<gypsy keeni> ♦ d6

what a shame we all became
such fragile, broken things
a memory remains, just a tiny spark

Gypsy Keeni.
Fifteen.
Female.
District Six.

i give it all my oxygen
so let the flames begin
let the flames begin, oh glory

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Built small and slight, Gypsy stands at the entirely unimpressive height of 5'1. She has next to no curves, small shoulders, tiny hands and feet (although her fingers themselves are long and nimble), and short legs. This has never particularly bothered her, though - in fact, Gypsy has never let her scrawny physique get to her; she simply doesn't care enough. What does it matter if she's short and small? Who cares if she's got a chest or not? None of her siblings give a damn, and anyone else who does can fuck off.

Her face is small and round and reflective of her soft bone structure. Her cheeks are still rather baby-like, round pink apples that puff out whenever she smiles, usually close-lipped out of habit to conceal her less-than-attractive teeth, which have long since begun yellowing as a result of her smoking habit. Her nose is very small, set exactly in the middle of her face and turned very slightly upward. Her ears are small as well, and somewhat elf-like; though shaped like normal human ears, it isn't hard to look at them and imagine them coming to a defined point at the top.

Her eyes are the largest feature of her face, wide and round and somewhat out-of-place juxtaposed with her otherwise small features. These big, brown orbs are the precise size, shape, and shade of her mother's, and a few of the other Keeni siblings share this physical trait as well. These eyes are framed by very long and defined brown eyebrows the precise shade of her hair. She has flawless, 20/20 vision, definitely something she takes full advantage of.

Up until age eleven, Gypsy Keeni had long, flowing medium-brown hair that reached down past her chest, waving very slightly. But these locks did not blend well with her lifelong hobby of playing with fire, and oftentimes sparks and flames found the tips of her hair, leaving the ends charred and split. It was when her ponytail was almost burnt off completely that she decided this was the final straw and took a pair of kitchen shears to her head, chopping her hair clean off until it was as short as a boy's and so much more practical for one who deals with fire so often. Gypsy fell in love with it immediately; it was edgy, different, her. Her father disapproved immensely - he wanted his daughter to be the picture of a normal, well-brought up child - despite the fact that he hardly even saw her - and a girl with hair like a shorn sheep did not fit that description. But Gypsy refused to grow it back, and to this day she's kept her homemade pixie cut.

As for her sense of fashion, Gypsy is incredibly eccentric - she mixes together a little bit of everything and manages to pull off a very unique style that catches the eye of many who see her. She'll find a sweater in a secondhand shop and mix it with a knitted scarf of a completely opposite color, or pair a minidress with neon-colored tights and moccasins. She favors high heels due to her small size; at fifteen years old she has already mastered the art of walking in them, and as she gets older, her choice of heels gets higher and higher; six inches is her norm, though she does have a few pair of eight inch heels that she flaunts around when she's feeling adventurous.

this is how we'll dance when
when they try to take us down
this is how we'll sing, oh

Gypsy knows she's odd and is unafraid of showing it; it's less a result of extreme self confidence and more because she more often than not chooses to ignore the presence of other people; if they're not there, why care what they think? She's the type of person who would turn left while everyone else goes right just for the fun of it, because her entire life has always been about self-indulgence rather than conforming to suit other people.

Often one can find her off somewhere else, lost in her own world. Since she was very young she's been fond of crafting her own alternate realities - they're more exciting than the world around her - and constantly thinks what if? Her mind works better with hypothetical situations than it does when trying to analyze reality, so when speaking to others it isn't rare for her to go off on a tangent about what would happen if this happened and what would happen then and after that and if someone did this instead of doing that and on and on and ...

Friendship is not something that interests Gypsy. She never got along with the other children in school when she was younger; they thought she was a freak, a loner, doing things opposite of everyone else. She never spoke much in school, save for the occasional angry outburst, and when someone did manage to engage her in conversation, she would start babbling about all sorts of out-there things that no one else understood. Her lack of friends never bothered her, though; she didn't need them, she had other things. Besides, she had the crowded Keeni clan for company, and Pyrian of course, who needed her to be his ears. She had more important things to keep her occupied.

This being said, Gypsy was also never the brightest star in the sky; her lack of both basic common sense and book smarts did not make her a very astounding student when it came to school. Even her way of speaking shows traces of her neglected attempts to master the English language. When they began to see how poorly she was doing in class, teachers attempted to schedule conferences with her parents to discuss what could be done about the situation, but Nina Keeni had her hands full with her oodles of accident-children and her father, of course, didn't care enough. So Gypsy's grades only just brushed the passing mark, and she never tried to make them better; she couldn't be bothered. The only knowledge-based skill she's ever proved to be adept at is sign language; she learned it at a very young age in order to be her brother's ears and translate for him, and to this day is a master of the art of talking with her hands.

An accident. That's what Gypsy had been, and she'd always known it, right from the moment she was old enough to understand that her family wasn't like a normal family. She and her twin brother had been the products of a young man's foolishness and a young woman's willingness to go to any means to snag a couple of bucks. It was clear that the mother was used to this sort of thing when she found out she was pregnant - she had three other older children from similar situations, after all - but the father, who graduated top in his class in District Six's most prestigious school of science and had such a promising future ahead of him, was caught completely by surprise. But, as the responsible man he was, he agreed to split custody and have a hand in raising the child that was, in all actuality, his fault.

Admittedly he had second thoughts when he found out he would be partly responsible for bringing up not one, but two babies - twins - but true to his word, he would take them on weekends to live with him in his small apartment, or whenever their mother -who, in reality, he hardly even knew - already had her hands full with her older four, all of which were under the age of six. It wasn't an easy job, not only because one - the male - had been born deaf, but also because his two infants seemed to have quite a knack for finding themselves next to an open flame.

Gypsy was an adventurous little child who didn't exactly play well with other children; she often toddled off on her own when forced into a playdate, more interested in spark plugs and candles and strange things she wasn't supposed to touch than the goings-on with the other toddlers. She liked her brother Pyrian, though; they were partners in crime for the vast majority of their childhood, and Gypsy took her job of being her deaf sibling's ears very seriously. She also got along fairly well - save for a few incidents - with the rest of Nina Keeni's clan of children, which seemed to grow larger as every year passed; it was the other kids she tended to avoid. When her siblings weren't around, little Gypsy would quite happily play on her own, her thoughts drifting off to somewhere no one knew. That was the way she liked it.

Since their birth, Clemson Rotz, their father, had tried to form as little attachments with his children as possible. This wasn't hard; he wasn't a generally caring or compassionate person, definitely far from the "fatherly" type; he raised Gypsy and Pyrian as if it were an obligation, not a privilege. When the twins were five years old, he landed an ideal position as manager of one of the district's most prestigious laboratories; needless to say, he took it, and his children became even more ignored in his life. This only escalated their habit of divulging in various shenanigans.

Gypsy had always been drawn to fire; as an infant, candles and bunsen burners and anything that lit up and radiated heat fascinated her, and she itched to be near them. As a toddler, she would sneak into that special, off-limits drawer in the kitchens of both of her houses to snatch up the lighter and make a pretty little flame. At six years old, she learned how to use a match, and started her very first fire; it was just a little pile of leaves out in the yard of her mother's house, but it flared up immediately, and the small child watched her flaming creation with wide, mesmerized eyes. Suddenly she gasped, for within the flames appeared what looks like a face, and a moment later, the six-year-old could have sworn that she heard the faintest whisper in her ear. A second later, both were gone, but she'd seen it, heard it, she had. And thus an irrevocable attachment to fire was ignited.

To her delight, Pyrian shared her fascination with flames, and together - no matter which house they were living in at the time - the two got into a lot of trouble involving fire. Whether it was unknowingly burning their father's important papers or dumping a colony of ants into a fire made in their mother's backyard, they were constantly up to no good. When their father came home from the lab to find his children - ten years old at the time - laughing and pointing as his expensive curtains burned to crisps, he decided this was the final straw. The next day he took them to see a shrink, sure that they had a mental problem that could be diagnosed and cured with a simple dose of medicine. But that wasn't the case - "Pyromania," said the shrink, "cannot be cured, only treated. Generally through therapy, but I can see you don't want that. So here, take this prescription for some mood stabilizers; I can't promise they'll work, but it's worth a try, yes?"

It didn't work. Perhaps this was because Gypsy developed a habit of taking her pill and tossing it in a fire she'd make as soon as her father left the house on the days she was with him. This was only a problem on weekends, anyway; the rest of the time they spent with their rest of the vast Keeni clan and their, who acknowledge the fact that her children were all screwed up in some way and didn't try to change them with pills. Gypsy continued to hone her passion for fire, sneaking matches up to her room to watch the shadows of the tiny, pretty flame dance on the wall, or staring into the flickering blaze of a candle and attempt to decipher the picture within. Oftentimes she'll insist to anyone who'll listen that fire is like her crystal ball, though she knows herself that isn't the case; most of the time the images she sees within the flames are completely random. She has no idea why she sees them, just that she does, and it only enforces her belief that fire was made to be hers.

Pyromania has led Gypsy Keeni to do questionable things; for one, she fell in love with cigarettes the moment she was offered one at thirteen years old, and hasn't stopped smoking since. She steals money from her father's house to buy boxes to add to her stash, which resides under her bed at her mother's house. Cigarettes aren't the only thing she's taken to stealing, though; oftentimes she sneaks into her father's lab - she's quite stealthy, so this has never been difficult - through a door carelessly left unlocked to steal various flammable substances, whatever she can find. Her favorites are the ones that make little explosions; those are always exciting to watch.

As for the Hunger Games, Gypsy has never really thought much about them; it really is a miracle that none of the Keenis have been chosen up until this point, because there are so many of them, and oftentimes they have to take out tessera in order to support their sprawling family. Three Reapings have passed for Gypsy so far and she nor none of her siblings have been chosen. Good; she didn't want to go in the arena, anyway, and if she did it'd only be to set the entire place alight. What she really dreams is to set the Justice Building on fire during the Reaping; now that would be quite a show.

somewhere weaknesses are strengths
and i'll die searching for it
i can't let myself regret such selfishness[/color]


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buried beneath it all and
hiding beneath it all and
growing beneath it all[/color]
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