Astor Yellowfin - D4 (Finished)

Name: Astor Blue Yellowfin
Age: Sixteen
Gender: Female
District/Area: District 4
Appearance:

Small scars all over her toes and feet from carelessly letting herself get caught in fishing lines and nets. About five feet tall and small, which makes her useful for getting into small places, like caves in which alabaster shells and their inhabitants—usually crabs—hide. Her hair is her favorite vanity, being bleached by the sun, and crumpling down to just past the small of her back. People continually tell her that if she wants to keep diving, she needs to cut it or she’ll get it caught in something and drown, but in the years she’s become quite good at braiding or tying it in such a way that it never does. Freckles dust the backs of her arms and legs like specks of sand, but her face is mostly clear of them.

As far as clothes, Astor is almost always barefoot--it's a struggle for anyone, regardless of who they are, to get her to wear shoes for any reason. If she truly wishes to wear them, she will do it of her own volition, and by no one else's demand. She makes some of her own clothes from scraps the seamstress lets her keep from the stitch shop, so she has an amalgamation of clothes pieced together with colorful bits of fabric that only occasionally match each other. Some people think this habit makes her look like a vagabond, but she likes the color and the unpredictable nature of the apparel, and besides, it's free.

Personality:

Astor at sixteen is a cheery, lighthearted girl. She doubles her time between the sewing shop and the ocean, earning money in both even though she’s not yet eighteen, and loves both jobs for different reasons. She loves the ocean because of its bright colors and the way the mostly warm water seems to embrace you like a favored child every time you step into it, and she loves the search and chase for the elusive creatures their district is known for. She loves the stitching because if the fix is simple, she can allow her mind to wander and multitask, and when it is not, it is at least complicated enough to entertain her interest.

Despite her apparent sweetness if you only ever saw her face, Astor has a quick tongue and thoughts that tend to lag behind—she often doesn’t think before she speaks, which has gotten her in more trouble than not. But she’s a fast runner, so she usually doesn’t suffer many repercussions of her thoughtless words. She’s got a sharp, wicked sense of humor, and has found that trying to hide things from people only prompts them to dig for it more, so she hides virtually nothing. When she needs to, she can lie like a demon, but she prefers just to confuse people; it’s funnier.

There is nothing Astor likes that she doesn’t do without enthusiasm—if she wants to do it, she’ll so it till something falls apart or something kills her, such as having the ocean catch fire or the stitch shop freeze over. If she doesn’t want to do something, she’s a master procrastinator, and will drag her feet as if she doesn’t have legs. Beware.

History:

Astor was born with ‘face blindness’, meaning that she cannot recognize individual faces. Her mother, her father, her brothers and sisters—the only way she knows them from any other people their ages is by the way they walk, the way they dress or their voices when they speak to her. As soon as they realized the minor disability, her family and friends adapted quickly, finding ways to identify themselves to her as they approached her so she’d not have to guess who they were. Each person either greets her in a slightly different way or just says enough for her to recognize their voice.

For the most part, this difficulty doesn’t hinder her ability to recognize other things, such as one fish from another or one plant from another. But she was never able to attend school regularly because the disorder damaged her ability to distinguish letters and numbers from each other, and she still cannot read or right. Her mother, fortunately, was a teacher, so when she came home every night she would read aloud to her daughter from their textbooks so she wouldn’t receive no education at all. Every fact Astor ever learned, she learned from hearing it. As far as learning goes, however, there is no place that she better excelled than in numbers. She cannot see them or write them, but because of this she had to learn to do all problems and equations in her head. Now, even if she doesn’t know the proper formula off the top of her head, if someone tells her how to do the problem, she can find its answer in her head, even if it takes her a moment to work it out.

There is more than one person in the district who thinks Astor is slow because she’s had no formal education, and especially because she can’t read or write or do figures on paper, but where her stunted education lacks, she makes up for it in determination and an easy heart. Living somewhere between town and the lesser parts of the district, she’s had an easy life in comparison to many. Aside from her mother, everyone in her family fishes, and they do well enough to not live on the cusp of starvation at the end of every month.

As soon as she could, Astor took up an apprenticeship in a stitching shop that did mostly small repairs in clothing, but also put together fancier outfit orders. The shop owner frequently gets frustrated with her for having to ask what the number measurements written on the patterns amount to, but she’s glad that Astor only has to be told once, and then she remembers everything she’s told. There is precious little that Astor sees or hears that she doesn’t remember—first it was a survival technique, but now it’s more useful than required. She spends almost every other day fishing, since she gets fidgety and antsy and decidedly unhelpful when she’s away from her beloved ocean for too long.

Codeword: odair
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