Reiben Cyntil - District 3

[Irmó]

Name: Reiben Cyntil (wants people to call him Ben, though most call him Rei — his sister has always called him Rei-Rei.)
Age: 15
Gender: Male
District/Area: District 3
Appearance:

Reiben is tall, but not immensely so. He has dark-brown hair which he parts to the left and sweeps across his high forehead, and a face that is unusually pale; his parents think he might have a mild form of skin albinism, but have never checked with a doctor. The striking feature about his face, however, are his eyes, which lance out in the brightest shade of blue in a gaze that takes in everything it sees and gives the implication of storing it away in the mental alternative of meticulously alphabetized filing cabinets.
His ears lie almost perfectly flat alongside his head; needless to say, they are not pointed. He enjoys wearing black and grey clothing, and metallic objects if he can find them. He has a small metal ring formed of what looks like four-sided steel scales overlapping, that his sister gave to him. When feeling paranoid or unfriendly, he wears clothing with a hood. He requires glasses, which through a malfunction of tint hide his bright eyes from the world. His hands are constantly flexing, as if playing a piece on a piano that no one else sees, and his fingers are long and quick. He wears an odd cross between sandals and flipflops on his feet.

Personality:

Like all of humanity, Reiben's personality cannot be simplified into a few short stereotypes. He is smart, but often makes the most foolish of mistakes. He believes more than anyone else he knows in the power of logic and focus, yet is frequently illogical and distracted (often by the products of his own illogical schemes). He is known to be quickfingered, and often slips off with someone else's possessions long before they notice. He thinks much of himself and little of others; part of the reason that he sticks to himself. When he does interact with others on a social level that level is sarcasm. He is a solitary creature, preferring the company of his puzzles to that of real people. He is reflective and curious, constantly noticing things about the world and wondering why (a simple question with a not-so-simple answer).

Skills:

Reiben is good at three things: fighting, stealing, and running away. Though he has never had any actual training in hand-to-hand combat he finds it comes naturally to him; he instinctively knows that this hand goes here and this hand goes there. Despite this, he is not by nature a violent person, preferring to use his speed to run away — which he does more often than he thinks is fair. This is because of his third skill: theft. With his long fingers and sharp mind, he os perfectly suited to 'borrowing' an object he likes the look of right out of the satchel of the man in front of him.

History:

The Cyntil family has its roots far back in history, but is known for the geniuses at manufacturing it produces. Any man or woman with the surname of Cyntil is automatically assured higher status and higher living standards (though in this age, that isn't saying much). So you can imagine the surprise Ervi and Donauld Cyntil had when their only daughter, Lia, went off and married a simple brickmaker who had come from District Seven. Out of respect to the family, her husband Jakub gave up his surname to adopt hers, the reverse of the usual matrimonal customs. However, all the did was soften the blow; the damage had been done. Lia had been praised for her delicate work and incredible detail in all she made — a husband who's greatest detail was carving his name on a rectangular stone-like slab was simply wrong. Indeed, Jakub himself often wondered what it was that drew such a talented lady like her to him. Lia, of course, often wondered to herself what didn't.
Though the rest of the family was cynical, Lia and Jakub had high hopes for their first child, a boy. Lia was by now a well-known maker of mechanical puzzles - from curiously-shaped metal bars that required careful contemplation before untangling, to cleverly-wrought tubes that so resembled Cryptexes that Dan Brown twisted in his post-apocalyptic grave. The average Cyntil is not particularly clever, but can easily create the most wonderful devices from the most common of objects. The average Cyntil has geometrical perception and mechanical intuition to put Albert Einstein to shame. Of course, in most other areas they are only mediocre, but that's not at all problematic for the average Cyntil.

Reiben was not an average Cyntil.

From an early age Reiben showed far less interest in creating devices and puzzles than solving them, an unheard of skill in his family! But his grandparents discovered in horror as he grew that the malady was even worse. From a young age, Reiben was fascinated by science, and one day dreamed of going to Capitol and becoming a famous scientist! This was completely intolerable, so Ervi ordered that he be brought with his mother when she created her devices. This backfired horribly. Reiben discovered a sudden passion for puzzle-solving: he would often lie in bed for hours with a stack of codes or shifting cubes by his side, twisting and shifting them and seeing how they worked and what he could make them do. That would be all fine and well for the earliest 21st century, but in this era lying in bed and still not even knowing a screwdriver from a precision cutter simply wouldn't support a family. In his grandparents' eyes, he was a total failure, and his parents had failed with him.
His sister Myri changed all that. From the start it was clear that she was a prodigy; at the age of two she used her building-block set to create a 10:1 scale of the inside of a lock, without ever having seen inside so much as a one-pin! She was adored by her grandparents and her parents, and by all who met her. With curly blond hair and bright hazel eyes, she immediately charmed everyone. But she was not envied by her brother. Rather, he doted the most upon her, and spent every hour he had to spare sitting in front of her watching in awe (and utter lack of comprehension of what she was doing) as three forks, a rubber band, and sixteen twigs transformed itself into a windup figure that balanced on its own. And as the materials she had to work with grew less and less crude, her creations grew more and more incredible. When Reiben first entered the Reaping and was given a chance for tesseræ, the parents instead brought Myri to the factory with them and gave her a chance to do what she loved most — and, of course, a chance to put decent-sized meals on the table. With the combined incomes of all three Cyntils, his grandparents forgot their bitterness and Reiben lived in a house where there was always at least a small amount of meat, and sometimes even breaded!

Codeword: muttations
Comments/Other:

DISCLAIMER: This bio was written up at 1 in the morning. As such, it is probably not my best writing ever, and I may choose to edit it slightly when I regain full cranial capacity.

[WT]

Interesting character- very unusual history. I like 'im, though. Accepted! Welcome to THG:RGP. =)