The 75th Games Election

Character Name: Ravi La Torre
Age: 50
District: 4
Does this citizen meet the requirements to run for Mayor? Yes

Bio Blurb:

There is a fine line — invisible to the naked eye — that bisects every youth, delineating between hubris and stupid. It is a line that Ravi La Torre has walked half a hundred times, teetering between one side and the other, until age and experience intersected at wisdom.

Hubris is knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that your new sister-in-law had the hots for you, stupid was insisting that to your bride.

Hubris is the notion that a headstrong teenager, head and pockets empty save for dreams of gilded kingdoms, could build himself an empire — if only he could get his hands on a gun, any gun. (The gun is god.) Stupid was thinking it had to come from a peacekeeper.

Through trial and error, the emperor himself incrementally colored in that line in his own life, learned through failure more than success what was hubris and what was plain stupid.

But in forty-five years he'd never seen a more clear-cut example of the difference than the one that had played out on the flatscreen in his basement lounge while a cigar burned between his index and middle fingers:

Hubris is kissing the barrel of a flare gun to the front of your own skull.

Stupid was daring Circe Lyon to pull the trigger.

Character Name: Rolex Ghram
Link to bio: here
Age: 29
District: 1
Does this citizen meet the requirements to run for Mayor? Yes

Character Name: Rose Valfierno
Link to bio: here
Age: 23
District: 5
Does this citizen meet the requirements to run for Mayor? Yes

Character Name: Craig Wiely
Link to bio: here
Age: 20
District: 13 (originally 9)
Does this citizen meet the requirements to run for Mayor? Yes

Character Name: Florence Tempest-Vane
Link to bio: x
Age: 19
District: 6
Does this citizen meet the requirements to run for Mayor?: Yes

Character Name: Angelica Belrose
Link to bio: x
Age: 24
District: 4
Does this citizen meet the requirements to run for Mayor?: Yes

Character Name: Oriana
Link to bio: x
Age: 19
District: 8
Does this citizen meet the requirements to run for Mayor?: Yes

She'd done her time already long ago, humble origins condemning her to seven terrifying years of empty bellies and excessive tesserae, to long hours in wheat fields and orchids alike, the threat of never having enough leaving a perpetual block of ice in her sternum.

And yet she had survived, even to the point of calling herself lucky. Her status as an only child had ensured that she would never feel the terror of watching a sibling picked for the slaughter. But others were not so lucky, and she watched with sadness as first her peers, then younger relatives of her peers, and then the children of her peers were selected in her place, sent to compete in a game that they couldn't win.

Until someone did.

Against all odds, with an arena that looked as if it were built to specifically hinder her and a heart that was too pure for simple murder, Katelyn Persimmon had come home, the first that thirty six years of memory could recall, and with her came a year of wealth and prosperity to her impoverished home.

And then it seemed as if for once luck was on the side of the agricultural district, for Persimmon proved to be a tactical genius in the art of mentoring, bringing home first her sole charge from the previous Quell and then one of the large, good-hearted Rhodes boys the year after that.

But alas, luck was a fickle lover. A mere four Games had passed since Eleven had won the crown, and yet not one, not two, but three individuals with the blood of the Victors running through their veins had lost their lives to the Capitol's machinations.

And oh, she wasn't sad anymore.

She was angry.

And so she plotted, keeping details of her own schemes to herself. No one, not even her loving spouse of twenty years, not even any of her five wonderful children, could know the truth.

All they had to know, all anyone had to know, was that Maya Fel was going to run for the highest political office she could manage.

For regimes broken from the outside would always rise back up again, but regimes that crumbled from within?

Those were the ones that never again made it anywhere beyond the pages of history.