{Cora DeWitt} Thirteen.

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please leave all overcoats canes and tophats
with the doorman
from that moment you'll be out of place and underdressed
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Cora DeWitt.
Twenty.
Female.
Wonderland District Thirteen.

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i'm wrecking this evening already and
loving every minute of it
ruining this banquet for the mildly inspiring and...

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when you're in black slacks with accentuating off-white pinstripes whoa-oh
everything goes according to plan
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i'm the new cancer
never looked better
you can't stand it

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Cora is notorious for her cruel beauty; even aside from the disapproving looks that are constantly etched across her features, her thin face, high cheekbones, narrow eyes, and tight-lipped, closed-mouth expression suggest that she isn't particularly fond of you. Not to mention the big head - and this isn't a metaphor, Cora's head actually is a bit larger than usual, disproportionate to her small size. At the same time, though, many of her physical attributes are the very definition of beautiful; well-kept, flowing hair, flawless skin, a slim figure. Those who want to look must look from afar, though - she's far from approachable.

She's not particularly tall; only 5'6, though she has a habit of looking down on people in spite of her height. Her build doesn't make for many curves, something she's never liked, so she often tries to play them up as much as possible, though the drab District Thirteen wardrobe doesn't give her much to work with. Her torso is fairly long, and her legs are a bit on the short side, though still proportional to her body. Her feet are small, as are her hands, although she has longer fingers.

As established, Cora's face has many sharp, defined features. The pink undertones of her creamy skin give the impression that her face is often flushed - most probably with anger. Her nose is of average size, set exactly in the middle of her face, directly over a pair of tight lips that rarely ever open in a smile. In fact, on the rare occasion she does smile, it isn't open-mouthed anyway. Cora's lips are always pressed tightly together, with the exception of when she's shouting at someone...and this occurs rather frequently.

The young woman's eyes are precisely the same shade of chocolate brown as her father's, only there is a significant difference in the way they look - hers are cold, distant, uncaring, while his were always warm, full of friendliness and inquisition. They're average size, though are often narrowed so they seem smaller than is normal. They are framed by sharp, thin eyebrows that are just a few shades darker than her hair.

The luscious, full locks of deep red that fall to her chest in thin curls are all Cora's own, as both of her parents' natural hair color was brown. It most likely came from somewhere on her father's side, though, as vibrant shades of that sort are very uncommon among the drab haired Thirteeners who spend their lives underground, away from the light of the sun. Regardless of where it came from, though, she takes great pride in it, and keeps it well groomed and perfect - the fact that it sets her apart and catches the attention of others is something she's always loved. Besides, red is a very powerful color, even where hair shades are concerned.

Had she lived anywhere else but Thirteen, Cora probably would have focused a lot more on her fashion, because she's always felt that someone who is meant to be in charge should look the part. The subterranean district that she calls home doesn't allow for much variety in outfits, though, so she primarily has to make do with the insipid greys and whites that the citizens are forced to wear. This doesn't keep her from accessorizing, though, and sometimes very eccentrically, at that - once she plucked the feathers from the back of a living rooster and made herself a headpiece. Her style is another thing that allows her to attract well-deserved attention, and she intends to utilize this in as many ways as possible.



Though she may not always act in the best interests of her so-called subjects, Cora is a natural born leader, with the uncanny ability to sway a crowd. Whether she does this with fear or with actual raw charisma is sometimes unclear; in all reality, it is most likely a mixture of the two. Either way, though, the redhead attracts a number of followers - she has for a long time, since her school days - and she most definitely likes it that way.

The trait of human compassion is completely lost on Cora DeWitt - she's never truly cared for anyone, rather she pretends to so that she can use them to her advantage somehow. And use them to her advantage she does; Cora has a long history of manipulating people to do as she wants...or at least, pretend to do what she wants. Laziness is a factor that works against her; she very rarely enforces her demands, because she simply can't be bothered to. So her 'loyal followers' often ignore her frequent cries for the execution of someone who upsets her, knowing that she'll soon forget all about it and they'll be off the hook.

This brings us to another point - Cora's attention span definitely isn't top notch. Though she is easily angered by even the littlest things, she'll soon forget about them as something else captures her attention. If she weren't so frightening, many would find her complete lack of ability to focus on one thing at a time amusing. But of course, if they ever said anything about it to her, she would instantaneously demand their decapitation. It wouldn't happen, of course, but it was still a lot better to be on 'her majesty's' good side.

Not surprisingly, her cruelty extends outside of the human race as well. Since she was very young, Cora has made a hobby of what can only be considered animal torture - it amuses her, the sounds they make when they're in pain, the way they writhe. Plus, Thirteen was boring; what else did she have to do for entertainment? Perhaps her exposure to the animals in the first place can be blamed on her father, who worked in Thirteen's animal pens since he'd grown up in Ten, where he had dealt with them his whole life. But he was an animal lover - how could someone who loved to see them suffer possibly be related to him?

Cora is a lot more street-smart than she is book smart - she was sly and cunning enough to get away with her shenanigans during her school days under the noses of her teachers - an undercover bully, if you will - but when it came to actual schoolwork, her efforts were subpar. This can be attributed both to her attention deficit as well as the fact that she simply didn't care; she had much more important things to focus on than the nuclear history of the country and whatever else they were attempting to teach her. Seeing as Thirteen immensely values intelligence, though, this isn't a good quality for someone who aspires to be the president of her district one day.




Randall Tex was a cattle roper from Ten - basically a cowboy in the truest sense of the word - when he decided he had a problem with the Capitol and everything it stood for. On top of that, he hated being watched nonstop by Peacekeepers, being forced to endure the televised Hunger Games every year, (when he would much rather be out riding) and especially being hungry all the time. So at the young age of 20, he took his horse and rode away from his lifelong home, never intending to return.

He wasn't particularly good at surviving in the wild. Just when he was quite sure he was going to starve to death, he stumbled upon District Thirteen - Thirteen welcomed runaways, and there was a fair amount of food to be had, (much better than Ten, where everything had to be shipped off to the Capitol) so without much thought, he decided to stay. It was very different from Ten, though; he was used to a small ranch, but now he lived in this vast maze of underground rooms and compartments and all sorts of high technology that he'd never seen before. But when he met Aira DeWitt, the rebellious nineteen year old daughter of a District Thirteen official, he knew it was all worth it.

He was smitten. She wasn't. But she knew her father would disapprove of him, and she liked breaking rules, so she didn't resist his advances, and eventually just twenty minutes behind the locked door of his compartment resulted in an extremely unwanted pregnancy. Randall asked her to marry him immediately but, repulsed, she turned him down and refused to speak to him for the entire nine months she carried his baby, leaving him heartbroken and unhappy and alone in a foreign district. And it was even worse when she died of blood loss during childbirth. He was devastated, even though she'd rejected him, but he had a bigger problem on his hands - the baby. District 13 law stated that this newborn girl was legally his, and although she would keep her mother's surname, it was his job to raise her.
[/color][/right]He called her Cora, because it sounded like 'heart' in many of the ancient languages, and it seemed to fit since the baby and her mother had torn out his heart. She had an in explicable shock of rich red hair, which definitely hadn't been inherited from either of her parents - the only sign that she was Randall's child was her deep brown eyes, so very like his own. He was assigned a new, bigger compartment with space for a child, given the necessary supplies, and basically left on his own. Though he had absolutely no idea what he was doing, especially since he'd lived in this district for less than a year, he grew to love the little girl. It was clear, though, that she didn't feel the same.

Cora hated daddy dearest right from the start. She gave him hell as an infant, waking him up in the middle of the night with her crying, refusing to eat the food he tried to feed her in the dining hall and making a scene with her tantrums, biting him constantly as soon as she grew teeth. This carried on throughout her toddler years, although Randall, determined to see the good in his daughter, just attributed it to the 'terrible twos'. The only time she seemed to settle down and ignore him was when he took her aboveground, out to the District Thirteen animal and livestock pens where food was raised and where he'd been assigned to work because of his background in Ten. He'd settle her down in the pen with some of the small animals so she could play with them, and went off to work.

Cora was fascinated by the animals immediately, although she didn't play nice with them by anyone's standards; a favorite game of hers was to grab hold of the wings of a chicken and then watch it try to fly off. She would pelt the goats with rocks, giggling evilly, try to ride on the backs of pigs that were far too small to hold her weight, and at one point she even hung a rabbit by its ears from the the rafters of the hen coop and watched it squirm. She was a smart child, though, and made sure her father - an animal lover - never caught sight of her little games. By the time he finished working and returned to her, she would always be sweetly holding a little yellow chick in her small hands, or maybe petting a lamb.

tonight, tonight you are, you are a whispering campaign
i bet to them your name is 'cheap', i bet to them you look like shh...[/color]

At the age of six, Cora was meant to begin schooling as the rest of Thirteen's children did. She would begin to learn all about her district's primary industry, nuclear power, as well be educated in a variety of other areas, seeing as Thirteen pride itself in knowledgeable citizens. Of course, Cora, being a very belligerent child, had other plans. When her father tried to take her by the hand and lead her to school, she kicked and screamed and clawed at his face, making a scene in the usually hushed and serious corridors of the underground district. This continued on, every single day, though she'd be fine about school once she was there and away from her dad.

Randall was growing increasingly more miserable. Everyone in Thirteen knew about how he'd gotten Aira - a well-known and well-liked Thirteen citizen - pregnant. They blamed him for his death, and for the existence of the devil child that disturbed the peace and order of the district, and therefore he did not have very many friends. His love for his daughter was slowly diminishing, turning into frustration, exhaustion, desperation, and uncertainty. And one weekend afternoon up at the animal pens sealed the deal.

While sitting outside the chicken coop, seven-year-old Cora had found a pretty rooster that she wanted to play with. She tried to make it flap its wings, but it wouldn't cooperate. She tried to make it dance, but it crowed loud and obnoxiously, irritating the little redheaded girl. How dare that rooster be so uncooperative!? In a fit of annoyance, the child grabbed the fowl, one hand on its body and the other on its head, and wrung its neck. There was a crack as the bones broke and it slumped over, dead instantly. Cora was too busy smiling in satisfaction to notice her father, who had come to check on her after hearing the rooster's cry, had been standing outside the pen watching the whole incident in horror.
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That was the final straw. Randall couldn't deal with such a child anymore - how was that little monster really his own? - nor could he take living in a district that didn't even like him. So in the middle of the night, he left Cora sound asleep in her bed, stole a horse from Thirteen's stables, and took off, away from this district of hell and back to where he truly belonged in Ten. And Cora was all alone.

She spent the remainder of her childhood in the District Thirteen orphanage, which was nothing but a separate corridor with smaller compartments for the parentless children that resided there, under the watchful eye of the no-nonsense orphanage caretakers. She still attended school, where she was basically a notorious bully right under the teachers' noses, terrorizing those she didn't like. She had a following of other students who were either frightened of her or legitimately liked what she did who assisted her, and was feared by everyone else.

This continued on until her eighteenth birthday, when she was considered old enough by Thirteen's standards to leave the orphanage and be assigned her own compartment. She immediately expressed interest in the job her father had had, and was given it. It wasn't particularly interesting, though, so she found a way to liven it up a bit: cockfighting. In the back pens of the animal farm she would hold competitions in which two roosters (she still harbored a specific hate for them since childhood) would be pitted against each other in a fight for her amusement - as well as the amusement of her loyal following that had remained with her since her school days, and anyone else who happened to find out about the events and wanted a bit of entertainment. People would even bet on the animals, much to her delight. Of course, this was all done in secret - she couldn't risk being found out by the District Thirteen disciplinary board, could she? Even though she'd had her eye on one of them for a while.

oh and those smokes in the cigarette box on the table,
they just so happen to be laced with nitroglycerin

Elvis hadn't impressed her at first, though she'd been familiar with him for a long time. [insert more info that will probably come with his bio that Kay's making] She knew he had his eyes on her, despite the fact that he was quite a bit older, but Cora felt that ever getting herself tied into a relationship would be like relinquishing her independence. She liked being alone, being unofficially 'in charge' of her own little kingdom in District Thirteen, and didn't want to share that power with anyone, let alone a man. But it was when he was elected to the disciplinary board that she realized he might be of use to her.

Despite the fact that she was rather inclined to break the rules of the district, rather than follow them, Cora nursed a secret ambition to rise to legitimate power, rather than that which was in her own head, and become the president of Thirteen. She knew she had the leadership capability, and perhaps the official position would actually prompt her lackeys to listen to her and enforce her laws, seeing as now they never seemed to pay any attention when she demanded the timely execution of someone who bothered her. Problem was, the logistics of pulling off such a rise to power were incredibly complicated. It would definitely help if she could get on good terms with the disciplinary board, though, right? That was where Elvis came in.

When they started dating, she was much less smitten with him than he was with her. He was the picture of a devoted boyfriend, but she was exactly the opposite. She got mad at him for pointless reasons, resisted when he tried anything physical, and basically didn't hold up her end of the relationship at all. It was only when he got fed up with her lack of feelings for him and tried to leave her that she realized - much to her dismay - that she didn't feel right without him. Didn't feel whole, and was, ultimately, incredibly lonely. So reluctantly she admitted her feelings to him, skirting around an apology and avoiding begging for him to come back to her, though she knew he'd get the picture. And he did. Of course, she'd never admit her weakness for him to anyone else. It wouldn't be proper. Not for someone like her.



i've never been so surreptitious, so of course
you'll be distracted when i spike the punch[/i]





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