Maya Press

[PlatFleece]

Name: Maya Press
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Grade: 12th
School: John Endecott Memorial Academy
Hobbies and Interests: History, mythology, debate club, Model United Nations, bridge, miniature wargaming, trading card games

Appearance: Maya stands at 5'1" and weighs 112 lbs. She has tanned brown skin with combed brown hair tied in a ponytail. Her face is mostly clean of blemishes, with the exception of some freckles on her nose. She has upturned, dark brown eyes, thin lips, and a sharp, angular face. Maya mostly tries to look the best she can, grooming herself regularly. She wears makeup to clean up and sharpen her features, and has rectangular-rimmed glasses, but doesn't otherwise try to look pretty or be fashionable. She does her best to maintain a straight and composed posture when in public.

Maya's clothing style favors cardigans and turtlenecks with a combination of khakis. She dresses in modest light colors of beige, grey, or white. When attending formal parties, she wears button-up jackets, keeping with the greys and beiges. During more casual events, she opts for sweater vests or long-sleeved casual clothing. During the abduction, she was wearing a dark blue sweater vest and a white long-sleeved turtleneck, with darker skinny jeans and brand-new outdoor boots.

Biography: Maya was born in Cardiff to Arthur and Catarina Press. She is the second child of a family of two. Arthur currently works as a web developer, while Catarina is a freelance children's book author.

Arthur Press met his wife, Catarina Press, nee Lopez during his first web development job. The two of them had been in Boston at the time, and both agreed that the experience in their workplace was not to their liking. They bonded over missing out on their initial goals in life. Arthur was a skilled chess player who had potential as a professional player. Though he had ambitions for that competitive stage, he had to let go of his career due to stress and college, while Catarina wanted to become an author, but was finding it difficult to score a good publishing deal. Eventually, they got married after two years in a relationship, and both agreed to quit their jobs and start over in Cardiff.

A few years later, Maya was born, just two years after her older sister Maria. During Maya's childhood, her mother would often read stories to the two sisters. Oftentimes these stories were ones that Catarina made herself. It was during this time that Catarina decided that she would try starting her writing career by finding publishers for children's books. Eventually, Catarina found herself a publisher, and the time she spent with her daughters became significantly less frequent. This led to a period where Maya felt abandoned by her mother, and stuck much closer to her father.

During her primary school years, at around the same time Catarina was beginning to earn money for her children's books, Arthur had lost his job. While he continued to search for work, he began trying to spend some more time with his children. Arthur taught his children chess, something he was much more better at. This fostered an interest in chess in both Maya and her sister, and both joined the school chess club at the same time. Unfortunately, their father became more and more stressed at finding work that he had little patience whenever Maya or her sister lost a tournament. While Maria continued to foster her skills in chess, Maya did not appreciate how her father acted, and quit the chess club just before she went to secondary school.

When she was eleven years old, her father found a job at a start-up company in Salem. The move wouldn't affect her mother's job too much, and so the family decided that it was for the better that they all moved together and start a new life. The adjustment to the United States took some getting used to for the whole family, and for a while, Maya had trouble making friends. Because of this, she began to find a way to change the way people perceived her. She became much more outgoing, and worked to make herself seem as smart and confident as possible. She put aside several hours of her workload to improve her grades and would offer help to some students who were struggling. In class, Maya was always first to act, whether it be answering a question or finishing a test. She would feel intense pressure, mostly from herself, if she failed to meet these expectations, especially if another student was able to meet it before hers. Maya would often help other classmates who were struggling with concepts, whether they wanted to or not. She felt that inserting herself would help to better her chances of making friends and gaining the respect of her classmates at the same time.

Although there was a chess club in the school, Maya didn't want to enter, to the disappointment of her father. Maya felt that how her father treated her whenever she had bad games had made her feel useless, and because she was never able to talk back, she felt scared and powerless. Because of this, she instead joined two other clubs focused on speech and oratory skills, the debate club, and Model United Nations. Within these clubs, she worked herself as hard as she did when she was first studying chess with her father. She found the boost of confidence she gave herself during oratory speeches much more comforting after her past experiences with him.

Maya's relationship with her father in eighth grade was not very amicable. Due to her experience in debate club and MUN, she began to more frequently argue back against him, turning small spats into full-blown shouting matches around the house. This, combined with her father's better relationship with her older sister made Maya feel like the black sheep of the family. Her mother struggled to amend relations between the two whenever a fight broke up, and eventually her sister decided to have a talk with her, where she told Maya to try out for a competitive gaming club once again.

Still unwilling to try out for chess, Maya instead joined a similar club, the card game bridge. Like her other clubs, this game had teams to lead, and Maya very easily adjusted to the rules, oftentimes attempting to make strategies for her team in addition to what the coach had suggested. Maya is noticeably on edge whenever she had to play the Dummy role in bridge, where her partner would have to dictate the moves for her. She would find herself judging her teammate during these situations, and it would not be uncommon for her to point out misplays and give advice after the game, win or lose.

Because of her experiences in Debate, MUN, and the Bridge Clubs, Maya began to see herself as a strategist, and desired to find more activities that encouraged this kind of thinking. Around high school, her club members introduced her to various trading card games. Maya became interested in them, and started playing them with her friends more often, finding it to be a rewarding pastime. Of particular interest was Yu-Gi-Oh!, which Maya gravitated towards due to the talk that it was one of the more complicated card games to learn. Deckbuilding was one of her favorite things to do in trading card games, as she equated it to forming a strategy and winning with it before the match even begun. Before long, she began buying cards to build for her deck and became absorbed in the amount of strategy she found inside the cards. Maya dislikes buying booster packs, preferring instead to buy singles to reduce the chances of wasting money, regardless of how expensive they might be.

As she progressed in the interest of TCGs, she eventually found herself attracted to miniature wargaming, as it was even more like she was a general leading an army to peak efficiency. Like her card gaming interest, she eventually gravitated towards Infinity, mostly due to the supposed complexity in learning the full rules. This would lead to her buying not only the necessary miniatures, but also the terrain and other objects needed to make a tactical battle work. However, Maya was not an enthusiast for miniature painting, so often she wanted to buy pre-painted miniatures from online, as she didn't much care for assembling them herself so long as they looked play-ready. Maya particularly enjoyed starting in a non-balanced scenario, where she is disadvantaged by the terrain, just to prove that she could win against the odds with a perfect strategy.

Maya became further absorbed in her hobbies and friends during her time at John Endecott. The amount of money she spent buying the things she needed, alongside the investment in playing with her friends caused her grades to go from straight-As to Bs and Cs. Although Maya kept herself well-studied enough to prevent her grades from dropping too badly, to her parents, this was a clear sign that what she was doing was disrupting her academic studies. This started another period of strained relationships between Maya and her father, exacerbated by the many achievements Maya claimed she brought home through her club activities.

Around the same time, Maya started reading up on history books. Mostly books relating to great leaders, military strategies, and spies, but she has also shown interest in mythological texts like the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Nihon Shoki. Books that emphasized tactical knowledge. Maya enjoyed reading these books and applying them to both her games and her regular life. She found inspiration in many historical figures. Particularly those that have failed in the past, only to rise up and become known for something greater.

Meanwhile, her sister Maria had succeeded in enrolling to college, and had made a name for herself in chess tournaments. Her father was much more receptive to this, which caused even more strain to Maya's relationship with him. Maya's mother similarly became busier and busier with writing and fulfilling requests from her publisher, leaving Maya with little room to vent out her stress except to her friends that she made in clubs and in class.

Despite all of this, Maya continues to view herself as a talented black sheep, who simply needed to prove herself to her father with her own talents in her own ways. She continued to immerse herself in Debate and MUN, and still plays bridge and other trading card games both physically and online with her former Bridge clubmates, who disbanded when she entered high school, as some of them had moved out of Salem.

Maya's hopes for college is to enter a profession where she can make use of her oratory skills, such as a field in public speaking. She has not yet chosen where or how, and discussions with her parents about this go in circles as they struggle to come to terms with an appropriate university to apply to.

Advantages: Maya possesses the necessary leadership skills to command a small dedicated group of people on a large-scale task. Assuming she can get a team that is willing to work with her, she can easily delegate tasks and keep people focused on one big objective. Her experience also lends itself to constructing meaningful arguments, which could help with convincing others in a group. Her overachieving nature will also be useful, as Maya is not known to give up when confronted with failure.
Disadvantages: Maya has a tendency to insert herself into groups of people as the sole authoritative force. Her negative experiences with her father has made her resent being ordered around or underestimated. She is also prone to arguing and speaking out her mind when she disagrees with someone, and is not usually willing to back down.

[Buko]

Hey PatFleece! My name is Chad/Buko and I will be the one taking a look at Maya! First and foremost, I would like to thank you for your patience shown thus far and also extend the same little speech I try to extend everyone. That is to say that the profile process is just that—a process. Anything said in this review and brought up in subsequent rounds is brought up not to create obstacles but to get the best version of Maya into pre-game proper! In that vein, because I am a human being (allegedly), I may miss something in this review that I bring up in another. Be patient with me and we’ll both get through this!

So let us get to cracking!

Hobbies & Interests

This is done in list format and so only the first thing needs to be capitalized!

Appearance

This was straight forward and pretty concise, I didn’t see anything that jumped out grammatically, but I do think that you could use some more cleaning up in regard to phraseology and word choice along with tenses. I always advocate reading aloud because we tend to lose our mind’s ability to self-correct and we also get a sense of the rhythm and sentence structure in an audible and visceral way!

Biography

Firstly, I think we want to be careful with words like prodigy and genius—the higher the status the more explanation and justification that is required. Just a small thing but you can just state that Arthur was an avid and skilled player with professional prospects and ambitions that had to be put on the burner for college. You get the same result without the burden of the word ‘prodigy’.

In this same respect, we want to be careful with attributing and creating feelings for others in our biographies.

Her grades began to improve and her classmates began to respect her as the local smart girl.

We cannot really control and count for respect, but we can get a grasp of reputation. I would change this to focus more on Maya’s self-image and confidence and that effecting her reputation. We have Maya rejecting her father afterwards and sort of leaning into her intellectual pursuits all the way in total when it comes to debate and model UN. Let us focus more on the image of ‘the local smart girl’ that Maya tries to cultivate and have others see her as rather than simply stating how she is viewed by others. I want Maya’s idea of what a smart girl looks like and the efforts she goes to portray that to others—beyond simply grades. Lean more into the characterization you establish later and plant more seeds in this earlier part of the biography.

I enjoy the storyline of Maya rejecting chess and picking up other interests to establish her own identity. I do think we need to scale things back a little bit, especially in concern to her bridge skill. This is much like the idea of prodigies and geniuses—we want our game to be populated by a majority of regular, ordinary high school kids. Prodigal talent and nationally recognized skill are things we want to be careful with.

Like her other clubs, this game had teams to lead, and Maya very easily adjusted to the rules, winning national competitions that she did to impress her father.

So that is to say we are going to need to scale this line to something on the County or District level.

For the purpose of making the war-games and trading card game aspect of the profile worthy of standing on it’s own, I would advocate for a paragraph for each. I would also like to know what games she enjoys and plays along with how she affords the hobby. I think you can link the price of the hobby with her declining grades leading to more fractures with her parents.

Overall, the big thing here would be to flesh out her trading card and war game hobbies a bit more but also focusing on scaling back her father and her own skill at these games. What I said in the appearance section also applies here in that I believe you should read aloud and try to clean up the sentence structure and word choice a bit. Nothing seems egregious or out of pocket, but I think we all benefit from a few rounds of self-editing during this process.

Advantages & Disadvantages

Clear and to the point, knocked this section out the park. I enjoy that it is focused a lot on her character and personality traits. I get a sort of vision and thesis statement for the character here that I enjoy! Good job!

And that’s It for round one! If you require any assistance or elaboration on my end feel free to hit me up either via board PM or on Discord! I also respond to messenger pigeons, smoke signals and lucid dreams but the turn-around time varies a lot more! Good luck and happy writing! Looking forward to seeing the next version of Maya!

[PlatFleece]

Sorry for the extremely late reply, but thank you for the advice! It's one of the more detailed ones I've gotten! I've fixed her up and added a lot more details on her character and personality.

[Buko]

Looks good to me! You may get somebody who is stricter/more skilled than I in regard to grammar when it comes to final apps! Keep that in mind and maybe don't be surprised if you're asked to remove a word here and there or clean something up a little in the end! But for the purposes of pre-game? I think this passes the bar and Maya is more than ready. I appreciate the way you scaled things back and also the spaces where you elaborated. Solid effort all around.

Have fun!

APPROVED!