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 striking, with upturned almond-shaped green eyes, thick eyelashes, soft-arched brows, a perky medium-sized nose, and high cheekbones. She has sharp, heavy lips, a narrow, well-proportioned chin, and perfect teeth. Her ears are unremarkable, pierced once apiece. She is Caucasian, and has pale skin due to responsible use of sunscreen. Her naturally auburn hair is somewhat wavy, has been dyed a slightly more intense — but still natural-looking — shade of red, and is a few inches longer than shoulder length. 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, legitimately at ease, or drunk, her voice tends unconsciously 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 typical beauty and makeup regimens. Her aesthetic trends towards blacks and reds and has often been described by classmates as "sport goth", a label she accepts but is ultimately apathetic to. She usually wears her makeup in a socially acceptable Avril Lavigne-esque look. 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 2008 when 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 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, often spending her days following her imagination, engrossed in her private world. Meanwhile, as Stella began attending preschool, Lars grew somewhat restless and started 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 took the form of him removing her from whatever solitary activity she was doing and infodumping her about his hobbies, while jokingly insinuating to her that she was acting spoiled whenever she outwardly protested. As Stella didn't particularly care for any of this and preferred to remain alone, it had the opposite effect of intended, and she soon logically intuited that she could assert her own will by acting obstinate until Lars gave her ground. This led to an increasingly adversarial relationship between the two, culminating in Stella successfully avoiding learning to read until her kindergarten teacher voiced concerns. She then taught herself how over a long weekend while refusing any help from Lars. Meanwhile, despite spending less time together, she 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 stuck-up know-it-all among some of her more impulsive classmates, she quickly received a wave of positive attention from her teachers lauding her for her problem-solving skills, which she enjoyed very much. She soon fell in with a group of like-minded girls, spending recess 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 and why it framed things the way it framed them. Soon, she moved on to other teen series and even advertisements, and understood that these narrative techniques could also be subtly applied to her school's own emerging social narrative.

As she got older, 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 a way to bond as a group and for Stella to cultivate an air of implied sophistication around herself. Boys soon started paying more attention to her too, which she felt conflicted about. It flattered her, but she found them all too irritating on a personal level to reciprocate their feelings, and she turned them down whenever they tried to progress to something beyond friendship. 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. During longer days, she distracted herself by diving back into narratology, finding non-current media easier to analyze through an objective lens, and now studying more mature shows and satirical programming. During this time, she also started reading up on social psychology, after watching a Penn & Teller magic show on YouTube, and drawing a connection between the relationship of magicians and their audiences and the way she already perceived most real-life social narratives.

Stella's first year and a half of high school happened against a serious shakeup in Nyquist family dynamics. The housing market was the toughest since Stella's early childhood, and Brandi's income wasn't cutting it. Lars, having gone back to college and obtained a degree in software engineering while Stella was in middle school, was now working as an IT specialist 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, and would soon start working for them, as well as investing in company stocks. This was an extremely fortuitous development, as AI soon gained mainstream traction, and by the midway point of Stella's 10th Grade year, 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 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 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 is commonly lacking 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 and other sports-associated cliques, something 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. She is observant, high-strung, pragmatic, and often surprises people with her memory. She values her boundaries deeply, is easily angered whenever these are disregarded, and will occasionally punch down at people in an underhanded way over it — or freeze them out entirely — 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 his job gets for her, she finds spending time with Lars to be 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 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.

[Gundham]

It's me! Your bro-vince from the same pro-vince!

Slap an R on the end of Stella's name, because she's looking stellar so far. But there are some bits and bobs that need to be looked at before she's ready for primetime, so she is Not Approved Yet.

- As a general note, I'd recommend doing a verbal read-through of the profile, or a quick scan to identify long sentences and trim them down. Aim for more manageable lengths, and eliminate redundant bits of prose.

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.

There are twelve commas in this sentence, which makes it stray a bit close to Faulknerian. Either cut some descriptors, or find a way to split the information up into smaller, self-contained sentences so you're not mounding adjectives onto one another.

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.

The implication here is that her public voice is something she affects. Is this code-switching something she does instinctively, or does it require active effort to maintain?

following beauty and makeup regimes typical for teenage girls of her age, socioeconomic status, and placement in the social ecosystem.

"Regimes" should probably be "routines" or "regimens"? Additionally, this paragraph serves as a potential example of the redundancy I mentioned earlier. I can see why the age/status/placement filters aren't entirely superfluous, but they don't add a lot of information that we wouldn't get from, say, "following popular beauty or makeup regimens." or just "following typical beauty or makeup regimens." Since she is, herself, a person of a type, it seems valid to conclude that "typical" tacitly indicates "typical for her demographic."

life continued to pass by uneventfully until the housing bubble burst.

Which year was this?

As Stella had her own stuff she cared way more about,

Can you elaborate on this? Given the general tone of the profile, it seems unlikely that Stella's cares were about stereotypical things for her age. Did she try to let her father in on what she cared about? If he was actively seeking to engage with her, would he have been receptive to that?

Stella successfully avoiding learning how to read until her kindergarten teacher voiced concerns, at which point she taught herself how over a long weekend

Kids can teach themselves to read all on their own. I know, because I did it. But if the school reported to Stella's parents that she wasn't able to read, did they try? Seems like Lars would jump on that, at least.

--------

That's all I've got for you on the first pass. All in all, really solid stuff, just a few tweaks and things to potentially ask more questions on. Tighten those few things up and post in the thread, and I'll take another look as soon as I can!

[Kermit]

Grammar line go up

[Gundham]

Round 2: Fight!

each pierced once apiece.

Redundancy in "each" and "apiece." Remove one of them.

Lars, having gone back to college and obtained a degree in software engineering while Stella was in middle school, was now working as an IT guy

"IT guy" isn't the job title that would appear on his resume, and is thus perhaps a bit too informal for a profile.

Make those tweaks, and we're done here!

[Kermit]

[Gundham]

It feels wrong to post the word APPROVED in response to that image, but here we are.