Kaelen Reid

Name: Kaelen Reid

Age: 16

Member of: District 7

What profession are you (optional): part-time lumberjack on the weekends and some evenings after school

Appearance:

Kaelen is 6’1” with dark blonde/light blond hair which he leaves long enough to just brush his shoulders. It is often messy as a result of him constantly running his fingers through it. Being from District 7, he has built up muscle over the past couple years as he began to help out his district’s lumber industry by cutting down trees. Nevertheless, he is still a bit lanky for his years. His emerald green eyes are piercing against his tanned skin. He has a thin scar running from the inside of his wrist to just below his elbow where he lost his grip on a saw at the age of 13 and sliced open his arm. Kaelen is most comfortable in a worn-in pair of jeans accompanied by a T-shirt or buttoned flannel shirt with sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

Personality:
Kaelen is an honest, responsible, hard worker with one main focus in his life: his family. He works on the weekends and even sometimes in the evenings after school to help bring home extra money to the household, which includes his parents and two younger siblings. Every year at the reaping, he fears his name will be called and his family will lose his support, so throughout the year, he works hard to provide them with as much as he can in case he is taken away. While he puts on a fun-loving air around his siblings, Kaelen keeps to himself for the most part outside of the home. Inside the home, he is the ideal older brother.

He gives his all to whatever task is at hand, whether school work or lumbering. In school, he makes decent grades and will even help tutor other students in exchange for food or other necessary materials. Because he is intent on helping to put food on the table, Kaelen has missed out on some of the essential parts of being a teen, including relationships and hosts of friends. He does occasionally hang out with the local teens, but as of yet, nobody has been able to break past his internal defenses.

History:
Kaelen Wyatt Reid is the oldest of three children born to Liam and Elanna Reid. He has a 12 year old sister, Kareena, and a 9 year old brother, Kallum. His father is a lumberjack in District 7 while his mother adds what she can to the family’s table by working hard as a seamstress. She often enlists Kareena’s help in hopes of one day growing her business with her only daughter. When Kaelen was 10, his father was injured when a tree fell on top of him, shattering his hip bone along with the bones in his right leg and femur in his left. While the doctors were able to heal him, Liam still walks stiffly and with a bit of a limp, so he was put on lighter duty in the lumber yard. Lighter duty, unfortunately for the Reid family, also meant a decrease in salary. While the Reids are not poor, with Liam’s drop in pay and five hungry mouths to feed, the family was just barely making ends meet.

Kaelen begged to help out in the lumber yard as early as 12, but his father would not allow it. Liam wanted his son to enjoy his youth and not waste hours of his spare time in the woods. As a result, Kaelen requested tessarae that first year that he was eligible, putting his name in 5 extra times for each member of his family. After that, his father could not deny him work, wanting to spare his child any additional chances of being picked for the Hunger Games. So at 13, after some axe and saw training with his father, Kaelen was allowed to help out in the woods. He started small, helping to move around pieces of woods and split logs, but by 16, he was part-time lumberjack on the weekends and the occasional school night when homework was light.

Over the years, after he’d begun working in the forests, Kaelen developed a hobby in whittling. The fall of the first year Kaelen had begun working, he overheard his sister’s birthday request. Another girl in her class at school had received a pony for her birthday only the month before, and that inspired Kareena to ask for one as well. At 13, Kaelen could see the sadness in his parents’ eyes, knowing that they could not afford to give their child such a gift. When leaving work a few weeks before his sister’s birthday, Kaelen’s eye caught on a stack of excess wood. Occasionally there would be pieces of wood that would be rotting or split improperly so as to be of no use besides firewood. He took the opportunity when no one was looking to steal a chunk of wood and stuff it beneath his jacket. In the evenings of that following week, Kaelen would lock himself in his room after supper, carving away at the piece of wood with a small knife his father had given him for his birthday earlier that year. It took him a couple of tries, not to mention stealing a few extra scraps of wood, but by the time those three weeks had ended, Kaelen presented the small, misshapen, wooden horse to Kareena at her birthday dinner. She dearly loved horses, so while not a real one, the young girl cherished the gift. To this day, the wooden horse still sits on her dresser, along with some better formed horses and other animals that Kaelen had whittled for her over the years. He’s made a number of figures for his brother as well. Whispers of his work got around, and it wasn’t long before a few men in the lumber yard were asking him to make certain figurines for their own kids’ birthdays, providing Kaelen with an extra bit of income for his family.

That's a great character sheet, you're a talented writer!

But can you elaborate more on this?
"He does occasionally hang out with the local teens, but as of yet, nobody has been able to break past his internal defenses."

Do you just mean, like, the kids know who he is and when they see him it's a sort of "oh, that kid, he's pretty cool" and he just has no one close at all besides his family, or what? Thanks!