S025 - Graves, Katelyn "Kitty"
Posted: Sun Sep 11, 2022 7:13 pm
Name: Katelyn "Kitty" Graves
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Grade: 12
School: John Endecott Memorial Academy
Hobbies and Interests: Drawing, Writing, Sewing, Hiking, Hunting, Horror Genre, Dungeons & Dragons, Archery, Medicine
Appearance: Katelyn is petite, being very short (4'11") and light (93 pounds), with lightly toned muscles from hiking and archery. Her body is vase shaped with somewhat wide shoulders for her height, a relatively small chest, a tiny waist, and wide hips. Her face is round with soft features, a small nose, and bright blue eyes. Her skin is very pale, and her hair is light blonde, and kept in a medium bob cut with spiky ends. Her bangs are usually hanging over the left side of her face, clipped slightly out of the way, but still partially obscuring her left eye. Noticeable bags are under her eyes, caused by a lack of restful sleep. Her posture is usually unnaturally upright and tense when out in public, and slouched when by herself or with people she trusts. Her ears are pierced, with stud piercings, but these are rarely visible. Most of her body is dotted with various faded, jagged scars of varying depth, caused by a car crash she was in when she was young. Her forearms and thighs have additional straight scars in lines, caused by self harm. Her neck also bears a unique scar, being a shallow, patterned scar that circles her entire neck, a leftover from a previous suicide attempt. Besides that, her complexion is mostly clear, with the occasional zit that she treats with acne medication. Her voice is very high pitched, sometimes leading strangers to believe she is younger than she actually is.
Katelyn is usually found wearing a long-sleeved white hoodie that covers her entire upper body, with green cat ears and black buttons sewn onto the hood. When not in school but still out in public, Katelyn sometimes wears a white bandana with a stylized cat mouth on it that covers the lower half of her face, or a self-made, white, cat-like mask, depending on her confidence and how poor her self-image is that day. When not wearing her bandana or mask, she usually has fake fangs inserted over her real canines, to mimic a cat's fangs. Underneath her hoodie, she usually wears simple, black t-shirts. Her legs and pelvis are usually covered by black leggings bearing white, stylized cats from the knees down, sometimes wearing white jeans if the weather is cold. On her feet, she usually wears a pair of brown leather hiking boots, shoes that she wears for comfort rather than style. With great difficulty, she can be convinced to wear more revealing clothing such as black dresses for formal occasions, but she usually does not wear even slightly revealing clothing if she can help it, preferring to keep her body fully covered to hide her scars. Katelyn's fingernails are typically covered by long, white, acrylic nails that give the appearance of claws, and they are also usually painted black underneath the acrylic nails. Regardless of outfit, Katelyn always makes sure to wear a thick, black choker when out in public, to hide her neck scar. On the rare occasion that she decides to use makeup, she usually only uses heavily applied, black eyeshadow circling her eyes alongside minimal mascara and eyeliner.
On the day of the abduction, Katelyn was wearing her usual long-sleeved white hoodie, black t-shirt, leggings, choker, and hiking boots. Alongside these, she was also wearing additional layers in the form of an extra white and pink puffer vest over top her jacket, mittens with cat paw prints on the palms over her hands, and a white and pink winter hat with another set of cat ears.
Biography: Katelyn Graves was born in Salem, Massachusetts on August 13th, 2004 to Brian and Michelle Graves. She is the younger child of two, her older sister Ashlyn Graves being born earlier on November 11th, 2002. Michelle worked as a laboratory technician at a local hospital, while Brian was a former member of the US military, having retired from service a few years prior to Ashlyn being born, and worked as an electrical engineer afterwards.
Very early in Katelyn's life, her parents noticed that she missed various developmental milestones. She struggled learning basic language and how to communicate despite receiving help from her parents, displayed sensitivity to touch and loud noises, avoided eye contact, demonstrated difficulties relating to her sister and other children while mostly keeping to herself, and coped very poorly with even minor changes in her day to day routine. She was eventually diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) after a screening when she was two years old. Following the diagnosis, Katelyn received much more active attention and care from her parents to help her reach development milestones, and received various early intervention services, including speech therapy and counseling to help with her social difficulties.
As Katelyn began to grow up and receive additional care, the way her ASD manifested shifted over time. With the help of the additional care she received, she managed to make up for her basic language deficits by the time she was six years old, but continued to struggle with complex language skills such as understanding figurative language and drawing inferences based off of what was said to her. She continued to struggle socially despite receiving counseling and support from her parents, demonstrating difficulty empathizing with and talking with other children, lacking confidence in social interactions, and often accidentally making other children dislike her through her poor social etiquette. She gradually learned to cope more effectively with changes to routine, but developed many repetitive and compulsive behaviors, and still preferred to have a regular schedule that she would stick to.
Due to Katelyn's difficulties empathizing and socializing with others, alongside being perceived as receiving favoritism from her parents, she had a very poor relationship with her sister, Ashlyn. The two would frequently get into arguments and fights at home often due to disagreements or misunderstandings, but sometimes for no reason at all, with Ashlyn often winning these fights due to being both bigger and more assertive than Katelyn. Their parents did their best to stop the fighting between the two by separating them and encouraging better behavior, but were never able to stop the conflicts entirely, and Katelyn was left feeling unsafe when in her sister's presence, even when they were getting along and not fighting.
Despite her early difficulties with language development and social struggles, Katelyn demonstrated little learning disability and did very well academically due to her possessing an excellent memory and a talent for problem solving. This allowed her to easily retain new information and succeed handily on tests and assignments, receiving high grades for every subject with minimal study. She did however often struggle with group projects and other activities that relied on her poorly developed social skills, despite her school providing remedial classroom time and social counseling from the school's social worker as a part of her IEP.
Socially, Katelyn maintained only a few acquaintances and no close friends throughout much of her early life, often having a better relationship with her adult caretakers than her fellow peers. Many of her peers typically disliked her due to her social awkwardness, poor empathy, and tendency to talk at length about her interests without taking turns in conversation. This led to Katelyn being shunned by most of the children her age and often left isolated during recess and other periods of free time. This isolation caused Katelyn immense distress, as she had an intense interest in her peers and a strong desire to make friends, but nonetheless struggled to maintain even a single close friendship early in her life. To help with this, her mother began to teach her proper etiquette and specific moral behavior in order to help her make friends. This assistance did help Katelyn gain a small number of friends, and as a result Katelyn dutifully follows her mother's lessons to the modern day, but she was still left feeling isolated from the majority of her peers.
The stress from both feeling unsafe at home with her sister and feeling isolated from her peers caused Katelyn to develop emotional and behavioral problems. She had poor self esteem and self control, and suffered from frequent anxiety and panic. Additionally, she often struggled to understand and control her emotions, often leading to her having frequent destructive outbursts and emotional meltdowns. Wanting to help Katelyn's emotional problems but not knowing how to do so on their own, Katelyn's parents opted to begin taking her to undergo cognitive behavioral therapy with a local psychiatrist on top of her continued social counseling, going with her to help her feel more comfortable during the sessions and learn how to better help her. This therapy had a significant impact on Katelyn, helping her learn to cope better with her negative feelings, but it didn't remove the stressors from her life, and the increased time spent focused on her by her parents only worsened Ashlyn's perceptions of favoritism, furthering the divide between the two sisters.
Before his death, Katelyn's father would often take the whole family out for regular hikes and camping trips as a bonding experience. While both Katelyn and her sister didn't enjoy the trips initially, Katelyn eventually grew to enjoy the time spent exploring the wilderness with her family. The camping trips in particular quickly became some of Katelyn's favorites, finding it fun to spend days roughing it in the woods. Her father also often went out hunting with his old friends from the military, promising Katelyn that she would be able to join him on these trips once she was old enough, although she was never able to do so before her father's death.
From a young age, Katelyn had a passion for drawing the vivid images that often filled her imagination, spending much of her free time drawing by herself, finding the activity to be relaxing and fulfilling. While the crayon and pencil drawings she made in her early life were mostly a mishmash of colors and lines typical of most young children, Katelyn's parents were very supportive and encouraged her to develop her skills, buying her sketchpads, art supplies, and books to help her learn how to draw. Using these books and (later in her life) online tutorials, Katelyn gradually developed her skills over the years, spending many hours practicing her drawing and gradually getting better over time.
In the modern day, Katelyn typically draws either in pencil on a sketchpad or on her computer using a tablet monitor, usually while listening to either music or a podcast in the background. Her drawings are very high quality, with Katelyn having a deep grasp of anatomy, perspective, lighting, linework, and color theory due to her extensive practice. Despite the quality of her work, however, she rarely shares these drawings with anyone other than her close personal friends and on her anonymous art blog, due to a lack of confidence in her abilities.
Starting when Katelyn was seven years old, her mother began to teach her how to sew. While Katelyn didn't enjoy the activity much on its own beyond the interest in seeing the finished product, she greatly enjoyed the time spent bonding with and feeling close to her mother. While she initially struggled with the precise hand-eye coordination required to sew, with her mother's guidance she gradually improved, being able to sew simple, small garments and modify her outfits as she saw fit. In the modern day, Katelyn doesn't derive much actual enjoyment from sewing, but continues to occasionally do so both for practical reasons such as fitting her clothing to her figure and as a means of maintaining her memories of her mother.
Shortly after Katelyn turned eight years old, her family decided to get a pet in response to her continued insistence, choosing to adopt a three month old kitten from a local shelter, which Katelyn quickly named "Mister Kitty". The kitten turned out to be very friendly and social, quickly choosing Katelyn to be the one that he wanted to spend the most time with, and as a result she became immediately attached to him. Through his affectionate behavior, he would eventually become a huge emotional support for Katelyn, with her viewing him as someone she could trust and confide in, helping her feel significantly less isolated, even if her peers continued to for the most part reject her.
On June 26th, 2016, when Katelyn was eleven years old, during a routine trip to one of her cognitive behavioral therapy sessions, her parents got into a high speed collision with another vehicle on a major arterial road. Both Michelle and Brian eventually died in the hospital due to injuries they sustained in the car accident, while Katelyn herself survived after sustaining severe injuries due to being in the back seat of the car at the time of the crash. While she was left with no long lasting physical complications, much of her body was scarred due to the lacerations she sustained in the crash, including her face, and the impact on her mental health would continue for the rest of her life.
After the deaths of both their parents and the appropriate court proceedings, Amy Williams, Katelyn and Ashlyn's aunt on their mother's side and the designated guardian in their parents' wills, gained custody of both girls. Shortly thereafter the sisters (and their pet cat) moved in with her and her husband Christopher Williams, who also lived in Salem, Massachusetts. Amy works part-time as a hairdresser, and her husband Christopher works as an automotive mechanic.
Both girls received a significant amount of money from their former house being sold and their parents' life insurance policies, with Amy having the money placed into savings accounts in their names, but this did little to stymy the psychological impacts of the incident on both Katelyn and her sister. Katelyn suffered severe mental health complications due the combined grief at the death of her parents, loss of her primary support, the traumatic experience of the crash, and the life changes that followed from having to move in with her aunt and uncle. To help her deal with the trauma and grief, Katelyn continued undergoing cognitive behavioral therapy, seeing her psychiatrist every week from that point on, rather than once every two weeks like she had before. As a direct result of the incident, Katelyn would eventually be diagnosed with severe major depressive disorder, severe generalized anxiety disorder, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) by her psychiatrist, and given medications to help treat the former two, though these medications would prove ineffective.
Amy and Christopher did their best to help both girls, but were ultimately unprepared to deal with Katelyn's specific needs as a child with ASD struggling with grief and trauma. Her behavioral issues worsened as she struggled to cope, with her emotional outbursts and meltdowns becoming more frequent, and her relationship with her aunt and uncle becoming tense and distant as a direct result. The relationship with her sister worsened significantly too, with Ashlyn irrationally blaming Katelyn for their parents' deaths, justifying this by saying that they only got into a crash because they were on their way to Katelyn's therapy appointment. This blame would eventually become something that Katelyn herself would begin to internalize both due to repetition and her own feelings of survivor's guilt.
Following her parent's deaths, Katelyn felt the need to amplify her open self-expression, and began dressing in a manner similar to her modern day attire, insisting on such despite resistance and a lack of understanding from her sister, aunt, uncle, and less accepting peers. Taking inspiration from her nickname ("Kitty"), her love of and deep emotional connection to her cat, and one of her last remaining connections to her mother (a hoodie that her mother had sewn faux cat ears onto at a young Katelyn's request), she began constantly dressing in a manner to imitate a cat. She saw this aesthetic as a core part of her identity as a person, and more than anything wanted to be perceived as cute like a cat would in spite of her terrible self image and scars. This often had the opposite effect, marking her as an eccentric outcast to most of her peers, and drawing derision from her family, even if they didn't actively try to stop her. Despite this, having not gotten along with her family and peers anyway, Katelyn persisted with this unusual choice of attire, and it wasn't until high school that her aesthetic started drawing more positive attention from people who respected her courage to be and express her authentic self.
After the death of her parents, Katelyn also began to take up writing stories, initially as a coping mechanism, but later because she found the activity of rendering feelings and worlds on a page to be deeply enthralling. Her writing wasn't very good to start, with her language use being both minimalist and bland, but she persisted in spite of that. Eventually, she began to gradually improve over time once she joined an internet community for writers and received constructive feedback on her work. Through this along with consistently reading and practicing, her stories gained complexity and her use of language became much more evocative. Not only that, but her scope of her writing expanded, including not just short stories, but also longer form works that she rarely shared, a few collaborative writing projects, and poetry. The stories depicted by Katelyn were often quite dark, playing off of the horror and tragedy genres more than anything else, but she found great catharsis in these works, and continued adding to them to the modern day.
This enjoyment of writing would eventually culminate in Katelyn deciding to try running her own custom made horror game of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) in her junior year of high school on the weekend, inviting her closest friends to come play in the game. While she was initially uncomfortable with the improvisation required to deal with unexpected behavior from her players, she eventually adapted well, and it ended up being an extremely validating experience for her, with her friends praising her game for its worldbuilding, tense atmosphere, and likeable non-player characters. Not only that, but it also served as a valuable social outlet that Katelyn felt very comfortable participating in, being unafraid to express herself through her writing and roleplaying with her friends. She continued to run sessions of the game every weekend, all the way up to the date of the trip.
The school year following the deaths of their parents was especially tough for both girls, with Katelyn barely managing to pass enough of her classes to move onto the next grade, and Ashlyn being held back, placing her in the same grade as her younger sister. Socially, the loss of her parents only worsened Katelyn's struggles, with her emotional problems and frequent meltdowns further alienating her from her peers, and often resulting in disciplinary action being taken by the school on numerous occasions. Katelyn had very little support outside of her psychiatrist, social counselor, and her cat, being neglected by her aunt and uncle, hated by her sister, and completely isolated by her fellow students. This would eventually lead to Katelyn regularly self-harming as a coping mechanism, cutting her wrists and thighs with razor blades in an effort to punish herself for her perceived wrongdoings, a habit that would persist all the way up to her second suicide attempt.
The lack of support that Katelyn received would eventually lead to her developing suicidal thoughts, believing herself to be unworthy of living when both of her parents died, blaming herself for their deaths, and being unable to cope with her constant, intense feelings of sadness and anxiety. She consistently hid these feelings from both her psychiatrist and counselor, having learned from the internet that being honest about them could lead to her being placed in a mental hospital, somewhere she didn't want to go due to the association of hospitals with her parents' deaths. On the night of July 18th, 2018 when she was thirteen years old, after the rest of her family had gone to sleep, Katelyn attempted suicide by hanging herself with a thick, lengthy extension cord in her bedroom, shutting her cat out of the room in the process. The latter decision would end up foiling her attempt, as her cat ended up indirectly saving her life by meowing loudly outside of her bedroom due to normally sleeping in her bed with her, waking up the rest of her household in the process. Katelyn was found unconscious and was directly rescued by Christopher, being taken to the hospital and treated for the complications of her suicide attempt before spending several weeks interred in the mental health ward in the immediate aftermath. While Katelyn had not been hanging long enough to suffer permanent brain damage, she was left with permanent scarring on her neck, both from the cable itself and also from her unconscious body clawing at her neck to get it off.
Due to this incident, Katelyn immediately began undergoing even more frequent therapy, seeing another psychiatrist that specializes in treating troubled children alongside her regular psychiatrist, and beginning additional medications to treat her depression and anxiety. Amy and Christopher, heeding the advice of the mental health workers treating Katelyn, began to take steps to prevent another attempt while Katelyn stayed at the hospital, removing items that could be used for hanging and making sure that any and all blades and medication were kept behind locks. Ashlyn also became significantly less hostile to her sister in the aftermath of her suicide attempt, realizing that her behavior nearly led to the death of her sister, but failed to properly reconcile for how she treated Katelyn previously, leaving their relationship tense and distant, and Katelyn still uncomfortable around her sister.
With the additional support provided by her more frequent therapy, along with the additional, more effective medication, Katelyn's mental health began to improve as she entered high school, though she still struggled with depression and frequent bouts of anxiety, along with her PTSD. After enrolling in high school at John Endecott Memorial Academy, Katelyn began to make more friends, her improved mental health and social skills allowing her to succeed where she previously failed. While she was still considered strange by most of her peers, she was better able to fit into social niches at school and gained several extremely close friends that she was able to confide in, along with a number of casual friends.
With this more comprehensive support network, Katelyn's mental health really began to improve, lessening her emotional volatility, even if she continued to have her problems. With her mental health improved, the additional assistance provided through her IEP, and her initial difficulties early in life mostly overcome with help, Katelyn succeeded extremely well in school, using her excellent memory and problem solving skills to maintain a 4.0 grade average while taking advanced courses, and only needing to study very lightly, if at all. Her favorite subjects were art and creative writing, due to their relation to her favored hobbies and already developed skills.
After her father's death, Katelyn insisted on continuing to go on regular monthly hikes in his memory, supervised either by friends or relatives when she did so at her guardians insistence to make sure she remained safe. While it wasn't the same without her dad, Katelyn still appreciated the opportunity to explore the outdoors and often felt relaxed when out in nature. Later, at the age of sixteen, Katelyn decided to start hunting as an extension of her hiking hobby, having wanted to do it previously with her dad before his death. She decided to pursue a Basic Hunter Education certificate, receiving it after completing a two day course prior to that year's hunting season.
In order to be able to hunt on her own in compliance with state laws, Katelyn decided to take up archery, eventually joining her high school's archery club. While she initially struggled with basic bow drawing and the specifics of how to aim and fire a bow, once she built up the strength and understood the technique, she proved to be quite accurate when firing a bow, her hand-eye coordination from drawing and sewing translating well to the hobby.
Later on in her life and with great difficulty, Katelyn eventually managed to convince her aunt and uncle to allow her to get her own bow, though it came with the caveat that she was only allowed to access and use any ammunition for it under supervision from a trusted adult, for fear of her hurting herself. After that, Katelyn began to go out on hunting trips with her father's friends from the military during hunting season. During this time, Katelyn picked up very basic, cursory knowledge on the operation of simple firearms from the adult hunters teaching her, though she vastly preferred using her bow, due to the loud noises from the firearms aggravating both her general sensitivity to sounds from her ASD and her trauma from the crash.
Katelyn ended up enjoying hunting greatly once she was able to get into it, learning how to track and sneak up on animals from her father's hunting friends. Not only did it have the same appeal as going out on hikes, but she found managing to successfully hunt an animal to completion to be a thrilling, tense activity. Eventually, as she got older and demonstrated a more stable mental state, her aunt and uncle became more relaxed, letting her go out to hunt small game so long as she was at least accompanied by a friend, rather than requiring an adult to always go with her, something that Katelyn appreciated greatly.
Near the beginning of her Sophomore year of high school, she entered a relationship with a boy named Robin Valenti after he asked her out. This relationship was initially enjoyable, improving Katelyn's mental health to the point of relative stability, but quickly turned toxic and unhealthy. Robin would often ignore her when out in public, despite being very sweet and affectionate to her in private. This disconnect caused Katelyn immense distress, eventually culminating in a messy, stressful breakup seven months into their relationship that sent Katelyn into an emotional downward spiral over the course of the next month.
Not knowing how to properly cope with the emotional turmoil involved in the breakup, combined with her existing mental health struggles that were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, eventually led to Katelyn relapsing on her suicidal feelings and attempting suicide again on the night of April 23rd, 2020, when she was fifteen years old. She planned the attempt a week in advance and once again kept quiet about it, successfully locating the key required to access her medication and downing an entire bottle of antidepressants. She was once again foiled by her cat drawing the attention of the rest of her household, this time by meowing incessantly from within Katelyn's bedroom. After being found unconscious she was quickly rushed to the hospital where she was successfully treated for the overdose, spending another several weeks in the hospital's mental health ward in the aftermath as Amy and Christopher further strengthened the security of implements that Katelyn could use to harm herself at home. Katelyn began more new medications to help manage her symptoms, and continued to receive her usual therapy, though the length of her sessions were doubled for several months afterwards.
Upon returning to school after being gone for several weeks, Katelyn was met with an outpouring of support from her friends who had heard about what happened, many of them expressing sympathy and love for her along with sadness at how close they were to losing her. This caused Katelyn to greatly regret her actions, having not considered how her suicide attempt would have impacted all the people she had come to care about since entering high school, and has since then resulted in her not attempting suicide again.
However, after going through the death of her parents and her own near death experiences, Katelyn slowly started to gain a somewhat morbid fascination with death and dark topics not often discussed by most people, using it as a strange means of coping and coming to terms with the events in her life. While this initially started as Katelyn taking interest in dark fictional works and the horror genre, over time she began to seek darker subject matter, escalating from dark fiction to true crime to looking up footage of real violence on the internet, including heavily edited compilations of Survival of the Fittest. While Katelyn didn't outright take pleasure watching the footage (often being made uncomfortable by the more gruesome deaths) she had difficulty empathizing with the students on-screen and ultimately liked being made uncomfortable per her morbid fascinations. As a result, she found it mentally stimulating to dissect and use as reference for her creative works, which were often quite dark and horrific on their own. Katelyn understood this interest was taboo and abnormal, and as a result made sure not to tell anyone else about it, but otherwise heeded no mind to it, and it ultimately didn't result in any changes in Katelyn's behavior, though it did desensitize her to violence over time.
In the modern day, Katelyn's relationship to her sister Ashlyn is still quite tense. While Ashlyn has come to regret her prior behavior and attempted to try and help her sister with her issues, she has still refused to apologize, and as a result Katelyn is still uncomfortable around her. Although Katelyn wants her relationship with her sister to be better, she is unwilling to take the first steps towards reconciliation herself, leaving the two sisters in a stalemate. The only real point of common ground that they have with each other is a mutual love of the horror genre, with Katelyn sometimes joining Ashlyn to watch horror movies either at home or in theatres, serving as one thing they could generally bond over without difficulty, usually because they didn’t have to speak much to one another in the process.
Katelyn is highly depressive to a fault due to her life experiences, despite how heavily medicated her depression is, and she maintains a deeply pessimistic, fatalistic view of the world as a result, often believing herself to have no real agency over the course her life takes. She also struggles heavily with constant anxious feelings, often being fixated on how a situation could go catastrophically wrong, and she is prone to being overwhelmed by panic in stressful situations. Katelyn's self esteem is very poor as a result of internalizing her sister's abuse, and she has a poor body image due to a combination of her poor self esteem and her extensive scarring, which she tries her best to hide from others with her cute outfits and behaviors, only opening up about these issues to close friends. Much of Katelyn's issues are a result of or comorbid with her Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and because of the circumstances of her trauma, her anxiety issues are particularly severe when it comes to unexpected loud noises, sudden acceleration, and riding in cars (even for a short trip). As a result of her mental health issues and her autism, Katelyn is also often prone to lashing out at people she doesn't like, and having emotional outbursts when she is unable to manage stressful situations, which tends to manifest in impulsive, destructive ways, but she has gotten better at managing her stress as she's gotten older.
Katelyn suffers from an impaired sense of empathy and social skills due to her autism that requires her to try very hard in order to relate to others, which can lead her to accidentally hurting or otherwise bothering others without initially realizing she did anything wrong. As a result of this, Katelyn has had immense trouble in social situations in the past, with her current success in social situations coming from years of trial and error, much of which has earned her many grudges and individuals who can't stand her presence. Katelyn is often extraordinarily shy when out in public and when interacting with new people, due to a debilitating lack of confidence caused by her aforementioned poor self esteem and past social difficulties, keeping interactions to a minimum and not talking whenever possible to avoid potential rejection. When she is around those who have managed to get to know her, however, she is extremely hyperactive and highly social, often acting extremely sweet and friendly with her companions due to her mom teaching her good morals and behaviors when she was young. Because of her trauma, depression, and pessimism mixing with her interests and her sweet behavior, however, Katelyn often alternates between saying sweet, adorable things and deeply disturbing, cynical things, alienating many of her peers that get close to her that might otherwise like her. This isn't helped by the fact that Katelyn doesn't hide her love of morbid topics, often bringing them up even when it's an inappropriate situation to do so.
Katelyn is currently weighing various options when it comes to university, and plans to eventually go into medicine as a career path, ideally wanting to use her well-developed hand-eye coordination, intelligence, and ability to tolerate gruesome imagery to become a trauma surgeon and save lives. To this end, she volunteered at a local hospital the previous summer, wanting to get some hands-on experience in a hospital setting, and has taken courses on how to perform advanced first aid.
Advantages: Katelyn is extremely smart and clever, possessing an excellent memory and creativity along with good problem solving skills. She is physically fit due to her hiking, hunting, and archery hobbies, possessing good upper body strength and excellent endurance, along with experience navigating rough terrain. She is familiar with tracking and stalking techniques, allowing her to remain quiet and hidden when navigating the island. She possesses basic knowledge of how to operate simple firearms, but this knowledge is cursory and doesn't extend to more complex military firearms. Her hand-eye coordination is excellent due to extensive practice with her sewing, drawing, and archery hobbies, making it easier for her to aim and hit targets at a distance, which she has direct experience with. She is desensitized to violence because of her life experiences and her habit of watching footage of real violence, which could make it much easier for her to handle the violence during the game.
Disadvantages: Katelyn is extremely mentally unhealthy, being heavily medicated in order to control her various disorders. Should she lose this medication, her emotional state will greatly worsen and she will likely go through debilitating withdrawal symptoms. She is also impaired significantly by her Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and her ASD, handling extreme stress, loud noises (such as gunshots), and sudden acceleration (such as when getting struck) very poorly. Her struggles to empathize with those around her would likely inhibit her ability to relate to and interpret the intentions of her peers, along with making it difficult to make new allies. Additionally, her past struggles making friends have left her with only a small number of close friends and many people who can't stand her. Katelyn also has a tendency to have emotional outbursts that lead to her acting impulsively and often destructively when stressed, which could easily harm relations with others or otherwise greatly worsen her situation if she makes a bad decision in the moment. Finally, her extremely small size relative to the rest of her class would mean that she would be easily overpowered by most of her classmates despite her physical fitness, should they manage to get into close quarters with her.
Designated Number: Student No. 025
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Designated Weapon: Outdoor camping heater
Conclusion: Christ, where to even begin with this one. If you cheat death once and just try to kill yourself later, that says it all. Easy five bucks on first out. - Veronica Rai
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Grade: 12
School: John Endecott Memorial Academy
Hobbies and Interests: Drawing, Writing, Sewing, Hiking, Hunting, Horror Genre, Dungeons & Dragons, Archery, Medicine
Appearance: Katelyn is petite, being very short (4'11") and light (93 pounds), with lightly toned muscles from hiking and archery. Her body is vase shaped with somewhat wide shoulders for her height, a relatively small chest, a tiny waist, and wide hips. Her face is round with soft features, a small nose, and bright blue eyes. Her skin is very pale, and her hair is light blonde, and kept in a medium bob cut with spiky ends. Her bangs are usually hanging over the left side of her face, clipped slightly out of the way, but still partially obscuring her left eye. Noticeable bags are under her eyes, caused by a lack of restful sleep. Her posture is usually unnaturally upright and tense when out in public, and slouched when by herself or with people she trusts. Her ears are pierced, with stud piercings, but these are rarely visible. Most of her body is dotted with various faded, jagged scars of varying depth, caused by a car crash she was in when she was young. Her forearms and thighs have additional straight scars in lines, caused by self harm. Her neck also bears a unique scar, being a shallow, patterned scar that circles her entire neck, a leftover from a previous suicide attempt. Besides that, her complexion is mostly clear, with the occasional zit that she treats with acne medication. Her voice is very high pitched, sometimes leading strangers to believe she is younger than she actually is.
Katelyn is usually found wearing a long-sleeved white hoodie that covers her entire upper body, with green cat ears and black buttons sewn onto the hood. When not in school but still out in public, Katelyn sometimes wears a white bandana with a stylized cat mouth on it that covers the lower half of her face, or a self-made, white, cat-like mask, depending on her confidence and how poor her self-image is that day. When not wearing her bandana or mask, she usually has fake fangs inserted over her real canines, to mimic a cat's fangs. Underneath her hoodie, she usually wears simple, black t-shirts. Her legs and pelvis are usually covered by black leggings bearing white, stylized cats from the knees down, sometimes wearing white jeans if the weather is cold. On her feet, she usually wears a pair of brown leather hiking boots, shoes that she wears for comfort rather than style. With great difficulty, she can be convinced to wear more revealing clothing such as black dresses for formal occasions, but she usually does not wear even slightly revealing clothing if she can help it, preferring to keep her body fully covered to hide her scars. Katelyn's fingernails are typically covered by long, white, acrylic nails that give the appearance of claws, and they are also usually painted black underneath the acrylic nails. Regardless of outfit, Katelyn always makes sure to wear a thick, black choker when out in public, to hide her neck scar. On the rare occasion that she decides to use makeup, she usually only uses heavily applied, black eyeshadow circling her eyes alongside minimal mascara and eyeliner.
On the day of the abduction, Katelyn was wearing her usual long-sleeved white hoodie, black t-shirt, leggings, choker, and hiking boots. Alongside these, she was also wearing additional layers in the form of an extra white and pink puffer vest over top her jacket, mittens with cat paw prints on the palms over her hands, and a white and pink winter hat with another set of cat ears.
Biography: Katelyn Graves was born in Salem, Massachusetts on August 13th, 2004 to Brian and Michelle Graves. She is the younger child of two, her older sister Ashlyn Graves being born earlier on November 11th, 2002. Michelle worked as a laboratory technician at a local hospital, while Brian was a former member of the US military, having retired from service a few years prior to Ashlyn being born, and worked as an electrical engineer afterwards.
Very early in Katelyn's life, her parents noticed that she missed various developmental milestones. She struggled learning basic language and how to communicate despite receiving help from her parents, displayed sensitivity to touch and loud noises, avoided eye contact, demonstrated difficulties relating to her sister and other children while mostly keeping to herself, and coped very poorly with even minor changes in her day to day routine. She was eventually diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) after a screening when she was two years old. Following the diagnosis, Katelyn received much more active attention and care from her parents to help her reach development milestones, and received various early intervention services, including speech therapy and counseling to help with her social difficulties.
As Katelyn began to grow up and receive additional care, the way her ASD manifested shifted over time. With the help of the additional care she received, she managed to make up for her basic language deficits by the time she was six years old, but continued to struggle with complex language skills such as understanding figurative language and drawing inferences based off of what was said to her. She continued to struggle socially despite receiving counseling and support from her parents, demonstrating difficulty empathizing with and talking with other children, lacking confidence in social interactions, and often accidentally making other children dislike her through her poor social etiquette. She gradually learned to cope more effectively with changes to routine, but developed many repetitive and compulsive behaviors, and still preferred to have a regular schedule that she would stick to.
Due to Katelyn's difficulties empathizing and socializing with others, alongside being perceived as receiving favoritism from her parents, she had a very poor relationship with her sister, Ashlyn. The two would frequently get into arguments and fights at home often due to disagreements or misunderstandings, but sometimes for no reason at all, with Ashlyn often winning these fights due to being both bigger and more assertive than Katelyn. Their parents did their best to stop the fighting between the two by separating them and encouraging better behavior, but were never able to stop the conflicts entirely, and Katelyn was left feeling unsafe when in her sister's presence, even when they were getting along and not fighting.
Despite her early difficulties with language development and social struggles, Katelyn demonstrated little learning disability and did very well academically due to her possessing an excellent memory and a talent for problem solving. This allowed her to easily retain new information and succeed handily on tests and assignments, receiving high grades for every subject with minimal study. She did however often struggle with group projects and other activities that relied on her poorly developed social skills, despite her school providing remedial classroom time and social counseling from the school's social worker as a part of her IEP.
Socially, Katelyn maintained only a few acquaintances and no close friends throughout much of her early life, often having a better relationship with her adult caretakers than her fellow peers. Many of her peers typically disliked her due to her social awkwardness, poor empathy, and tendency to talk at length about her interests without taking turns in conversation. This led to Katelyn being shunned by most of the children her age and often left isolated during recess and other periods of free time. This isolation caused Katelyn immense distress, as she had an intense interest in her peers and a strong desire to make friends, but nonetheless struggled to maintain even a single close friendship early in her life. To help with this, her mother began to teach her proper etiquette and specific moral behavior in order to help her make friends. This assistance did help Katelyn gain a small number of friends, and as a result Katelyn dutifully follows her mother's lessons to the modern day, but she was still left feeling isolated from the majority of her peers.
The stress from both feeling unsafe at home with her sister and feeling isolated from her peers caused Katelyn to develop emotional and behavioral problems. She had poor self esteem and self control, and suffered from frequent anxiety and panic. Additionally, she often struggled to understand and control her emotions, often leading to her having frequent destructive outbursts and emotional meltdowns. Wanting to help Katelyn's emotional problems but not knowing how to do so on their own, Katelyn's parents opted to begin taking her to undergo cognitive behavioral therapy with a local psychiatrist on top of her continued social counseling, going with her to help her feel more comfortable during the sessions and learn how to better help her. This therapy had a significant impact on Katelyn, helping her learn to cope better with her negative feelings, but it didn't remove the stressors from her life, and the increased time spent focused on her by her parents only worsened Ashlyn's perceptions of favoritism, furthering the divide between the two sisters.
Before his death, Katelyn's father would often take the whole family out for regular hikes and camping trips as a bonding experience. While both Katelyn and her sister didn't enjoy the trips initially, Katelyn eventually grew to enjoy the time spent exploring the wilderness with her family. The camping trips in particular quickly became some of Katelyn's favorites, finding it fun to spend days roughing it in the woods. Her father also often went out hunting with his old friends from the military, promising Katelyn that she would be able to join him on these trips once she was old enough, although she was never able to do so before her father's death.
From a young age, Katelyn had a passion for drawing the vivid images that often filled her imagination, spending much of her free time drawing by herself, finding the activity to be relaxing and fulfilling. While the crayon and pencil drawings she made in her early life were mostly a mishmash of colors and lines typical of most young children, Katelyn's parents were very supportive and encouraged her to develop her skills, buying her sketchpads, art supplies, and books to help her learn how to draw. Using these books and (later in her life) online tutorials, Katelyn gradually developed her skills over the years, spending many hours practicing her drawing and gradually getting better over time.
In the modern day, Katelyn typically draws either in pencil on a sketchpad or on her computer using a tablet monitor, usually while listening to either music or a podcast in the background. Her drawings are very high quality, with Katelyn having a deep grasp of anatomy, perspective, lighting, linework, and color theory due to her extensive practice. Despite the quality of her work, however, she rarely shares these drawings with anyone other than her close personal friends and on her anonymous art blog, due to a lack of confidence in her abilities.
Starting when Katelyn was seven years old, her mother began to teach her how to sew. While Katelyn didn't enjoy the activity much on its own beyond the interest in seeing the finished product, she greatly enjoyed the time spent bonding with and feeling close to her mother. While she initially struggled with the precise hand-eye coordination required to sew, with her mother's guidance she gradually improved, being able to sew simple, small garments and modify her outfits as she saw fit. In the modern day, Katelyn doesn't derive much actual enjoyment from sewing, but continues to occasionally do so both for practical reasons such as fitting her clothing to her figure and as a means of maintaining her memories of her mother.
Shortly after Katelyn turned eight years old, her family decided to get a pet in response to her continued insistence, choosing to adopt a three month old kitten from a local shelter, which Katelyn quickly named "Mister Kitty". The kitten turned out to be very friendly and social, quickly choosing Katelyn to be the one that he wanted to spend the most time with, and as a result she became immediately attached to him. Through his affectionate behavior, he would eventually become a huge emotional support for Katelyn, with her viewing him as someone she could trust and confide in, helping her feel significantly less isolated, even if her peers continued to for the most part reject her.
On June 26th, 2016, when Katelyn was eleven years old, during a routine trip to one of her cognitive behavioral therapy sessions, her parents got into a high speed collision with another vehicle on a major arterial road. Both Michelle and Brian eventually died in the hospital due to injuries they sustained in the car accident, while Katelyn herself survived after sustaining severe injuries due to being in the back seat of the car at the time of the crash. While she was left with no long lasting physical complications, much of her body was scarred due to the lacerations she sustained in the crash, including her face, and the impact on her mental health would continue for the rest of her life.
After the deaths of both their parents and the appropriate court proceedings, Amy Williams, Katelyn and Ashlyn's aunt on their mother's side and the designated guardian in their parents' wills, gained custody of both girls. Shortly thereafter the sisters (and their pet cat) moved in with her and her husband Christopher Williams, who also lived in Salem, Massachusetts. Amy works part-time as a hairdresser, and her husband Christopher works as an automotive mechanic.
Both girls received a significant amount of money from their former house being sold and their parents' life insurance policies, with Amy having the money placed into savings accounts in their names, but this did little to stymy the psychological impacts of the incident on both Katelyn and her sister. Katelyn suffered severe mental health complications due the combined grief at the death of her parents, loss of her primary support, the traumatic experience of the crash, and the life changes that followed from having to move in with her aunt and uncle. To help her deal with the trauma and grief, Katelyn continued undergoing cognitive behavioral therapy, seeing her psychiatrist every week from that point on, rather than once every two weeks like she had before. As a direct result of the incident, Katelyn would eventually be diagnosed with severe major depressive disorder, severe generalized anxiety disorder, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) by her psychiatrist, and given medications to help treat the former two, though these medications would prove ineffective.
Amy and Christopher did their best to help both girls, but were ultimately unprepared to deal with Katelyn's specific needs as a child with ASD struggling with grief and trauma. Her behavioral issues worsened as she struggled to cope, with her emotional outbursts and meltdowns becoming more frequent, and her relationship with her aunt and uncle becoming tense and distant as a direct result. The relationship with her sister worsened significantly too, with Ashlyn irrationally blaming Katelyn for their parents' deaths, justifying this by saying that they only got into a crash because they were on their way to Katelyn's therapy appointment. This blame would eventually become something that Katelyn herself would begin to internalize both due to repetition and her own feelings of survivor's guilt.
Following her parent's deaths, Katelyn felt the need to amplify her open self-expression, and began dressing in a manner similar to her modern day attire, insisting on such despite resistance and a lack of understanding from her sister, aunt, uncle, and less accepting peers. Taking inspiration from her nickname ("Kitty"), her love of and deep emotional connection to her cat, and one of her last remaining connections to her mother (a hoodie that her mother had sewn faux cat ears onto at a young Katelyn's request), she began constantly dressing in a manner to imitate a cat. She saw this aesthetic as a core part of her identity as a person, and more than anything wanted to be perceived as cute like a cat would in spite of her terrible self image and scars. This often had the opposite effect, marking her as an eccentric outcast to most of her peers, and drawing derision from her family, even if they didn't actively try to stop her. Despite this, having not gotten along with her family and peers anyway, Katelyn persisted with this unusual choice of attire, and it wasn't until high school that her aesthetic started drawing more positive attention from people who respected her courage to be and express her authentic self.
After the death of her parents, Katelyn also began to take up writing stories, initially as a coping mechanism, but later because she found the activity of rendering feelings and worlds on a page to be deeply enthralling. Her writing wasn't very good to start, with her language use being both minimalist and bland, but she persisted in spite of that. Eventually, she began to gradually improve over time once she joined an internet community for writers and received constructive feedback on her work. Through this along with consistently reading and practicing, her stories gained complexity and her use of language became much more evocative. Not only that, but her scope of her writing expanded, including not just short stories, but also longer form works that she rarely shared, a few collaborative writing projects, and poetry. The stories depicted by Katelyn were often quite dark, playing off of the horror and tragedy genres more than anything else, but she found great catharsis in these works, and continued adding to them to the modern day.
This enjoyment of writing would eventually culminate in Katelyn deciding to try running her own custom made horror game of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) in her junior year of high school on the weekend, inviting her closest friends to come play in the game. While she was initially uncomfortable with the improvisation required to deal with unexpected behavior from her players, she eventually adapted well, and it ended up being an extremely validating experience for her, with her friends praising her game for its worldbuilding, tense atmosphere, and likeable non-player characters. Not only that, but it also served as a valuable social outlet that Katelyn felt very comfortable participating in, being unafraid to express herself through her writing and roleplaying with her friends. She continued to run sessions of the game every weekend, all the way up to the date of the trip.
The school year following the deaths of their parents was especially tough for both girls, with Katelyn barely managing to pass enough of her classes to move onto the next grade, and Ashlyn being held back, placing her in the same grade as her younger sister. Socially, the loss of her parents only worsened Katelyn's struggles, with her emotional problems and frequent meltdowns further alienating her from her peers, and often resulting in disciplinary action being taken by the school on numerous occasions. Katelyn had very little support outside of her psychiatrist, social counselor, and her cat, being neglected by her aunt and uncle, hated by her sister, and completely isolated by her fellow students. This would eventually lead to Katelyn regularly self-harming as a coping mechanism, cutting her wrists and thighs with razor blades in an effort to punish herself for her perceived wrongdoings, a habit that would persist all the way up to her second suicide attempt.
The lack of support that Katelyn received would eventually lead to her developing suicidal thoughts, believing herself to be unworthy of living when both of her parents died, blaming herself for their deaths, and being unable to cope with her constant, intense feelings of sadness and anxiety. She consistently hid these feelings from both her psychiatrist and counselor, having learned from the internet that being honest about them could lead to her being placed in a mental hospital, somewhere she didn't want to go due to the association of hospitals with her parents' deaths. On the night of July 18th, 2018 when she was thirteen years old, after the rest of her family had gone to sleep, Katelyn attempted suicide by hanging herself with a thick, lengthy extension cord in her bedroom, shutting her cat out of the room in the process. The latter decision would end up foiling her attempt, as her cat ended up indirectly saving her life by meowing loudly outside of her bedroom due to normally sleeping in her bed with her, waking up the rest of her household in the process. Katelyn was found unconscious and was directly rescued by Christopher, being taken to the hospital and treated for the complications of her suicide attempt before spending several weeks interred in the mental health ward in the immediate aftermath. While Katelyn had not been hanging long enough to suffer permanent brain damage, she was left with permanent scarring on her neck, both from the cable itself and also from her unconscious body clawing at her neck to get it off.
Due to this incident, Katelyn immediately began undergoing even more frequent therapy, seeing another psychiatrist that specializes in treating troubled children alongside her regular psychiatrist, and beginning additional medications to treat her depression and anxiety. Amy and Christopher, heeding the advice of the mental health workers treating Katelyn, began to take steps to prevent another attempt while Katelyn stayed at the hospital, removing items that could be used for hanging and making sure that any and all blades and medication were kept behind locks. Ashlyn also became significantly less hostile to her sister in the aftermath of her suicide attempt, realizing that her behavior nearly led to the death of her sister, but failed to properly reconcile for how she treated Katelyn previously, leaving their relationship tense and distant, and Katelyn still uncomfortable around her sister.
With the additional support provided by her more frequent therapy, along with the additional, more effective medication, Katelyn's mental health began to improve as she entered high school, though she still struggled with depression and frequent bouts of anxiety, along with her PTSD. After enrolling in high school at John Endecott Memorial Academy, Katelyn began to make more friends, her improved mental health and social skills allowing her to succeed where she previously failed. While she was still considered strange by most of her peers, she was better able to fit into social niches at school and gained several extremely close friends that she was able to confide in, along with a number of casual friends.
With this more comprehensive support network, Katelyn's mental health really began to improve, lessening her emotional volatility, even if she continued to have her problems. With her mental health improved, the additional assistance provided through her IEP, and her initial difficulties early in life mostly overcome with help, Katelyn succeeded extremely well in school, using her excellent memory and problem solving skills to maintain a 4.0 grade average while taking advanced courses, and only needing to study very lightly, if at all. Her favorite subjects were art and creative writing, due to their relation to her favored hobbies and already developed skills.
After her father's death, Katelyn insisted on continuing to go on regular monthly hikes in his memory, supervised either by friends or relatives when she did so at her guardians insistence to make sure she remained safe. While it wasn't the same without her dad, Katelyn still appreciated the opportunity to explore the outdoors and often felt relaxed when out in nature. Later, at the age of sixteen, Katelyn decided to start hunting as an extension of her hiking hobby, having wanted to do it previously with her dad before his death. She decided to pursue a Basic Hunter Education certificate, receiving it after completing a two day course prior to that year's hunting season.
In order to be able to hunt on her own in compliance with state laws, Katelyn decided to take up archery, eventually joining her high school's archery club. While she initially struggled with basic bow drawing and the specifics of how to aim and fire a bow, once she built up the strength and understood the technique, she proved to be quite accurate when firing a bow, her hand-eye coordination from drawing and sewing translating well to the hobby.
Later on in her life and with great difficulty, Katelyn eventually managed to convince her aunt and uncle to allow her to get her own bow, though it came with the caveat that she was only allowed to access and use any ammunition for it under supervision from a trusted adult, for fear of her hurting herself. After that, Katelyn began to go out on hunting trips with her father's friends from the military during hunting season. During this time, Katelyn picked up very basic, cursory knowledge on the operation of simple firearms from the adult hunters teaching her, though she vastly preferred using her bow, due to the loud noises from the firearms aggravating both her general sensitivity to sounds from her ASD and her trauma from the crash.
Katelyn ended up enjoying hunting greatly once she was able to get into it, learning how to track and sneak up on animals from her father's hunting friends. Not only did it have the same appeal as going out on hikes, but she found managing to successfully hunt an animal to completion to be a thrilling, tense activity. Eventually, as she got older and demonstrated a more stable mental state, her aunt and uncle became more relaxed, letting her go out to hunt small game so long as she was at least accompanied by a friend, rather than requiring an adult to always go with her, something that Katelyn appreciated greatly.
Near the beginning of her Sophomore year of high school, she entered a relationship with a boy named Robin Valenti after he asked her out. This relationship was initially enjoyable, improving Katelyn's mental health to the point of relative stability, but quickly turned toxic and unhealthy. Robin would often ignore her when out in public, despite being very sweet and affectionate to her in private. This disconnect caused Katelyn immense distress, eventually culminating in a messy, stressful breakup seven months into their relationship that sent Katelyn into an emotional downward spiral over the course of the next month.
Not knowing how to properly cope with the emotional turmoil involved in the breakup, combined with her existing mental health struggles that were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, eventually led to Katelyn relapsing on her suicidal feelings and attempting suicide again on the night of April 23rd, 2020, when she was fifteen years old. She planned the attempt a week in advance and once again kept quiet about it, successfully locating the key required to access her medication and downing an entire bottle of antidepressants. She was once again foiled by her cat drawing the attention of the rest of her household, this time by meowing incessantly from within Katelyn's bedroom. After being found unconscious she was quickly rushed to the hospital where she was successfully treated for the overdose, spending another several weeks in the hospital's mental health ward in the aftermath as Amy and Christopher further strengthened the security of implements that Katelyn could use to harm herself at home. Katelyn began more new medications to help manage her symptoms, and continued to receive her usual therapy, though the length of her sessions were doubled for several months afterwards.
Upon returning to school after being gone for several weeks, Katelyn was met with an outpouring of support from her friends who had heard about what happened, many of them expressing sympathy and love for her along with sadness at how close they were to losing her. This caused Katelyn to greatly regret her actions, having not considered how her suicide attempt would have impacted all the people she had come to care about since entering high school, and has since then resulted in her not attempting suicide again.
However, after going through the death of her parents and her own near death experiences, Katelyn slowly started to gain a somewhat morbid fascination with death and dark topics not often discussed by most people, using it as a strange means of coping and coming to terms with the events in her life. While this initially started as Katelyn taking interest in dark fictional works and the horror genre, over time she began to seek darker subject matter, escalating from dark fiction to true crime to looking up footage of real violence on the internet, including heavily edited compilations of Survival of the Fittest. While Katelyn didn't outright take pleasure watching the footage (often being made uncomfortable by the more gruesome deaths) she had difficulty empathizing with the students on-screen and ultimately liked being made uncomfortable per her morbid fascinations. As a result, she found it mentally stimulating to dissect and use as reference for her creative works, which were often quite dark and horrific on their own. Katelyn understood this interest was taboo and abnormal, and as a result made sure not to tell anyone else about it, but otherwise heeded no mind to it, and it ultimately didn't result in any changes in Katelyn's behavior, though it did desensitize her to violence over time.
In the modern day, Katelyn's relationship to her sister Ashlyn is still quite tense. While Ashlyn has come to regret her prior behavior and attempted to try and help her sister with her issues, she has still refused to apologize, and as a result Katelyn is still uncomfortable around her. Although Katelyn wants her relationship with her sister to be better, she is unwilling to take the first steps towards reconciliation herself, leaving the two sisters in a stalemate. The only real point of common ground that they have with each other is a mutual love of the horror genre, with Katelyn sometimes joining Ashlyn to watch horror movies either at home or in theatres, serving as one thing they could generally bond over without difficulty, usually because they didn’t have to speak much to one another in the process.
Katelyn is highly depressive to a fault due to her life experiences, despite how heavily medicated her depression is, and she maintains a deeply pessimistic, fatalistic view of the world as a result, often believing herself to have no real agency over the course her life takes. She also struggles heavily with constant anxious feelings, often being fixated on how a situation could go catastrophically wrong, and she is prone to being overwhelmed by panic in stressful situations. Katelyn's self esteem is very poor as a result of internalizing her sister's abuse, and she has a poor body image due to a combination of her poor self esteem and her extensive scarring, which she tries her best to hide from others with her cute outfits and behaviors, only opening up about these issues to close friends. Much of Katelyn's issues are a result of or comorbid with her Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and because of the circumstances of her trauma, her anxiety issues are particularly severe when it comes to unexpected loud noises, sudden acceleration, and riding in cars (even for a short trip). As a result of her mental health issues and her autism, Katelyn is also often prone to lashing out at people she doesn't like, and having emotional outbursts when she is unable to manage stressful situations, which tends to manifest in impulsive, destructive ways, but she has gotten better at managing her stress as she's gotten older.
Katelyn suffers from an impaired sense of empathy and social skills due to her autism that requires her to try very hard in order to relate to others, which can lead her to accidentally hurting or otherwise bothering others without initially realizing she did anything wrong. As a result of this, Katelyn has had immense trouble in social situations in the past, with her current success in social situations coming from years of trial and error, much of which has earned her many grudges and individuals who can't stand her presence. Katelyn is often extraordinarily shy when out in public and when interacting with new people, due to a debilitating lack of confidence caused by her aforementioned poor self esteem and past social difficulties, keeping interactions to a minimum and not talking whenever possible to avoid potential rejection. When she is around those who have managed to get to know her, however, she is extremely hyperactive and highly social, often acting extremely sweet and friendly with her companions due to her mom teaching her good morals and behaviors when she was young. Because of her trauma, depression, and pessimism mixing with her interests and her sweet behavior, however, Katelyn often alternates between saying sweet, adorable things and deeply disturbing, cynical things, alienating many of her peers that get close to her that might otherwise like her. This isn't helped by the fact that Katelyn doesn't hide her love of morbid topics, often bringing them up even when it's an inappropriate situation to do so.
Katelyn is currently weighing various options when it comes to university, and plans to eventually go into medicine as a career path, ideally wanting to use her well-developed hand-eye coordination, intelligence, and ability to tolerate gruesome imagery to become a trauma surgeon and save lives. To this end, she volunteered at a local hospital the previous summer, wanting to get some hands-on experience in a hospital setting, and has taken courses on how to perform advanced first aid.
Advantages: Katelyn is extremely smart and clever, possessing an excellent memory and creativity along with good problem solving skills. She is physically fit due to her hiking, hunting, and archery hobbies, possessing good upper body strength and excellent endurance, along with experience navigating rough terrain. She is familiar with tracking and stalking techniques, allowing her to remain quiet and hidden when navigating the island. She possesses basic knowledge of how to operate simple firearms, but this knowledge is cursory and doesn't extend to more complex military firearms. Her hand-eye coordination is excellent due to extensive practice with her sewing, drawing, and archery hobbies, making it easier for her to aim and hit targets at a distance, which she has direct experience with. She is desensitized to violence because of her life experiences and her habit of watching footage of real violence, which could make it much easier for her to handle the violence during the game.
Disadvantages: Katelyn is extremely mentally unhealthy, being heavily medicated in order to control her various disorders. Should she lose this medication, her emotional state will greatly worsen and she will likely go through debilitating withdrawal symptoms. She is also impaired significantly by her Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and her ASD, handling extreme stress, loud noises (such as gunshots), and sudden acceleration (such as when getting struck) very poorly. Her struggles to empathize with those around her would likely inhibit her ability to relate to and interpret the intentions of her peers, along with making it difficult to make new allies. Additionally, her past struggles making friends have left her with only a small number of close friends and many people who can't stand her. Katelyn also has a tendency to have emotional outbursts that lead to her acting impulsively and often destructively when stressed, which could easily harm relations with others or otherwise greatly worsen her situation if she makes a bad decision in the moment. Finally, her extremely small size relative to the rest of her class would mean that she would be easily overpowered by most of her classmates despite her physical fitness, should they manage to get into close quarters with her.
Designated Number: Student No. 025
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Designated Weapon: Outdoor camping heater
Conclusion: Christ, where to even begin with this one. If you cheat death once and just try to kill yourself later, that says it all. Easy five bucks on first out. - Veronica Rai