Atlas Kerke District 12

Atlas has a very tall figure, 6' 3" (190.5 cm) but he's very skinny. He has a very imposing stance with his height, even though his muscular build isn't great. He manages to have an almost intimidating look as he stands. He has long, dark brown hair with dark eyes. His face usually shaven. His face usually twisted into a frown, his face has a few very faded creases due to the consistent frowning. His skin is white, with a little tan mixed in there, giving him the average Seam resident complexion. His hands are rather big and leathery. His face has a few burn marks and scars that are very visible. One burn mark runs down from his left jaw to his collar bone. Another is just a small gash-looking burn on the left side of his forehead. His scar is on his lip, cutting from the middle part between his nose and his lower left lip. This scar is actually very small, but still visible.

Kerke wears black worker boots with some very baggy jeans. His boots look as if they have been worn to the point where you can see some of the metal on the steel-toe portion. His jeans are all tattered and riddled with burn marks and spots where it has been sewn back together. His shirt is just a tan, long-sleeved shirt. It looks very tattered and worn. But don't let that fool you, it is tattered and worn. He also wears a very heavy aviator jacket passed down from his father to give himself extra bulk. He wears glasses due to his near sight problem. He also sometimes wears gloves, but that's only for work. He can usually be seen with his wrench in the afternoon as well, and with a hard helmet during work. Off work he takes off the jacket and the hard hat though.

He's a very quiet sort of person, but very determined. He doesn't really like to get in the way of anybody, he tends to just keep to himself and finish his own work. Atlas tends to shy away from conflict in general even though he works with electricity in the Seam. He tends to stay quiet in most conversations, and when he does participate he is more sarcastic to try and get people away from him. He doesn't really know how to deal with people, especially women. He was never very good with the opposite sex, and his quiet ways never really helped.

Addressing his problem with women, they simply make him a nervous guy. He has never really been able to talk to them properly, so he hides behind sarcasm and the usual quietness. He keeps a straight or frowned face usually to signify that he isn't totally afraid. Even though he may have problems when talking to girls, it is fair to say that he is capable of spinning the conversation in some way to make the girl talk mostly while he will just say very little. He may not look it, but Atlas understands people better than others would like for him to. He has a talent for deciphering people's meaning behind words, but he never has anything to say. Which causes others to think that he really is an ass.

Along with his quiet nature, he is also very methodical and logical. Most of his thoughts and ideas follow a logic manner, which also attributes to his talent in understanding hidden meanings. He is very logical and mathematically gifted. His logical thinking helps a lot in his electrician job as well, considering the logic of circuits. His actual love for math and logic is what draws him to science and free thinking as well. He is a strong believer in freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Atlas, therefore, holds very little love for the Capitol and its ways. He is a freethinking, mathematician whom simply cannot speak to women.

Atlas never knew his mother since she died during the act of giving birth to him. He never met the woman that brought him into the world but he still feels like he knew her in some way. He never really felt guilt from losing his mother during his own birth as he knew it was not his fault but his father saw it differently. His father always blamed him secretly for his mothers death. When his mother died, Atlas's father began drinking heavily. Trying to cope with his wife's death. This went on for years, Atlas having to suffer many beatings from his father as he screamed "You fucking killed her Al! You took her away from me!" as he did it. Atlas never was able to defend himself, considering his father was a boxer. Until he was around eleven, his father rarely acknowledged him except for the occasional beating and giving him food. Atlas turned to reading books during those first eleven years.

At first, he began to read Algebra books after he learned basic math in school. He already was learning how to do advanced math for his age. Every day, he would come home to read more out of his mathematics book which he stole from the library. He would read it through the nights, learning equation after equation on how to find a variable in an equation or some other random algebra teaching. Soon after he taught himself Algebra, he moved over to Geometry. He continued to fill his head on math with the Pythagorean theorem or surface area. His eyes would show the nights of sleep lost over practicing problem after problem trying to understand it. He never really was one for Geometry.

During the time he read his Geometry, he aged further and further into becoming fifteen. At the age of fifteen, he and his father had a fight where Atlas reasoned with his father about how he never meant to kill his mother as he put it. His father broke down crying and looked at him. He could see what he had done to his son and told him that he would help him defend himself in this world. His father, the expert boxer, began to teach his son boxing. Atlas had once asked his father where he learned boxing to which his father replied "we aren't allowed to talk about it...." For months, his father taught him from left right left to uppercuts and more advanced techniques in boxing. However, Atlas knew that boxing would not help entirely in a real fight. Boxing could only get you so far, and Atlas understood that his lean figure could help him. He began to experiment with his father on other ways to fight, not necessarily sticking to boxing but heavily embedding it into the fighting way. Eventually, Atlas was capable of taking down his own father by using his openings. Atlas learned to duck under and sweep the legs of an enemy, he learned that the legs were a vulnerability of any enemy. Though, he preferred the peaceful way rather than the fight, he was glad he developed his own way to fight multiple people.

At the age of eighteen, Atlas had taken over his own fathers home as his dad was arrested. He had no provider so he had to go out and get a job. He had found an electrician's job in the Seam. Some of his co-workers tell him that he's far too intelligent to be working as an electrician. He knew physics and understood them, but he could not use it unless it was for electrical purposes now. Atlas understood that he needed to make money, however little it may be. He enjoys the job at this point, but he sometimes wishes he could be a scientist. As his main ambition is the stars and astronomy, he understands much more about his sky than most. He read many books on astronomy when he was a child along side the mathematics. He wishes to explore space, knowing Panem would never allow it. But people can dream, right?