Runa Coronet [District Six]

Runa Coronet.
Female.
District Six.
Twenty.
Odair.

Up and down her arms, there is ink. They’re not tattoos, though she knows she could probably get one, if she found the right person in a back alley somewhere. No, Runa Coronet can generally be found with a marker or a pen in hand, scribbling on her arms or her palms just so she’ll remember stuff for later. It’s always important things, and she knows better than anyone that if she doesn’t write her idea down, a better, more important thought will come along and push it away. It’s the little stuff that gets forgotten, and that’s why her arms are all marked up.

‘Cause see, Runa Coronet has a lot of ideas. She even looks like she’s got a creative mind, and sometimes in District Six she drowns among the people who are straight-forward thinkers, all the physicists and the chemists and the doctors with their lab coats and their encyclopedic knowledge of everything. She doesn’t look like any of them; she lacks a lab coat and whatever other proper clothes they wear, and her hair isn’t neat and pulled back. She looks younger than she is, probably because her hair’s a mess and her clothes aren’t always clean, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t demand respect. Looks aren’t everything, but the people of District Six often mistake her dark eyes to be expressionless and dumb when really she’s just taking observations, lost in her own rapid-fire thoughts. With brown skin and black hair and a penchant for blending into a crowd, she often takes her job too seriously.

Runa Coronet gets lost in her psychological observations, but it doesn’t matter. A good observer is one that people don’t even notice, and that’s what makes her work quality.

Curiosity is a staple of District Six, and Runa’s interest has always been directed at the humanity of things. Anatomy and biology certainly influence the study of human behavior, but neuroscience isn’t exactly her schtick. She yearns to know why people behave and think the ways they do, and that’s why she’s always taking notes on her arms and across her fingers; if something in her day-to-day life strikes her as odd, she’ll take note of it and discuss it with her colleagues later. She fills up entire notebooks with questions and hypotheses, and she knows – in the back of her mind – that her colleagues might call her obsessive. Her attention to detail is unparalleled, and that’s why she’s so good at what she does.

Scruffy as she might look, she doesn’t lack for intelligence, though some of the citizens of District Six would scoff that she isn’t doing real science. Often teased in school for not aspiring to be a doctor or a physicist, she worked in spite of her classmates and talked with everyone, developing social skills that some of the secluded introverts of Six couldn’t grasp. In a word, she can be described as exuberant, spewing out thoughts and ideas and smiles at a hundred miles an hour. Runa Coronet knows how to work a crowd and speak with people to get what she wants, and it’s that kind of social intelligence that got her to a successful position in the Institute of Psychology.

The only problem she has with her field is the issue of ethics. In another place, another time, people might be more concerned about creating ethically-sound experiments and issuing consent forms and understanding what makes a study wrong, but her comrades don’t care. This is where she often differs from the people she works with; many of them are morally corrupt and will do anything for the answers they seek, and she’s got such a strong sense of right and wrong that she’ll step back and refuse to cooperate with her co-workers. It causes her a particular burden in everyday life, as well, mainly because her stubbornness can bring along problems and arguments she never asked for.

From the age of six, Runa’s parents wanted her to be a doctor. They were both doctors themselves, of course, and the interest in medicine had spanned several generations before them. Plus, the doctors made decent money, and Runa never grew hungry. She envied the surplus wealth of the Capitol, to be sure, but they weren’t poor when she was growing up. Comfortable as they were, the cost of comfort was in her parents’ long working hours, and Runa rarely saw them. Plus, the way her parents saw it, there wasn’t any time to have another child either, and their only daughter always assumed that maybe she was too much work and they didn’t care about her in the first place.

Her childhood was a lonely one, and that’s why she always reached out to other people in the District. It didn’t really matter who it was – a four-year-old kid down the street, an old man in the market, a dying homeless woman – Runa Coronet learned how to talk with people by roaming the streets for a friend, and the level of bravery it took for a young girl to talk to strangers never really crossed her mind. She talked all the time and never stopped, and when she’d get home her parents would tell her to shut up, and she would. But even then, her interest in people (and the human mind) was unmistakable, and sooner or later she was fighting with her parents about becoming a Psychologist, not a Doctor, and the arguing never stopped. But what could they do? They couldn’t force the information down her throat.

With all of her abundant free time avoiding her parents, Runa would often bury her nose in a psychology textbook, studying the foundations of personality and social patterns and learning and memory and everything she could get her hands on. This often involved stealing money from her mother and buying the books in secret – at least, when she couldn’t borrow them from someone else – but her mother never noticed, mainly because Runa’s mother never noticed anything about her. Years later, when she finally got out of the dull required education of Panem, she began specializing in Psychology, and that’s been her life’s work ever since.