Camila Cañizares

Camila Cañizares (art by Yonagoda)

Name: Camila Cañizares Santamaría
Gender: Female
Age: 18
Grade: Senior
School: George Hunter High School
Hobbies and Interests: Agriculture, horticulture, fishkeeping, business and entrepreneurship, swimming, hiking, parkour, exploration, volunteering, cooking, foodie culture.

Appearance: Camila is a 5'6" woman of Hispanic descent, with a fair skin tone that is generally bronzed evenly due to extensive tanning. She weighs 130 lb. on average and her body is of an hourglass shape, though not dramatically as her silhouette is small. She has a slightly stocky profile, with a torso that is longer than her legs. Her legs and shoulders are athletically developed, with gently muscular contour.

Her face is a short circle and highly symmetrical. She has a soft chin and fairly undefined cheekbones, and a little baby fat stubbornly clings into this area of her face. Her nose is small and button-like, with a bridge that vanishes shy of her eye-line. Her lips are full and shapely, and naturally a pale pink. She has a distinct gap tooth in her smile, slightly off-center on the upper row of her teeth. Her eyes are a dull and dark blue, almost indistinguishable from the pupil unless one is attentive enough. She has good skin complexion for her age and has never had to deal with acne breakouts or other skin conditions. Her black hair is grown out to rest against the blades of her back, and this long it becomes fairly wavy in distinct, fist-size tresses. She usually styles it back into a simple ponytail.

Camila cares little for fashion. She will occasionally indulge herself on a whim with light and feminine wear, but the sundress or frilly blouse is sparingly represented in her wardrobe. For the most part she wears rough-and-tumble clothes, dusty and damaged jeans in neutral tones like blue and black. For her tops she pursues either plain and monotone color tees or short-sleeve button-ups, and her clothes tend to be light cotton to deal with heat and ventilation issues. Camila rarely wears makeup, though she is knowledgeable enough to pull off a modest and natural look in the rare instance that she deems it appropriate. She tends to wear hiking boots, steel-toes, or other supple footwear, and she uses a simple fiber drawstring backpack universally in place of other accessories like purses.

Her voice is airy, naturally middling in pitch, and with a slight Cubano accent. Her enunciation and projection are developed, and she can reliably speak very loudly and confidently as she deems fit. Camila has an unabashed habit of openly speaking to herself in public in either of her native tongues. She speaks fluent Spanish.

When kidnapped Camila wore a fitted black windbreaker, a zip-up, on top of a gray short sleeve shirt with a scoop neckline. She wore denim faded-gray jeans, long knitted socks decorated with a pattern of concentric circles in earthy toes, and tie-up light brown leather boots with inch thick soles that ride up the ankle.

Biography: Camila Cañizares Santamaría was born October 3rd of 1999 in Baptist Hospital, Miami, the second child and first daughter of Nicolás Cañizares and Lismary Santamaría de Cañizares. Young Camila was part of an enclave of about fifteen who had made it to the country in the early 90s as economic refugees. Camila's family members were businesspeople and doctors, her own parents were former analysts for the state bank whose positions had been eliminated by a restructuring prior to their deciding to flee.

Camila's early years were pleasant. She hit all her developmental milestones at expected ages. The few blocks around Camila's apartment were friendly, with a strong influence and flavor of her parent's homeland. She had plenty of friends and was a bustling sort, eager to explore and get out of the house, and often the leader in the neighborhood games between the many other children she was on close terms with. She did not attend preschool, as her parents did not know this option was available to them. Camila however, would strongly developed her English from a young age. Her parents, who themselves had struggled for years to reach business fluency, insisted upon it. Though Spanish was the casual language around the home, Camila would develop a reputation among her friends in the neighborhood for being particular with her English, a fact she was sometimes teased for.

The richest members of the family had made a number of investments to maintain financial security, but a particularly ill-advised one had been farmland: the family had invested in thirty acres against the Chickamauga in Tennessee, buying from an insolvent farm that had been about to close. The farm had been entrusted to one of Camila's uncles by marriage. His management eventually went under, the farm was bleeding money. Months of heated debate Camila was only occasionally even aware of eventually ended with her mother and father agreeing to turn around the farm's sagging cash flow. Though not farmers, the two of them had been growing restless in Miami as they hadn't been able to find jobs that sufficiently challenged them. They were considered the family's brightest, and most likely to be capable of handling the turnaround. Thus, Camila would be attending Kindergarten in Chattanooga's suburbs.

Rebuilding the failing farm was an all-hands-on-deck affair, as for the sake of profitability the farm had to be rebuilt completely. Camila had been excited to share her home with farm animals, however this promise from her parents would never materialize as the farm’s acres were shifted into fields and orchards. Camila’s daily chores were age-appropriate but extensive: as soon as she was able she would till and harvest and do basic field inventory. Her responsibilities were exhaustive by the time she’d hit puberty: she’d be handling tractors, directing field hands, and so on. From a young age Camila grew used to lacking for free time: her parents allowed her to have an easier day if she had school activities or dates with friends, but besides this she was kept busy and learned to keep a tight schedule and sleep efficiently.

The family was tight knit as such a small unit. Camila’s elder brother Martín was separated from her by five years, but the two would bond over their home duties and Martín took a pride in having his little sister under his wing. Nicolás and Lismary were kindred spirits who took to their new lifestyle well and inspired young Camila with their stable relationship and their brusque and efficient approach to business. They raised her with economic maxims Camila has memorized to this day. The home remained cozily Cubano in aesthetic, and the four speak fluent Spanglish when together and without guests in the home.

In school Camila was sometimes out of place but her personality was strong, bullies would avoid her because she wasn’t an easy target and had little patience for being excluded. She thrust herself into various social groups and provided good social value: her roaming spirit and natural bend for leadership meant she was excellent in entertaining her peers, often leading long rambling trips into the wilderness of suburban Chattanooga fearlessly.

Camila in turn was easily impressed by some of her other peers who she respected and cherished. She is loathe to give up on early childhood friends, to this day, even if they have moved schools or states since then. Her stubborn and self-determined nature is positive in this regard, as she often defines individual relationships on her own terms. Her family was frugal and socially low-class due to the profit margins of the farm being razor-thin, Camila herself exuded her lifestyle in her behavior. She was thrifty and didn’t follow trends, but she was often bullish enough to win friends from any sort of background.

For example, Camila’s parents were only Roman Catholic culturally, and no longer paid lip service to their faith. Camila herself went along with this, but meeting Claudeson Bademosi and being strongly impacted by his kindly nature and spirit inspired her in kind. She attended service with him and soon formally declared herself Protestant, her brother inspired shortly thereafter to follow. She couldn’t attend Sunday School as her family could not justify the monthly fees, but she would do church activities on weekends and was integrated into the local parish very well. She had a taste for volunteering and she often led small groups of children her age in caretaking for the church lawn and topiary. She was praised by the adult leaders of the volunteer groups for her initiative and knowledge, and she internalized her ability to reach out and help others of her own volition and ability, continuing as she aged to develop a strong sense of pride and self-sufficiency.

Camila was and still is an early morning waker. She liked to get some of her farm chores done early, and while waiting for the sun to be high enough for her to walk to school she developed a routine of swimming the nearby river or mentally mapping the undeveloped acres that the family had access to. Swimming and hiking were Camila’s easy hobbies, in her own words, relaxing activities that she didn’t need to invest a lot of her mental energy into. She often crashed richer friend’s homes when they had pool access, and she briefly considered a YMCA swim team, though she ultimately decided the fees and practice schedules were too much to commit to.

In the later stages of Camila’s elementary school years her ambitious nature would have its first field test. She’d been alternately asking and pestering her parents for the right and support to implement her own vision and project: she’d found an area she believed could support a fish pond near the river, inspired by late night documentaries about fish farming that her parents had been idly discussing as a potential future revenue source for the farm. After some back and forth they agreed to undertake the investment, with Camila expected to primarily handle the grunt work of caretaking. Camila's original intent to be in charge of the planning was pared down for legal and practical considerations, and she initially was not happy with her role as entrepeneur being reduced but she settled in with the assumption that she'd prove herself worthy when the farm became profitable. Over the course of six months the family carefully selected and bred sunfish, goldfish, koi and so on sourced from nurseries all over the state, with her handling the mundane parts such as cleaning and breeding. She marketed in schools and fairs, and took great craftsman’s pleasure in running the ponds entirely by herself.

When Camila entered middle school Martín graduated to college. He attended Austin College in Texas, a private liberal arts college with ties to the Presbyterian church, a decision Martín credits Camila and Claudeson Bademosi for as in the intervening years since converting he’d become significantly devout in his faith.

Camila was proud for her brother, but his decision also made her budding, maturing mind come into confrontation with a certain fact: she hated school and academics. For most of her primary education she’d come to only exert effort and try in classes if she instinctively understood the subject, otherwise she couldn’t be bothered. She’d had friction with her parents over her subpar, middling grades. At this time in her life as she graduated to middle school she finally decided to make it clear that she intended to take over the family business or otherwise pursue her own independent entrepreneurship. Her parents and herself came to a practical understanding, that Camila’s focus was elsewhere and she simply didn’t intend to be a college-bound girl, though they agreed likewise on the caveat that Camila had to maintain good enough grades to keep college as an option. She does study, but sparsely, she only puts in as much academic effort as need be and she has cheated on essays and tests when she can get away with it.

Camila likewise did not engage much with clubs and extracurriculars within school. She developed a habit and preference for spending as little time on campus as was possible, to the point where she would even use other libraries besides the school library when doing research. She considered herself too occupied with her farm duties and preferred spending her free time elsewhere in general. In eighth grade Camila was reported by her Social Sciences for accumulating five days of unexcused absences. The consequence of detention periods and parent teacher meetings led to a businesslike contract between Camila and her parents. She'd take care of her attendance from then on despite her misgivings, in exchange for her continued freedoms on and off the farm.

As she graduated into high school and continued to mature Camila’s plans in life were fairly set in stone and she began to broadly explore her chosen path in life accordingly. Bold and energetic as she was she continued to develop her business acumen, though she’d have less success than her small fish business in future endeavors. She’d try to license the brand of her family’s produce for local stalls in markets that could develop their local reach, however she ran into limitations that even her force of personality couldn’t overcome. She takes failures in her stride and considers reaching out and searching for deals in her community to be a pet hobby.

Her attendance to church was also reduced, as she began strongly questioning the tenants of organized religion, deeming it too stifling and limiting in scope. Her friends noticed that her extroverted and impassioned tendencies took on an argumentative bend, Camila unconsciously began to enjoy being contrary for the sake of it as it amused and thrilled her when she could get away with it.

Camila’s high school experience is generally focused, given her strong and particular ambitions. She maintains a good relationship with her parents but one evolved into professional ground, as each party tries to honestly critique the other. Camila’s parents are quietly proud of their daughter, whose perceived maturity they hold in high regard. Her branch of the immediate family is generally considered distant from their old enclave in Miami, on friendly terms, but wildly diverged. Camila has been to Miami two summers since moving away, and generally considers her extended family unfamiliar and only distantly useful connections to have. She questions the practicality of otherwise being swayed by the pull of her own heritage and culture beyond how it’s immediately applicable in her home life.

Camila is friendly but distant in school, holding an openly expressed disdain for most academic pursuits that she considers wasted time and often being willing to give her peers critique to the point of coming off as something of a bully or otherwise, even if she personally does not perceive herself as such. This is of course secondary to her anyways, she often slips through school without being too bothered about her social status or lack thereof.

Her few positive engagements in school are often tangential, teacher anecdotes or blips of information that will settle in her mind and quickly inform her still developing business sense. As a farm girl with a strong sense of her local land she always felt sensitive to conservationist efforts. She felt a certain practical disdain for the effects of these considerations onto profits and livelihood, a dichotomy she still balances to this day, but her love for nature born of exposure combined with what knowledge she bothered to take to heart in her classes led to her developing approaches she hoped would be more sustainable, a more progressive and future-looking mindset she often tries to wrestle with while considering her daily activities and business plans. Through discipline she is a strong recycler and often cleans areas during her lonely wanderings in town or outside.

Camila’s growing independence and self-determined schedule led to her picking up particular habits in her day-to-day routine, mainly that she often cooked for herself and her family, rotating duties with her mother. Her agricultural knowledge was easily developed into an intuitive cooking sense, she tends towards a blandly hearty palette given her family’s default cupboard. Cooking was of secondary importance to her as she considered it a difficult talent to leverage in her drive for accomplishment, but she entertained it as at least a hobby where she didn’t have to hustle, or could muse on her more mentally intensive plans and activities in a low-stress environment. She developed a strong affinity for food over her high school years as such, and found a comfortable home in the kitchen to supplement her lonely time on the farm, especially as her chores often stole away her time and forced her into solitary pursuits.

Her social life did lead her off the farm at irregular intervals. Through some friends she is at least willing to attend parties, often with the practical motive of trying to find new clients that will be interested in her drug peddling. She’s a social presence at once odd and endearing, while she’s odd in how she’ll talk to herself or often be unavailable she’s also unabashedly so. Lacking shyness and often taking initiative and responsibility with her self-direction she has social capital in her own way, and she’s far from a social martyr.

Her social web has led her to adapt her stubborn tendencies in at least some sense. As she spends more of her off-time than ever in town and civilization she often observes a certain restlessness in more urban settings. She handled this energy with pursuits that she believed integrated her existing persona handily. For example, her physical prowess became an interest in freerunning and urban exploration, with her quick feet and stamina being trained into a propensity for parkour and navigating urban landscapes. She enjoyed the idea of trespassing into areas she shouldn’t be, and Chattanooga slowly became a playground much as her own local neighborhood was, one far larger than she had much more work to do with, work she enjoys earnestly for it engages her goal-oriented nature. Often she tries to rope sympathetic friends into exploring with her, otherwise, explorations and ramblings about are her after-hangout activities until she is needed at home. She has yet to be caught in a sticky situation beyond occasionally being shooed away from a site she's lurking around the edges of by guards, though she's somewhat restless and eager to get more bold with her explorations in the future despite well-meaning advice from friends.

She also noted that her interest in food and modest access to disposable income gave her an opportunity as a reviewer. She wouldn’t let her relative inexperience as a creative writer arrest such a potential and she started a blog, using her connections made in farmer’s markets and through her parents to put her foot in the door in restaurants. This particular pursuit came in the summer before her Senior year, thus she is still a budding blogger with no formal publications to her name, but her blog has a small and active community of locals and her energy allows her to engage her audience effectively with events and discussions. Her tastes and interests are broad, and her writing style, while sparse, has a certain charm in its characteristic simplicity. Her friends are often aware of her pursuits, and the rumor mill tends accurately reports that Camila can often hook up those interested with discounts or free meals at restaurants given her growing sway in the local area. These engagements have opened at least some of her lost heritage, at least in inspiring her to explore more of her Hispanic heritage in cuisine, though her explorations of it are colored by her lifestyle and she often elects to not follow the recipes.

Other ventures, however, began to prove her limits to her in ways she found disquieting, as her sense of self-sufficiency was threatened. Notably she decided to try and leverage her private knowledge and connections to her advantage and took the bold initiative of cutting at a piece of the nascent marijuana industry starting in her Junior year. Her venture was illegal per law in Tennessee, and additionally her parents were also not in the know.

She cultivated three plants in a hidden outdoor area of the family's acreage, in the clearing around an abandoned stone wall that marked an area of the woods. She ambitiously attempted breeding her own strains based on her developed horticultural knowledge and research. Due to expenses and lack of funds she could only purchase few seeds by backdoor dealing with college students. Her growing attempts were successful, to an extent, as the outdoor location forces her to forcibly limit plant growth with various techniques such as purposely withholding sunlight and constricting plants with tied to keep the plants innocuously hidden away. Further difficulties included actually moving product, which produced few returns due to the few she could trust- friends currently know she has a source, but far fewer know the source is herself. The amount of work she must put in and the secrecy she must maintain keep her output low and inefficient. Presently she continues, but considers her two years to be developmental as her connections and product are not developed enough for her to enter the market fully. She has yet to recoup her initial investment after two years, much to her chagrin. Indeed a pruning accident lost her a plant, so she's overall incurred net loss since her start. She justifies it to herself as research and development, as she'll often also give away her product for free for favors or to test her new strains.

Her time being in charge of the family fish pond also continued to evolve as her other major business engagement as a supplier. The work remained satisfying in a down-to-earth way, and by her Junior year she was also handling bookkeeping and accounting matters. However, handling the finances impressed on her the high overhead costs of moving even the modest volumes they did. She began to sense that it'd be a long time before she could take over the pond fully like she'd hoped, and even with increased responsibilities the pond became something of a mental roadblock, a symbol of her still depending on her parents.

Camila has entered her Senior year as a developed personality, sometimes off-putting but always interesting to hang out with when she’s willing to afford the time to socialization. She has a decent family life and decent school life, her poor grades and disdain of class time aside. She has not dated and has no care for making any inroads on that front, indeed she correctly suspects she is asexual and mostly aromantic due to her sheer lack of interest, but that same lack of interest has made her inquiries into the matter underdeveloped. She has branched out from her church- though keeping her closest friends from there- and now volunteers on her own time in local wilderness preserves, and is considering non-profit initiatives, drawing up business plans often related to environmental issues she has done usually cursory research into.

She enjoys her life strongly, and believes she is steering her own destiny and has many options and potentials for the future. She confidently hopes to find a more successful venture that can purely be her own undertaking, and looks forward to the day that she'll no longer need parental assistance to thrive.

Advantages: Camila is energetic, practically minded, and strongly self-sufficient and will likely bring this energy into her survival attempts. She has the physical stamina and endurance to reduce the impact of the wilderness environments on her survival chances.
Disadvantages: She is stubborn to a fault, she quickly makes up her mind and rarely affords her initial thoughts further introspection, a tunnel-vision sort of mindset that can lead to her making poor decisions in the short and long term. Her lone wolf tendencies may limit her own perception in terms of alliance opportunities. She’s argumentative and doesn’t readily perceive the risks in being so, leading to a potential social stress point that could put her in danger.

Designated Number: Female student No. 040

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Designated Weapon: Teddy bear with too many eyes

Conclusion: That's... disturbing. In spite of her new friend, G040 seems to be very self-sufficient. She can at least survive off natural resources if nothing else, allowing her to live the rest of her short life in relative peace. - Abby Soto

The above biography is as written by Cicada. No edits or alterations to the author's original work have been made.

Evaluations

Handled by: Cicada

Kills: None

Killed By: Michael Froese

Collected Weapons: Teddy bear with too many eyes (assigned weapon, to Michael Froese), Bad Dragon dildo (from Nia Karahalios, to Michael Froese)

Allies: Blaise d'Aramitz, Dante Luciano Valerio, Liberty Wren, Camilla Bell, Michael Froese

Enemies: Blaise d'Aramitz

Mid-game Evaluation:

Post-Game Evaluation:

Memorable Quotes:

Threads

Below are a list of threads containing Camila, in chronological order:

The Past:

• Child'splay

V7 Pregame:

• Dissonance
• The Good in Everyone (#SwiftBall)

Prom:

• Getting Down With The Clown
• follow up, follow through

The Trip:

• Pool Puns-n-Harmony
• The Best of You

V7:

• Starting Point for G007
• Student Government
• Dormire
• My Body Is Ready
• don't show, tell
• Rakshasa Country
• Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Is In)
• live with yourself

Your Thoughts

Whether you were a fellow handler in SOTF or just an avid reader of the site, we'd like to know what you thought about Camila Cañizares. What did you like, or dislike, about the character? Let us know here!

• Cicada's characters are always a fascinating exercise in voice, and Camila is no different. Unlike Beryl or Demetri, however, she felt quite mutable at stages, her tone and mannerisms shifting with threads and circumstances yet retaining a core that was defined most strongly to me by a certain goodness and willingness to help others, even at peril to herself. This was a great things to see, somewhat uncommon among V7's often darker-shades-of-grey cast, and yet at the same time it marked Camila as doomed more or less from the start. Every good thing she tries to do costs her, and thanks are few and far between.
  
  I think perhaps the single greatest moment of tragedy for Camila comes from her interactions with Tonya. Not coincidentally, this ties to her best Pregame thread, which established the two girls' relationship and was in fact written while V7 was ongoing, only shortly prior to their meeting. I think there's a really good lesson to take from this: a little willingness to go back and explore a relationship or provide context outside of the game can lend a scene way, way more power than trying to summarize it in the moment or coasting along and hoping the audience just rolls with it. It's also nice to see Camila outside of giant event threads, which otherwise accounted for most of her Pregame (split between Prom, the trip, and Swiftball, plus a thread in the school cafeteria that never went anywhere).
  
  And, of course, Camila's death is fascinating both for the ideas it explores and for the role it plays in setting the trajectory for one of my absolute favorite characters of the version. The cool part of it is, there is some real ambiguity and emotional development over the course of the thread, and this combines with Camila's stepping out to finally perish by herself to create a situation which can be read both to support and to refute Michael's later assertions of having manipulated her into giving him permission to kill her. That sort of uncertainty is a lot of fun for me.
  
  Of course, there are a few wrinkles and rough patches. I feel like Camila's nadir probably comes around the time of Dante's death, as she spends two threads in a row sidelined and then shunts her own narrative interests aside to try to push the scene, which to a degree backfires because it feels markedly less natural than the rest of her story. On the whole, however, I would say Camila is a really good character, one who stands apart from the version for approaching goodness from a nuanced perspective and showing how easily it can fall to despair in the face of failure. - MurderWeasel