Name: Mari, Marigold True Name: Mia Stanley Gender: Female Age: 27 Birthday: 02/16/1988
Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual Single or Taken: Single
Skills and Training: Horseback riding, Medical training, self taught herbalist, speaks French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, and sign language. Strengths: Honest, loyal, inovative, diplomatic. weaknesses: Can be cruel when forced to, impatient, suspicious, gets bad headaches. Items carried: pain killers, simple medical supplies. a knife she keeps well honed.
Birth Location: Greenwich, Connecticut Blood Family: Frank Stanley (presumed Deceased). Miranda Stanley (Deceased car accident).
Tribe: Canowicakte Rank: Tribe doctor
Physical Appearance
Mari is five foot four and weighs around a hundred and fifteen pounds. She has fine pale skin. She has long brown hair and blue eyes. She can change her appearance drastically just by altering her makeup. by doing this she can either appear to look unremarkable or very exotic. She tends to dress in comfortable clothes that sometimes give the illusion of being finer than they are. Distinguishing Marks: She has a long thin scar down her left arm, where her father slashed her with a broken bottle. She has a tattoo of a Celtic knot moon on her right ankle.
Personality
When people first meet Mari they think that she is a pretty and nice yet quiet girl. They don't look below the surface and because of her facade she can be easily forgettable. She uses those first moments upon meeting someone to size them up. After watching her father conduct his businesses she learned how to manipulate people based on their mannerisms when they talk to her. She stores these pieces of information away in case she may need them later. She has learned to manipulate her features with makeup to appear vastly different if she needs to hide for any reason.
She tries to be a decent person like her mother taught her to be. She is always willing to help if it is needed. She is incredibly intelligent and uses her knowledge and compassion to do what she can, where and when she can. She is a very professional physician and has a great bedside manner. She knows when a patient needs someone to joke around with or when they just need someone to sit quietly with them. However, just because she is compassionate does not mean that she is a victim to be pushed around and used. If anyone thinks that about her the are in for a rude awaking on the day they push her too far.
When she is backed into a corner or sees no other options she can turn vicious. She will use every tool at her disposal to remove the threat. She know how to cut to the core of a person just saying a few words. She also knows how to confuse someone just long enough for her to get away. If she can't do either of these things she is not above resorting to good old fashioned murder. She carries several different types of poisons with her just for such occasions. She even taught herself not only how to milk venomous creature for their venom, but also how to make anti-venom. She keeps these just in case, she refuses to be used again like she had been before.
She has loved deeply only twice in her life, only one of those loves was able to get through all of her shields to really claim her heart. She still misses him with everything she has in her, and would do anything to find him again. However, after six years of no word, she is worried that she may never see him again and fears the worst has happened to him. If anyone decides to try to be with her they will find a lot of walls up. She trusts no one, and it would take a lot to convince her to care enough about someone to let them in.
History
No one knew how her parents had begun dating let alone why they got married. They were complete opposites. They met in college at a school formal. He was attracted to her beauty and wanted to dominate her quiet strength. She had been put off by his arrogance and loud boisterous nature. He wanted to own her and began to court her, sending her expensive gifts until she finally gave in and accepted a date. He took her on a lavishly romantic date, acting so completely different than he normally did. She thought that she was seeing his true personality, one that he felt the need to hide when his friends were around. He convinced her to go on another date, and then another and she slowly began to fall in love with him. The day after they graduated from college, he asked her to marry him and she agreed. The first couple of years together were pleasantly happy. They gave birth to a daughter Mia.
For the first few years of Mia's life she was spoiled by her parents and wanted for nothing. To say her family was rich was an understatement. Her earliest memories are of dance lessons, horseback riding, and family vacations to Europe and Asia. By the time she began school she spoke French and Italian almost as well as English, and she was becoming proficient in Japanese. When she was six her life drastically changed. Her grandfather on her dad's side of the family passed away leaving his son in charge of the family businesses. Her grandfather's last words to her father were "You have always been a disappointment to me, do not disappointment me in this as well." Her grandfather's words seemed to throw a switch in her father and he slowly became colder toward Mia and her mother. He spent more and more time at the office. He didn't have time for his daughter as much as he used to and he started treating her mother cruelly. Miranda tried to shelter her daughter from Frank's outbursts and tried to make up for his long absences by teaching her different skills, and taking her out on shopping trips to make her happy. Miranda tried to teach her daughter not to be cruel or cold like her father, but it wasn't completely enough. Mia felt as if a shadow had entered her happy life, keeping part of it submerged in a deep gloom. She grew up kind and friendly because of her mother's influence, but deep inside of her was a thread of her father's cruelty as well.
When she began high school she was popular, and she knew how to manipulate her friends in such a way that they never knew they were being manipulated. she spent a lot of time away from her house. She didn't want to deal with the conflicting emotions that she got from her parents. Her first boyfriend had to fight really hard to get accepted into her heart. She didn't trust herself enough to allow herself to be loved easily. She brought him home for dinner one night and her father made one of his rare appearances. After her boyfriend left her father told her she could do better and that he was not impressed. She dumped him the next day. At her father's urging, and because she wished to be free of her cold home, she took extra classes to graduate early. She graduated high school at the end of her Sophomore year. At sixteen she applied and was accepted into Stanford University. She chose it because it was as far away from Greenwich as she could get.
She decided to go for a degree in internal medicine and began studying hard to push herself and to try to make her father proud of her like he had been when she was younger. She got her Bachelor’s degree at 18, and then began life as a medical student. She dated casually, telling herself she had no time for anything serious. Any time the guys began to get serious about her she would break things off with them with no concern about their feelings. That was before she met Damien Johnston. She had just turned 21 and was celebrating at her favorite club, with a few friends from her medical classes. One of her friends had ran into Damien and some of his friends and brought them over to meet the rest of the group. She took to him like no one else before. He cut through her walls and made her laugh, made her feel light inside. They had been dating steadily for several months and she felt like her life had finally gotten back on track. She loved him so much she didn't even care about her father's opinion anymore; Damien had saved her in so many ways. She was planning on bringing him home to meet her parents over the winter break when the news came that her mother had died in a car crash.
She was crushed, she didn't know what to do without her mother's gentle influence in her life. If she hadn't had Damien to hold her through those hard days she may have ended up like her father. Frank spent the first three weeks after the accident in a drunken daze. At one point while she was trying to get him to eat something besides booze her father slammed an empty bottle against the counter, shattering it and attacked her with the broken pieces. He sliced up her arm as she tried to defend herself. After that day she left with Damien and went back to California, her father be damned. Frank finally pulled himself out from the bottle and moved to a penthouse in Washington DC to better supervise on of his companies. She went back to her classes and started to get back on track she began her second year in her clinical studies. She was looking into where she would apply for her residency at and thinking about her future with Damien.
She threw herself into her studies and her job at the hospital. Pushing herself to the point of exhaustion she barely saw Damien. He knew that she was trying to prove something to herself because of her father. Fearing for her health, he suggested that they take a vacation for the holidays. She agreed that it was probably a good idea to get away for a while. They decided to go to her family's vacation home in Nantucket. They spent time there rediscovering their relationship after the last year of stress. Then the pulse went off and the world went to hell.
They could see explosions in Boston from where they were and Mia felt panic set in quickly. She tried calling to her father in DC but the cell towers were down everywhere. Damien was worried about his family back in California, and Mia had to find out about her father. They decided to split up to find out what happened to their families. He kissed her goodbye and headed out in his car. It was the last time she saw him. She drove as close as she could get to DC but all she could see were fires and people panicking. She managed to get into the city, and to her father's home. All that was left of it was burning rubble. She was completely alone in the world.
She tried to drive back across country to try and find Damien. She got about halfway through Virginia before the roads got too bad to navigate. She had to leave her car by the side of the road low on gas and walked back to the closest town she could find. They had a lot of refugees flowing into the town and there was a high need for medical workers. She couldn't leave people in a crisis so she stayed to help out, thinking that eventually things would be up and running again.After about six months the town seemed to realize that no aide was coming. They were running low on stocked medical supplies, and Mia realized that they needed alternatives if they were going to be able to continue treating patients. She turned to homeopathic remedies. She got piles of books from the library and other book stores and studied between shifts at the clinic. She taught herself the look and names of various plants and flowers, and their medicinal properties. She then studied up on how to extract essences from the plants, and how to make poultices and other various supplies. She was the main supplier of medical supplies to the clinic after about a year. One day she was out in the woods looking for new supplies when she was hit over the head with something heavy and knocked out.
She woke up several hours later tied up in the back of a cart being pulled by horses and driven by two large men. Three more men were in the back of the cart, one holding a gun at her. They had been traveling around finding new girls for their camp when they had seen her going alone into the woods. The opportunity was too good to pass up. She was taken into what they called their tribe. They called themselves the pirates and were patriarchal. The women they caught were little more than slaves and whores. They gave their women new names like they were pets. The guys who grabbed her called her Marigold, on account of some of the flowers she had been picking. They traveled around a lot, stealing supplies from dead towns. She was with them for a year quietly biding her time. She tried to escape several times; each time she was caught they beat her till she couldn't move. The last time they caught her she decided to make a better plan. She used the cold seed of cruelty her father had planted in her to come up with this plan. She spent several months collecting deadly plants and extracting their poison. Then one day when most of the tribe was running a raid she slipped the poison into the midday meal. Within an hour the men who had been left to guard the women were dying. She gathered some basic supplies stole one of their horses and took off as fast as she could ride, never looking back.
She decided to try and find Damien again. She started traveling West again. She would stop in small settlements along the way trading medicines and other goods for fresh supplies. She got to California and searched for Damien. After a few weeks she gave up and headed north. Eventually she came across a settlement in northern Oregon. She fell in quickly with the Canowicakte tribe and joined them as their doctor.
Plot Ties: 1. She is still looking for Damien or any news of him 2. she is on the run from the Pirate's tribe. The ones who lived are going to want payback. 3. She is a doctor with homeopathic training.
Writing Sample Mari sighed wearily and looked at her map. She was close to home, and couldn't wait to get back. She had spent the last couple of months out on the road searching for supplies that were needed by her tribe. She had also picked up some things that they could trade to other tribes. She had found several packets of seeds in one mostly picked over hardware store just outside of Humboldt California. Some of them were food and some of them were for different plants and herbs that she could use for medicine. A couple more hours on the road and she could make out the trees she called home. When she arrived at her destination she hopped down off her cart and called up to the trees for assistance putting her haul away. Once everything had been taking care of, and her horse tended to, she climbed up to her house. There she ate a small meal and collapsed into her bed. Tomorrow she would have to report in to the leader and give her the list of supplies she had just brought in. For now, she was content in sleeping in her own bed. Mari smiled softly to herself. It was good to be home. PB: Zooey Deschanel Player: Kristi