Emmaline Cartright || District 8

Emi is a tiny little slip of a girl, small in stature and decidedly thin. She wears her hair long and red, usually preferring to braid it into two perfect plaits that hang down her back to her waist. When undone, her hair is wavy and falls nearly to her knees, but it is a rare thing to see it hanging loose, as it is out of her way when it is pulled back, and she's been taught to always be careful with her hair, since one day it might get in her way when she's working the looms and the other machinery in the mills. Her eyes are wide and haunted, with dark circles underneath them, the eyes sunken deeply into their sockets. She rarely looks a person in the eyes, but when she does it's often as though she's looking directly into the person she's watching, since she is so deeply and disturbingly haunted.

Her frame is tiny, with no breasts to speak of in spite of her being past the age when most girls enter into puberty. Perhaps it's because of the poverty that she has experienced in District 8, or maybe it's just the natural way of things for her, but she is flat chested and has the narrow hips of a child along with a narrow waist. Her clothes fit baggy in every direction, and she is often tugging at the sleeves and having to hold her skirts or trousers up in order to prevent them from falling off of her thin body.

Perhaps because of her size or the way that she is forced to dress, there is always a look of shame on Emi's face, and she rarely looks people in the eyes. She shuffles her feet when she walks, and is usually seemingly lost in her own world. If you don't know Emi, she's a very, very easy person to miss.

Noteworthy: Emi is missing the last two fingers on her right hand and there are burn marks that climb her left arm all the way up to the shoulder and around her back.

Like any teenager who has grown up in the lower and lower middle districts, Emi is browbeaten and exhausted. She spends her days attending the Capitol-sanctioned school and goes home at night to work at the laundry business that her mother left behind when she died of consumption, falling into bed for long enough to get four or five hours of sleep before getting up in the morning to do it all again five days a week. While her outer appearance gives the impression that she is doing nothing but thinking quite deeply about everything that she is working on or doing for her day (for her customers, for her school, for the Capitol), her inner workings are always busily moving, constantly thinking and dreaming. Like any young girl, even one who is the victim of such intense oppression, she is constantly dreaming about the way that things could be, about the day that she will eventually marry the boy of her dreams, have children and... The dream stops there, because she can't bear to think of what might happen to those children should they be fortunate enough to live to be in their teens.

Emi is smarter than she appears to most people, but she doesn't complain when others think that she is nothing more than a simpleminded girl. It's hard for her to focus on the reality of life in the districts because it is such a horrifyingly sad way for her to live. It's much easier for her to live in her mind, and she finds often that she wishes she had something to write on, because she would make up the most delightful stories -- not that the Capitol would approve of someone in the districts taking the time to create something beautiful. After all, beauty, instruments, art, music, those things belong to the Capitol and the districts are made to serve them. Beside which, she's quite sure that she's nothing good enough to produce the quality that anyone in the Capitol would want to read.

One thing that most people don't know about Emi is that she is an incredibly quick thinker. Twice now her life has been put in danger, once when she became trapped by one of the machines that she uses to wring out the items that she's laundered (in which she lost the last two fingers on her right hand) and once when her kitchen caught fire, shortly after her mother's death. In both cases, her life would have ended had she not had the quick thought process necessary to dodge danger before she found herself trapped. While she appears to be a slow and steady thinker, her best talent is for thinking on her feet rather than for making drawn-out decisions. If you need someone who can put the pieces of a puzzle together very quickly, then you're looking for Emmaline Cartwright. After all, she's managed to survive for the past two years virtually on her own.

Emi has grown up in District 8. Her mother, a poor washer woman from the wrong side of the tracks, was widowed when she was pregnant with Emi, and by the time that the little girl was born, she was left with two children she couldn't afford to feed. Emi's brother went into the state home for nearly two years before his mother managed to buy him back out of it, and it was a good thing that she did, as well. He was twelve when she pulled him back out of the group home, and it was a good thing, too, because she needed the help in the laundry just to put food on the table. Gregory and Emi continued to go to school for the next few years and to help with the laundry in the evenings, trading their services for quality food wherever they could. Life has always been hard for them, but they got by with the business and their skillful trades.

It was fine until Emi was five years old. That was the year that her mother developed consumption and began to cough up blood. The family had no money at all for medicine and there were no real cures for the disease in the districts anyway. Emi cried over her body for two days before the Peacekeepers finally dragged the body out of the house. Gregory became a man that day, standing up to protect Emi, taking tessarae in order to feed her. It was only lucky that Gregory didn't get reaped in those years, because he'd told her the horror stories from the group home. She relied on him, they kept their mother's business going, and eventually he became old enough to work in the mills. After that, the business belonged to Emi, who has worked it since she was twelve years old -- the first year that she was eligible for the reaping.

Since then she's insisted on doing her own work. She takes her own Tessarae since her brother is no longer eligible to do so. She works hard, keeps a low profile, and because of the poverty in which her family lives, she has become quite a waif. It's easier to be invisible than to allow other people to get to know her, and she knows for sure that if she were to be reaped into the Games that she would, no doubt, be forgotten almost instantly. After all, Emi sees herself as one of the most forgettable girls in all of District 8.

I'm back! It's been forever but I'm back! I'm back I'm back I'm back! Let's play! (: