Keith Thompson*

[Fiori]

Name: Keith Thompson
Gender: Male
Age: 16
Grade: Junior
School: Cochise High School
Hobbies and Interests: Video games, comic books, anime, playing the guitar, drawing.

Appearance: Standing at 5'5 and weighing only 120 lbs, Keith is a notably short and skinny individual. His skin is paler than most of his peers, due to his preference towards staying indoors over outdoor activities, and the dark circles under his eyes are the results of a lifetime of staying up too late staring at a computer/tv screen.

He has something of an angular face, most of which is often hidden behind a mop of straight blonde hair that reaches his jawline. Even when he brushes most of it aside, his right eye often finds itself concealed behind his bangs, something which has often led to his peers labelling his hairstyle as an emo cut. Other then that his facial features are somewhat unassuming, neither attractive or unattractive enough to really stand out. He does however appear notably youthful for his age, with many of his peers mistaking him for a 14 or 15 year old instead of a 16 year old.

Temperature permitting, he is often found wearing his signature red hoody, along with faded jeans and a pair of black & white trainers. Whenever it's too hot however, he generally prefers to wear long sleeved shirts and other unrevealing clothing, avoiding shorts and t-shirts unless it's seriously impractical to do so.

Biography: Born and raised in Las Vegas, Keith spent the first twelve years of his life growing up in the city suburbs. The younger of two siblings, Keith spent most of his life growing up with his older sister Caroline and his mother Abigail, seeing little of his father after his parents divorced two years after his birth. As a result, he adores his mother more than most teenagers his age, seeing as for the most part she was the only person looking out for him as he grew up. His relationship with his sister however is somewhat caustic, as the two have had something of a sibling rivalry going on for as long as Keith could remember, thanks to his sister's enjoyment in teasing her younger brother. Even though this rivalry has mostly disappeared by the time Keith entered high school, even to this day Keith is very jealous of his older sister's popularity and social confidence, two things that Keith has always lacked in.

Despite his mother's reasonable income as a consultant, growing up in a family of three with only one wage earner meant that his early years were somewhat frugal. Although his family were never poor by any means and for the most part lived quite comfortably, he had to settle for the fact that most of his peers where more well off than he was. Which, given the fact that Keith was the kind of person who always wanted to keep up to date with the latest Nintendo consoles, was something that brought him much grief. It wasn't until his mother married Jake, a firefighter from Arizona whom she had met during a friend's wedding, that this state of affairs changed. However, as part of this change his family moved from Las Vegas to Kingman when he was 12 years old, made possible by the fact that his mother's job allowed her to work from home.

Having spent most of his life growing up in a city, moving to a smaller town proved to somewhat difficult at first for Keith. He was a city boy at heart, having grown accustomed to the benefits of living in a metropolis like Vegas, as a result he feels that living in Kingman is like living in the middle of nowhere. Whilst he was always somewhat ambivalent about the hustle and bustle of city life, he missed the variety of entertainment venues and restaurants that Vegas had to offer, not to mention his dislike for the dusty Arizona countryside. However, in many ways things hadn't changed for the young boy. Back in Las Vegas Keith was a particularly shy child, reflected in ways such as his preference towards wearing unrevealing clothing, preferring to keep to himself rather than go out of his way to make acquaintances. As a result, he only had a handful of people he called friends back in Vegas, and even after moving to Kingman his shy disposition still posed a difficulties despite his attempts to open up more.

Middle school for Keith proved to be a difficult period of his life. Keith was never a particularly strong child, due to his dislike for physical actives and poor diet, which along with his shy nature made him a prime target for bullies who took advantage of his short stature and poor social skills. While bullying is still an issue for Keith, it is no longer the major problem it once was thanks to Cochise's stricter policies on the matter. While the worst of it is behind him, he still carries the mental scars that leave him prone to occasional anxiety.

Once he arrived in Cochise, Keith began to try and open up more, seeing it as a chance to move on from his shy childhood and reinvent himself as a more socially confident individual. This attempt at opening up more has led to somewhat mixed results. On the one hand, Keith has made more friends at Cochise than he ever had in his previous schools, mostly fellow gaming and anime enthusiasts such as himself. However, there have been many times when his attempts at socialising have backfired thanks to his inexperience, especially when it comes to speaking to girls. Unsurprisingly for someone as socially awkward as Keith, he has never had a girlfriend or gone on a date, a fact that bothers him more than he lets on. Although his lack of romantic experience was something that didn't trouble him at first, as he grew older it has slowly began to irritate him more and more, especially once he reached Junior year and he realised that a number of his peers had already lost their virginity by that point.

As far as his aspirations go, Keith has spent most of his life not knowing what to do with himself in the future. Academically, he scores tend to be average across the board, with the exception of Art and Music which he usually gets moderately high grades at. He spends most free days either playing video games, reading comic books about superheroes or watching shonen anime on the internet. It's only somewhat recently during his final few years of education that he's began to genuinely think about what he wants to do with his life, a question that still bugs him to this very day.

That said, he does have some skills that he has honed over the years. For as long as he could remember, he has enjoyed drawing cartoons, from simple doodles to short comic strips. By the time he began attending Cochise, he had developed something of a unique art style that took influences from both Western and Eastern cartoons, although he's done little to do anything useful with it. Apart from several failed attempts at producing gaming themed webcomics, he hasn't made much use of his drawing skills, even though whenever he's shared his illustrations he has often been complimented on them.

He's also recently spent the last few years of his life learning how to use the acoustic guitar, originally with the intention of trying to become popular on Youtube, although it's become apparent to him that he is nowhere near talented enough for that to ever be the case. Which isn't to say that he isn't better than most at the instrument, but most of the time he only bothers to learn how to do acoustic versions of Nintendo songs and anime openings.

Advantages: Because of his unassuming nature, Keith is very good at avoiding attention, and could potentially slip under the radar and avoid being targeted by other players. Having a smaller social circle than most of his fellow classmates also means he has less friends to be concerned about, allowing him to focus more on his own survival.
Disadvantages: Keith is both physically weak and socially incompetent, not to mention lacking in any skills that would be useful in a survival situation. His social anxiety could also easily impede him in a stressful situation such as SOTF.