B008 - Futscher, Demetri [DECEASED]

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Name: Demetri Futscher
Gender: Male
Age: 17
Grade: 12
School: George Hunter High School
Hobbies and Interests: Soccer, math, Magic the Gathering, poker and casual gambling, punk music, acoustic and electric guitar, creative writing, photography, memes, alt-right internet culture.

Appearance: Demetri is 5'11" and is a slightly pale Caucasian who burns relatively easily in strong sunlight. He is lanky with small and bony shoulders and a thin and contoured V-shape waist. Given his height and athleticism he is slightly underdeveloped at only 150 lb. on average, and he doesn't carry much in the way of visible muscle except for slight biceps and calves.

Demetri's face is heart-shaped, he is slightly baby-faced and doesn't have much of a defined chin. His cheeks are thin and he has a long nose. His lips are thin and dry. He has soft and expressive brown eyes and also suffers from strong under eye dark spots. His eyebrows are thick, light in color. He has a few freckles dusted over his nose and right cheek. He also suffers from occasional acne breakouts, usually on the chin and upper lip area, but he has no scarring and his complexion is clean if pale and sallow. His hair is a dirty straw blonde and he has grown it into an unkempt body of curls that hang to his ears and over his forehead.

Demitri doesn't care much for fashion. He likes athletic clothing but besides that will wear nondescript clothing like plain monocolor tees and jeans. He has a large wardrobe but with little variety, and he often shops in secondhand stores for a lack of funds. He also has a knack for athletic shorts and the like, which tend to be among his few pieces with recognizable brands and names, such as teams or leagues.

His voice is slightly rough and raspy naturally, and slightly on the higher end of pitch for a male. He speaks quickly and often mumbles.

On the day of the abduction Demetri wore a simple zip up hoodie with a gray body and blue sleeves, under it a plain white tee shirt. He wore baggy, grey with black trim Under Armor pants. He wore long white athletic socks and beat up dirty white sneakers with mud and dirt caked to the soles. He wore a mechanical watch, a light blue design. The bridge of his nose is slightly crooked and dented, an obvious injury.

Biography: Demetri was born in Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee to Carl Futscher and Laurena Millner. Carl was a plumber who started an installation and repair plumbing business with a friend who lived in Chattanooga, so the family moved there to pursue the business venture with Carl splitting his time between his regular job and the start up. The business is only modestly successful so Laurena and Carl work together to scrounge, save, and provide their two children, Demetri and his three years elder sister Hannah, with opportunities while keeping the mortgage in check. Their marriage is sometimes contentious due to Carl being overly controlling but they quietly work through rough patches.

Demitri grew up shy as a child and often playing by himself even when allowed outside. He was friendly with his peers when approached, but often seemed to not wish to approach others of his own volition. He disliked Hannah from a young age since she was bossy and wild in his perception, he made a habit of avoiding her so she couldn't take the things and space he considered his. Of his family he shared the most with his father, who was boisterous and encouraging from a young age and imparted onto him mature wisdom such as finance and women advice, as much as Demitri could understand such things at such a young age. Demitri liked to listen to dad play his guitar. Carl exposed Demetri to certain genres of music with covers of bands such as Green Day, The Ramones, and Nirvana.

His primary education was fairly typical, and from a young age Demitri had a mental capacity for math, advancing in his addition, subtraction, and later multiplication tables at a faster pace than the rest of his peers. He remained fairly shy, but was gender blind with his first close friends. His male friends at the time were more childishly discriminatory, but Demetri would stubbornly hang out with his girl friends at the time despite teasing. He dabbled in neighborhood sports with friends, and tried to pick up skateboarding because his friends all enjoyed it, but he was not initially particularly interested in such activities, preferring to spend his free time chatting and listening to music. His tastes trended to follow his father's, and he developed a strong dislike for genres such as rap and 'no real instruments' electronica.

Due to limited finances the family only had one desktop for most of the 2000s. It was child locked and in the family room, so prying questions whenever Demetri wanted to look at sites for his interests like video games or fanfiction shied him away from regular usage. Demetri and Hannah were sometimes out of the pop culture loop as a result, Demetri especially was typically embarrassed when he missed a reference or meme that got popular in school.

The family eventually bought the kids their own used desktops for their birthdays in the sixth grade. Laurena was always a hands off mother with Demetri, permissive and happy to let him get away with things in contrast to her treatment of Hannah, so when Demetri asked to have the child locks removed from his computer Laurena allowed it. He did typical kid things like Club Penguin and Cartoon Network games, but he also gained interest in things such as 4Chan. He thought it cool to use crass and offensive humor, and for a period of time he was purposely shocking to annoy and offend Hannah and girls at school he felt self-conscious around. His friends, for a time, also joined in. However a complaint by a parent quickly got Demetri in trouble, after a parent-teacher conference and an embarrassed apology to the girl he'd tried to gross out Demetri was banned from the computer for six months, all of his second semester of sixth grade. Only appealing to his mom's mercy spared him from a longer ban and more restrictions.

With his friends at the time Demetri did usual things like roughhousing and video games, but he also enjoyed card games, especially the Pokemon TCG. He asked for a full deck for his birthday. Carl would actually buy two packs and ask Demetri to teach him the game as well, Demetri happily did so and relished the opportunity to include his father in the games. The two spent many a night after school and Carl's work playing Pokemon, watching episodes when they came on, and playing guitar. Carl began to teach Demetri chords and strumming at this time, and through Demetri was slow and sometimes impatient he kept at it over the years. Demetri eventually developed solid competency at acoustic guitar. He would practice a wide variety of songs but had an especial love for aggressive or upbeat punkish and pop riffs. In the sixth grade he'd pseudo competently play and sing the song About A Girl by The Academy Is, for the talent show using his father's guitar rig.

Demetri started middle school and began to grow insecure, as other boys who hit puberty early made him start questioning his own masculinity. He would not properly hit puberty until the age of fourteen, by which time he felt he was behind the curve. He would pretend he was shaving when friends asked and get defensive when called out. He stopped feeling comfortable around women at this time for these reasons, hormones made it difficult for him to carry himself gracefully. Awkwardness and stumbling and short conversations increasingly became his response to female attention, self-conscious ruminating on his awkwardness only made it grow worse and worse over time. Demetri's relatively poor creativity seemed to work against him, while he was fair in the harder academics he was not an interesting conversationalist when nervous, and his grades in classes like English began slipping to mediocrity at this time of his life.

Demetri played Facebook and Flash video games with his computer mostly, but also started to religiously develop a social media presence, posting on forums for his interests and curiosities. He quickly got back into 4Chan, and convinced his Mom to buy him a Something Awful membership so he could develop his writing interests. She remained fairly uninterested in policing his online habits, and thought it positive that he was being creative and making friends like Hannah had through the web. He participated in budding internet meme culture, he and his friends devoted chunks of free time to brainstorming funny gags and new memes like reaction gifs online, with essentially no success. Demetri considered uploading content with the family camcorder to YouTube but his lack of creativity once more struck him, he had no ideas in particular for what he could do, and he was intimidated away by good quality videos and covers of songs.

He developed a penchant for elitism due to his musical tastes and perceived insights from regular internet usage that gave him a pseudo libertarian but hardly well-informed worldview. That translated into real life to an extent, and Demetri would lose a few friends over spats and stubborn arguments, over his love of offensive jokes, childishly argued politics, personal issues, or music. His growing self-esteem issues would nip his overt argumentativeness in the bud, but breed internalized and repressed resentfulness of others over time, and he also remained a defensive sort.

In middle school Demetri would enjoy a brief period of popularity as a Pokemon TCG player. He was introduced to gambling over games through this activity, because a smaller group of players would hang out in houses without parents around. He enjoyed the thrill of victory that betting money, even small amounts, provided him. Usually he only played in dollar increments, which stretched the limits of his meager weekly allowance, but he'd still get in trouble since he had far less money to give than he could take, given his family background, and IOUs and a deserved reputation for flakiness soured his relationships with this group sometimes. On his end Demetri did not often mentally conceptualize the consequences of his actions until he was once physically intimidated and threatened after a class. Demetri quickly paid up. His ego further deflated now that one of his stronger triumphs had been taken from him. As a member of online forums and communities for the TCG he vented in private on PMs. He found socializing easier online for a time, but his trolling and shock humor tendencies also won him some enemies. He would stubbornly stand his ground when a moderator of one forum started to tell him off and he was ultimately banned. The incident caused him to withdraw from other online engagements and become more stand-offish, as he refused to believe he'd done anything wrong and pinned the blame onto 'toxic internet culture'.

Hannah was a senior at George Hunter at the same time that Demetri entered as a freshman, and the two mostly avoided one another. Demetri had an honors math and science path from the get go, and entertained vague dreams of being a researcher in chemistry or a physics professor in a prestigious university, on top of vaguer dreams of being a rockstar or great poet someday.

Pokemon as a card game proved predictably unpopular and out of fashion when Demetri moved schools, and he dropped the game and his affiliations with it quickly, going so far as to sell his cards for cheap despite his father's protests. The school had a Magic: the Gathering club, and Demetri attended a few sessions and decided he was enthused enough with the game to make his new flame, though he does not have the money to deck build effectively outside of the game to the level he feels is appropriate to play competitively. To this end he only plays with friends cards in club. Outside of club he's taken to more traditional card games like hold'em and blackjack for playing with friends, and continues to be willing to bet money when prodded to. He considers himself better and wiser with his betting habits now, compared to back in his middle school days.

Demetri's social life in high school is considered decent, he is casually friendly and has modest inroads into several social circles despite his floundering reputation. He does not personally consider it so, and stubbornly holds onto a mental image of his being an pre-pubescent looking loser. His weakness and awkwardness around women only continued to peak, escalating from an incident where Demetri made an attempt early his freshman year to ask out a classmate, Ariana Simpson, by composing and playing her a song while walking home on the same route. She thanked him earnestly but asked to remain acquaintances. Demetri would later hear unverified rumors from his friends that she'd been unimpressed by his lyricism and atypically pre-pubescent stature and build. Demetri took this loss hard and his confidence continued to weaken, girls increasingly became a central focus of conscious self-loathing and self-pity.

He began struggling to improve his writing skills despite his lack of natural skill, he wrote cliche fanfictions and original fictions and buzzed around writer forums for a while, but lukewarm receptions for his work drove him into a funk. He became somewhat obsessed with classic poetry and literature despite not having the easiest time actually comprehending it. To compensate he dealt quite a bit in buzzwords and trite English and tried to turn himself into an English aficionado. He feels like a poser and believes people see through his pretensions, but stubbornly keeps at it, motivated by positive feedback from his parents. Hannah jokes about and belittles his work, and one of his motivations is to prove her wrong.

He also started trying out for sports and taking a more active interest in physical fitness. He was rejected from sports teams for a while, but as his puberty finally began to bulk his physique up he eventually landed a spot on the junior varsity soccer team and joined the soccer club. He didn't have the best equipment and was easily discouraged, but with some coach attention he did prove to have potential as a solid and reliable player without a visible ego. Demetri in turn benefited from the confidence of seeing his physique and fitness visibly improve, and from the mental health boosts afforded to him by being physically active. He became slightly happier and confident, but his struggle with self-confidence and resentment of what he felt was a lack of payoff for his hard work at self-improvement remained ever strong Sophomore year and beyond.

Demetri's remainder year as an underclassman was a flurry of activity. His team won several games at regionals, he learned and played more songs like Blink 182 and Yellowcard, and he found a group of poker players where betting became a regular thing for him again. In spite of all of this Demetri remained mentally blocked when it came to girls, he became increasingly frustrated, composing poetry dedicated to girls he barely knew and then not showing it off, having long and elaborate daydreams that he hated for being pathetic. He started to create dating site profiles, though his mother and father and Hannah's more traditional opinions on online dating meant he did so with a sense of shame, and he oft told himself he was doing it ironically. Such a mentality unfortunately made him produce poor profiles on sites like OkCupid and stay passive or only message to troll, unsurprisingly winning him no leads.

Two interesting developments occurred in early 2017. First Hannah purchased her mother a camera for her birthday with her college part-time paychecks, but Laurena had little interest after some time. Demetri was able to take the camera for himself, he experimented with photos and found he enjoyed it, it was an easier and more immediately rewarding way to express his limited creativity. He is an active member of yearbook club, and finds that his social sphere has improved due to involvement.

He also met a certain Garren Mortimer in a class, and the two quickly became fast friends. Garren and Demetri share senses of humor and sources of material in 4Chan, Reddit, and other hotspots of internet troll culture. The two prank friends together. Garren has also introduced Demetri to new ways of considering his situation with women that Demetri is conflicted on. Garren is a vehement MRA activist and Demetri is now well familiar with the concepts. He is very inclined to agree with some of them, though he is still ultimately hesitant and tells himself he is merely trolling and trying to shock people. Demetri is Garren's right hand man in a lot of ways, and Demetri is very permissive with Garren, though the quieter and more timid of the two by a large step. Girls in the know have understandably come to view Demetri in a new negative light, but his lack of self-awareness is such that he doesn't legitimately understand their reasons for giving him the cold shoulder.

Nowadays as his senior year comes to its end Demetri remains in Garren's orbit, and represses a lot of his more complex emotions concerning women, no more confident than before despite his reputation being buoyed by his hard work in Yearbook and his solid performance in soccer, and so on. He maintains insecurity over his lack of good wordsmithing, but he remains earnest in trying to improve despite poor results. He stubbornly maintains and curates his dating site profiles without success. He wishes to get out of Chattanooga like Hannah was able to, to move on to greener pastures with a better crowd. He studied hard and got As in all classes that are not English and arts. He was accepted to the University of Memphis as a major in Mathematical Sciences, with a decent scholarship package, and he intends to move to his dorm before the summer ends.

Demetri and Hannah have a repaired relationship, though they ultimately don't talk much and Hannah's growing radicalism and her sarcastic tendencies leave Demetri without much to say to her in extended conversation except platitudes and well wishes.

Carl continues to be Demetri's main confidante, though Demetri sometimes resents Carl's gung-ho attitude about relationships that leads to advice Demetri feels is condescending and out of touch with his problems. Demetri and Laurena are also on loving terms, albeit sometimes without much to say to one another due to lack of overlapping hobbies. Demetri proudly considers himself a good son. Carl and Laurena are generally more distracted nowadays, experiencing a renaissance in their relationship that Demetri is happy for, both as their child and selfishly as new date nights and weekend retreats with other couples give him the house to himself more.

Advantages: He is physically fit as a proper school athlete and thus capable of outperforming his average peer reliably, in terms of aerobic ability. In some ways his extremely dull and non self-aware personality could help him, he may maintain a solid mentality due to a very stubborn and established self-image.
Disadvantages: Demetri has a weak stomach for responsibility and confrontation and may be cowardly at inopportune times. Demetri has a very dull and uncreative mind, and even obvious solutions to problems may evade him due to a lack of self-awareness and a low capacity to change his perceptions on a dime. He's used to being passively offensive and running his mouth and has little capacity to change this due to his aforementioned poor self-awareness, and he may ruin some potential alliances or otherwise helpful alliances due to poor self-control.

Designated Number: Male Student No. 008

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Designated Weapon: Copy of the Communist Manifesto

Conclusion: Oh come on, come on! The perfect "manifesto" pun is here, I know it, but it's just out of my reach! Ugh, whatever, I'm sure I'll think of it later in the shower. In the meantime, try using that to broaden your political horizons or something in the five minutes before somebody takes you out, okay? - Josh Baines

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