Castanea Dentata /// District 7

5’9 Castanea is a tall, lean girl with at least 130 pounds on her. Her appearance - at a first glance - is rather thin and lanky. However, once you approach her, you notice some of the muscles in her long arms and her strong body structure. She has quite broad shoulders and tough arms, practiced daily on lifting and cutting timber and wood. She has athlete’s legs to power up trees which are also perfect for running through the agility course people call a forest. Her deformed, wide, flat feet balance her body. Her hands are pretty similar to her lower limbs; large, flat, square palms with splinters all over them. Her long, oddly formed fingers have hardened from her work (picking up some scabs on the way) and her nails are trimmed short.

Castanea has gentle, pale purple bags under her eyes that vanish if you look at her from a distance. She has black pores, which enjoy standing out on her easy-burning pearly skin, sprinkled on her sphere-like, wide nose. Her sparse eyebrows are uncontrollable and widely spread; however many times she tried to put order to the chaos of hairs, she never succeeded. She has a group of pustules on her temples, which stream down to come into line with her eyes. Some other form of pimples groups under one of her light eye bags looking like inflamed tear drops and living on her forehead, another small colony of the irremovable pink spots. Her face is rounded and her side-fringe makes her facial outline stand out more. Her jaw seems to stick out a bit sharply when illuminated by lights, which make her look a bit edgy, despite the fact her personality is completely against that. She has giant, Van Dyke brown eyes protected by short eyelashes that tend to frighten people with infrequent blinking. Her layers of long, thin, occasionally greasy hair are an extreme dark brown and the tips of the strands are black. In the hot summer (or when exposed to hours of sunlight) Castanea’s top layer of hair tends to lighten up a shade or two to give her old, shiny hairstyle some exciting spark.

Castanea doesn’t wear make-up or anything to make her skin look better, apart from some honey or sap on her face to take off the worst of the invading spots. Occasionally, on reaping days and such, she highlights the high points on her face and adds a little bit of gloss on her lips too, but nothing too eye-catching. Castanea dislikes attention. She is often seen in a checked or plain layered shirt; a white or black long sleeved under layer with a large buttoned shirt draped over it. She wears denim, baggy trousers or something loose to suit her top. She wears leather hiking boots that look like they must’ve cost a fortune. During her time at the lumberyard, she wears a yellow helmet and some padding to keep her safe up in the trees, to avoid getting hurt like her parents did. She is rarely caught in feminine mode, her being a tomboy and all. On reaping days, she is forced into some kind of a horrible dress, which she clearly detests since the facial expression she pulls in dresses relates to a grumpy smile that her mother managed to paint onto her. Castanea has a little token that she likes to carry around with her; it’s a tiny chip of wood with exquisite markings carved into it. It’s tied to a shifty, yet reliable, thread that has been around her neck for 9 years, since she cut her first tree. The chip is a fragment of the chestnut tree she practiced on all those years ago.

Castanea has a habit of befriending the opposite gender rather than her own gender. She never truly got along well with girls (apart from the only one at the Lumberyard), since she never shares the same interests as the ones in her class. They talk about beauty, fashion, what they’ll do when they are older, boys, et cetera. However, Castanea doesn’t talk about beauty and fashion since she isn’t beautiful or fashionable, she doesn’t talk about what she’ll do when she’s older because she doesn’t have a choice (it’s straight to the lumberyard) and she doesn’t talk about boys because the majority of the time she is hanging around with them. Instead, she talks about the news, sports, comedy, what the weather is and what she managed to take home from the Lumberyard. Her tomboyish attitude is all explained by her having 2 older brothers; she had to adapt to boy-talk and the dominant personalities. She doesn’t trust anyone she meets and tends to examine them for a long period of time before she accepts them and figures out what they are like, this determines if they are friends or foes.

Castanea has a talent for working in a team. Her group in the Lumberyard consists of several well trained young men and two strong young women (including her) that she has to work together with to get her weekly pay. She can also work alone at a high standard, but she can achieve even higher with a team she can co-operate with more easily. She’s quite assertive and she likes to show off her own knowledge to other people; at times she can be a bit protective of her work and snap at others, even if she didn’t mean to. She isn’t really good at using empathy, and as a result she can’t guess what others are feeling. She can’t cheer people up unless she uses her sense of humour to make them laugh, which isn’t too effective most of the time.
If Castanea is ever angered, she takes it out on the timber she cuts in the Lumberyard, where the pain you inflict on trees doesn’t matter. When she is sad or depressed, she likes to run and go to the forests of thick coniferous woods and hide there, climbing up a tree and wailing her eyes out. It happens at three times per year when stress piles onto her and Castanea is no good with handling stress at all. She has an addiction which is chewing and sucking honeyed honeycomb (wax) to exercise her teeth and attempt to rid of boredom. She has a craving for peaches and honey, although she isn’t sure why. The peaches from District 11 are her absolute favourite; she receives some from her friends when it’s her birthday.

When Castanea was a child, she was treated like an angel: The first female child of the paternal side of the Dentata family. She grew up with two older brothers - Cren (19 years of age) and Allen (21 years of age) - and proved to be just like them. The Dentata family traits: broad shouldered, muscly and tall for their age. She turned out to be a copy of her father, Henyri, appearance-wise and personality-wise, like her mother, Mollis. The family had a history in cutting lumber, just like a massive amount of families in District 7. After all, District 7 is known for chopping the trees. Castanea was 7 when she chopped her first tree, a tiny young Chestnut tree that had been diseased with a deadly fungus. The tree was only 3 meters high and had about a 2 foot trunk. Castanea had some help from her brothers, of course. It was decided from then that Castanea had some sort of a talent for being a lumberjack, passed through the generations; she held onto a chip from the Chestnut tree she cut and hung it around her neck after crafting little beauties into it. The little tag holds immense sentimental value for Castanea, since her brothers have somewhat identical tags, just in different shapes. Cren has a rectangle, Allen holds the triangle and Castanea has the oblong in her possession.
The relationship between the siblings and parents has deteriorated since the good old days, though. Allen left home and only goes back to meet Castanea on the weekends of every fortnight, since he works 24/7 in the lumber career. Since Cren left school, he went to study medicines and he’s been hoping since to make his own pharmacy, him being the dreamer of the family. As soon as he stopped giving in the tesserae for The Hunger Games, Castanea had to take over the role to keep her 47 year old parents alive and well fed by applying plenty of tesserae, risking years of her life in the games.

Like the majority of District 7s 16 year olds, Castanea has to go to school. Her school grades are above average for a girl her age but still not as fantastic as some other individual in her class. She makes it through school with her best friends, Akre and Orcan. They are both boys and have been her best friends for as long as she can remember. Castanea, however, has another thing to do. Her free time after school is taken up by Akre, Orcan, Sherri and a few other lumberjacks that work in the junior Lumberjack team, another way to gain money for her parents that continuously seek money for necessaries.

At home, Castanea works hard to keep Henyri and Mollis nice and safe, since they are unable to work in the condition they are in. They were seriously injured in a small forest fire a few years back and they haven’t healed much since. They have been left incredibly weak after their 3rd degree burns got better and their broken bones and wounds healed up fully, leaving them in a state where they can only stay inside because they can’t bear to go back to the hazardous woods where they nearly lost their lives. They get cases of nightmares and become so frightened that Castanea has to treat them carefully as busy Cren attempts to work his magic on them using the skills he learned from the town’s pharmacist who has been giving him a few lessons. The little wooden lodge they live in is situated in a calm village near the middle of District 7, where everything is tranquil and the school and shops are just a 10 minutes’ walk away.

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