A01: SOLANA LUCERO ESTELLE [DECEASED]

#1

Name: Solana "Sunny" Lucero Estelle
Gender: Female
Age: 18
Hobbies and Interests: Activism, charity work, gardening, kickboxing, rollerskating

Appearance: Sunny stands at 5'10", taller than average for a girl of her age, and weighs about 150 pounds. Her body is fit and toned, well-built from her active, physically demanding hobbies and frequent supplemental exercise; she has strong, long arms and legs with significant amounts of musculature—contributing to an expansive wingspan—and a well-defined core and abdomen. She has a build like an inverted triangle, beginning widest at the top and narrowing further as one goes down, with a broad upper body—her chest and shoulders—that tapers into a thin midriff and waistline.

Her skin is somewhat dark and tawny, simultaneously a natural result of her heritage—primarily Hispanic and Khmer Krom, with some traces of other European descent—and the time she spends outdoors in the sun. She has an oval-shaped face. Her large, almond-shaped eyes are brown and full of brightness and excitement at all times. Her nose has a straight shape but is very slightly crooked from an errant strike during kickboxing practice. She has a medium-sized mouth and thin lips, often curled in a friendly, kind-looking smile that clearly shows her rows of pearly teeth.

Sunny has dark, raven-black hair inherited from her mother's side; it is straight when left to its own devices and does not curl or wave unless otherwise made to do so. Her hair has a thick, almost fluffy texture, soft, silky, and comfortable to run one's hands through. She wears it medium-length, let down to her shoulders; she parts it from the far-left side of her head towards the right side of her head, and it falls slightly over her forehead as it does so. Her eyebrows are the same color as her hair, down to the shade, but their texture is neater, thinner, and coarser by contrast.

She often does not have the luxury of choosing her wardrobe. Many of her clothes are purchased second-hand from thrift stores; the few new articles inside her drawers came as gifts from family and friends, as they are outside of her family's price range for purchases. When possible, however, she opts for sporty, athletic clothing and activewear; on the day of the attack, she wore a sunflower hairpin, a gray zip-up hoodie, worn open-faced, a white tank top below that, a pair of baggy gray sweatpants, white knee-length socks, and off-brand black and white running shoes.

Due to her distaste for and difficulties with Cyber Reality technology, Sunny rarely deigns to change her Avatar. In her early years at Sycamore High School, she sometimes ran afoul of the school's once-per-year Avatar edit requirement, often due to simply not thinking of it. Nowadays, as a result of the light ribbing of her peers, Sunny keeps on top of it more; nonetheless, her Avatar only changes when her only appearance does—such as for a haircut. She never changes her Avatar's outfit, finding it too inconvenient. It currently has the same outfit she wore in the Real World.

Background: Solana Lucero Estelle—or, as she usually prefers to be called by others, "Sunny"—was born in San Jose, California. Her father, Daniel Lucero Suárez, is an asylum-seeker who fled cartel violence in Culiacán Rosales, Sinaloa, Mexico; he works as a line cook at a local restaurant. Her mother, Sovanna "Savannah" Estelle, of mixed Hispanic and Khmer Krom descent, works at a local laundromat. She has two last names; a patronymic one, Lucero, and a matronymic one, Estelle, though she goes by the former. She has no brothers or sisters, the first and only child of her family.

She was born into poverty. Her father came to the United States with nothing but the clothes on his back; her mother, from a disadvantaged background herself, never went to college. As a result, the two both worked at low-paying jobs that barely cracked the minimum wage, spending most of their days slaving away for pennies. While increases to the state's minimum wage in recent years have buoyed their finances and provided much-needed stability to the family, they have never managed to break free from the shackles of poverty and remain in difficult straits.

Sunny grew up in a diverse cultural tapestry. Her father and mother, both Spanish speakers, taught her the language from an early age; her mother, also a speaker of English and Khmer—primarily the southern Khmer Krom dialect, due to her upbringing—taught her those languages, though only some Khmer. At school and in public, she speaks English and does so with only faint traces of an accent, as her mother is proficient in the language; at home, she talks predominantly in Spanish, as her father's English is somewhat limited, though she often defaults to English with her mother.

Her upbringing was spartan. While her family always had food to eat and a roof over their heads, Sunny was raised, in their one-room box apartment, subsidized housing, with little of the creature comforts that many other children had. Nonetheless, she was doted on by her parents, who wanted to provide a better life for her than the ones they had lived. They worried that their financial strain would depress Sunny; however, instead of dampening her spirits, the environment built a modest, empathetic girl with a big heart. She found happiness where she could.

Nonetheless, her father worried. Though far from the violence and the crime he witnessed in his youth back in Culiacán Rosales, he never wanted Sunny to feel helpless the same way he once had in his homeland. As a result, early in her life, she enrolled in kickboxing classes at a local gym and proved a natural. Not only was the young girl proficient at it, however, but passionate as well. She grew to love the sport. While she likes to compete and does so often, she is not naturally fierce; she was raised and trained as a pacifist—and abhors violence on a deep level.

To this day, Sunny often competes in physical bouts and competitions at local kickboxing events within her age group and weight class. She typically does very well at these competitions and frequently places highly in their brackets or wins the events outright, though the latter occurs more infrequently. She does not participate in so-called "network tournaments," named as such for their implementation of Cyber Reality technology in place of physical bouts, as a result of her difficulties with the technology; she also feels an amount of distaste for the concept.

As soon as Sunny was old enough to leave the apartment complex on her own, she grew to love spending time outside; while the neighborhood she lived in, Spartan Keyes, was not the most beautiful place in the world, she still loved to explore it. It led her to develop a taste for rollerskating; while her pair of skates were used and cheap, falling apart at the seams, she loved being able to glide at high speeds down the sidewalks, as it gave her a rush of adrenaline. Sunny would often skate to school rather than take a bus. Nowadays, she has a better pair of skates, often used.

One day, when she returned to the apartment complex from a day of rollerskating, she noticed that some of her neighbors were at work in the greenery behind the flats. When she asked them what they were doing, they told her they had decided to create a communal garden for themselves and other residents. Sunny found the idea delightful and asked if she could help; soon, she was in the dirt with them, digging rows and planting seeds. Her favorite plants to cultivate are flowers and, in particular, sunflowers, for which she feels an affinity due to her name.

To this day, she is still an active participant in her community's communal garden. She has become good at identifying the right amounts of water for most plants and what kinds of soil they tend to grow well in, although her knowledge is still that of a competent amateur rather than an expert. Most of the plants she grows are flowers, as she finds them to be pretty and feels that they add a splash of color to the garden, though on the side, she also has a little vegetable garden with herbs, tomatoes, beans, peppers, and the like, to save her family some money spent on groceries.

For most of Sunny's life, from kindergarten until the end of middle school, she attended school in person—in the Real World. The only times she used computers happened at school and the library, as her family did not own one, and she had never seen a Cyber Reality Device, much less operated one herself. That changed when her family enrolled her at Sycamore High School for her first year of secondary education. They were excited by the opportunity to enter her into what they saw as a cutting-edge place of education and jumped at the chance to do so.

With the start of Sunny's time in high school came her first taste of Cyber Reality. Unfortunately, it did not pan out entirely as expected. Their apartment complex was, and still is, infamous among its residents for having terrible internet connectivity, which has been the case for many years without any sign of improvement. As a result, Sunny often found herself disconnected from the servers she tried to participate in. Even today, it is not uncommon for Sunny's connection to suddenly fail, often causing her to be abruptly booted out from the school's server entirely.

As a result, she never grew to love Cyberspace, as she often found most of it inaccessible to her; any games she tried to play would lag to an unbearable and unplayable extent, and even her ability to participate in classes was erratic. Nonetheless, she works hard to ensure that she does well despite these issues and has found that the teachers are more than understanding of the problem; Sunny often receives more slack when it comes to late arrivals and disconnects than most otherwise would. However, she never abuses or misuses the leeway the faculty give her.

At age fourteen, a little way into her first year of high school, Sunny applied for a work permit; she did this out of a desire to help her family, aware that they often struggled to make ends meet. She took a minimum-wage job at an organization that provides temporary weekend staff to non-profit charity organizations, as she wanted to help other people while at work. Though it is still a job, Sunny counts it as a hobby; it feels good to do good work. She gives most of the money to her family to help with the bills, but they insist she keeps some for herself and what she wants.

In her sophomore year of high school, she realized something about herself. For a long time, Sunny had felt confused about why she did not seem to have the same attraction to boys that many of her friends did; she also wondered why her heart would seem to flutter around other girls. After a long period of questioning, Sunny discovered she was gay. Soon, she came out to her parents, who accepted her with open arms; they were happy as long as she was. Sunny wears her identity as a gay woman on her sleeve and makes little effort to hide her true self from others.

Sunny knows San Jose, California, is a very progressive city—and intends to help keep it that way. To that end, she participates in activist events around her local community and among the student body of Sycamore High School. Even after the bigotry revealed by the results of the 2016 election and the inauguration of Hannibal Garrett as President of the United States, she refuses to be cowed by the hatred and fear of others; she is proud of who she is and will not allow herself or others like her to get bullied into silence by the intolerance and prejudice of the ignorant.

Sunny's grades in school are good but not exceptional; often, she finds gaps in her knowledge of course materials due to her frequent loss of connection to the school's network. In addition, she does not consider herself a book-smart person. Nonetheless, she is dedicated—a hard worker who tries her best to persevere despite those facts. As a result of her hard work, her grades are higher than one might expect at first glance and hover around the B range in most subjects—higher in languages and lower in STEM subjects—with a solid grade point average of about 3.0.

As a result of her hard work, Sunny may be the first member of her family to attend college; her GPA makes it likely that she will receive some scholarships, and financial aid will make the costs easier on her. However, she has not yet applied to any college; she professes to want to take a gap year to decide on a major, but secretly, Sunny feels torn. While her family has encouraged her to attend college, she still feels obligated to help support them monetarily, a dichotomy that stresses her. In addition, the prospect of being a first-generation college student is daunting to her.

In her mind, Sunny still debates between two futures; one where she enters the workforce full-time to support herself and her family and one where she enters college as a student, full-time or part-time. She has not yet decided on a specific school or topic of study if she does decide to attend college; some recommendations made by her teachers and parents include subjects like agriculture and social services. Nonetheless, she is excited by the options laid before her. Sunny feels a sense of optimism and hope for the future, whatever it may have in store for her.

Personality: Sunny is a spirited person. Her struggles in life have given way to an empathetic, kind nature, and it is well-known that Sunny has a big heart. She goes through life with a smile, always optimistic and excited for the future, whatever twists and turns it may hold for her; her indomitable spirit seldom wavers. As a result of her difficult upbringing, Sunny is a modest person, not one to talk up her strengths. In addition, she is dedicated and perseveres in the face of adversity; she has never been one to give up in times of hardship and instead puts her nose down to the grindstone.

Reputation: Sunny has a positive reputation around the halls of Sycamore High School. She holds some infamy around the school due to her connection issues—which often occur amid ongoing classes—but most other students find her to be, first and foremost, a friendly face. Her teachers also have positive views of her, although many sometimes feel exasperated by her constant issues with the school's technology. Her activist efforts around town are known and appreciated by some. In addition, her assistance with charity work also mean she is well-liked by those in her community.

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Designated Number: A01

Designated Weapon: W-7 — Gold Silverware Set
Designated Utility: U-26 — Surveillance System

Evaluation: "A01 better wisen up and make the decision to drop those precious morals before someone else decides to wipe that smile off her face and drop her; otherwise, I predict that it's going to be nighty-night for little Miss Sunshine over here." — [MCKINLEY], Armorer and Site Security (Querida / Site B)

DECEASED