Gale Bailey

[Grand Moff Hissa]

Name: Abigail "Gale" Bailey
Gender: Female
Age: 18
Grade: Senior
School: John Endecott Memorial Academy
Hobbies and Interests: Disaster preparation and survival (especially Survival of the Fittest), video games and Let's Plays (especially Pokemon), YouTube and the internet, music and vinyl records, Blaseball

Appearance: Gale stands at 5'6" and weighs roughly 130 pounds, leaving her somewhat slender. Her weight is fairly evenly distributed between her limbs and body, giving her a generally rectangular body type. Gale has a round face and wide green eyes; her shoulder-length hair is platinum blonde and straight, and she usually wears it loose, parted neatly in the middle. Gale has small ears that lie close to her head, pierced once apiece in the lobe, and a straight nose of average size. She has a fairly small mouth, and straight, white teeth which she takes good care of. She keeps her makeup minimal, eschewing it entirely on some days and generally sticking to light lip gloss and a bit of eyeshadow. She keeps her eyebrows neat and thin. Gale is Caucasian with a pale complexion; her skin is generally clear, and on those rare occasions she suffers from acne she tends to try to mask it with concealer. Gale is fairly nearsighted and wears glasses with thin, oval lenses.

Gale's fashion sense is fairly restrained in most ways, but also generally varied. She favors t-shirts for most outfits, usually either in plain colors or with meaningless patterns, though if it's colder or she's feeling more formal she'll don a button-down shirt or blouse. Depending on weather, she'll sometimes add a hoodie or a rain jacket to her ensemble. Gale does not particularly favor skirts or pants, and switches as her mood of the day dictates. She tends towards knee-length skirts or skinny jeans when it's normal or cool, and shorter skirts or shorts when it's warmer out. On particularly formal occasions, Gale will sometimes break out a dress. She wears sneakers whenever possible, only ditching them when they're totally unfitting for her outfit or the formality of an event. On the day of the abduction, Gale was wearing a loose white skirt that came to her knees, white sneakers, high black socks, a black t-shirt, and a black hoodie with a handwarmer. She also brought with her gloves, a beanie, and a zip-up jacket styled after a band uniform but patterned with a fan-created logo for Breckenridge Jazz Hands on the back. She paired this with small gold stud earrings and her glasses.

Biography: Born on August 13, 2003, in Boston, MA, Gale Bailey is the youngest daughter of parents Gary and Mayra Bailey, a human resources worker for General Edward Lawrence Logan International Airport and a real estate agent respectively. She followed elder sister Jessica, who she normally calls "Jessie," by two years, and throughout their lives the sisters spent a lot of time together. When they were little, their caretaking was primarily the responsibility of Mayra, though she did not exult in this task; while she loved her daughters, she also resented the disruption to her career and the limitation of her personal freedom, which could often come out at Jessie and Gale in the form of stressed-out snapping or exasperation.

While these outbursts never rose to the level of abuse, they did have a profound effect on Gale especially. Jessie would often argue back, but Gale found it easier to become unobtrusive and quiet and try to just ride out any anger. This served her fairly well; her mother was usually quick to calm down and apologize if placated. This method of solving problems followed Gale as she started school and combined with a somewhat reserved nature to leave her more of a background presence in classes, rarely garnering much notice either positive or negative.

Gale performed adequately in class for the most part, but if a specific topic drew her attention in a substantial way, she would become much more involved, pouring her focus and effort into it and talking about it nonstop to anyone who would listen, coming out of her shell to a large extent when she had the opportunity to converse upon her favorite subject. What these areas of attention were cycled over the years; in elementary school, she was at first absolutely enthralled with the pyramids, then shifted focus to animals, especially amphibians, then as she entered middle school, took to Roman history.

Aside from her academic favorite subjects, Gale developed a few other early interests which have proven remarkably constant in her life. Gary had been a big video-gamer in his younger days and still loved to unwind with games in his free time. He quickly introduced both daughters to gaming, and played age-appropriate games with them, especially Mario Party and Kart and similar casual titles. Jessie and Gale also played on their own and with one another, and Gale especially took to games, finding that they offered her both a way to amuse herself and an avenue through which to socialize with some of her classmates without putting herself too far out of her comfort zone.

While Gary had mostly enjoyed racing games and shooters, Gale found that RPGs were more to her liking. She loved the way they rewarded time and attention, and her favorite series quickly became Pokemon, after she was gifted a game from the series for her ninth birthday. Gale is drawn to the optimistic world and the cute creatures but also to the complicated metagame and optimization strategies; she has spent hours and hours breeding and training towards competitive viability, and while she has experienced no success to speak of at higher levels of play, she's good enough to offhandedly crush casual players the majority of the time. She also has a collection of Pokemon merchandise of various sorts, including a couple of costumes she cobbled together with help from her sister, replica gym badges, and a number of plushes she keeps in a net in a corner of her room.

Gale's game interests and solitary nature led her fairly inevitably to the internet, as she researched game strategies and other subjects of interest. She was soon exploring YouTube, as well as streaming sites such as Twitch.tv. It did not take long before Gale discovered some of the darker sides of the internet, encountering sexism, prejudice, and poor behavior that left her extremely distraught due to her belief that the hobby should be a happy, shared space. She typically turned to her sister about such issues, or occasionally her father; Jessie was always sympathetic and understanding, while Gary often had greater perspective, though also was prone to downplaying some of the cultural issues as niche elements and bad luck. Mayra had no interest in gaming and little trust for the computer in general, and tended to react to any issues by suggesting that Gale spend less time online and more time outside. She did not, however, do anything to enforce this, enjoying the relative quiet afforded by Gale's independence and computer-based hobbies.

In 2014, Gale stumbled upon a medium-sized Twitch stream run by a streamer called Enzo Gatti. Gale was captivated both by Enzo's frank openness about being genderfluid and by their charm and gameplay, and became a loyal follower, though never actually interacted in any notable or direct way with them, even through chat.

This was how Gale was ultimately introduced to Survival of the Fittest. She had, of course, known of the terrorists attacks beforehand in the abstract, but had always viewed them as distant and not meriting much thought. In 2015, however, Enzo's stream went offline. Gale thought little of it at first—streamers had vanished before—but a year and a half later when she went through old bookmarks she began to wonder what had happened and dug into the matter further. Her curiosity turned to panic when, through reading the old detective work of others in the fan community, she became aware of Enzo's kidnapping and death in SOTF. While Gale did not watch any of Version Six, she read about Enzo's fate and listened to an audio recording of their final speech.

It horrified and destroyed her. SOTF was no longer some abstract tragedy; it had now touched Gale directly and personally, had taken someone she had viewed as a part of her life—her first direct brush with the reality of death. She could not stop thinking about the attacks, or Enzo's fate, and soon began researching them with the same zeal and fixation she'd brought to her pet subjects in previous years of school. The more she read, the more convinced Gale became that SOTF would somehow hit closer still to home.

Between her final year of middle school and her first year of high school, Gale's family moved from Boston proper to nearby Salem, into a more spacious, nicer home—a move sparked when Mayra fell in love with the area over a number of jobs selling houses there. While this meant an increase in comfort at home for Gale, it also landed her in a different school from most of those friends she had, and she did not maintain contact with them very well. This created a time of great stress for her, and this combined with her irrational SOTF fears when, during the first field trip of Freshman year, Gale slipped out of the room and pulled the fire alarm, leading to the school being briefly evacuated, and the trip delayed by approximately forty-five minutes.

Gale was quickly apprehended, and a great deal of official attention ensued. Ultimately, she faced a three-day suspension and a moderate fine (paid by her parents). The more serious repercussions, however, were on the home front—Gale's parents had noticed a gloomier bent to her demeanor over the past year, but until this incident had completely failed to grasp the depths of the situation. A tearful conversation about the suspension with her parents quickly turned into her spilling the entire story, including her reasoning for her actions, and she was promptly signed up for therapy by her family.

This came too late to temper the initial repercussions on her return to school, however. In her first days back, Gale was open and relatively unrepentant about her actions when questioned by her peers, assuming that any interest expressed in her ordeal was genuine and good-natured. She also heavily derailed a discussion in history class, responding to a call to relate eighteenth-century United States politics to the modern era by shoehorning in her fixation on SOTF through a rambling, incoherent series of suppositions that quickly led to her being asked to remain quiet for the remainder of the period, coupled with a call to her parents from the school counselor.

All this from a girl generally unknown to the population prior to the start of the year immediately destroyed whatever good reputation Gale might have had. She became known as "fire alarm girl," and was treated by most of the class as something between a ticking time bomb and a pitiable freak. Some of the less kind members of the class took to harassing her, calling out to her whenever fire drills were held or subtly mocking her about her SOTF fears in the halls.

As a result, Gale withdrew even further socially, though in so doing she discovered that she was not alone in her predicament. A number of the school's less popular outcasts found some measure of common ground with Gale, and the disruption she'd wrought with the fire alarm stunt won her a measure of respect among some of the troublemakers. So, ironically, while Gale's overall social stock plummeted to the lowest point in her life, she found herself making closer, more genuine friends than she'd ever had before. With this new groups, Gale felt able to be herself. These were people who had in many cases also been suspended, who also had issues with the popular kids, and who—most vitally—would at least loosely humor her when she shared her fears and thoughts about SOTF.

The core of this group ultimately transformed, in large part under Gale's guidance, into an unofficial group they called the "Student Disaster Preparedness Association," which met regularly in sheds and garages belonging to the parents of group members. While in theory a group dedicated to discussing student safety and how to deal with disasters, in practice the friend circle spent much of their time playing video and roleplaying games, watching movies, and socializing. Gale tended to bring SOTF into the discussion regularly, but didn't force it to dominate most of the time.

This was, if anything, a break for her, as in her personal life she grew ever-more fixated. While no abductions occurred during her freshman year, she grew comfortable enough in her relationship with the members of her group to broach the subject of viewing footage with a few of the more open-minded, and ultimately she enlisted the help of one of the technologically-adept members of the group in order to actually obtain and view a stream of the archived V7 broadcast, telling herself that it was for safety reasons. Gale locked herself in her room alone for twelve hours while her parents were at work on the weekend, the first session of what was intended to be a comprehensive viewing of the season. While she made it through the first few deaths, she steadily became more disturbed, and eventually raced through some of the most discussed sequences, specifically avoiding the more graphic violence; at the end of the stint, she purged her browser history and didn't return to the pursuit. Still, even this incident of exploration took a great mental and emotional toll on her, and she became quiet and withdrawn for the first half of summer vacation, losing weight and losing track of her interests.

A number of further aftereffects lingered. Struck particularly by an incident of poisoning that occurred, Gale began to fear that she might someday suffer the same fate and fixated on the subject. She began to joke about practicing mithridatism under the guise of a great appreciation for The Princess Bride, and attempted to enlist members of her friend group to help her actually secure arsenic. While she had no success in this pursuit, a concerned friend broached the topic with her parents and she ended up facing much stricter observation from her family; her therapy sessions, which had tapered down to a bi-weekly occurrence, returned to a weekly schedule, and her access to even benign household chemical was restricted, much to her irritation. Still, this direct attention and intervention proved largely, if slowly, effective. After a month of beating around the bush, she finally confided a sanitized version of her viewing experience to her therapist, and was given better guidance in approaching her conflicted feelings regarding her own actions; over the rest of the summer and into the start of the next school year she built up a better person routine, taking daily walks around her neighborhood and going to bed at a regular time, though this last point eventually became much less strict.

On one point, however, nothing has budged her: Gale has steadfastly refused to participate in any school trips for the entirety of her high school career. While this has caused notable friction between her and her family, they have grudgingly allowed her to do as she pleases, making up for missed trips with alternate assignments where required or spending the day in study hall. They do not allow her to skip school entirely on trip days, viewing that as too much of a potential reward for her stubbornness. They view this arrangement as an acceptable compromise because removing the prospect of trips keeps her generally calmer and has prevented active outbursts and disruption on her part. Gale has, however, pushed her friends to adopt a similar stance with somewhat limited success; her level of fervor is unusual even among her clique, and she tends to resort quickly to emotional appeals and guilt tactics, which backfire as often as they succeed. By and large, her friends placate and/or avoid her in the days immediately preceding trips, having learned that for all her dramatics, she calms down almost immediately and gets over any bad feelings once her friends are home safe.

When the pandemic struck, Gale fared much better than some of her classmates. While she missed the gatherings of her group, she was already used to a measure of isolation, was deeply involved in online communities, and regularly contacted her friends through Discord and other social media. When local guidelines allowed, she would also meet her friends for socially-distanced roleplaying sessions, or for group activities like walks. At the same time, the temporary suspension of in-person learning removed her biggest fear, and with school trips universally off the table, she was able to integrate with her peers to a greater degree than she had since middle school, engaging more fully with her classes and socializing with students outside her immediate sphere with less stigma, even adding some people outside her clique on social media.

This time also brought a new interest to Gale: Blaseball, a sports simulation with fantasy and horror elements designed in part to build community during the pandemic. While historically totally uninterested in sports, Gale was fascinated by the game's mechanics and its active, highly artistic community, becoming an avid follower. She found her interest and experience with Pokemon mechanics translated easily, and she spent large amounts of time theorizing with friends from school and friends online. She supports the Breckenridge Jazz Hands, having selected the team based on fond memories of a family ski trip to Breckenridge when she was twelve, and has a few article of clothing bearing the logo of this fictional team.

Gale's current relationship with her family is fraught but loving. Her father is often busy, and the quality time he spends with her tends to be devoted to gaming, but he cares deeply for Gale and remains concerned about her habits and fixation, even as they've steadily improved. Her mother is embarrassed by her actions but also has gone to bat for her much more directly at several points, proving an unexpected ally in the field trip fight. Gale spent some time at odds with her sister, when Jessie was still attending John Endecott Memorial Academy as well, as Gale was an embarrassing social millstone around her sister's neck. Now that Jessie is in college, however, the girls have begun to repair their relationship. It is from Jessie that Gale has gotten into vinyl records. Her sister bought her a suitcase player and Gale enjoys spending time exploring thrift stores and secondhand shops for new music to play, often dragging her player along when her friend group takes outings or gathers for roleplaying sessions. Her listening mostly skews towards indie rock and widely-available classic albums from the 1970s through 1980s, and she has a particular fondness for some popular musicals of the time; she was crushed when the 2019 film Cats failed to do justice to the 1981 cast recording; she also collects soundtracks that she can put on as backdrop for roleplaying sessions. She favors vinyl records for the physicality and intent involved in the listening process when compared to more portable music (though she does most of her personal listening on her phone anyways), and claims the sound quality is better, though can only loosely distinguish a difference in most cases.

Gale's school social circle is limited to her general clique for positive interactions; the resumption of in-person learning brought some of her anxiety back, and her class participation dwindled; while her reputation is slightly better than it once was, many students outside her clique still think her weird or distasteful, and many of the members of the upper echelons of popularity in student body usually mock her or steer clear of her. Gale is bothered to some extent by this, but also wears it as a badge of pride among her true friends.

Her reputation is slightly better among teachers. While she was heavily disruptive near the start of her career, the past three years have seen her more or less well-behaved around authority figures, and her opting out of field trips is overt but she no longer makes a big deal of it outside her friend group. In class, she's mostly quiet and low-participation when it comes to class discussions, but she engages heavily in written assignments and sometimes lingers after class to discuss subjects more directly with her teachers. She's a good student, mostly picking up As and Bs, with the mathematical nature of some of her hobbies giving her an easier time engaging in numerically-based subjects and her interest in storytelling lending itself well to writing and analysis in English class. She struggles comparatively with history, mostly due to a lack of application; her interest steadily increases the closer to present-day the subject matter comes. She also does poorly in physical education; despite her pretensions of disaster preparedness, she doesn't work out much on her own and has no interest in team sports. She has lately mentioned an interest in playing softball or actual baseball but has not pursued this yet.

Gale considers herself heterosexual. She is not particularly romantically experienced, having only begun to explore dating during the pandemic and having conducted the majority of her early relationships almost exclusively online; her dating has been almost exclusively within her friend group. Her relationships have typically fallen apart quickly due to her being a fairly clingy and emotionally needy person while at the same time not being very good at being there for others, though she has at least managed to remain cordial with her exes.

As the midpoint of senior year approaches, Gale is looking to her future. She plans to attend college and is applying to schools throughout the state, though right now is unsure about her major, leaning towards English; her main hesitation here is that she doesn't know what career paths it could enable besides teaching, and she has no intentions of returning to the public school system in any capacity. Her parents are optimistic that, as she leaves high school behind, she may finally drop her focus on SOTF and move on to a more normal life. At the same time, in part at her therapist's suggestion, they have started to encourage Gale to face her fears by actually participating in more school activities—if not the senior trip itself, then possibly a smaller trip earlier in the year. Thus far, at least, Gale has remained adamant that she will not do so, and has been busily browbeating her friends into promising the same, in part because she's truly afraid of what may happen to them, but in part because she doesn't want to be staying home all alone again.

Advantages: Gale knows more about SOTF than the average student and is aware of common pitfalls and mistaken assumptions; she knows, for instance, that actively hunting other students tends not to pay off, in contrast to the claims of the terrorists. Gale has a small but quite loyal friend circle, though many of them may not attend the trip. While she is clumsy at it, she does have some experience with persuading others, though her typical tactics take form of heavy-handed appeals to emotion and playing on people's guilt.
Disadvantages: Ending up on SOTF is without a doubt Gale's biggest fear, the focus of a fixation she's held for years, and finding herself actually faced with the reality is likely to be extremely damaging to her even beyond the standard for her peers. At her core, Gale believes that survival in SOTF is more a matter of luck than of the results of specific decisions (barring certain obvious mistakes) and she is convinced that escape is impossible without outside assistance totally beyond the ability of students to affect, leaving her likely to pursue a passive playstyle and susceptible to despair or apathy preventing her from working to better her circumstances. Gale's reputation among those peers outside her friend circle is poor to horrible; she's considered weird, emotionally unstable, and obsessed with SOTF, leaving many unlikely to trust her and opening the door for her to be assumed a threat regardless of her actual intentions.

[Ruggahissy]

Hello there. I'm Ruggahissy and I'll be your moderator. Gale is not ready at this point in time to go through, but we can discuss some of the things that may need tweaking so she is ready.

As far as I can find, Let’s Play doesn’t get a hyphen.

Youtube should be “YouTube” throughout.

"Her weight is fairly evenly distributed between limbs her limbs and body,"

- Typo here.

“Office worker” is a pretty broad category of worker. Can you be a bit more specific about what Gale’s father does?

“This created a time of great stress for her, and this combined with her irrational SOTF fears when, during the first field trip of Freshman year, Gale slipped out of the room and pulled the fire alarm, leading to the fire department being called in, the school evacuated, and the trip delayed by several hours.”

- I’ve done some reading and had some discussion with people that work in school or school environments about their fire systems. It seems that what would be most likely is a system where pulling a fire alarm will result in noise and light. Students would be evacuated, someone from the staff goes to the area to investigate and if no fire is found, they do not call the authorities and turn off the alarm. This would delay the trip by approximately thirty minutes to one hour once a faculty member comes to the alarm, turns it off, and the students and reorganized.

“Gale was quickly apprehended, and a great deal of official investigation ensued. Ultimately, Gale's parents were able to argue her way out of expulsion by blaming mental health problems, and Gale was put into therapy. As part of her agreement with the school, she helped give a presentation on fire safety at the next school assembly, but nerves threw her wildly off-script and she ended up going into a rambling monologue, touching in part on SOTF, before she was shuttled offstage.”

- After talking with staff, the decision was made that the most likely punishment for this for a first-time offender with no previous history of disciplinary action would be a three-day suspension. Gale would not be required to give any kind of presentation. If the parents are saying she’s having mental health issues, the school might recommend therapy, but the decision on whether or not to pursue that would be down to Gale and her parents. She would also have to pay a fine of a minimum of $100, not to exceed a maximum of $500 per Massachusetts state law regarding false fire alarms.

Source: You can read the state law here

“Some of the less kind members of the class took to harassing her, calling out to her whenever fire drills were held”

- I think perhaps if you’d like to still keep some pieces of this regarding Gale and her bullying, you may consider having her SOTF breakdown speech during a regular class presentation or something similar when she’s actually supposed to be talking about The Great Gatsby or whatever you think is most appropriate.

“So, ironically, while Gale's overall social stock plummeted to the lowest point in her life, she found herself making closer, more genuine friends than she'd ever had before. With this new groups, Gale felt able to be herself. These were people who hadn't grown out of video games either, who also had issues with the popular kids, and who—most vitally—would at least loosely humor her when she shared her fears and thoughts about SOTF.”

- I feel like this characterization is a bit odd regarding fans of video games. It’s a fairly mainstream hobby now (not to mention the huge popularity of mobile games) that many high schoolers enjoy, no longer carrying some of the stigma it might have in the 80’s and 90’s as a “geeky” pursuit.

“While no abductions occurred during her freshman year, she grew comfortable enough in her relationship with the members of her group to broach the subject of viewing footage with a few of the more open-minded, and ultimately she enlisted the help of one of the technologically-adept members of the group in order to actually view much of the archived V7 broadcast, telling herself that it was for safety reasons. Gale watched every death, which took a great mental and emotional toll on her, and she became quiet and withdrawn for much of the summer, losing weight and losing track of her interests. She was eventually coaxed from this state with assistance from her therapist, to whom she finally confided a sanitized version of her viewing experience.”

- I have some questions here. Are her fellow friends in the Student Disaster Preparedness Association ok with watching the footage of 158 deaths? Do they watch this with her or do they eventually leave her, not wanting to participate? I feel like most people would not stick around for this. Did none of the members of the Student Disaster preparedness Association tell their parent or an adult about this or about why they no longer are going to Gale’s to hang out? Did they not tell other friends or classmates about their friend asking them to watch snuff footage with them? Are her parents not checking on her throughout the summer or concerned about why she’s starting to become withdrawn, malnourished or suddenly no longer seeing friends? I’m also shocked that Gale could make it through even a few of these clips of real-life deaths let alone all of them from V7. How much of this footage is she watching? Just the deaths? I feel like for per purposes of safety and survival she may need to watch the context surrounding each death which would be a lot of effort, involving parsing up to two weeks of individual 24-hour surveillance footage for hundreds of kids.

“Struck particularly by an incident of poisoning that occurred, Gale began to fear that she might someday suffer the same fate and after much research took to quietly trying to build a resistance to arsenic, microdosing herself with rat poison; while her research and care kept her from suffering greatly dangerous or deadly results from this, and she has actually managed to build her resistance up, she has taken great pains to keep this secret even from her family and friends, well aware that it would trigger immediate and great alarm and intervention.”

- I’ll let the American Cancer Society help me out here regarding arsenic:

“Arsenic has not been produced in the United States since 1985, although it is still imported from other countries. In the past, workers in smelters and in plants that manufactured, packaged, or distributed products that contained arsenic had high exposures from breathing in arsenic fumes and dust.

Arsenic was a common ingredient in many pesticides and herbicides in the past. People who made, transported, applied, or worked around these products may have been exposed to higher levels of arsenic. Inorganic arsenic compounds have not been used in pesticides in the US since 1993, and organic compounds have been phased out of pesticides (with one exception used on cotton plants) as of 2013.”

Source: here

Even at the best of times, arsenic was not something that could be freely be purchased by a minor.

I did a bit of reading on this and it looks like the kind of poison which is most used in rat poisons now is brodifacoum. Brodifacoum is an anticoagulant that reduces vitamin k in the blood and prevents blood clotting until the blood is no longer able to clot. It also increases the permeability of the blood capillaries so that blood plasma and blood leaks from the smallest blood vessels, leading small animals to bleed internally and die. If she were to expose herself to brodifacoum over an extended period of time, she would begin to bleed internally, suffering from things like bloody urine and bloody stool and would not develop an immunity. In the case of a 17-year-old male who ingested 7.5 milligrams of brodifacoum, it took 50 days for them to recover even with medical intervention. At an even smaller amount, an adult who ingested 1 milligram had bleeding that persisted for a little over 2 months.

Source: Section 7.2 Toxicity, 7.2.1.1 Adults in a document put out by the WHO’s Internally Peer Reviewed Chemical Safety website here

Given the poison available to her, I do not believe that Gale could build up any kind of poison immunity and it would require her doing almost no research to believe she could – which seems out of character for someone who you say has done research. I also do not believe that she could get far in this endeavor without anyone noticing and it would take several months of recovery.

“At the same time, the temporary suspension of in-person learning removed her biggest fear, and with school trips universally off the table, she was able to integrate with her peers to a greater degree than she had since middle school, engaging more fully with her classes and socializing with students outside her immediate sphere with less stigma.”

- How is she socializing? Purely over web conferencing? Some other way?

“...as Gale was an embarrassing social lodestone around her sister's neck.”

Is lodestone the word you want here? According to Meriam Webster it means:

1: magnetite possessing polarity
2: something that strongly attracts

Is Gale attracting socialness?

What kind of music is it that Gale listens to on vinyl? “Music” is listed as an interest but there is no information on it other than that she goes to buy vinyl. Which group is she taking on outings? The preparedness group? What does she like about vinyl?

What does Gale want to do after school? It says she plans to attend college, but there isn’t information about further goals or possible career interests.

What is Gale like academically?

“The biggest factor in favor of Gale's survival of SOTF is how unlikely it is that she attends the trip to begin with.”

- Unfortunately this cannot be counted as an advantage because this section is for traits that would be an advantage on SOTF and the absence of being on SOTF cannot be counted as an advantage if one is already there.

“Should she be persuaded to, however, she is further aided by her comparatively extensive knowledge of the program, its mechanics, and its history, subjects she has pursued to a greater extent than the vast majority of her peers. Gale actually has a comprehensive survival plan laid out for such a situation, which may calm her or give her guidance if she finds herself stuck.”

- I’m not sure I believe that this is actually an advantage. The mechanics of the game are outlined to all of the students at the start, and I’m not sure that knowledge of the “program’s” history, which I assume to be the AT’s history, would be of any practical use either. I’m not sure why she has prepared the possibility of being on SOTF given her strategy has been to never go on trips. If she did think that there was a possibility that she could end up on SOTF, I would expect she knows that she would not survive. She has no sports listed as any hobby. It seems she’s woefully outmatched physically by most of her classmates who are doing any sport. She doesn’t seem to have taken to things like hiking or camping that would give her outdoor knowledge. Basically, it seems she hasn’t prepared for being on SOTF at all in any real sense and her main strategy is just not going on trips, as mentioned.

“While she is clumsy at it, she does have some experience with manipulation, especially in the form of appeals to emotion and playing on people's guilt.”

- Has she been doing this intentionally in the past? Manipulating people’s emotions and guilt? I assumed she was sincere.

“Though of only niche practicality and sometime in the past, Gale has practiced mithridatism to give herself a somewhat higher than average tolerance for arsenic.”

- As previously discussed, this is not possible for a number of reasons.

I feel like it’s missing from her disadvantages that she seems to have no physical ability to speak of. I do not know from this if she’s even capable of the most basic displays of fitness like a push up or running a mile. She is also likely weak from poisoning herself.

Having reached the end of this profile, I think her outburst in school (if you choose to keep it), her insistence on watching many hours of actual murders which she asks others to also watch with her (which has adverse physical and psychological effects on her), and her self-harming via poisoning herself all result in someone who needs more psychological intervention than what she is currently getting. I’m concerned that her family haven’t taken more steps after she’s visibly lost weight, dropped non-SOTF interests and started to poison herself.

She may be recommended to take a break from attending regular high school to seek treatment for some of these conditions in her current state.

That is the critique for now. If you have questions, feel free to contact me. As always, give a post when edits are done.


Edit: I had forgotten to include this while I was writing but there is also this additional article citing that there is no way to build a tolerance to arsenic:

"There is no way of developing a tolerance to arsenic through eating small regular doses. Eating the same amount of arsenic added to the same meal is most likely to kill either all or none of the people that eat it. It’s not a risk worth taking."

This comes from an article by Dr Kathryn Harkup, a chemist and science communicator and author of the book: A Is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie. Source here

[Grand Moff Hissa]

Edited! Dialed down a lot of stuff overall so hopefully no more dying-during-character-creation. Also, teaches me to steal details about false fire alarms from that time in middle school someone actually set the school on fire.

In addition to the requested changes, I swapped her favorite fictional sports team to one whose colors I like better. Not super important and doesn't really adjust any details but wanted to point it out for the sake of completion.

[Ruggahissy]

Hello again.

Thank you very much for the edits. My last critique also had some typos so apologies. There are just a few smaller things left to take care of:

“Her weight is fairly evenly distributed between limbs her limbs and body,"

- Typo.

Gale is kind of an edge case, but her outfit of a white, above-the-knee skirt with (mid-calf?) socks might be a little cold given the abduction will be happening in early winter in New England. However, this one can kind of go either way, since she does have the socks and a hoodie, so I’ll leave it to your discretion if you’d like to keep her outfit as is or opt for some tights or something for warmth. Up to you.

“…responding to a call to relate Eighteenth Century United States politics…”

- Hyphen for eighteenth-century.

“While this has caused notable friction between her and her family, they have grudgingly allowed her to do as she pleases, making up for missed trips with alternate assignments.”

- Some field trips will have no alternate assignment if they are leisure trips or trips not tied to an assignment like a trip to the aquarium or something. For those, she would just stay in study hall or another class all day. She could also choose to just call in sick for those days.

“By and large her friends placate and/or avoid her”

- I think I might have missed this on my first pass, but comma after “large.”

“…and claims the sound quality is better though can only loosely distinguish a difference in most cases.

- Comma between “better” and “though.”

“Gale knows more about the SOTF ACT”

- As far as I can find, SOTF has not been referred to as the SOTF ACT for several versions as a holdover from the Battle Royale days as a reference to it being a government-sponsored “act.” As of the most recent State of the World, SOTF is just referred to as SOTF or it’s unabbreviated name, Survival of the Fittest.

[Grand Moff Hissa]

Edited! Gale no longer has extra limbs, brought a jacket and gloves, does study hall on trip days (but isn't allowed to fake sick), no longer punctuates like William Faulkner on a bender, and no longer names things like Kaishi on a bender.

[Ruggahissy]

Go forth, pale horse rider.

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