S124 - Press, Maya [DECEASED]

[Ruggahissy]

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 free 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 accentuate 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 black winter jacket, 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 Boston, Massachusetts 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 Salem.

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 elementary 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. 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 about finding work, so he had little patience whenever Maya or her sister lost a tournament, often blowing up at them and demanding that they perform better next time, or implying that failing to win a tournament would be equivalent to wasting time practicing. 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 a new city 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. While some students appreciated the gesture, others were annoyed at the eagerness she displayed. Still others would sometimes take advantage of this side of her. Yet Maya was not discouraged by those kids, but in fact convinced herself that she was doing the right thing as a smart, self-confident student. 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 for fear of disappointing 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 trading card games, 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 oratory skills that could help her motivate others on the island and potentially create allies. Assuming she can get a team that is willing to work with her, she can easily 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 in ensuring that failures do not break her spirit.
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.

Designated Number: Student No. 124

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Designated Weapon: Nostalgia Premium Snow Cone Syrup Party Kit

Conclusion: How many allies can you win with treats? Who snows. - Abby Soto