BC11: LARK WILSON [DECEASED]

#1

DECEASED

Name: Lark Wilson
Gender: Female
Age: 18
Grade: Senior
Hobbies and Interests:Drama Club, Figure Skating, Social Experiments, Post-Rock

Appearance: Lark is a 5’9’’, 130lb white girl with a slender build. Her straight, pale blonde hair reaches her shoulders, with bangs that she sweeps to the side of her head. Her eyes are green. She has thin, curved eyebrows, and a long face with a pale complexion and thin lips. Her nose is small and slightly upturned. She typically wears a light layer of makeup; using foundation and concealer to cover up blemishes on her face. She had her ears pierced when she was thirteen, but she has not worn earrings in years and the piercings have healed.

Lark’s daily wardrobe is subdued, consisting of a variety of t-shirts (mostly graphic or band merchandise) and sweatshirts that she wears over jeans or leggings. She owns a small collection of modest, casual dresses for when the whim strikes her to feel slightly more fashionable; usually a handful of times a month.

On the day she was cast, Lark was wearing a dark yellow sundress with a hemline slightly above her ankles, along with brown sandals.

Biography: The youngest of three children, Lark was born on April 3rd, 2003 to Sara and Theodore Wilson, who respectively work as a marketer and a systems engineer. She has lived in Miami her entire life. Her brother, Robin is five years older, and her sister Phoebe is two years older.

Lark was a quiet child - her mother often joked about how she was too busy staring wide-eyed at the world around her to throw tantrums. Even as she got older, she treated most things she said with a childish gravitas, seriously considering the conversation before replying.

This attitude led to her being somewhat out-of-step with her elementary school peers. While she was friendly enough to avoid outright ostracization, she still gravitated towards her fellow loners and quasi-outcasts.

While Lark did have a few friends, her parents became somewhat concerned with her reserved nature around the time she began middle school. They encouraged her to join a school club that interested her, in the hopes that it’d help her open up to others a little more.

She ultimately decided on the Drama Club, mostly because one of her friends was also joining it. While her friend quickly lost interest and quit, Lark was genuinely engaged by the club’s activities, and stuck with it. She was surprised to learn how much practice and preparation goes into a show that’ll only be performed a handful of times, and enjoyed the camaraderie between the members for the various on-stage and backstage obstacles they faced.

In her free time at home, Lark spent a great deal of time on the internet. While her parents had nervously policed Robin’s childhood internet usage, her parents had become more relaxed by the time Lark came around - she got her own tablet when she was in elementary school. As such, she spent a lot of time browsing various content and social media sites.

One particular type of entertainment she gravitated towards was prank videos on YouTube. While she often found the so-called main personalities of these channels to be completely obnoxious, she kept watching despite herself. The real attraction, for her, was the variety of reactions random passerby would have to the disruptive antics of the content creators. She liked that she never knew what to expect - that some nobody on their way home from work could be on-the-spot funnier than someone who made their living as an entertainer, or the way some people completely freaked out. When she gradually realized that a good amount of those videos were staged, she still found it entertaining to try and figure that out for herself - to spot the telltale signs of a genuinely spontaneous reaction, something that’d catch even the hosts off guard.

As time passed, Lark found herself trying to guess how the unfortunate subjects would react based on their appearance - a realization that surprised her, as it implied that other people likely judged her the same way, even in real life. This caused a quiet crisis of self-awareness in middle school, as Lark tried to figure out what her essential traits were, and how they likely affected how people viewed her.

She didn’t feel confident enough to drastically change anything about her real life appearance, aside from the relatively minor change of not wearing earrings, so instead she decided to try a small experiment online. For about a year, she’d been posting on a medium-sized fan forum for a television show she enjoyed - what would happen if she created a new account, one with a drastically different typing style, claiming to be male? How would the people she’d come to be familiar with treat that alternate version of her?

Her deception was swiftly caught due to both accounts sharing the same IP address, and after being generally mocked Lark embarrassedly abandoned that community. However, she just took it as a sign that she needed to be more careful with any further experiments. While it was harder to draw any conclusions from how entirely separate communities reacted to her separate personas, it was safer, and still fascinating to her.

Lark made sure never to use the same usernames whenever she signed up for a site - for each new account, she would come up with a simple backstory - deciding on an age, gender, type of avatar, typing style, and various other quirks. Most of the time, this made little to no difference - on many sites she was just another account in a massive crowd of commentators, after all. She still found it an interesting thought exercise, and continued the habit to the modern day. On the rare occasion where she befriended someone using a particularly artificial account, Lark would feel vaguely guilty, but brushed aside those feelings with the justification that she wasn’t trying to exploit or harm anyone.

In the modern era of Discord, using a variety of accounts is more cumbersome than it used to be - Lark has pared her collection of active accounts down to three. She uses one to keep in touch with her real life friends and family, and is very careful to make sure there’s no connection between it and her other two accounts, which she uses in a variety of online communities.

Branching off her initial interest in prank videos, Lark’s focus has broadened to include more formal, studious social experiments such as the Stanford Prison Experiment - both the studies themselves and the investigations into their many failings. She thinks the intricacies of human behavior is an endlessly fascinating subject. She is also interested in the fields of history and anthropology, essentially anything that involves interesting stories of people coping with unusual circumstances.

Despite this, Lark isn’t a fan of SOTF-TV. While she still has a passing interest in the show, and will watch highlights and stay up to date on the latest developments, she finds its format suffocating. While it does offer a unique insight into what people do when they’re pushed to the edge, it’s all so artificial - it ends in death just because that’s what the rules demand. As such, the seasons she’s genuinely interested in are the disasters, like the infamous season sixty. Any time that the producers’ expectations aren’t matched, when the audience doesn’t get what they want - that’s when Lark thinks SOTF-TV is at its best.

While Lark does exercise in the form of taking regular walks, her only physical hobby is figure-skating. Her interest in it began when she was watching the Winter Olympics with her sister, one boring evening when they were both in middle school. They were captivated by the complicated routines that were performed with effortless grace, gliding freely across the ice. Afterwards, they both begged their parents to sign them up for local ice-skating classes.

The girls took to it immediately, and Lark has continued skating to the present day. She isn’t interested in trying to compete or showcase her skills at all - the freedom she feels when she successfully twirls or jumps is its own reward.

Lark’s favorite musical genre is Post-Rock, especially the artists A Silver Mt. Zion and Explosions in the Sky. Her first exposure to the genre happened in middle school, on a night where she was trying to find suitable study music for an exam she was stressed about. She clicked on a mix with an evocative title and thumbnail art, and was enthralled enough to listen to the entire discography of every artist featured within. To her, the instrumentals are compellingly desolate and gorgeous - filled with a melancholy that somehow drives her forward. She has a lengthy playlist filled with her hand-picked favorite tracks, and after many years of listening to it, she finds it difficult to study or sleep without it.

Lark knew that she would be attending Mangrove Garden long before her time came to actually apply. Five years prior, her brother Robin had been an exceptionally diligent student, and was able to get into Mangrove Garden on a scholarship. While neither Phoebe nor Lark scored well enough on the entrance exams for their own scholarships, their parents had been sufficiently impressed by the school that they were willing to pay tuition for both of them to attend, wanting all their children to receive a high standard of education.

Lark doesn’t have strong feelings about her school’s ranking system. Her grades have been consistent but unexceptional, and she enjoys the quiet anonymity of adequacy. As such, she lands in the middle of the pack. She thinks the drama and rivalry of those trying to achieve the top ranks is interesting, but only from a safe distance. She feels sympathy for those who are crushed by their low ranks, but feels that’s something they should have expected when they enrolled in such a unique private school.

In Mangrove Garden’s drama club, Lark exclusively plays minor roles, and while she’s had speaking roles she has no complaints about being a nameless member of crowd scenes. She finds it compelling to be part of the show, so close to the spotlight, yet completely unmemorable. While she prefers plays, finding musicals to be conceptually hard to take seriously, she still finds the club to be a rewarding experience, and has a soft spot for the morbidity of Little Shop of Horrors.

Lark’s relationship with her family is broadly good. She and her siblings get along, though she’s much closer to Phoebe than Robin, due to their proximity in age and shared hobby of figure skating. She likes her parents, but feels like they love her from a distance. They both have demanding careers, and often have to work overtime. Lark has spent less and less time around them as the years went by - first when Robin was old enough to start looking after her, and later when she was old enough to look after herself. Additionally, as the youngest child, she feels like they have no real expectations of her, compared to her siblings - which is freeing but somehow disheartening at the same time.

Lark finds her mother’s line of work to be fascinating, even though its profit-focused nature means she has little interest in pursuing it, herself. Still, marketing is fundamentally about trying to understand the best way to appeal to human needs and desires, and Lark enjoys talking with her mother about the various projects she spearheads at work.

Lark’s father likes to cook on the occasions where he’s able to leave work on time, and recently she has taken to helping him in the kitchen in order to prepare herself for when she goes to live on her own. She appreciates the practical knowledge, and enjoys the rare opportunities to talk to her father.

Lark is somewhat of an enigma to her fellow students - she’s quiet, and she usually eats lunch on her own. Most have likely only ever heard her speak when answering a question or doing a group project in class. She is pleasant to anyone who actively tries to talk to her, but makes little effort to seem approachable. As such, she rarely interacts with anyone outside of Drama Club. Lark has remained friends with those she was close to in middle school, but no one from her old school followed her to Mangrove Garden. She feels a little isolated, and occasionally lonely, but she is unsure how to make friends outside of the niche she’s already in. As graduation is approaching soon, she views it as a low priority, regardless. Too little, too late.

While Lark has been accepted to the University of South Florida, she is currently undecided about what she wants to study in college; torn between the fields of psychology and anthropology. She plans to take a year of low-level and prerequisite classes for both, and declare a major by the start of her second year.

Advantages: Lark is socially isolated from much of the class, meaning it is extremely unlikely that anyone would hold a grudge against her. Her connections to Drama Club may help her. Her long standing fascinating with human interaction may help her approach other students - whether it’s getting them to help her, or simply deescalating a situation.
Disadvantages: Lark is socially isolated from much of the class, meaning it is extremely unlikely that anyone would care if anything happened to her. Her studies of human interaction may cause her to become overconfident in her own judgement and fatally misread a situation.

Designated Number: BC11

----

Designated Weapon: Steel Ball Bearings

Mentor Comment: "Time to bust some balls IRL. Or use some balls to bust some people? That one kinda fell apart. But getting through this game is all about how you spin it, and I'm sure our, uh, adverse communications specialist will navigate that minefield expertly."

DECEASED