Template:MemoryZeta:Featured Article/October 2009
From Memory-Zeta
Counsellor. USS Oberon (NCC-80111)
USS Oberon (NCC-80111)
Ensign Penelope Merryman is the ships Counsellor aboard the Luna-class USS Oberon.
Penelope was born on Earth, Europe, United Kingdom, in the Cornwall area. Her youth was unremarkable and rather happily spent between her father, curator of a private collection in local relics and her mother, an antiquarian specialized in books. The first shock came around 11 as she seemed to turn into a tall and gangly adolescent over the course of a single year, while nobody actually bothered to ask her opinion about it. The second shock was the birth of her brother Colin (you guessed it - nobody asked her about THAT either) when she was 13, forever breaking a most happy familial arrangement for no good reason she could see. The third shock was to be dumped overnight by her fiancé at 21, right after he admitted an attraction to her Bolian (male) childhood friend, Dakiel.
Penelope gave up her literature studies in Oxford and went home. She spent one week shut up in her old bedroom before deciding she needed both a compass and a huge change of scenery if she was ever to understand the universe she lived in. The compass was to be psychology studies, the change of scenery to be provided by a career in Starfleet.
It wasn't to happen so easily.
After a rather dismal failure at the entrance test, Penelope moved to San Francisco and spent the next three years on a combined preparation course and psychology degree, studying up obsessively. (She also went through 3 different lodgers before finding an old lady sufficiently deaf and batty not to take exception of her erratic behaviour on quantum physics day. Or any other day.) Eventually she got her degree, passed the entrance exam by the skin of her teeth and went on, to the mild astonishment of some of her teachers, to graduate from the Academy. Some think she gained a measure of indulgence for being one of the relay sprinters to beat the Space Merchant Navy team for the first time in four years. Her time at the Academy certainly was a blur for Penny.
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