Stella Nyquist

[Kermit]

Name: Stella Anne Nyquist
Gender: Female
Age: 18
Grade: 12th
School: Southwest Red Rock High School
Hobbies and Interests: Cheer Team (flyer), Socializing, 2000s & 2010s Pop Culture, Social Psychology, Media and Communications Studies

Appearance: Stella is 5’2” and weighs 115 lbs. Her facial features are somewhat striking, with upturned, almond-shaped green eyes, thick eyelashes, soft-arched, well-shaped brows, a perky medium-sized nose, high cheekbones, sharp, heavy lips, a narrow, well-proportioned chin, and unremarkable ears pierced once apiece. Her teeth are perfect, and she has never required orthodontics. She is Caucasian, and has fairly pale skin due to responsible use of sunscreen. Her wavy, slightly-longer-than-shoulder-length hair is naturally auburn and has been dyed a slightly more intense, but still natural-looking shade, and outside of athletics, she wears it down and middle-parted. Her peers tend to find her attractive, and she holds herself with natural sprezzatura and balance, with a strongly developed core from cheerleading and gymnastics. In public, she speaks with a friendly, expressive-sounding, medium-high pitched tone and prominent high-rising terminal; however, when she's alone, when she's by herself with a person she legitimately trusts and likes, or when she's drunk, her voice tends to fall into a flat and relatively low register. She is left-handed, and she often freezes up for a second or two if something touches her when she's not expecting it.

Stella holds a great deal of pride in her appearance and reputation, and puts a considerable amount of effort into maintaining it, following beauty and makeup regimes typical for teenage girls of her age, socioeconomic status, and placement in the social ecosystem. Her aesthetic trends towards blacks and reds and is often described by classmates as "sport goth", a label she accepts but is ultimately apathetic to, and she typically wears her makeup in a socially acceptable Avril Lavigne-esque look, designed to make her stand out but not in a tacky way. On the day of the abduction, Stella was wearing a white Coach camisole emblazoned with the words "le COACH bag" above a red and black graphic print of a Coach bag, an oversized Red Rock High cheer team varsity jacket with a black body and red sleeves, black denim short shorts, and stylish black sneakers.

Biography: Stella was born December 21st, 2006, the only child of Lars and Brandi Nyquist, currently a software engineer / graphic designer working for Tapestry Inc., and a veteran realtor specializing in foreclosed homes, respectively. Her parents spend little time together and aren't particularly alike in personality or interests, and Stella sometimes wonders what her mother sees in her father.

The first few years of Stella's life were spent in Henderson, Nevada. The Nyquists were firmly middle class, with Brandi treading water in the National REO Brokers Association during the lead-up to the subprime mortgage crisis, and Lars habitually unemployed. The family couldn't afford for Brandi to stop working, so Lars volunteered to fill the role of Stella's main caretaker, spending his days with her while moonlighting on his laptop as a novelty mouse cursor designer. Stella learned to walk and talk at a normal age, and life continued to pass by uneventfully until the housing bubble burst. Brandi, a pragmatic businesswoman with deep industry connections, quickly capitalized on the situation and snapped up foreclosed homes left and right, selling most of them at a great profit but keeping one in upscale Silver Springs, Las Vegas for herself and her family to move into.

Stella, an observant and independent toddler, quickly adapted to the new, larger property. Meanwhile, as Stella began attending preschool, Lars grew somewhat restless and began trying to introduce her to his interests in the hopes that as she grew up, he'd finally have someone to share his passions with. This usually took the form of him disrupting whatever she was doing, regaling her with stories about his favorite bands, making her watch late night cartoons with him, or trying to read comic books to her, all while jokingly insinuating to her that she was acting spoiled whenever she outwardly protested. As Stella had her own stuff she cared way more about, this had the opposite effect of what Lars intended, and she soon logically intuited that she could assert her own will by acting obstinate until he gave her ground or did something she wanted. This led to an increasingly adversarial relationship between the two, which culminated in Stella successfully avoiding learning how to read until her kindergarten teacher voiced concerns, at which point she taught herself how over a long weekend. Meanwhile, despite the two spending less time together, Stella got along much better with her mother, learning most of her basic social skills from observing her.

Now literate, Stella started excelling in school both academically and socially, often by first observing her peers, learning from their mistakes, and applying those lessons to her own experiences. While this earned her a reputation as a bit of a stuck-up know-it-all among some of her more impulsive classmates, she quickly received a wave of positive attention from her teachers, who lauded her for her problem solving skills, something she enjoyed greatly. She soon fell in with a group of likeminded girls, spending recesses sitting and chatting with them atop the monkey bars. Brandi, while driving past Stella's school on her way to a house for work one day, noticed her daughter's climbing abilities and natural flexibility, and signed her up for gymnastics classes. While initially hesitant, Stella grew to enjoy these, and they would lay the groundwork for her eventual decision to join the cheer squad in high school.

It was also around this time that Lars, attempting to find a better approach to father-daughter bonding, decided to try to watch the entirety of the recently-concluded teen sitcom iCarly with Stella. While Lars quickly gave up, Stella found herself transfixed — not by the show itself, which she found rather sophomoric, but by the intended interaction between the show and its viewer — how it chose to dictate its version of reality, why it did so, the sentiments with which it framed certain things, and why it expected viewers to react a certain way. Soon, she moved on to other teen series and even advertisements, and understood that these narrative cues and techniques could also be subtly applied to her school's own emerging social narrative.

As she got older and elementary turned to middle school, Stella quickly positioned herself high in the developing social hierarchy. Despite her relatively polite and reserved demeanor, she often channeled her inner emotions, highly tumultuous from the onset of puberty, into a surprisingly measured, dry, and cruel wit, especially when talking about classmates considered acceptable targets. This acted as a social lubricant, and also as a way to bond as a group, and for Stella to cultivate a charismatic air of implied sophistication around herself. Boys too were soon paying more attention to her, which she felt conflicted about — she was flattered, but she found them all too needy, insensitive, self-absorbed, or smothering, to reciprocate their feelings, and she turned them all down whenever they tried to progress to something beyond friendship with her. As she reached the end of middle school, the COVID-19 lockdown hit. However, she coped with it well, keeping in touch with her friends through technology, and distracting herself by diving back into narratology, now studying more mature shows like Lost and satirical programming like Portlandia, finding non-current media easier to analyze through an objective lens. During this time, she also started reading up on crowd and social psychology, after watching a Penn & Teller magic show on YouTube one day, and drawing a connection between the relationship of magicians and their audiences, and the detached, flowchart-esque way she already perceived most real life social narratives.

Stella's first year and a half of high school happened against the backdrop of a serious shakeup in Nyquist family dynamics. The housing market was the toughest it'd been since Stella's early childhood, and Brandi's income wasn't cutting it anymore. Lars, having gone back to college and obtained a degree in software engineering while Stella was in middle school, was working as an IT guy, and had become fairly entrenched in the fledgling AI art scene online during the pandemic. In February of 2022, he would receive a personal invite to the beta testing Discord server of a small generative AI startup called Midjourney, and soon would start working for them, as well as investing in company stocks. This ended up being an extremely fortuitous development for him, as AI soon gained mainstream traction — with Midjourney receiving a $10.5 billion valuation by the end of 2022 — and, as Stella reached the midway point of 10th Grade, her family was richer than ever. Lars would later be headhunted by the fashion industry, and currently works from home as Creative Coder in Residence for Tapestry Inc.'s Las Vegas office.

Stella, on her part, coped with this short period of financial instability by focusing on school life. Her whole life had been spent watching TV shows about high school, and she was incredibly excited to finally experience it for herself. However, the transition from middle school to high school meant a serious reshuffling of the social dynamics of her classmates — while she was seen as respectable by people she already knew, high school's social hierarchy seemed much more competitive, and she now also had upwards of a thousand new peers to deal with. She realized that, if she wanted to preserve as much of her social autonomy as possible, she had to get her foot in through the door as fast as possible and establish herself at the front of the pack. She joined the cheer team, a natural fit with her gymnastics background, and started attending parties — though before her parents let her go to her first, they made her promise to them that she'd never do drugs or have premarital sex while attending one. By the time Lars's new income started to flow in, Stella had again managed to snake her way into a social position she found comfortable — near the top of the ladder, but subtle enough to be classy.

Stella is bisexual, and tends to find femme personalities far more engaging than masculine ones. At the moment, she is deeply closeted, due to a combination of her family's treatment of sexual topics, her desire for privacy, and her belief that the LGBT+ community of Red Rock commonly lacks in discretion and sensitivity to personal boundaries. She finds situations that remind her of these feelings deeply uncomfortable and anxiety-inducing, and she will often spend the next few days in a depressed mood if she's unable to avoid them.

Currently, Stella finds most of her friends in the cheer squad, sports-associated cliques, and the rest of the popular crowd, something which she is quietly very proud of herself for, especially given the importance that Red Rock places on athletics. She usually gets good marks in every subject except math, which she has alleviated by paying another student for tutoring. Her personality has an adaptable, reflexive kind of charisma to it, and some of her peers confuse her aloofness for absentmindedness. She is observant, high-strung, pragmatic, and often surprises people with her memory. She values her own boundaries deeply, is easily angered whenever these are disregarded, and will often punch down at people in an underhanded, indirect, contemptuous way — or freeze them out entirely — over it, which has at times created tension between her and some of her friends.

Stella's relationship with both of her parents is fairly distant these days. She is friendly and pleasant with her mother, but they've grown apart with age. While she appreciates his money and the merch he gets for her from his work, she finds spending time with Lars to be deeply grating, and she treats him the same as she does anyone else she dislikes. She has applied to Harvard, Cornell, and UCLA, plus the University of Nevada, Las Vegas as a just-in-case, and plans on pursuing a degree in Media Studies.

Advantages: Stella excels at both reading and subtly guiding social situations, and her internally detached demeanor may act as a boon if she needs to make any life-or-death decisions. She is generally well-liked, respected, and easily recognized by the majority of her peers, and is unlikely to be proactively targeted for personal reasons, at least during the early stages of the game. She is fairly athletic from cheerleading, which gives her an edge in physical situations over most other girls her size.
Disadvantages: Though she's athletic, Stella still stands at only 5'2'', and is likely to have a bad time if required to fight a larger competitor head-on in close-quarters. Finally, when combined with the intense levels of pressure she'll likely be dealing with, her general irritability may result in her acting in a way that alienates otherwise viable allies.