Socket District 3

Socket is a lanky creature with slightly tanned skin. Being just over 6 feet tall, but significantly lighter than is probably healthy, he has only a 26 inch waist. Normally he wears oversized clothes held together with a piece of braided wire that was too worn to be used in a tv. His shirts usually have the sleeves rolled up, and the shoulders hanging down to almost his elbows. The one pair of boots he owns are worn, to the point where he has tied the soles back on several times with scrap wire, leaving them unlaced to save wire. He has a single pair of goggles that he uses when working on electronics, held together with bits of wire and cable-ties, with a slight magnification in the lenses for clearer visibility.

His sooty black hair has speckles of brown peeking through, particularly in his bangs, which hang loosely over his eyes when he doesn't tie them back. The back part of his hair is almost as messy, and has a tendency to stand up on its own, partially because he spends almost all of his time working on electronics. His eyes are a bright electric blue, but seem darker because he hides them behind his bangs when they aren't tied back. Socket's skin appears to be a lightened coffee, except around his fingertips, where they are more copperey, due to tiny bits of wire actually embedded in the skin. In addition, more as a static-prevention measure, he shaves his arms completely hairless. He also has a scar running from his left eye-brow down, across his eye and around his chin where an over-stressed wire snapped and took out his vocal-chords as well as a chunk of chin, leaving a scar across his cornea that left him totally blind in that eye.

Socket is an introverted, shy artist. He tends towards the back of the pack, hiding behind his creations and letting them speak for him. Having his vocal-chords torn like he did, he learned to communicate in other ways. When he does have to talk, or communicate directly, rather than through his creations, he can use his hands and face to communicate nearly anything. What he can't say with his body language, he usually doesn't say, never having learned to write or read. The extent of his reading knowledge is the lines on schematics. Even when he communicates in person, he tends to think through what he will say for minutes at a time. This makes him seem somewhat snobbish, but his posture tends to correct this.

Since he doesn't speak, and tries to avoid actual face-to-face contact unless he has to, his creations tend to be his voice. He will hide messages that only a few people can understand, mostly in the form of wires that are longer or shorter than traditional design theories would call for. Some of these messages can be very complex, practically novel-length, but so obfuscated that no-one can read them. This extends to the coloration even, sometimes making repairs more difficult because the colors don't match tradition. This communication style makes it hard for anyone to get close to him without already being close to someone he is close to.

To those who actually are close to him, he is slightly more outgoing, and can carry on a silent conversation for hours. Mostly these conversations revolve around what he did that day, or intends to do, or whatever. As his primary focus is on his projects, food will rarely be the topic of these discussions, even if he hasn't eaten in a few days, which he does frequently enough that it shows on his body. Socket often finds himself so buried in a project that without others to pull him out of it, he would have starved to death, or possibly even missed going to the reapings. Even as a young boy, he was never really interested in the games, but he picked up bits and pieces from the tvs and radios he was always repairing. When he finally was old enough for his name to be in the drawing, he just shrugged it off and went right back to his work. His assumption was that if he ever went, he'd be dead. Not a big loss, as long as the work he did before then was exemplary.

This attitude bleeds over into his art, made of bits of wire and broken plastic, held together with soldier and other wires. Sometimes the art shows more depth to it, other times, he shows his passive nature, and still others, it is nearly incomprehensible. It also tends to have others describing him as an oddity. The fact that he can sometimes blend right into his 'gallery', a small shed he found on the edge of his town, and look just like some of his taller sculptures has led to him being mistaken for just a bit of useless wire, the derogatory nickname he had been given by some of the rougher boys in the district. His use of the 'Useless Wire' moniker is mostly in reference to how he'll probably never get picked, because he wouldn't give a good show.

Socket was born to a pair of repair-people, his father a computer repair-man, his mother did stuff like automatic looms. The day of his birth, unfortunately coincided with his older brother being drawn in the reaping, and subsequently slaughtered during the opening minutes. He was given the name of a simple, unassuming part of a machine, in hopes that that was what he would become, just another socket on the wall. It worked too, for the first four years he was eligible. He managed to escape notice as anything other than another head in the crowd, even as school-mates were plucked and slain. Shortly after the first reaping though, he hit his growth-spurt and shot up to be a head and shoulders above his age group, making him stand out like a sore thumb.

As a child, his parent got him started on the family crafts early, fixing and maintaining electronics. His first clothing was made from the packing materials for a miniature oven door. Both parents nurtured him in their own ways, his father teaching him to bounce back, and his mother teaching him to not get injured in the first place. Both methods helped form him into a wonderful craftsman, while a combination of electric shocks and small defects in his brain made him behave very similarly to recorded cases of autism. Between the two issues, the boy became an invisible gremlin that constantly produced optimal technology.

His career started out with him repairing just little things with big, obvious wires, but he managed to get down to micro-components. At age 12, he fixed his first tv, by himself. At 13, he managed to rewire a full computer to run better. By 16, he was starting to have his work known, but not by his name. The people outside his district only knew him as UW, the abreviated form of his moniker.

His goggles have a gouge through the left lense that matches up with his scar, although he put the gouge there after the event that took his vocal-chords and eye.