Winter "Hareraiser" Castillo

[KamiKaze]

Name: Winter “Hareraiser” Alejandra Ponderosa Castillo
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Hobbies and Interests: eSports, video games, CR modding and glitch hunting, audiophilia, rollerskating, listening to music, retro aesthetics, anime and manga, furry fandom, aerobics

Appearance: Winter’s Meatspace self has curly dark brown hair that falls to her shoulders. She doesn’t put as much effort into maintaining it other than washing and occasionally brushing, leaving it somewhat frizzy and messy, as if she had just crawled out of bed.

She has thick, dark eyebrows that tend to be on the expressive side. Her eyes are naturally dark, and have a round shape to them. Due to spending a lot of time on CR and staying up late, she has noticeable bags under her eyes. Her nose is a Greek shape, while her lips are bow-shaped. Winter is Mexican-American, with a predominantly Spanish background. However, she has some Black and Native American ancestry in her. As such, she has a light olive skin tone that tans easily. She has a square-shaped face. As a result of mild nearsightedness Winter regularly wears glasses with thin, oval-shaped frames.

Winter is 5’0 and 121 pounds, making her short and on the higher end of average weight. She has little muscle on her body due to her not being as physically active until very recently. Her body type is a curvy hourglass. Winter wears dark blue gel nails in a squoval shape. She tends to slouch some while sitting. As someone who regularly rollerskates in Meatspace she tends to have minor bruises and scrapes along her arms and legs.

Because Winter does not typically leave the house as often as some of her peers, she usually wears pajama shorts and a T-shirt outside of CR. However, if she’s meeting someone in person she typically puts more effort in. Her Meatspace dress sense is generally more on the casual side of things. A typical streetwear outfit for her would be jean shorts, a T-shirt, and black sneakers. Many of her T-shirts are black, with anime, furry, or gaming-related graphics, such as a shirt with anime characters on it. She does own some retro-inspired accessories, such as a windbreaker with a pink, purple, and blue color-block pattern. Winter is not as skilled at applying makeup out of CR, so she wears hers in a more subdued fashion with some foundation, lipgloss, and mascara.

In contrast, Winter presents herself completely differently in CR. Because she loves Avatar customization, she changes hers regularly, often pushing the boundaries of what school faculty deems acceptable. However, some features remain consistent. Her hair in CR is thicker and fluffier, with more ironed and permed curls. The color is pure black, with curly light-blue bangs framing her face. She changes her eyes to an icy blue shade, with prominent electric blue-and-purple eyeshadow and dark eyeliner in a cat’s eye shape, along with mascara. Winter also wears pinkish-red lipstick with some liner. She also removes her eye bags and does not wear glasses. Winter’s outfit choices are consistently inspired by 80s fashion and retrofuturism, anime, and alt-fashion. One consistent element that she has worn since freshman year is a rabbit ear and tail accessory that can easily be removed upon request. The design is inspired by the Silver Marten rabbit breed and is predominantly black with steely flecks, as well as silvery white on the insides of the ears and the underside of the tail. Winter’s off-campus shoes are typically a pair of black and blue quad skates that have a mode to make them regular street shoes. However, because school faculty did not allow her to wear them on campus, her school shoes are instead heelies with an identical design. Winter tends to regularly change the laces on both shoes, with the most usual variant being retro-inspired skate laces that are wide, flat, and patterned with various icons such as hearts, animal shapes, 8-bit motifs, and similar. Her school backpack is denim, with a Memphis Style pattern of geometric shapes and squiggles in multiple bright neon colors. As someone who has participated in nonhuman CR areas, she has at times changed her avatar to a more anthropomorphized rabbit design of her usual appearance, the Silver Marten breed influence becoming more noticeable.

On the day of the abduction, Winter wore her hair in a high side ponytail with a dark blue scrunchie. Her light blue bangs were left loose to frame her face. She wore a sailor fuku inspired outfit that consisted of a white short-sleeved top with a blue collar, tie, and sleeve cuffs, and a matching blue pleated skirt. She wore a black and blue leather biker jacket with shoulder pads. For legwear, she wore light blue tights, dark blue leg warmers, and her heelies. She kept a blue Swatch-inspired watch on her left wrist with a red ohm symbol on the face. She brought light blue Wayfarer-style sunglasses with her, tucked into a pocket of her jacket. Her shoelaces that day were dark blue with an alternating sky blue and black heart pattern. Winter finished off the look by wearing leather fingerless biker gloves with silver studs.

Background: Winter was born in San Jose, California, to Diego Castillo and Lucia Ponderosa. Diego and Lucia are both programmers, who have experience with both coding and CR, having high-paying jobs working directly with the latter. She has two younger twin siblings, Holly and Aster, who are both 11.

From a young age, Winter proved to be exceptional as a student. She advanced through cognitive milestones quickly, such as learning how to read faster than other children and developing a wider vocabulary at a younger age. However, she was high-energy and often got into trouble because of her energy and curiosity. She took tests in first grade that confirmed that she had giftedness, which might have explained some of her energy, as she was easily underwhelmed by what other children were learning about. So, she was placed into programs meant to help gifted children throughout her childhood. She also skipped fifth grade, due to her teachers at the time feeling it would help her feel less underwhelmed.

Her competitive, bold personality began to show, as she knew she was a talented student early on. This led to a form of arrogance that has followed her throughout her life, where she believes she is more competent than other people. However, if proven otherwise, such as people showing more skill in certain areas or pointing out a mistake she made, she tends to take it poorly, becoming defensive. This has been a source of friction that she has had with other people since she sometimes becomes argumentative. When she was younger, she wasn't particularly liked by her classmates for this reason, making her somewhat of a bully target for some time. However, it was fairly mild and easily resolved, though Winter did get into some trouble because she lashed out. She has, in the past, pushed friends away with her competitive and arrogant personality, due to people feeling overwhelmed by her when she gets frustrated as well as her sometimes coming off as callous or insensitive in how she talks about others. For this reason, she had few friends in her early schooling due to coming off as offputting.

Both Diego and Lucia were proficient with technology from their jobs, which exposed Winter to it from a young age. She has fond memories of playing computer games when she was growing up. Many of these were edutainment games, although she also had a fondness for retro games as well. One game she was skilled at was Pac-Man, with her gaining high scores both in arcade booths and online ports. They also had an interest in audiophilia, with them owning a well-maintained stereo system that Winter has fond memories of playing music on. Much of the music they had was 80s-era records, from a collection that used to belong to one of Winter’s grandparents. Another interest she shared with her family was anime. She grew up watching works like Sailor Moon, Dragonball, Studio Ghibli’s works, Pokemon, and the original Voltron. One element that inspired her early tastes in media was Winter’s love of kemonomimi and other anthropomorphized animal characters in anime, as she enjoyed the designs and themes of these characters. She also went through a phase where she was focused on the novel Watership Down and its various adaptations, due to liking the xenofiction and conlanguage elements. Another aspect that influenced her tastes was the fact that her parents loved a lot of 80s-era media in general, which meant that she was exposed to a lot of movies and TV shows from that time period growing up.

When CR hit the market in 2010, her parents were able to afford it, which allowed Winter to have early experiences with the system. These early forays into it were largely supervised, with her not accessing areas that were occupied by strangers. Once schooling began to transition to CR-based models Winter was transferred into such a program.

Although she had begun to become a lazy student due to apathy, she developed a passionate interest in coding and programming CR in middle school. Like many modders, her first forays into modding were in Cyber Driving Simulator. Most of her early attempts at modding were rudimentary. However, after taking CR modding classes both as an elective and outside of school, they became more elaborate. Another CR-related pastime that Winter developed was glitch-hunting, as she finds the ways CR can break down to be funny. So, she’d often stress-test servers by doing odd, unpredictable things, such as installing a mod to rain a significant amount of rendered fish to see how the server manages. This meant that Winter developed a love for speedrunning games, as finding new ways to use in-game exploits was something she found fun. As for CR games she plays normally, she is a big fan of CyberTag and 5K4T1NG P4R4D153. Winter developed a love of CR quad rollerskating in particular, both in 5K4T1NG P4R4D153 and roller rink servers, and has started wearing skates even outside of those areas, with heelies being an on-campus compromise.

Like many children who were exposed to CR and the Internet at a young age, she started to fall into various subcultures. As someone who liked anime, Winter spent time interacting with other people from the otaku subculture, and, from there, the furry fandom. Some of her friends also shared an interest in anthropomorphized animal characters and loved roleplaying in non-human areas, so Winter followed suit. She did not immediately settle on a fursona as much as picking a rabbit because it was the first thing that came to mind, then growing attached to it over time. Winter still feels rabbits suit her, as she has fond memories of her Watership Down phase, as well as finding the personalities of actual rabbits– playful and intelligent, if stubborn and occasionally destructive– relatable.

Another subculture Winter fell into was the audiophilia subculture. She got into it because she was curious about how to fix a problem with the family surround system, and began searching information online about the subject. This led her to find communities of high-fidelity enthusiasts who were able to answer her questions. While the hobby is pricey, due to the difficulty of finding equipment that is both affordable and high quality, she enjoys talking to people online about high fidelity and ways to achieve it, enough to be picky about headphones, speakers, and acoustics in a given room. This also gave her an increased interest in listening to music. Her tastes tend to be synth-heavy electronic tracks, with specific genres she likes being 80s new wave, house, dance-pop, synthwave, and nerdcore. As an anime fan, she also likes Vocaloid artists and considers herself part of the Vocaloid fandom, though she does not have the patience to learn how to use the programs herself as of yet. Because of her interest in 80s-era music and media in general, her personal Avatar aesthetic followed suit with her taking direct inspiration from synthwave, retrofuturism, alt-fashion, 80s fashion trends, and anime in her outfit choices.

In high school, she was swiftly recruited as part of the eSports clique, known on campus as the Omega Squad. Many of her friends in the group also have similar interests in CR, gaming, and related subjects, so she quickly became attached to them. The group often plays CyberTag competitively and has since become a prominent fixture among their classmates. Winter goes by the gamertag “Hareraiser” in competitive gaming circles. Aside from eSports, she also is a member of the anime club and is responsible for some of the more risque posters that have gotten the club audited before.

One thing she is notable for is that she has a history of bending the rules through CR. She regularly changes her avatar, which causes problems when she brushes against dress code regulations. Additionally, there was a notable incident earlier this school year where she installed a mod into Class 12-B which briefly caused chaos. Winter was inspired by the principal cracking down on students leaving CR to attend to physical needs such as bathroom breaks when class was in session, which prompted her to make a mod called FuguFish, which was installed into Senior Class 12-B due to a security loophole. The next morning, whenever a student in 12-B logged in, their HUD would automatically pull up, playing an unskippable clip from the video game Stupid Invaders depicting a singing yellow cartoon pufferfish. What made it worse was the mod glitched; it was originally only supposed to play once for each student when they logged in, but it instead played the video for every classmate logged in each time someone joined, resulting in further chaos and confusion. Winter, much to the surprise of her classmates, got off relatively light for this, out of a mixture of the mod being more obnoxious than malicious in nature, it being easily removed with no damage done to the system, and Mr. Franklin admittedly finding humor in the situation once it was resolved.

Winter still loves making mods, especially ones that are ridiculous in nature. While she initially didn’t share them with others out of pride, she has more recently allowed people to download them for their own use, FuguFish included. None of these mods have resurfaced on campus, whether by Winter or otherwise, but they are still passed around by the Senior class for various off-campus uses. Winter generally has an odd sense of humor and is typically savvy about CR meme culture, often being among the first in her friend groups to be aware of them. For example, there has been a recent meme about ‘woodies’, or people joining non-human servers in the form of Avatars based around various types of furniture, the name coming from it being a common material used in their production. While it started as a way to make fun of furries, many people in the subculture, including Winter, have instead embraced the meme, and, while she has not ever used a woody Avatar, she does have a ‘woodsona’ and has worked on some mods specifically made for people who want to participate in the trend.

She tends to prefer harder work, as well as subjects she sees actual use in; she tends to put more effort into mathematics, sciences, certain aspects of social studies, and CR-related courses than English or art. She takes AP courses to help with her feeling less underwhelmed, and tutors other students since she learns quickly. She feels she is less interesting without it, and while she wants to reach out to people for Meatspace meetings, she has not been able to do so because she feels that they would be underwhelmed by her once they met her outside of CR. Although her depressive episodes have affected her, she has not sought out therapy, believing it to be a sign of weakness if she did, nor have many people pushed her to do so as they typically don’t realize that it’s a bigger issue than how it initially looks outwardly. She is interested in dating and openly identifies as bisexual, with a preference towards women. However, she has trouble asking people out due to her insecurities.

Because so much of her self-identity involves CR, she spends a lot of time on it even outside of class. She and her younger siblings are often latchkey, which has made it even easier to do so. What prevents her from spending all her time on it, aside from attending to physical needs, is the fact that she often has to take care of the twins. As a result, she often takes care of them when their parents are at work. Neither of them has a huge interest in CR, so she often has to log off to check on them. Because Winter read an article about the health effects of CR, including physical weakness, she has started working out more, such as learning how to rollerskate in real life. She also started pulling up 80s aerobics and jazzercise videos on YouTube and following along, often feeling worn out by the end due to being physically inactive. Holly and Aster have joined in both on her rollerskating and aerobics adventures, expressing interests of their own. It has since become bonding activities for the three of them. As for their parents, she does feel a little bit of resentment for them being latchkey and leaving Winter to take care of the twins, but deep down she adores them.

Winter has been accepted into a university as a Computer Science major, with a focus on CR in particular. In the past people have pushed her into a STEM field due to her giftedness and talent in CR modding, and Winter has relented due to feeling it would be a waste of her capabilities. While she still has a passion for CR, she feels somewhat confined in her career options due to her talents, as many people have told her that not doing so would not be the best use of her capabilities, which she has internalized. However, she is unaware of any other career paths she could take if her career in CR doesn't take off. Currently, she gets some work as a part-time tutor, as well as doing some CR-related work that is available to her, such as taking paid surveys or doing seasonal beta-related jobs such as bug-testing upcoming features.

Personality: She can be competitive and ambitious in certain ways, such as when she plays online games and aims for high grades. To some extent, she is perfectionistic, which leads to her being somewhat controlling and demanding. She is outwardly arrogant and likes things done her way, which can make planning things with her tricky. Despite this, she doesn’t have a strong drive or work ethic, relying more on her natural abilities rather than practicing ahead of time. If anything, she gets bored by what she perceives as tedious tasks, such as studying for an exam on a subject that she feels has no practical use outside of class. She still gets good grades, but she also still has a tendency to be bored by things she finds impractical. As a result, she has a pattern of slacking off, finishing work last minute, and still getting a good score due to memorizing things well.

Despite coming off as arrogant and argumentative, Winter is actually insecure and anxiety-prone. Winter is self-conscious about certain things, such as her being slightly younger than her classmates due to skipping a grade and thus is often the last to experience milestones, and will get snippy if it is brought up. She generally doesn’t have as strong emotional intelligence, in part due to her being slightly younger, and often comes off as self-centered. As such, she is known for starting arguments whether because she’s upset or out of a desire to bait people, but angrily throwing insults when others counter her. Her perfectionism leads her to be self-critical and has fallen into brief depressive episodes when she feels she has failed or someone has succeeded at something she couldn’t, which has been a factor in her lashing out at people before. Another factor is that her self-image revolves around CR, as many of her accomplishments and relationships involve it in some way or another. In spite of her negative traits, she can be extremely protective of those she is close to, such as the other members of the Omega Squad and her younger siblings. Additionally, she has an odd sense of humor, as seen in the CR mods she has either made or installed, and can be seen as a bit of a class clown. When she is interacted with outside of CR, she is noticeably quieter, self-conscious, and melancholic.

Reputation: Winter is somewhat polarizing. She is acknowledged as being talented as a student, a CR modder, and a member of the Omega Squad. At the same time, her arrogance, combined with her being somewhat confrontational, has made some people dislike her. Some people remember some of her CR antics and react with either amusement or annoyance. The FuguFish incident is a standout among Senior Class 12-B, as it is still fresh in many of her classmates’ memory. She has some background in tutoring, which is another point of connection.

[Cicadan]

Hello there! There shall be critique.

[+] .

which she applied at home in a fit of boredom

Unnecessary info for the Appearance section.

Winter has a few minor bruises and scrapes from rollerskating in Meatspace.

This would be more suited as info for her abduction appearance Meatspace self (which also isn't particularly necessary) unless you mean she tends to routinely have minor injuries from her rollerskating, in which case be more specific.

A typical streetwear outfit for her would be jean shorts, a T-shirt,

It'd be better to note things like preferences for colors, mono or patterns or prints, brands or generic off-brand, expense of IRL wardrobe so on. That's more character indicative.

patterned with various icons

Style of icons? One could infer given her interests/what she's wearing on abduction but better to be specific.

While there's a lot of good info here concerning Winter's hobbies it's a bit dense at times with information I'd argue isn't necessary to understanding the core of her character. I'd consider removing or paring down the following lines:

such as changing the color of the cars and environments to be less drab

such as changing the track to an ice cream theme

She began looking into strategies for CyberTag gameplay early on, while she loves the JU5T CH1LL1NG 20N3 area of 5K4T1NG P4R4D153 due to allowing her to try out various antics.

as well as giving her good feedback on how to maintain good audio reproduction

Because she enjoys customization in general, other objects made by her, when possible, take on a similar vein.

The consequences Winter received were a talk with the principal as well as the security program performing double checks on Winter’s in-school actions, resulting in minor delays when Winter does certain things.

Another mod she has created is the Emo Shooter, which is a CyberTag mod that changes a player’s gun to all-black and plays a snippet of ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ by My Chemical Romance when fired; this was, of course, inspired by a typo.

--

One thing she is notable for is that she has a history of bending the rules through CR.

The paragraph following this line is gigantic, and I think you can do a combiantion of truncating the modding incident, plus probably splitting into a new paragraph for all the content after the incident.

Other than her history of CR antics and eSports, Winter can sometimes frustrate other students. She is outwardly arrogant and likes things done her way, which can make planning things with her tricky. Winter is a naturally competitive and perfectionistic person but actually does not have the drive to hone her skills. She still gets good grades, but she also still has a tendency of being bored by things she finds impractical. As a result, she has a pattern of slacking off, finishing work last minute, and still getting a good score due to memorizing things well.

This is content that'd be better in her Personality/Reputation sections. What we're looking for in Background is any insight into the causality of these personality traits, and or how they changed over time as she progressed through her youth and adolesence.

as well as tutors

and

Despite coming off as arrogant and argumentative, Winter is actually insecure and anxiety-prone. Her perfectionism leads her to be self-critical and has fallen into brief depressive episodes when she feels she has failed or someone has succeeded at something she couldn’t, which has been a factor in her lashing out at people before. Winter, despite her saying otherwise, is self-conscious about certain things, such as her being slightly younger than her classmates due to skipping a grade and thus is often the last to experience milestones, and will get snippy if it is brought up. She generally doesn’t have as strong emotional intelligence, in part due to her being slightly younger, and often comes off as self-centered.

Despite her negative traits, she can be extremely protective of those she is close to, such as the other members of the Omega Squad and her younger siblings.

Same as above concerning this being content that's more suited for Personality.

In the past people have pushed her into a STEM field due to her giftedness and talent in CR modding, and Winter has relented due to feeling it would be a waste of her capabilities

Relented is an interesting word here. Did she originally have other ideas concerning her post-high school future? There isn't much I could infer from the profile about this.

As a more general concern, what kind of social life did she have prior to high school? You mention she was arrogant, and that she had online aquaintances through her various hobbies, but some general idea of what kind of person she was around her peers in school beyond having friction with others would be good: was she off-putting to the point of having few friends, or was she the sort to be toxic in her friendships? So on.

That's it.

[KamiKaze]

[Cicadan]

Few more minor things.

[+] .

they became more elaborate Another

Missing punctuation here.

She also looked at lists of recorded glitches to find new ways to personally trigger them.

Recommend you remove this, it's unnecessary and we already got the idea from the previous example.

Her perfectionism leads her to be self-critical and has fallen into brief depressive episodes when she feels she has failed or someone has succeeded at something she couldn’t, which has been a factor in her lashing out at people before. Another factor is that her self-image revolves around CR, as many of her accomplishments and relationships involve it in some way or another.

This content is more suited for integration into personality than backstory.

Split the paragraph in Personality into at least two, its a but unwieldy and large at the moment.

Apologies for leaving this up for so long! Getting through these as best I can.

[KamiKaze]

Ready.

[Cicadan]

Approved.