apples to appells! wait wut? [lulu]! help me!

It was a marvelous day, perfect for picking apples in the vast Orchards of District Eleven. There was a soft breeze that cooled the hardworking farmers, and the sun shone brightly overhead. It was a cheerful day.

Too bad Kiara Mason was not a cheerful person.

Rather than hanging out in the sun, enjoying the beautiful late August weather with the rest of the district, Kiara was up in a tree. She didn't like the sun; it burned against her very fair complexion. The shade was nicer, more comfortable. And this large apple tree, with its spreading branches thick with leaves, provided a very large amount of it. Since she couldn't be in the woods right now, this was an okay compromise.

The fourteen-year-old was in an extremely bad mood. She'd just gotten in a fight with the two people that were her only friends in the world. Kiara had yelled at them, just out of anger at the world, and they'd taken offense. Now she was left to brood over her frustration in a tree that sported rosy red fruit, because she didn't want to risk going out into the forest. Peacekeepers had been patrolling the area of fence she normally snuck out in, so she planned to lie low for a while just to let things play out.

Searching for a way to amuse herself, the small teenager plucked an apple off of a branch near her, shining it on her shirt after doing so. Seeing as she was still pissed, she found herself carving profanities with her knife tip in the delicate skin of the fruit, various words that would make her mother cringe if she knew her little daughter was thinking them. Not that she cared, though. Since her brother's death she'd spent less and less time with her parents, growing farther away from them by the day. Sometimes she'd like nothing more than to shout the words that were on her apple at them...but she refrained from doing so, as they were her parents, however much they didn't seem like it.

She was jolted out of her discontentment when she heard a high little voice somewhere down below. Her emerald green eyes locked on a little girl with creamy brown skin and dark pigtails who couldn't have been more than five years old standing below her tree, her tiny hand interlocked with an young woman's. "Apple, ma!" the small girl crowed, pointing excitedly up at a handful of apples hanging from a branch. For a brief second Kiara's mind flitted over the possibility of throwing her profanity apple down at the two people, just because the startled expressions on their faces would be incredibly entertaining, but decided against it. Instead she lowered her legs off the branch and let herself fall, ignoring the mother and child's shocked gasps as she landed squarely on her feet and walked off onto the thin dirt path.

She hadn't walked very far when she came to a peculiar looking guy sprawled in the dust, a whole bushel of apples spread on the ground around him. He wasn't getting up, though, just lying there and...laughing. Stupidly. But her wasn't laughing for long before he started...crying. And talking to the apples.

Fairly certain that she'd come across a 'Loopy', as her father had once called certain people, she stood in front of him, eyebrow raised, arms crossed.

At the age of ten, Kiara had been assigned to help her brother, Colton, harvest in the grain fields. It was a hot day, too hot for comfort. Kiara, extremely small at the time, sat on her brother's shoulders. Though this probably made it difficult for him to tie the wheat into bundles, which he had been assigned to do, he didn't complain, and Kiara didn't notice: at that point in her life she was happy and carefree, at peace with the world. Looking back, it was a nice feeling, but not something she'd embrace now. She had dug too far in to her hole of unfriendliness and hostility now, and there was no climbing back up to the surface.

But anyway, there she sat on the shoulders of her older brother, who was now deceased. She peered around the fields, as vigilant as ever, despite her young age, and happened to spot a man not too far in the distance, leaping through the wheat stalks like a somewhat ungraceful gazelle, his mouth open wide in an expression of utter excitement. Raising one eyebrow, something she'd discovered she could do as a very little girl, she hung herself upside down in front of her brother's face, her braids streaming towards the ground, so that her deep green eyes were looking straight into his dark brown ones. When she got his attention she pointed off in the direction of the man who continued to leap. "He's crazy?" Her words were a question directed at Colton. Her older brother took one look at the man and nodded. "I would think so." As is proving Kiara's observation, the man began to speak, even though there wasn't a soul around him. Some kind of exclamation about how bored the wheat must be, just waving around in the wind all day! He'd talk to them, to give them a little excitement!

It was needless to say why staring at the boy in front of her reminded Kiara Mason of this occurrence in her past.

There were a number of reasons why someone might go bonkers in a district like eleven. It was always hot here; the heat was enough to drive anyone to insanity. The workload was particularly tough for some, too. Sometimes the Peacekeepers dished out particularly torturous punishments, and well...those who were sensitive to the pain suffered mental side effects as well. But then there were always those who were just born with it.

The District Eleven teen observed in silence as she watched the boy in front of her speak to his apples, as if they were not only inanimate fruits, but friends. Just to be sure, she lifted the swearword apple she was still holding up to her face and stared at it, half expecting it to speak to her like these apples apparently did to this guy. Sure enough, though, the only words the round red fruit 'spoke' were those carved into its skin, words that Kiara highly doubted any talking apple would utter. Well, that was a relief. Apples didn't talk.

She could do without the extra voices in her head, anyway.

Just then Luther asked her if she liked apples, and then started babbling on about something else related to them. Kiara couldn't help but roll her eyes. "Um...sure?" For once in her life, the fourteen-year-old could not formulate a more fitting response.