Mabel Moss

[Namira]

Name: Mabel Moss
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Grade: Senior
School: John Endecott Memorial Academy
Hobbies and Interests: Painting, Tinkering, DIY, LARP, ROMhacks, Driving

Appearance: Mabel is 5’4 and weighs 140lbs, her frame solid and holding some decent muscle tone in her arms. She has dirty blonde shoulder length hair with a wavy texture that she either lets free or wears up in wildly messy buns. Mabel is white and has a significant farmer’s tan up to her shoulders and mid thighs from a lot of time spent outside. She has few freckles, and her complexion is a little rough from wind exposure. Her eyes are brown. Mabel’s face is round, emphasised by her short chin and lack of jaw or cheekbone definition. She rarely wears makeup.

Mabel has a variable fashion sense, freely and without embarrassment wearing whatever she feels like at the time, which has led to her falling foul of the school dress code on multiple occasions. She has an array of jeans, skirts, dresses, t-shirts, tanktops and blouses, often tweaked for LARPing purposes, and has been known to mix and match with little regard for whether these actually form a cohesive outfit. On the day of the abduction, Mabel was wearing a pair of steampunk-inspired goggles pushed up onto her forehead, a red beret, a white neckerchief, a short, forest green jacket over a white blouse, dark green slacks, and a pair of black work boots.

Biography: Mabel is the only child of Davis Childs and Darcy Moss, a pair of Massachusetts locals who met when Darcy fixed Davis's car. After dating for several years, they moved in together after Darcy fell pregnant. Davis has cycled through numerous jobs over the years, usually involving web development or copy-editing, and is presently working freelance. Darcy operates a small garage.

Mabel grew up in her paternal grandfather Mick's residence in Beverly, MA, a short drive from Salem. The construction, located on a large plot of land at the end of a long lane, began life as a mobile home. Over the years, various DIY extensions and expansions, along with three trailers, morphed the building into an odd place filled with nooks and crannies. Since Davis usually worked from home, Mabel spent a lot of time around him and her grandfather as a child, and would often play make believe with the two of them, although it fell to Mick, a widower, to indulge the more rambunctious and active of Mabel's games, chasing her around outside, planting the seeds of a very active imagination.

Starting up at school, Mabel quickly developed an indifferent relationship towards learning. She was not especially drawn into any of her subjects, and would mostly sit quietly, drawing and daydreaming, only responding when called on. She was more enthusiastic about playtime and making friends, but tended to find that other children weren't quite as elaborate in their ideas as her, nor had the patience for her long and winding stories about whatever world she'd come up with that day. As a result, Mabel didn't get particularly close to any of her classmates; one sticking point that she found was that she wasn't as familiar with technology as other kids her age, since her parents had not given her any electronic devices and did not expose her to the internet much.

After a particularly frustrating day where everyone continually referenced a video that Mabel had not seen, Mabel brought up the topic of mobile phones and getting online to her parents. However, Davis was deeply opposed to allowing her on the internet, going on a long diatribe about how online activity was constantly monitored by the government in order to sell secrets about browsing activities to extraterrestrials, who, in due time, would flood the markets with exotic goods specifically tailored to humans and put human-ran companies out of business. Mabel did not understand this even slightly, but the end result was the same; she wasn’t allowed on the internet. She protested that Davis was on the computer all the time, but was told that he was an adult, and knew how to keep his activity hidden. Darcy simply told Mabel that she had plenty of things to do without needing electronics. Mabel was very disappointed, and at her young age, did not recognise the strangeness of the explanation her dad had given her.

Mabel’s interests developed separately from the digital. Finding her grandfather a continued receptive audience to her playacting, she started to create a more consistent world for her play, complete with recurring characters and storylines. Mick, experienced with woodwork and metal, created props for her, such as play swords, a much-beloved hobby horse, and even a mock castle gate complete with drawbridge that spanned across a ditch on the family land. Mabel was just as fascinated with the construction as her imagination games, and started to help out, albeit under very careful supervision. Given the opportunity to decorate, Mabel also took to painting the props with broad explosions of colour, something she found she enjoyed a great deal. One of her fondest memories is spending a summer painting a shed with her grandpa and parents.

When Mabel turned eleven, her parents finally relented on electronics, and gave her an old laptop of Davis’s. Although it did not have an internet connection, her parents refitted it together, installing several art programs and games and allowing Mabel up to two hours a night on the device. The existing games were Mabel’s introduction to video games, although unbeknownst to her, none of them were legitimate versions of the respective properties. Instead, Mabel grew up playing unusual ROMhacks of the likes of Pokémon, Fire Emblem, and Final Fantasy, often modified to the extent that they barely resembled the original games. The hacks had mostly been discovered and in a couple of cases developed by Davis, though he had also introduced Darcy to the hobby. Davis mistrusted the games industry for innumerable reasons, from the mundane of disliking monetisation and microtransactions, to the more outlandish of familiarising consumers with scifi and fantasy worlds, such that when those began to cross over into the real world, the changes would sneak up on people. Nonetheless, Mabel enjoyed these games and became proficient in creating off the wall or just plain cheesy strategies to defeat them, often nudged onto the right path with some guidance from her mom.

Socially, Mabel stayed fairly isolated and didn’t fall into solid friendship groups, tending to be a peripheral figure. Her main connection was with some students that usually played computer games during the lunch period. However, she was a bit of a hanger-on to the others, and only forged one strong connection, befriending a girl by the name of Lilith Auclair. Since Lillith was unphased by Mabel’s awkwardness and attentive to her stories, and Mabel in turn happily absorbed Lillith’s opinions about games and occasional venting, the two became close.

As Mabel grew older, her dad started to more frequently and openly discuss his world views in front of her. Davis was deeply involved with a number of online communities that promoted all manner of conspiracy theories, many of them pertaining to extraterrestrial activity and parallel dimensions. Although these were not harmful to Mabel, per se - he did not espouse dosing with chemicals or dietary restrictions outside of a garden on the property, and he was against anything that targeted ethnic groups or LGBTQ+ people - she attended to and sometimes recycled things that she heard her dad say. For Mabel, there was no reason to disbelieve what her dad told her. The confused and sometimes derogatory responses from other kids didn’t dissuade Mabel, instead, she stubbornly doubled down, aggrieved that anyone wouldn’t take her dad’s word. Her grandfather did not intercede with this, as he felt it was not his place, while her mother aimed to passively steer her away from these theories by encouraging Mabel’s practically-minded hobbies and introducing her to others, teaching her a few things about vehicles and their maintenance.

Mabel reached high school age without much issue, and finally began to develop some aptitude and interest in class, although this was largely limited to art and her shop elective, happy to apply her experience from home into school and thankful that she was able to do something she didn’t find as dull as textbooks. Mabel tended to stray outside of guidance or topic with her art, but scored high marks when indulged by a more permissive teacher or nudged back on task. Mabel excelled in shop, both in carpentry and occasional mechanical contraptions, and not only sometimes stayed late under supervision to work more on projects, but also took them home to get advice from her grandpa and mother. Her other classes were middling, save social studies, where Mabel’s tangents based around her dad’s worldview frequently saw bottom marks. Although this topic was raised during parent-teacher evenings due to a concern Mabel was intentionally writing bad answers, the school found Davis very firm in his perspective that Mabel was not doing anything wrong. Since the single grade was not dragging Mabel down sufficiently to fail, the school did not address the issue further, as they were rebuffed each time.

At around this time, Mabel’s grandfather took a fall while playing games on the land, breaking his ankle. Mabel was devastated, in spite of reassurances that it was not her fault. Nonetheless, Mabel was left without an outlet for her activities, upsetting her further. However, her dad completed some research on her behalf and was able to locate a local LARPing community to suggest she participated in, as well as recommending she broach the topic to some of her friends. Unused to expressing this part of herself fully, Mabel was very nervous, but did find some kindred spirits of a similar age. The roleplay was less freeform than Mabel was used to, and she struggled with rules for a time, but as a very enthusiastic roleplayer who was always fascinated by other players’ props, she managed to make a niche for herself. Mabel has been fantasy roleplaying ever since, and was also introduced to tabletop RPGs via LARP, which she has intermittently played and ran in the meantime. Mabel generally prefers smaller groups and quirky, unique settings - she largely only plays fantasy because it is what the main LARP group runs. However, she has assembled private games with friends on the family land, and is considered to be a very competent games master, albeit one who can sometimes have wild leaps in her storylines. Much of the nucleus of Mabel’s personal group formed around the “Student Disaster Preparedness Association”, a socially limited set of students that ostensibly addressed student safety but mostly hung out playing video games or roleplaying. Mabel fell in with them almost by accident, when she happened to be overheard by Abigail Bailey while recounting a theory of SOTF being a front for the government to create experimental clones of the kidnapped students.

Mabel’s mom started to teach Mabel to drive when she was fourteen, although this was strictly limited to their own driveway and land, under supervision and at slow speeds. Still, as a result, Mabel already had experience under her belt by the time she started taking classroom learning at fifteen, and she immediately applied for a learner’s permit at sixteen, swiftly passing the test. Her mom allowed her to have a vehicle, but the condition was that Mabel had to at least diagnose any faults if she could not fix them herself, a project which took Mabel well into her sixteenth year. Mabel’s car is a 1980s chevrolet truck which she has dubbed the Mabelmobile and is scrupulously careful about driving and maintaining. Her dad gives her money for gas provided she completes chores and schoolwork, which is a very effective incentive.

Although her grandfather is no longer able to participate due to his advancing years and ankle injury, Mabel has continued to build and paint props and terrain on the family land for use in games with her friends or to bring to LARP. She has also, with encouragement from teachers, turned towards using her skills in practical purposes at home, such as helping assemble furniture, put up shelves and the like. Mabel gets extremely focussed on her projects, although others sometimes question her assurances that she never sets one idea to the side in favour of another. Mabel claims that her tinkering does not count as a project, as it is never truly finished, but her mechanical projects definitely have a very small completion rate.

Lockdown in the pandemic was challenging for Mabel. Although she had finally been allowed a bit more online freedom, she felt constrained from her favourite things to do since she couldn’t see her friends in person. She was forced to tide herself over with online chats and moving some of her tabletop gaming to websites, but consistently felt behind in terms of operating all of the different programs and browsers thanks to her slow start, as well as the wariness of many common sites that her dad had instilled into her. Mabel’s schoolwork mostly remained the same, but since her best classes were practical subjects, she was frustrated that they more frequently fell back on theory during this time. Since she was at home with her dad and he could regularly see what she was doing online, Mabel was exposed to more of his theorising. This resulted in her further internalising some of his beliefs, though to an extent her interest in those concerning extraterrestrials or parallel dimensions and time travel were more that she thought they were cool and sparked her imagination than wholeheartedly agreeing.

Now emerged from quarantine, Mabel’s schooling and social life have more or less returned to normal, though some of the limitations on interaction in LARP bother her. Her grades have actually minorly improved now that she has fewer distractions, though she is far from a star pupil. She retains her small but close friendship group, especially Lilith and Abigail, finding a good balance of give and take of one another’s eccentricities and hobbies. Mabel is uncertain of what she will do after graduating high school, as she finds the idea of going to college daunting but is unsure as to whether any of her practical skills are applicable to a career. Mabel has a good relationship with her parents and her grandfather, often painting for her grandpa and catching him up on stories from LARP since he cannot play with her any more. She will happily talk with her mom about cars and mechanical work and chats with her dad about new ROMhacks she has found, and during quarantine they were mutually interested in sports simulation game Blaseball, which Mabel introduced him to after some of her friends talked to her about it.

Advantages: Mabel has a lot of stamina and good upper body strength from all of her running around and wielding fake weapons. She is good with vehicles, machinery, and carpentry, and would have a much better chance than most to get a vehicle up and running or jury-rig or repair a useful piece of equipment.
Disadvantages: Mabel is socially inept and does not tend to be taken seriously by her peers, which will make it a challenge for her to win others over. Mabel’s insistence on ascribing bizarre motives to those in charge of SOTF will likely further alienate possible allies while detracting from Mabel’s focus on survival or escape.

[VoltTurtle]

Heya Nami! Mabel's got some things that need to be addressed before she can be approved.

To address the elephant in the room, the biggest issue with Mabel's profile is her father, and I can't see this issue being reconciled without some amount of rewriting. While conspiracy theorists in real life can often have beliefs that are incredibly out there, the beliefs that Davis has are in-line with the delusions of real-life paranoid schizophrenics in both the depth of the delusion and its scope (think of the minds behind Time Cube and TempleOS if you want to look those up). Even cases of seemingly sane people who have similarly insane beliefs (like Alex Jones) tend to quickly be revealed as con-men and deliberate hoaxers and not true believers. The way you present Davis is a seemingly normal-ish father who just goes on mad diatribes sometimes and has some quirky traits, but if Davis was a genuine true believer in this nonsense like you make him out to be, he wouldn't be normal at all, he'd be losing his mind all the time thinking that everything was a part of his nonsensical conspiracy.

With that in mind, Davis being seemingly sane but holding these beliefs anyway stretches the bounds of realism too much for my liking and creates a number of questions/problems that aren't adequately addressed in the profile itself. Reading through it, here's a short list of the kinds of questions that came to mind in light of Davis' beliefs:

• How does Davis ever manage to hold down any job, given his delusions? You do paint the picture that he doesn't remain at any job for too long (likely being fired because of his delusions), but his resulting resume would likely look like a complete mess, and I doubt anyone would want to hire him for anything even as a freelancer.
• Why is Mabel going to public school if her father's beliefs are so insanely out-there and so anti-government? Wouldn't he also believe that public school was indoctrinating children for the sake of the aliens?
• How is Davis not abusive to his wife and child? You say that his beliefs weren't harmful to Mabel, but if he's willing to completely deny his child access to technology and the internet, what's stopping him from going further? His wife and father both don't seem to believe what he believes, so why does he tolerate that by letting Darcy intervene and Mabel live with her grandfather? Is he inexplicably okay with his wife accessing the internet and using technology even though he insists only he knows how to do so safely? Why did he seem to completely change his mind about internet access because of the pandemic? Wouldn't the pandemic have been incorporated into his beliefs as part of the conspiracy (as with what happened to real life conspiracy theorists)?
• Why did Darcy marry and stick by Davis, a guy she met out of the blue that just so happened to get her pregnant, given his beliefs? She seems like she doesn't believe any of his nonsense, so wouldn't she want to remove Mabel from that kind of dangerous environment to protect her from falling in with those beliefs (or worse on Davis' end)?
• Failing that (if she truly loves the man), wouldn't she want to get Davis some kind of help, and perhaps have him brought in to a psychologist to be assessed (and likely diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia)? If that isn't feasible, why isn't she more forceful about denying Davis' beliefs to Mabel and making sure her daughter doesn't adopt the same delusions? This egregious kind of passivity with a significant other would be a red flag that Davis is abusive and she can't do anything about it.
• How did Davis' father (Mick) not intervene at any point with his own son's delusions? You say that he felt like it wasn't his place with Mabel, and while that's a bit questionable I can accept it, but with his own son? If Darcy wouldn't want to get help for him, why wouldn't his own father want to get him some kind of help?
• Why didn't Mabel's teachers intervene more than they did? If Davis was espousing his beliefs to them and backing up his daughter repeating his own conspiratorial nonsense, wouldn't the teachers have grounds to contact Child Protective Services for fear of Mabel (and Darcy) being in danger from a clearly delusional man?

With the way Mabel's life is currently laid out, her father's beliefs being what they are requires basically all of the adults in Mabel's life to not treat this as the serious matter that it is and completely brush it off, and I have trouble believing that would be the case.

So with all that in mind, I have to ask what the point of Mabel's father being as crazy as he is, well, is. If the point is to instill some measure of conspiracy theorist thought into Mabel (which I believe is the intent) then there are a few ways that could be accomplished without bringing up all of the problems I listed above that I see:

1. Mabel could simply come to these conclusions on her own, via browsing the internet and falling into some bad communities. This would obviously require the most extensive rewriting of the profile since a lot of it is based around Mabel not having internet access, but it's an option.
2. Mabel's father could be reigned in, and his beliefs made only mildly conspiratorial (so as to allow Mabel to feasibly live a relatively normal life), with Mabel simply adopting the same mindset and then taking it a step further. This would likely require less rewriting than the above option, but may require more rounds of editing.
3. Both of Mabel's parents could be conspiracy nuts instead of just her father, with neither of them going to the same extremes as her father currently. Mabel could then pick up on and combine both of their respective beliefs. This would help explain away a lot of the issues I mentioned above (with the exception of Mabel's grandfather and her teachers not stepping in), but would require a lot of rewriting on its own.
4. Another option if you just want to do the least editing possible is to simply have Davis be a genuine paranoid schizophrenic, only for Darcy to get help for him and for him to mellow out once he was finally put on anti-psychotics. If you went with that option and also wanted to keep Mabel's own conspiratorial beliefs, you could lean into something like option 1 above, but I'll leave that up to you.

With that out of the way, here are the other, more minor things I noticed:

Mabel grew up in her paternal grandfather Mick's residence in Beverly, MA, a short drive from Salem. The construction, located on a large plot of land at the end of a long lane, began life as a mobile home. Over the years, various DIY extensions and expansions, along with three trailers, morphed the building into an odd place filled with nooks and crannies.

A ramshackle construction like this definitely wouldn't be up to the Massachusetts fire code. While it's theoretically fine for the house on this land to have been constructed as a DIY project, it'd be infeasible for it to have been constructed as-is. You don't need to read the fire code to come up with something, but I'd suggest a more conventional cabin or a collection of disconnected mobile homes/trailers instead, or both.

Also, where does Mick get his income? Is he relying on retirement or some kind of pension? He's a significant force in Mabel's life and lives on his own on quite a bit of land, so that should be in there somewhere.

dresses, t-shirts, tanktops and blouses

Typo; "tank tops" is two words.

1980s chevrolet truck

Chevrolet is capitalized as a proper noun.

but consistently felt behind in

Typo; fell.

--

And that's all. It's a lot, I know. If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me a message on the boards or over Discord, and post back here when you think you've got everything handled and I'll give Mabel another look in round 2. :3

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