Cryus Markreach District 10

Cryus is a seventeen year old farm hand from district 10. He’s tall thin and agile with a ridiculously large smile and clearly defined bone features. He stands at approximately six foot tall and weighs a hundred and sixty pounds making him neither ludicrously thin nor overly large; slender describes his build best with the absence of excessive amounts of either fat or muscle. His hair is a mesh of black wire that possesses a small amount of curl to it leaving it to resemble the waves of the cornfields he works in sitting atop skin of almost the same color of the corn, combining this with his slim stature means that he resembles the produce of his district all too closely. His hair and eyes are almost identical in color, both being a deep brown bordering on jet black. His overall features render him looking a little more than average, he’s attractive and few would deny that but no one is going to be swooning at the mere sight of him any time soon. Years spent working in the fields have left his skin calloused and hard, particularly his hands which are noticeably rough to touch.

His fashion stems from his families wealth, they aren’t the richest residents in the district but neither are they the poorest meaning his fashion is most definitely outdated but is in good condition. He’ll typically wear a loose shirt and pants suspended by a thin brown leather belt although in the most formal of occasions such as the reaping he may stretch to adorn a jacket and may even part his otherwise unkempt hair. To those in the capitol clothing is another thing to set them apart from the others, to Cryus it’s just a necessity to go out in public and he rarely dwells for long over his wardrobe in the mornings.

Cryus comes from a generally good upbringing and as a result is a fairly well balanced individual. He laughs a lot and is fairly sociable but lacks any real sense of charisma. He’s friendly enough but appears awkward when speaking to anyone that he deems to be above himself, which unfortunately is most people outside his district, except for the poorer ones of course but then he goes down a standard human psychology route and simply pretends that they don’t exist. District 10 may not be the poorest district but as far as Cryus is concerned it is, he knows that the lower districts suffer more than him on a subconscious level but rationalizes that they are simply over exaggerating as no one could live that poorly, could they? When talking to people from the capitol or higher districts Cryus becomes increasingly shy and whilst he tries to be polite he will regularly trip over his own words in trying to do so and ends up apologizing almost continuously which most people find cute at first but becomes irritating very rapidly.

After Cryus has broken down the social barriers of the circumstance he will start to open up a little but it should be noted that this takes time, he isn’t likely to get over the difference in status rapidly and it can take multiple meetings before he’s truly himself. Ultimately he’s a relatively open individual and free of most emotional scarring having spent his life so far working in farm land he’s gained a few practical skills but also a few emotional. He’s able to communicate with people far better when he’s working but this work is almost always manual, his intellect is low in comparison to those district 5 science buffs and whilst he can manage to do simple maths his computer skills are practically non-existent. When faced with a battle of wits Cryus wil almost always loose, he’s not a violent person and so he’s unlikely to lash out in defense of a mere insult but he lacks the mental capacity needed to trade insults on an intellectual level.

Cryus doesn’t adapt well to change, he’s quite content with his life and has no real desire to change it. If such an event was to occur his most likely response would be a simple one, to pretend it hadn’t. He’d keep on acting as normal right up until the last possible moment when it all sinks in and he absolutely has to adapt, at this point he withdraws into himself and becomes increasingly quiet until he can properly adapt to the change. As stated Cryus enjoys his life, it’s a simple one with little expendable income but it is a comfortable one, he’s aware of how bad things could be and so he tends to keep on the side of the law rarely venturing into the forests to hunt although that’s largely because he has little need, food is in surplus in the district and although much of it is exported to the capitol his family gets by with enough food for the number of mouths under that roof. Cryus has never been a fan of the Hunger Games but he’s always supported it, largely out of necessity, but he views the competition as unnecessarily violent however he hides this well and doesn’t make an example of himself with the peacekeepers, if anything the peacekeepers like him for his conformity.

Cryus’ past is a fairly regular one, it isn’t shrouded in despair or torment, he doesn’t have a dramatic tale of origins, he has simply existed for most of his life with only a few landmark events marking anything interesting at all. He was born to one of the many farming families of the district and since he was seven years old he’s been helping out with various tasks around the farm lands. From feeding chickens and collecting eggs to the herding and slaughter of cattle like the other men of the district he’s developed as most of the others in his district in that sense. The skills acquired from his farm land chores are both numerous and useless in any other sense but the ranch work, the only ones that even remotely applicable outside of the farm are a sense of responsibility, a skill with a knife and killing quickly, experience killing animals and trapping rats and the ability to gather food from a kill. Most of Cryus’ life has been spent on farm land and he’s had little contact with women, not that this has ever bothered him, he’s never really been overly bothered about getting a girlfriend, that’d just mean that he needed to move out from his parent’s house and start up another farm, that’s all way too much effort for him. Cryus’ life revolves around immediate his family, his two parents and his little sister the four of them get on well enough and form a functional family, sure there have been fights but never anything bigger than a row and they’d never really encountered problems partially because they can’t afford to, the entire family is needed to manage the farm and without both parent's extended relatives coming in during the spring and lambing season to help they’d soon fall under financially.

So from the beginning, after Cryus was born not much happened for many years, he simply grew older had some birthdays and learnt how to look after the farm it wasn’t until he was 9 that his baby sister arrived and his older brother left. His brother wasn’t murdered or reaped, he just left, out into the forests one day without looking back. Cryus knew his brother left, he saw him, then he saw the peacekeepers capture him and then he never saw him again. Cryos thinks his brother is alive, he hopes so anyway but he doesn’t know and it seems unlikely to say the least. Since that day Cryus made sure he played by the rules, he didn’t want to leave his family without a son to look after the farm, after all his father was getting older and one day he’d need to take over all together.

Since then not much has happened to Cryus. He’s been pretty much a model denizen of district 10 the peacekeepers are still just as wary of him as the other residents and he’s rarely cut any slack but that’s better than having them watch you like a hawk your whole life. All the remains of his immediate family are alive and none of them have encountered any real health problems. Cryus has never known anyone in the Hunger Games, he’s known of them but never truly known them. He knows how lucky he is, the sheer number of people in the district that have lost friends or loved ones to the Games is uncountable and now that he’s almost out of the reaping age the odds truly have been in his favor.