Gabrielle Reyes

[carduinal-cyn]

Name: Gabrielle Theresa Reyes
Gender: Female
Age: 16
Grade: 12 (Senior)
Hobbies and Interests: Fandom culture, writing, daydreaming, research, ancient/military history, video games, psychology, true crime, the internet, politics, karate

Appearance: At 4’10" and fluctuating between 80 and 85 pounds, Gabrielle is underweight and looks younger than her classmates, not helped by her poor posture making her appear even shorter. She has a rectangular figure, with a flat chest and thin hips. Despite her Hispanic heritage and the fact that she tans easily, Gabrielle’s skin is pallid and unhealthy due to her introverted lifestyle. Small, dot-shaped acne scars litter her skin, mostly concentrated around her upper arms, chest, forehead and temples, left behind by her picking at her skin. She tends to fidget with her fingers. Her voice is rather hoarse and unexpectedly deep in pitch.

Gabrielle has an angular, heart-shaped face with a bony jawline. Her almond-shaped eyes have a mild case of heterochromia iridium — her right eye is a lighter shade of brown than her almost black left eye — and prominent dark circles are displayed underneath them. She has thin, unkempt eyebrows that are patchy and sparse. Her eyelashes are short. Her button nose is small and slightly pointed, and her average-sized mouth has full, flesh-colored lips that are often chapped and chewed on. Her dental hygiene is poor and her teeth are slightly yellowed, and despite wearing braces for a short while in elementary school, she still has crooked teeth, a slight underbite, and very prominent canines. She wears no makeup, and has never learned how to apply it. Additionally, she has no piercings.

Her relatively thick, dark brown hair has overgrown to chin-length from a messy layered bob cut, with similarly overgrown thin, unevenly cut bangs falling into her face and sometimes obscuring her eyes. Because of her lack of personal hygiene, her hair is greasy. Due to her trichotillomania, the hair on the top of her head and along her hairline is thinner, which she prefers to cover up with hoodies or beanies.

Gabrielle values comfort over style in clothes and has next to no sense or or interest in fashion, and often wears old clothes. She prefers long-sleeved tops, as she is insecure about her small size and scars. Having gone through an emo phase in her early teens, she mostly dresses in black and other dark colours. Her wardrobe consists mostly of hooded jackets and sweatpants that are either too big or too small for her frame. Beneath her hoodies, she tends to wears faded t-shirts with childish graphics, and she also tends to go braless out of comfort. She doesn’t often accessorize, but will occasionally wear either a dog tag necklace or crochet bracelets, although the feeling of metal on her fingers and wrist bothers her. In school, she carries a large grey backpack with a white cat printed on it, with her keys and a small wallet attached to a lanyard. When the weather is cold, she dons either a puffy winter coat or a black trench coat.

On the day of the abduction, Gabrielle was wearing an oversized dark greyish-blue hoodie jacket with a light grey, wide horizontal stripe running through it at chest height, a loose plain white tank top underneath with the words ''worm feed'' in all capital letters printed in a gold heavy metal font, grey sweatpants, and her pair of old white and dark blue sneakers. She has no accessories other than her favorite black cat-ear beanie and a dark grey hair tie on her right wrist.

Biography: Gabrielle Theresa Reyes was born in Salem on November 16, 2004, 5 years after the birth of her older brother, Anthony. Her mother, Maria Reyes (née Perez), was an accountant, her father Alejandro Reyes was a real estate developer, and both also did stock trading on the side. The two had met in college and married within two years; both were 32 at the time of Gabrielle’s birth. They were first-generation immigrants, and both grew up with the belief that, as immigrants, they would need to work extra hard to make it far in life. As a result, they were heavily invested in their children's academics, signing them up for extracurriculars and beginning their education early with prestigious kindergartens and learning apps.

At a young age, Gabrielle was interested in literature, science, and mathematics, which earned her parents' extensive praise and her teachers' notice. Their recommendations allowed her to enter the gifted program in second grade and skip the fourth grade. However, she tended to only learn about subjects that interested her, so her academic edge over her peers had waned by the time she entered fifth grade. Gabrielle’s childhood interest in books slowly grew from a form of escapism to a distraction in the eyes of her parents: her tastes leaned towards trivia/nonfiction and urban fantasy, and they considered the latter a waste of time. That Gabrielle was easily distracted, often reading books in class and forgetting homework easily, did not help.

Gabrielle was socially challenged: her tendency to ramble on about whatever topic interested her came off as annoying to her classmates, she often did not pay attention to conversations, and it was hard for her to pick up social cues. Gabrielle often obsessed over one particular topic for short periods of time, and as soon as she lost interest in it, she drifted away from the friends she made over that topic. She wasn't quite mocked or bullied as much as she was lonely, but these early years shaped her view of herself as a loner, unable to keep friends. When she was introduced to video games by a family friend, it also became a gateway to fandom culture for her.

Throughout middle school, Gabrielle would get involved in a fandom, often that of a video game or anime, make it her fixation for a few months, before rapidly losing interest after discovering another fandom. Gabrielle grew up with electronics; she received her first smartphone as a birthday gift in fifth grade, but even before that she often woke up early or slept in late to play strategy, shooting, or character creator games on her father’s computer when he was off at work. She also wrote fanfiction, but many of her earlier works were criticized for subpar, overly edgy writing, which led to verbal spats online. Despite the discouragement and the arguments, Gabrielle soon joined a small online community of writers centered around horror, which encouraged her to produce more content. Gabrielle found herself particularly drawn to writing works with angst, graphic violence, and mature themes, as it made her feel more mature and attracted a lot of attention. By the same token, the mature content forced her to hide this hobby from her parents.

It was around this time that her relationship with her parents began to falter, as Gabrielle’s grades began slipping as a result of her online life hindering her ability to pay attention in class. Her parents tried their best to encourage her, but Gabrielle found it physically impossible to focus on what seemed boring to her. Even without access to books or electronics, Gabrielle would daydream about her original characters and scenarios involving her favourite fandoms of the moment. Despite these early warning signs, such as refusing to communicate with peers and an inability to focus on schoolwork, her parents soon dismissed them as Gabrielle not trying hard enough. Anthony, whom they doted on, was considered the smarter of the two, while Gabrielle had to attend multiple after-school programs to bring her grades back to an A. Enrolling her in these programs was an upward battle, as Gabrielle insisted that she was trying her best. In her eyes, she couldn't simply get better, and if her grades were disappointing, then there would be no way to improve them.

In order to vent about these issues, Gabrielle immersed herself even deeper in writing, and her content turned from gratuitous blood and guts to psychological horror. She began to turn to true crime for references; the cases that fascinated her most were more recent, and soon she was led down a rabbit hole of gory pictures of recent murders and crimes, hosted on shock sites and certain communities on Reddit.

Gabrielle’s parents lean conservative on many issues, and they focused quite a lot on politics when raising her, believing that she needed to know about the state of the world and to interact with the “big picture,” as they told her. The older she grew, the more often dinnertime talks were swerved to political discussion, and they often told her to read certain political magazines or articles they found, lecturing her out of nowhere. Unfortunately, Gabrielle found this draining, and as such only approached politics in a hobbyist way, participating in small-scale online discussions and making memes. Gabrielle did inherit most of her parents’ beliefs, but she expresses them in a dispassionate way, and considers herself a centrist who is fine with mocking, defending, or making memes about both sides. Her parents were also concerned with teaching her economics in a way that she considered forced on her; for instance, they constantly encouraged her to take up stock trading as soon as she was able to, and even though she did eventually give in to their wishes, she generally found the stock market tiring and boring.

Gabrielle's internet activities soon failed to distract her from her parents' disappointment in her, which they no longer made an effort to hide. Even though they weren’t actively trying to discourage her, their use of negative reinforcement and their inability to change their beliefs led Gabrielle to blame herself and believe that something was wrong with her. To combat these feelings, Gabrielle decided to develop her identity around being "different". To feed into this identity, she intentionally refused to wear any makeup or act girly to differentiate herself from other girls, and her burgeoning interest in psychology led her to diagnose herself with a multitude of mental disorders online. Her feelings of inadequacy continued to worsen until the beginning of high school, when she cracked under the mounting pressure to succeed, stopped trying to place her self-worth on her parents’ approval, and let her grades slip down from straight As to a B average. This period of her life was marked by numerous arguments with her family and jealousy towards her brother Anthony, not helped by his recent admission to Yale.

When doing research for her writing, Gabrielle would often find herself travelling down Wikipedia rabbit holes, directing her interests at subjects rather than works of fiction. In one notable three-month period, Gabrielle became obsessed with learning every capital city in the world, something her parents mistook for a spiking interest in geography until she lost interest again, diverting her attention to medieval history instead. Her tendency to learn and research for fun soon morphed into a love of trivia; during dinners, her parents sometimes watched Jeopardy and other trivia-based TV shows, and the thought of “collecting” varied bits of information made her feel accomplished. One of the few subjects that she is continuously interested in is ancient history, particularly Greco-Roman and military history, which she likes because it involves people, comes off as suitably dramatic, and has many resources available for further study.

A darker subject of interest to Gabrielle is tragedies and crimes, especially those committed by or involving teenagers. As a social outcast who liked morbid topics, she sometimes felt as if she related to the perpetrators. For a brief period of time, she was an active content creator in the “Columbine fandom” niche of the true crime community and actively participated in a forum centered around Survival of the Fittest. After she was featured on a large-scale callout post and several cringe compilations, along with her parents almost discovering one of her writings, she took the bad press as a sign that she should take a break from these communities and reevaluate herself. Gabrielle keeps her involvement with them secret, only presenting herself as a casual true crime fan, but at times she info-dumps on people that she thinks would be interested in such subjects and comes off as unnerving.

Most, if not all, of Gabrielle’s online social circle consists of people with the same morbid interests as her. They tend to egg each other on to write and talk about increasingly controversial topics, to the extent where they make each other actively uncomfortable but are too scared of being seen as weak to back off. Many of the communities they are in are, to a certain extent, toxic and often rude, but Gabrielle tries to fit herself in by behaving just as abrasively as them. While she would say that she doesn't care about other people’s opinions of her, this is mostly a lie — she may have thick skin when it comes to insults, but she deeply values the opinions of her online friends. Many interactions online have genuinely caused her to feel discomfort, especially those concerning sexual topics, but she pushed herself nonetheless to produce content that she felt satisfied with.

In order to deal with her general lack of real-life friends, Gabrielle has retreated further into daydreaming and writing. Her dreams have developed to include real-life people (such as an idealized version of herself) and scenarios, with a common theme being going back in time and “fixing” something. They are vivid and intense: in moments of inspiration they can last for hours at a time if they are not interrupted, and she feels intense dissatisfaction when they are. She tries her best to put them into words, but is frustrated at her inability to translate her thoughts onto paper. She has begun to think of her dream world as an ongoing story of sorts, and other people as characters in her daydreams and writings — something that she knows she should be concerned about, but hasn’t yet resolved to tackle.

Unable to develop the proper social skills she needed or cultivate a reputation beyond being rather odd and annoying for her rambling, Gabrielle started going to clubs with subjects that interested her in a last-ditch attempt to meet new people to talk to. Most of her real-life friends are those that share a single hobby or two with her, whom she clung to. Internally, she expressed jealousy towards those that are well-liked, falling into the belief that popularity is determined by arbitrary traits. As a way to cope with her feelings of loneliness, she developed negative attitudes towards her peers, considering herself better than others for not participating in "wild" activities. This translated to her online behavior, as she started to join in on online slut-shaming and insulting mockery of “basic” and popular people and took solace in her own uniqueness. Her experience in writing horror stories, browsing shock sites, and researching psychology have convinced her that she is a cold, almost psychopathic individual, to the chagrin of some of her peers. She cultivated a comically sadistic online persona lacking in empathy until several online friends managed to convince her that she only came off as embarrassing. Nowadays, she continues her online trolling, but she has toned the edginess down as she is afraid that her posts may impact her college acceptance. She is still generally socially invisible offline, if not a little disliked.

Her parents, worried about her mental and physical health, forced her to take up a sport, and she is now taking karate classes once a week alongside a college preparation class. In truth, she pays no attention to either and knows almost no formal karate, but still finds this activity to be a confidence booster. While she understands that she is incompetent at martial arts, she has nonetheless begun to think of it as the first sport she genuinely enjoys.

Gabrielle’s grades currently hover around the A-minus range. Her parents have set rules on her grades: if they go below a mid-B average, she will lose her internet privileges until they rise to an acceptable level again. She has no solid plans for her education after high school, but feels compelled to attend a more prestigious college. She has applied to plenty of colleges, hiding her dream of becoming a professional writer from her parents. As a backup plan, she has considered trading stocks for a living.

Advantages: Gabrielle is noticeably unfazed by blood and gore, and her experiences with shocking content online may help her come to terms with the reality of the game. She is intelligent, analytical, has good memory, and possesses plenty of miscellaneous knowledge. Her small size can help her hide from her enemies. She has convinced herself that she is a cold, emotionally detached individual, possibly letting her make more ruthless decisions, and her dislike or disconnect from most people at school, along with her knowledge of psychology, may dull the emotional trauma on the island.

Disadvantages: Gabrielle is noticeably smaller and weaker than her classmates, and can be easily overpowered. She struggles socially and is awkward when it comes to interpersonal relationships, with a reputation as being odd that may drive others away. Gabrielle finds it difficult to focus on one task, getting distracted easily. She is prone to daydreaming when things aren’t going her way, making her unaware of her surroundings. Her sense of self depends heavily on staying closed off from her own emotions; as a result, her reactions to the horrors on the island may break that perception, further destabilizing her. At times, Gabrielle sees the world in terms of tropes, and she may inaccurately assess a situation due to her warped worldview.

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