Spensur Herrick - District 4

Spensur Herrick is a 17 year old crabber and apprentice angler from District 4. She stands proudly at 5ft and 7inches, she has a naturally slender build with lean muscle and sun tanned skin; the result of a lifetime of laborious work on the shoreline and out at sea.

Her charming green/blue eyes mimic the beauty of the ocean that lines the coastal district and compliments her delicate but striking features perfectly. Spensur's long medium ash brown hair is naturally threaded with sun bleached locks of gold and almost always resides in a neatly tied fishtail braid that hangs over her shoulder in order to keep it out of her way when she works. Though many have told her that she is beautiful and that she should feel very blessed for her appearance, these words mean little to Spensur; she believes that there are far more important qualities a person could have though she accepts compliments graciously.

One aspect of her appearance that she is notably fond of, however, is her teeth: white and near perfectly aligned straight, neatly sized and with an attractive teeth to gum ratio. Spensur's teeth are arguably her favorite thing about herself.

Spensur rarely bothers with fashion and for the most part she remains in her work clothes or in similarly comfortable and practical wear. Most often she can be found in her size 8 black rubber wading boots that cover her calves and stop a few inches short of her knee. These are paired with a set of slim black waist pants that although waterproof are matte in appearance and have elastic suspenders that lay criss-crossed over her back when she is working and fall from Spensur's hips when she is not. Atop this ensemble she often wears a waterproof hooded jacket that is half sunshine yellow at the top down to her mid torso and black from there down to the hem, a contrast from the white drawstrings that hang at base of the hood at either side of Spensur's neck.

Spensur's arms are lean and her muscles are strong without being visibly bulging. The tanned skin of her arms is almost hairless save for a light layer of near undetectably fair hair that can only really be seen in direct sun. Her hands are rough but she keeps her nails clean and the tiny scars of crab bites and slipped knives mark the V of her forefinger and thumb on both hands.

A stray slash of a large fillet knife almost completely severed the delicate connective tendons in Spensur's right heel when she was just a child. The injury that had been predicted to leave Spensur crippled for life now exists only as a slightly pink scar and in fact the almost miraculous healing of her youthful flesh strengthened her right heel and allows her to run very quickly.

Spensur is a hard worker, she is a proud girl who holds her personal reputation and that of her family in high regard. She can be a little elitist and even arrogant at times but Spensur thrives on having a sense of purpose and a set of goals to work toward, it is her unrelenting drive and determination paired with her skillfulness and adaptability that has allowed her to be considered a remarkable asset to the male dominated industry of Distrct 4.

Though some may be intimated by Spensur's insatiable need to succeed, she is in fact a loyal friend, a worthy confidant and a cherished companion. She loves her family very much and has a particularly close relationship with her father whom she often works alongside.

Spensur doesn't like children much and has a very limited capacity for civility when it comes to dealing with them. She's not sure where this attitude comes from but she is relatively sure of her inability to shift it, she just doesn't like kids. She has a similar distaste for pets (Who, if you ask her aren't all that different from kids) except for a very small and commercially worthless fish that became trapped in Spensur's father's net when she was a child. Spensur was just 13 when her father brought home the fish that was affectionately known Periwinkle from that day on, as a gift for his daughter. She has since kept her only pet in a glass bowl in her bedroom.

Herrick; an ancient Germanic name that meant, once upon a time, "Lord of War" - Spensur had always found it ironic that her ancestry had once had the gall to call themselves warlords when Spensur, in her humble opinion, thought that she would perish within the Games arena within minutes, killed by any one of the tributes that annually appeared on the screen in her family's living room. She often wondered how many jokes would be made at her expense about the meaning of her name if it had been pulled out of the glass ball but then again, she thought, would they even bother to learn that much about her?

"Luck is not good or bad, luck is luck, you either have it or you don't and you try to make it out of what you have either way" is what Spensur's father, a kind hearted and good natured man, had always said, reminding her with a pat on the shoulders that was always a little too rough for his daughter and a signature smile on his face that in turn put one on hers. Spensur was a fraternal twin and had believed that her fathers words were true, the one exception being her brother or at least he had been the one exception when he was alive.

If you had asked anybody in the district who knew Troiyan Herrick they would tell you that the boy was simply born under a bad sign. Shouldn't Spensur have been born under the very same in that case? She had always wondered but had never asked aloud. It was the dismissive nature of the comments made and the general attitude regarding Troiyan's death that Spensur blamed for her lack of response to the event. Certainly she missed her brother, mourned for his loss and longed for his company but only in small doses and with little impact on her daily life. The basis, she reasoned, was this; Troiyan's name was entered into the reaping twice as many times as Spensur's though they were of the same age and she had always predicted that her brother's luck, or lack there of, if there was indeed no such thing as bad luck, would have him selected as tribute and that he would be murdered in the most brutal of ways in the Games broadcast all over the land for the entertainment of those residing luxuriously in The Capitol. Each year since the age of twelve Spensur stood at the reaping, one eye trained on her twin brother because surely the odds were never in is favor and surely, she thought, year after year, it would be his last reaping.

Troiyan's name was never called and in an odd way in Spensur's mind this served as justification for the boy's death.

Spensur's mother is yet to recover from the trauma of losing her only son, the realization of his death had taken two and a half weeks to sink in and since that day, two months and six days ago, she has been withdrawn from her family, friends and community, surfacing only for brief periods at a time in an attempt to regain normality in her life.

Spensur's father, though equally as affected by the loss of his son has taken a different road in his mourning. The confronting fact that life is so precious, so easily taken away and so difficult to preserve no matter how hard one tries has inspired him in his daily life and he does all he can to maintain his cheery demeanour though there is an unmistakable sadness in his eyes.