PENN, Marpesia

[style= text-align: center; text-transform: uppercase;]MARPESIA PETREUS PENN

This application is currently complete. My name is michelle and I'm 17 years old.

NAME: Marpesia 'Maury' Petreus Penn
AGE: 18
GENDER: Female
BIRTHDAY: August 13 '94
OCCUPATION: Scavenger

PLAYBY: Miley Cyrus

MOTHER: Janette Theresa Penn [nee Kross]
FATHER Samuel Jeb Penn
BROTHERS: n/a
SISTERS: n/a
SPOUSE: n/a
CHILDREN: n/a
EXTENDED FAMILY: Several. Probably dead.

Dark highlights have faded with time and have revealed Maury's true hair color, an auburn red mix that suits her pale complextion much better than the black ever did. Lack of electricity has allowed the fake looking straightness of her locks to mellow out into the gentle curls that adorned her head when she had been little - making her the child her parents used to show off at dinner parties. Lack of make-up has clensed her face of the dark black racoon eyeshadow that once adorned her face. Now it's merely the natural dark blue rings of sleeplessness that compliment the young girl's piercing blue eyes. Her height is now unmarred by the heels she used to wear while partying all night, landing her at a modest 5'6''. And her weight has evened out with the help of Henley falls, weighing in at a modest 110 pounds. With the help of the living dead, her once limp exterior has hardened with leg muscles and her heart works twice as well as it ever did when she was only a dancer. Survival does things.

If you look past Maury's make-up covered face and tight dress covered body, you would see an intelligent girl. By no means an Einstein, Maury is smart enough to maintain her grades and extra curriculars even with her...ehm...extracurriculars. She tends to keep her brains to herself. It's not like she hides it. She's insanely proud of what she can do. She loves going to her parents holding an A paper. Maury just knows her friend's wouldnt care. They'd care if she picked up a cute guy at the club. They dont care about school. But so long as her parents care, Maury doesnt need her friends. She's independent.

But Maury loves her parents. Their personalities have rubbed off on her immensly. Her father the cellist and her mother the bug-tologist, yeah. Their early active part in her education really gave her a boost. Their insistance she change schools to be at the one with better teachers, it taught Maury to adapt, and to adapt quickly and no matter what. "Reacting is better than acting" her mother told her. Maury reacted by changing her name and adapting a new lifestyle while still maintaining her old. There was always that one thing of their's she could never pick up on. Their understanding of her lifestyle (although they never got all the details) was impressive. Marpesia was never able to grasp their understanding. She was never able to look at a person and see the absolute good. She could look at a homeless person and suspect them of being an alcoholic. You could call it being a pessimist, Maury calls it being a realist.

NATIONALITY: Georgian ;; American

Pampered and spoiled is the only way to describe Maury's childhood. Her mother Janette was an avid butterfly collector, jetting off every other week to Brazil to research Amazonian bugs. She stopped when Maury was born, named her daughter after one of her favorite butterflies, and joined Atlanta's Botanical Garden Butterfly Pavilion, becoming the lead curator. Her father Samuel was the concertmaster of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Altogether, the pair netted well over what they needed to survive. A baby hardly pinched their fortune. Marpesia was born with a head of bright red curls, just like her grandma, that gradually muted into an auburn. The baby girl was given the best toys, diapers, strollers, legos, dresses, anything money could buy. This included her first "baby" grand steinway piano when she was only three years old. She was belting out Beethoven and Bach before she could read or write. She was considered the apple of her parents' eyes. To them she could do no wrong.

Marpesia never did. Known as Mary for all of elementary school, she was a bright girl. With numbers and grammer, she could do no wrong. In science, she relied on friends to help her - so she wouldnt have to go home and admit defeat to her parents. She hated disappointing her parents, so she always did whatever they asked. Including learning to ride a horse - something "proper" girls had to learn. Despite being afraid of heights, and hating the smell of horse dung, Mary did it for her mother.

Something changed when Mary hit middle school. She had to change school districts because her mother wanted her in the "better" school. Mary left her friends and when she was ridiculed for her name Marpesia, she requested everyone to call her Maury - a name she figured would never be made fun of. She figured it would be the type of name she could tell her old friends of and they'd laugh and together they'd make fun of these new people. She did, and then she returned to school after that first week and started to make friends with the outgoing kids who laughed at her. These girls had names like Joey, Ross, Dylan. Twelve year old girls also wore short skirts. Maury's first sleepover with them consisted of playing truth or dare, with the questions being of their first kisses and the first time they got grounded. Maury had never done any of those things. She didnt wear short skirts like those girls. She wore khaki pleated knee length skirts, and blazers. She had friends who were boys, and had gotten cheek kisses from old men in her father's orchestra. She had never been grounded, because she had never done anything wrong. But, as she changed her name, she changed her past. In effect, she changed her identity.

Maury came home from that first sleepover with a new perspective on life. The next time she went shopping with her mother, she bought shorts, and skirts. Slyly, Maury eased her mother into this new her, by asking for things that werent too short, and begging with almost tears. As Maury could never say no to her mother, her mother could never say no to Maury. By grade eight, Maury had completed the new her. She had been kissed, she had been grounded - for an afternoon because she skipped horse back riding lessons. Her grades stayed the same. She was still the same Maury at home. Her parents saw nothing changing except her appearance. They thought it was just a phase.

In highschool, Maury did everything her parents asked of her. She joined debate. She joined orchestra. She joined the math team. She tutored. She joined track and cross country. She became president of the school's volunteering club. She maintained a 4.0, tying for the rank of 4 out of 600 students. The musical's pit pianist. Held down a job as a hostess at the Cheesecake Factory. She was a great daughter. Because she was already so good, her parents didnt mind what she did in her spare time. They felt they raised her well enought to know right from wrong. And they did. Maury understood what she should and shouldnt do. But that didnt prevent her from having numerous boyfriends (none too serious to go into), going to numerous clubs, or getting drunk off her ass numerous times, all before her senior year of high school.

When she hit that final year of school, she had already been applying to schools. She even had an early acceptance to Penn State. Although her future was being made, she continued to live in the present. Drunk on the weekends, sober and learning on the weekdays. It wasnt real until the first zombie attacks. She had been shopping with her friends at the mall. A zombie walks into Hot Topic. Panic. Chaos. Splitsville from her friends to run home in her Lexus. A family ride to the Walmart. A stint together in her father's studio. Everything was relativly okay until the dead started to outnumber the living. Running out of food, the three attempted to leave the building and get into the nearby apartments. Armed with a fire ax and extinguisher from her dad's fire prepareness corner, and her mother's pistol (she had to keep herself safe out in the jungle), they left. It was an attempt, because her father died. She and her mother were able to jump into a nearby car, with the keys still in, and hightail it outta the place.

She and her mother made it out of Atlanta, then out of Georgia. Kentucky was relativly safe, until a horde came by and blood was everywhere. It was a miracle the pair made it out alive. Or half alive. When Janette revealed she'd been bitten, when they had been driving for several hours, she did the only thing a mother could do. She took her pistol and shot herself. Maury then did what any daughter in mourning would do, she lit her mother's body on fire and had a nice little funeral - better a funeral by fire than by teeth. The young girl then continued North, thinking Canada would have been safe. By the time she found Henley Falls, it was up and running and she quickly got into the swing of things by offering up her quick wit and fast running as a scavenger.