentally altered her life and future dreams. She's in a way become the caricature of herself she feels she is: unapologetic and unreliable and not forthcoming with information that she feels could cause others to think less of her, even if she is lying to herself and others. To protect herself she's secretive with many things to where she sometimes is unaware of her own reasoning for taking certain action, which is exacerbated by the un-organized nature of her mental process. She herself fails to realize it due to the dulling of her own emotional awareness. This growing mental disconnect has subtly and nefariously poisoned some of her recent relationships, leading her to go behind the backs of friends and lovers due to an unwillingness to be honest. For example, she has spent most of her senior year tied up in a polyamorous relationship experiment with two other boys with her flighty tendencies making her something of a third-wheel within her own relationship that she started and causing her to allow petty drama to fragment them while she has quietly moved on without alerting anyone involved.

Her narcolepsy has stabilized, she has almost daily attacks of some nature but has grown used to it, and a lack of escalation of the symptoms means she has no interest in taking medicines, though she has pursued alternative cures unsuccessfully. She was accepted with generous merit scholarships to the honors college program of the University of Arizona. However she’s not set in her goals despite this and has even considered dropping her enrollment on a whim.

Advantages: Beryl is well trained in the usage of rifles and can use these types of guns with reliable form and aim, even if otherwise armed she has general knowledge of gun safety and usage and will generally be prepared to use all sorts of guns with competence and due caution. She is also trained in wilderness survival oriented outdoorsman techniques and thus may be able to survive off the land to a degree her peers cannot match. She is physically fit and trained and may be able to use her athleticism to her advantage.
Disadvantages: Beryl struggles with social passiveness, emotional repression, and general difficulty translating her thoughts that may prove deleterious to her psyche and cause her to take actions not conducive to survival, especially in potential group settings. The severity of her narcolepsy and cataplexy creates potentially dangerous and acute risks for her on island, and makes her emotional states a potential liability. Beryl has a natural bad habit in her lack of discipline and she can easily lose track of details and change plans almost arbitrarily, a trait that can worsen survival prospects.

Designated Number: Female Student No. 018

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Designated Weapon: Chainsaw

Conclusion: She has a decent array of advantages and a weapon draw with incredible potential for carnage, but... nope, I just don't see it. Maybe with a gun in her hands, G018 would be a force to be reckoned with, but I can't envision her getting up close and personal the way her draw demands. What a waste. - Christina Stockton

DECEASED