Penny Huang

[Brackie]

Name: Penny Huang
Gender: Female
Age: Eighteen [18]
Grade: Senior [12th]
School: Aurora High School
Hobbies and Interests: Cheerleading, Singing, Piano/Keyboard, Art, and First-Person Shooters

Appearance: Penny stands at a very modest and petite 5'4", 122lb, with all the features common of a young girl of Korean descent. She has brown eyes topped with thin eyebrows and a pair of brown, rectangular-framed prescription glasses (which she replaces with contact lenses occasionally), and a pale skin tone. Her nose is small, her face is narrow but shapely, and her hair, dark brown, is long enough in length to reach the curve of her back and also part at the front with side-swept bangs that cover the sides of her face. Her lips are thin, and usually look like they're on the way to a smile.

Modest is also a good word to describe her sense of style, at school anyway. While at Aurora, Penny doesn't wear anything more outlandish or sexualized than a plain t-shirt, jumper and long skirt in the winter, and plain t-shirt and knee-length skirt in the summer. She occasionally spruces it up when she can afford to, but her mother usually prevents her from going out in anything outlandish (at least to her standards). She has no piercings or tattoos, her only notable accessories being her glasses and a silver chain around her neck that she keeps under her clothing

Biography: Penny was born in Seattle, Washington to Jin "Julia" Huang, a fourth-generation Korean-American and Hiking Guide and Mattie Parker, a Washington native and Anesthesiologist. For the first eight or so years of Penny's life, everything was fine - she grew up without incident, nothing tragic or notable, but the first thing that really affected Penny's life was a few months after she turned eight. Her father and mother had been growing apart, but after a particularly nasty fight, the two decided that they didn't love each other anymore. Not even willing to stay together for Penny's sake, the two went through a quick and almost painless divorce, and Mattie moved interstate to go pursue other options in his life. Penny would always resent her mother deep down for, at least in her eyes, driving her father away. She never believed for a moment that her father would simply leave her, so she grew slightly distant from her mother. However, since Julia was all Penny had in terms of parents, she at least appreciated what she had.

School was nothing special either. Like any normal girl she would make friends, make enemies, get in trouble occasionally and get a kick out of being in the limelight. The friends she made were wide and varied, since she never really belonged to a certain "clique", but would simply just make friends with whomever she fancied making friends with and whoever would put up with her. This pattern never faded from her life. At Aurora High, she's friends with different kinds of people from cheerleaders to gamer geeks, with no distinguishing between whom she prefers.

From an early age, Penny enjoyed the arts. Two arts in particular she enjoyed were music and painting, both of which she held in high regard. During her second year of middle school, she discovered a passing interest in the piano, and begged her mother to pay for lessons so she could learn how to play. Julia agreed on the condition that she wouldn't give up when it got hard, and she would continue until she had finished as many of the examinations as she could muster. She was a slow learner, but Penny had a lot of enthusiasm and appreciation for the piano, and managed to claw her way with lots of practice up to Piano Grade 4.

Meanwhile, paintings she enjoyed in particular bordered on the abstract, since she was quite knowledgeable by the time she had taken up piano that art was not supposed to make sense. Penny enjoyed making paintings that both made sense and made absolutely no sense at the same time, and varied between winning contests and merely getting honorable mentions. It wasn't about making something beautiful or something that people would enjoy, it was all about letting her express herself in art form. It was the same philosophy that she held in regards to piano, and a philosophy she made into a personal motto by the time she was in her late teens; "It's not about making something good, it's all about making me happy."

Over the next few years, she would find many more things that would make her happy. She discovered around the time she was fifteen that she had an excellent singing voice, and joined the thousands of people who also had excellent singing voices and posted videos of herself playing the piano and singing onto YouTube, where she gained a weak but esteem-boosting following of around a hundred people. She also found out she enjoyed playing First-Person Shooter games by chance when she was sixteen, when visiting a friend's place and finding out that shooting virtual people was a great source of stress relief. She managed to sneak a few of these games such as Call of Duty 4 and Left 4 Dead onto her and her mother's shared computer and played them occasionally instead of studying. Finally, she discovered a certain enjoyment in watching the Cheerleaders do what they did at every sporting event they were needed. On a whim at the start of her junior year she signed up for tryouts to join the Cheer squad and despite a slightly shaky first impression, she made it on.

Her mother was simply a presence in her life after Penny's father left her. She was a stereotypical mother, always making sure she studied every night, that if she went out with friends she was dressed appropriately, and a very harsh stance on boys. Julia would never let her daughter have a boyfriend, since she didn't trust American boys, but that was fine with Penny, since despite being a growing teenager she had not seen anyone at her school that caught her eye in particular. She'd flirt with the occasional guy she knew was attractive, and maybe even "date" one or two, but her relationships never even passed handholding, or even a peck on the cheek if they were lucky. These "relationships" were never serious in her eyes.

Around people she doesn't know or just met, Penny is not a very interesting person. One could almost say boring, since she's less inclined to open up to them if they're a stranger. Around friends and family, however, she's very excitable and enthusiastic about the smallest things. They know she spends most of her time with her head in the clouds and her dreams all about making herself happy, and it doesn't bother them. Despite being quite odd in nature, she's a smart girl who gets good marks in most of her subjects, so she has her options open in the future even if she can't be happy all the time.

Advantages: Cheerleading has helped her become nimble and athletic, while a creative mind leaves her able to think of ways to escape most situations, which could work to her advantage. While not a real advantage over someone with actual gun knowledge, she's at least a little familiar with how guns work thanks to her affluence in shooting games.
Disadvantages: Her odd and easily excitable nature is somewhat off-putting and in a game like SOTF, not many people will be able to tell if she's simply being her or she's really crazy. She's not the smallest girl in the class, but she's among them, and would be easily overpowered in direct combat. In addition, many of the "guys" she's dated may feel strung along thanks to her disinterest, which may not work to her advantage on the island.