Entry tags:
Temple Drake App for The Games
WARNING: This entire app will contain descriptions of rape and the psychological fallout. Trigger warnings all up in here.
OUT of CHARACTER
Name: Lisa
Other characters: Venus Dee Milo, Black Tom Cassidy, Punchy, Bayard Sartoris, Jason Compson
IN CHARACTER
Name: Temple Drake
Alias: Temple Stevens (current legal name), ‘Boots’
Fandom: Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun by William Faulkner
Canon point/AU: Panem AU
Journal:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
clotting
PB: Emily Rose
Age: 25
History:
The summary for Sanctuary is here. Temple also appears as a main character in Requiem for a Nun, although there is no summary online for that: basically, Temple is married to Gowan Stevens, has an infant daughter who is killed by their servant Nancy, and in a plea to save Nancy’s life admits to having tried to blackmail a man into rescuing her from her shitty marriage.
As a Panem AU:
Temple is the Victor of what was termed for many years as “The Worst Hunger Games Ever”. The (relatively) privileged daughter of the mayor of District Eight at the time, Temple never expected to be a Tribute, and it came as a shock to the community when she was Reaped at seventeen. Since she was in the pot so few times, no one actually expected that her name would be called, and she had spent her teenage years in school and avoiding having to take out tesserae by embroidering fine gowns for Capitolites. Devastated, she pleaded during the Reaping for someone, anyone to take her place, but no one came to her aid, and with a last embrace from her father and her four brothers, she was whisked away to the Capitol with the male Tribute from her District, a boy named Tommy.
Temple’s luck went from bad to worse when she realized that her Escort, Gowan Stevens, was an alcoholic with no optimism about her chances of success who chose instead to focus on Tommy. Temple failed to make a positive impression with either the other Tributes or Sponsors, who saw her as weak cannon fodder and predicted she would die within the first week - at Flickerman’s interview, Temple weepily asked if she could leave and eventually walked off the stage to vomit into a trashcan. At her scoring, she burst into tears and curled up in the fetal position under a table, earning herself a score of 2 and Gowan’s scorn. Gowan didn’t even bother to try and secure Sponsors for her, although Temple’s Stylist did dress her in revealing, coquettish clothes in hopes of coaxing some of the more lecherous audience-members into supporting her.
During the first week of the Arena, Temple surprised even herself by surviving and even making it out of the Cornucopia with a backpack full of food, although she badly twisted her ankle. The Arena was set up as a corn maze with occasional sheds full of rusty farm equipment, which the Tributes were presumably to kill each other with. Temple and Tommy, the other District Eight Tribute, encountered each other, and Temple convinced her Districtmate to hide her in one of the sheds and protect her. Tommy, a kind-hearted type, agreed to shield the vulnerable, hapless Temple from other Tributes in exchange for a pittance of food. During this, Gowan sent no Sponsor gifts to Temple, although Tommy received a few.
Unfortunately, Popeye, a Career Tribute who had allied with other Careers prior to the Arena’s start and acquired a crossbow at the Cornucopia, found the shed, and killed Tommy when he attempted to prevent Popeye from finding where Temple was huddling in a stack of hay. Popeye proceeded to rape Temple with a corncob, then, threatening to kill her if she tried to escape, brought her back to the other Careers so she could ‘entertain’ them. Temple spent the next few nights with the Career Tributes, bloodied and helpless, and was sexually brutalized by the male and female Tributes from One, Two and Four. Because she was too afraid to even try to escape, and because her ankle had gotten progressively more swollen and damaged, she wasn’t even bound. As part of this sick game, the Career Tributes gave Temple ‘gifts’ made of cornhusks and garbage, but they also fed and sheltered her.
The audience detested this sort of torture-porn, which was just a step too far even for the most avid Games fans; Sponsor gifts tapered off and viewing parties declined. The Gamemakers, realizing that this level of depravity and brutality was going over badly, started cutting out pretty much all the footage of that entire group and trying to sweep them under the rug with Gamemaker accidents. Most of the Careers were mowed down by Gamemaker deaths of rattlesnakes, ‘killer farm equipment’, and fire. Eventually only the male Tributes from One and Two, Red and Popeye, were left - the female from Four, Reba, split away from the group and didn’t return. Temple was traumatized, but she also had become vicious, and she started to plant ideas in Red and Popeye’s minds that a betrayal between the two was imminent, even though there were plenty of non-Careers left. Temple’s plan paid off, although not as planned - she had intended for Red to kill Popeye, and instead Popeye beat Red to it. Temple was left with Popeye, the most vicious of them all and the projected winner, who told her every night before they slept that he was saving her for last to kill.
The Arena began drawing to a close as Tributes were picked off from dehydration, Arena traps and Popeye’s crossbows. Finally, only Temple, Popeye and Reba were left. The Gamemakers, antsy about having such an unpopular Tribute as Popeye win, staged a feast back at the Cornucopia. Popeye told Temple to stay put and went to collect the bounty; Temple, starved and pained, climbed to the top of one of the sheds and hid there, hoping that Reba wouldn’t find her. From that vantage point, Temple could see that the feast was going to be hit by a tornado from the Gamemakers, and that Popeye would have to move quickly if he was going to avoid dying there.
Reba did find her, but did not attack Temple, instead asking where Popeye was so she could kill him before he killed her. Temple told her, honestly, that Popeye had headed towards the feast, but lied and said that it looked like clear skies from up atop the shed. Secretly, Temple hoped that Reba and Popeye would fight each other long enough for the tornado to kill them both. Reba thanked her and left, and Temple’s scheme came to fruition: Reba and Popeye were soon both killed by the Gamemakers, and Temple was lifted from the Arena by a hovercraft.
No one had expected Temple to win, and the handful of people who had placed bets on her soon found their coffers filled with gambling money. Gowan, who had never expected to have to apologize to Temple for having basically abandoned her during the Arena, started a sexual relationship with her in a foolish attempt to apologize; Temple acquiesced because she hoped it would be a good way to ward off some of the bidders who had started expressing interest in her. The two were soon married, and most - but not all - of the bidders started to look elsewhere. Gowan quit drinking and, using pull from his prominent politician uncle, became an entrepreneur in District Six and ran a successful, lucrative business. Temple bore him two children and moved out to District Six with him to watch over the business during the winters; the profits vaulted them both from the middle class life of Tribute Staff and Mentor to Capitol elites.
Recently, one of Temple’s children died in the cradle from a congenital heart defect. Gowan saw it best for the two of them to move back to the Capitol so Temple could ‘recover’ from the stress of losing a child, and she was called upon to start Mentoring for District Eight again.
Presentation: At first glance, any Tribute would be forgiven for thinking Temple was a Capitolite and not a Mentor. She’s flighty, vapid, fashionable, self-absorbed to the point of narcissism, judgmental and shallow, and she’s made an art out of namedropping people and places in a way that makes it sound as if she’s lived in the Capitol her whole life. She has perfect posture, flawless makeup and a sort of disdainful air about her, and a way of aggressively spending money when other people are around as if she has something to prove.
Capitolites likely think of her as a social climber and gold digger at worst, or a Kool-Aid-drinking philanthropist at best. Though she hasn’t been in the Capitol lately, the Stevens are a staple of the social scene; Temple makes it a point to send cards to every important family on every major holiday and to keep in touch with all the local gossip. Though Temple isn’t nice, she’s certainly capable of impeccable manners.
However, Temple has a mean streak and a tendency to verbally harangue people as her way of lashing out. She can be petty and cruel, passive-aggressive and bitchy when she’s wronged, using her station as the wife of an important man as a bludgeon against people beneath her. She also doesn’t bother to pretend she’s alright when someone’s upset her, and will instead storm off, chain-smoke, get shitfaced and snap at people. Nothing is off-limits when you’ve crossed her; she’ll drag your dead mother out of the grave and rub her in your face if it makes a point.
Temple is libidinous and has definite sex appeal, and uses that to manipulate people around her. She’s very skilled at getting her way by wheedling and flashing a little bit of thigh, and though it’s not a well-kept secret that she sleeps around behind Gowan’s back no one’s ever really caught her in the act or had any concrete details. Temple just has a naturally high sex-drive and has come to believe that sexuality is her only source of power aside from money; what she can’t get with one she will try to get with the other. She’s a manipulative schemer at heart, even if she lacks the cleverness to pull much of anything off.
As a Mentor she won’t be the most helpful to her Tributes in terms of advice, but will be eager to shower them with the gifts that she never received in the Arena. She’ll be evasive when talking about her Arena, citing not trauma but simply that hers was “tedious” and that she won by chance and therefore doesn’t have anything useful to impart. She’ll direct her Tributes to other sources of information and instead take on a role more like an Escort, using her social pull and wealth to shower her charges with material affection.
Temple is deeply self-centered, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t form human connections to people. She’s a profoundly lonely person who just wants to have someone to relate to, someone who can serve as her mirror and be as lowly as she is so she can feel a little better about herself. She’ll take people under her wing, the more damaged and unlikable the better, and try to form secretive little bonds with them where they’ll like her best and they can reassure each other of their worth.
Motivations: Temple walks a tightrope between guilt and impulse, and almost sees her impetuousness as an external force that she’s victim to. She’s terrible at taking responsibility appropriately, either projecting an avalanche of guilt onto things that aren’t her problem or completely evading fault; life is very all or nothing for Temple, a game of extremes. She’s either a saint or the devil, ecstatically joyful or miserable, bored or overstimulated, the savior of District Eight or a piece of refuse on the side of the road.
She blames herself for her rape, both in the Arena and in the Capitol, and since the guilt is too painful to bear she’s taken it upon herself to try and leave it behind and bury it. She wants to pretend that Temple Drake, the girl before the marriage to Gowan, never really existed, or if she did was a whole separate person from Temple Stevens. By staying in the same place and putting down roots, she’s actually just running away, but she’s miserable because her new self-made home is no happier. The ghosts of her trauma still follow her and a safe, shallow life as a Capitolite isn’t one that would ever work for her in the long term.
She longs to do violent, selfish, crazy things - not like typical Capitolite selfishness like starting up a vanity business in the Districts and shutting it down from boredom, but something dramatic and dangerous and self-destructive. She longs not just for excitement but for agency, which she will never have as a Districter living in the Capitol, and possibly never have at all so long as the country of Panem exists, but she lies to herself and believes that her current method is the only sensible one.
Setting: Temple is trying - desperately and artlessly - to assimilate herself into Capitol society to try and pretend her past doesn’t exist. If people start mistaking her for an actual Capitolite, that means she’s winning. When push comes to shove Temple only really cares about herself and her own angst, and will sell out anyone and everyone to keep herself safe.
She isn’t happy to be back as a Mentor, since her station alone advertises that she has a story, one which she isn’t keen to share. She’s likely rationalize it as a sort of penance she must do for failing to protect her baby.
SAMPLES
First Person Thread: An example of a first person post, at least 200 words minimum. Feel free to use introspection and scene setting if your character is not chatty. Please use one of the two following prompts:
For Tributes:
For Capitols OCs and AUs: Somehow you ended up privy to a private post just gushing about how much they just LOVE the new games, how they think they are the best thing since sliced bread. Then the poster (Your friend? Some random person from a party who decided they wanted to send you their private thoughts? A rival trying to pin you into an uncomfortable spot?) namedrops you for your opinion on the new format, versus the quaint, old-fashion style of the game.
Everyone on the broadcast is just waiting for your input.
[Temple’s mastered the art of fielding uncomfortable questions with one of those razor-toothed smiles that’s as unsettling as it is polite and benign. It’s the sort that communicates exactly to the speaker that she’s displeased with being put on the spot while looking unflappable to everyone else. It’s the expression she wears now with her red lips and white teeth.
She tries to convince herself that they were asking her opinion because they wanted to include her in the conversation as a social acquaintance, not because they were needling at her for her ‘Mentor’s expertise’. She can’t believe it, however; these sorts of circles are ones where the daggers are slipped into silk sheaths. This is exactly the sort of slight that’s textbook here.]
I think that’s a rather simplistic take on it, isn’t it? It’s not that these Games are necessarily better, they’re just different, with a bit more pizzazz and a bit more work for the Staff, too. [Not just for the Mentors; she’s fine with people mistaking her for an Escort or a Stylist out of forgetfulness.]
I mean, personally, I thought there was some rustic charm to the old ones, but I can’t pretend that these aren’t more exciting. Superpowers and aliens, what more could we want? It’s like our best novels brought to life. And on that note, does anyone have any suggestions for books? Gowan’s out of business for the next few weeks and I’m bored out of my mind by myself at home.
[It’s not her smoothest redirect.]
Prose: 200 word minimum. To mimic the style of the game, please write your third person sample based on the following prompt:
It’s Temple Drake who stands before the Gamemakers now, not Temple Stevens. Temple Drake, the weak, facile, helpless teenage girl who stood before them once before, the person Temple Stevens has been trying to excise from her soul like cutting a tumor out of cramped, healthier flesh. But Temple Drake is wearing Temple Stevens’ skin, and so she doesn’t burst into tears and crawl under the table like she did last time.
It’s not the same table. She knows that. Her memory is just projecting another image onto the room she’s in now, a reminiscence of sickening fear that’s too alike to the present to be ignored.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” She reaches a hand into her purse - they let her have her purse, and she thinks of how weak they must think she is, to not even bother to take her possessions off of her - and pulls out an old-fashioned tobacco cigarette and a lighter. Her hands shake as she brings the smoke to her mouth, the flame to the end, and she accidentally kills the light twice before managing to get it to catch.
She reaches out and steadies herself on the table, feeling faint, wishing there were a chair she could sit in. Instead, watery-eyed, she sits on the edge of the table, swallowing and smoking and barely looking up to the Gamemakers before saying in a voice that will only barely carry up high enough for them:
“I’m not going to waste your time showing you the things I can’t do. Give me the old score, if you have to.”
What is your character scored: 2. Temple sucks. Seriously though, she’s very good at asking to be taken care of, but she has no resilience, no physical prowess, and no knowledge of the outdoor world. Her survival in her first Arena was a fluke.
Token: Temple’s token is an embroidered handkerchief.
Additional information:
Past victor: I feel that I have covered Temple’s Arena in her History section, but if there are any other questions feel free to ask me. She doesn’t hate the Capitol, but she does resent ‘society’ as a general concept although she wouldn’t call it that. She hates feels limited by her station and her history more than she hates the Capitol. and she’s eager to spout Capitol nonsense if it’ll help her to fit in with her rich, carefree friends and cohorts.
Hunger Games AU and OC:
The Capitol could include her doppelgänger as a message to her to stop getting too big for her boots and pretending to be something she isn’t. Temple’s from District Eight but she rarely goes home, except to see her father and brothers, and she doesn’t visit the town she came from, feeling as if she’s somehow disappointed them or that they’ve betrayed her, she isn’t sure which. She’s mostly cut ties with her District, except for continuing to embroider as a hobby.
OUT of CHARACTER
Name: Lisa
Other characters: Venus Dee Milo, Black Tom Cassidy, Punchy, Bayard Sartoris, Jason Compson
IN CHARACTER
Name: Temple Drake
Alias: Temple Stevens (current legal name), ‘Boots’
Fandom: Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun by William Faulkner
Canon point/AU: Panem AU
Journal:
clottingPB: Emily Rose
Age: 25
History:
The summary for Sanctuary is here. Temple also appears as a main character in Requiem for a Nun, although there is no summary online for that: basically, Temple is married to Gowan Stevens, has an infant daughter who is killed by their servant Nancy, and in a plea to save Nancy’s life admits to having tried to blackmail a man into rescuing her from her shitty marriage.
As a Panem AU:
Temple is the Victor of what was termed for many years as “The Worst Hunger Games Ever”. The (relatively) privileged daughter of the mayor of District Eight at the time, Temple never expected to be a Tribute, and it came as a shock to the community when she was Reaped at seventeen. Since she was in the pot so few times, no one actually expected that her name would be called, and she had spent her teenage years in school and avoiding having to take out tesserae by embroidering fine gowns for Capitolites. Devastated, she pleaded during the Reaping for someone, anyone to take her place, but no one came to her aid, and with a last embrace from her father and her four brothers, she was whisked away to the Capitol with the male Tribute from her District, a boy named Tommy.
Temple’s luck went from bad to worse when she realized that her Escort, Gowan Stevens, was an alcoholic with no optimism about her chances of success who chose instead to focus on Tommy. Temple failed to make a positive impression with either the other Tributes or Sponsors, who saw her as weak cannon fodder and predicted she would die within the first week - at Flickerman’s interview, Temple weepily asked if she could leave and eventually walked off the stage to vomit into a trashcan. At her scoring, she burst into tears and curled up in the fetal position under a table, earning herself a score of 2 and Gowan’s scorn. Gowan didn’t even bother to try and secure Sponsors for her, although Temple’s Stylist did dress her in revealing, coquettish clothes in hopes of coaxing some of the more lecherous audience-members into supporting her.
During the first week of the Arena, Temple surprised even herself by surviving and even making it out of the Cornucopia with a backpack full of food, although she badly twisted her ankle. The Arena was set up as a corn maze with occasional sheds full of rusty farm equipment, which the Tributes were presumably to kill each other with. Temple and Tommy, the other District Eight Tribute, encountered each other, and Temple convinced her Districtmate to hide her in one of the sheds and protect her. Tommy, a kind-hearted type, agreed to shield the vulnerable, hapless Temple from other Tributes in exchange for a pittance of food. During this, Gowan sent no Sponsor gifts to Temple, although Tommy received a few.
Unfortunately, Popeye, a Career Tribute who had allied with other Careers prior to the Arena’s start and acquired a crossbow at the Cornucopia, found the shed, and killed Tommy when he attempted to prevent Popeye from finding where Temple was huddling in a stack of hay. Popeye proceeded to rape Temple with a corncob, then, threatening to kill her if she tried to escape, brought her back to the other Careers so she could ‘entertain’ them. Temple spent the next few nights with the Career Tributes, bloodied and helpless, and was sexually brutalized by the male and female Tributes from One, Two and Four. Because she was too afraid to even try to escape, and because her ankle had gotten progressively more swollen and damaged, she wasn’t even bound. As part of this sick game, the Career Tributes gave Temple ‘gifts’ made of cornhusks and garbage, but they also fed and sheltered her.
The audience detested this sort of torture-porn, which was just a step too far even for the most avid Games fans; Sponsor gifts tapered off and viewing parties declined. The Gamemakers, realizing that this level of depravity and brutality was going over badly, started cutting out pretty much all the footage of that entire group and trying to sweep them under the rug with Gamemaker accidents. Most of the Careers were mowed down by Gamemaker deaths of rattlesnakes, ‘killer farm equipment’, and fire. Eventually only the male Tributes from One and Two, Red and Popeye, were left - the female from Four, Reba, split away from the group and didn’t return. Temple was traumatized, but she also had become vicious, and she started to plant ideas in Red and Popeye’s minds that a betrayal between the two was imminent, even though there were plenty of non-Careers left. Temple’s plan paid off, although not as planned - she had intended for Red to kill Popeye, and instead Popeye beat Red to it. Temple was left with Popeye, the most vicious of them all and the projected winner, who told her every night before they slept that he was saving her for last to kill.
The Arena began drawing to a close as Tributes were picked off from dehydration, Arena traps and Popeye’s crossbows. Finally, only Temple, Popeye and Reba were left. The Gamemakers, antsy about having such an unpopular Tribute as Popeye win, staged a feast back at the Cornucopia. Popeye told Temple to stay put and went to collect the bounty; Temple, starved and pained, climbed to the top of one of the sheds and hid there, hoping that Reba wouldn’t find her. From that vantage point, Temple could see that the feast was going to be hit by a tornado from the Gamemakers, and that Popeye would have to move quickly if he was going to avoid dying there.
Reba did find her, but did not attack Temple, instead asking where Popeye was so she could kill him before he killed her. Temple told her, honestly, that Popeye had headed towards the feast, but lied and said that it looked like clear skies from up atop the shed. Secretly, Temple hoped that Reba and Popeye would fight each other long enough for the tornado to kill them both. Reba thanked her and left, and Temple’s scheme came to fruition: Reba and Popeye were soon both killed by the Gamemakers, and Temple was lifted from the Arena by a hovercraft.
No one had expected Temple to win, and the handful of people who had placed bets on her soon found their coffers filled with gambling money. Gowan, who had never expected to have to apologize to Temple for having basically abandoned her during the Arena, started a sexual relationship with her in a foolish attempt to apologize; Temple acquiesced because she hoped it would be a good way to ward off some of the bidders who had started expressing interest in her. The two were soon married, and most - but not all - of the bidders started to look elsewhere. Gowan quit drinking and, using pull from his prominent politician uncle, became an entrepreneur in District Six and ran a successful, lucrative business. Temple bore him two children and moved out to District Six with him to watch over the business during the winters; the profits vaulted them both from the middle class life of Tribute Staff and Mentor to Capitol elites.
Recently, one of Temple’s children died in the cradle from a congenital heart defect. Gowan saw it best for the two of them to move back to the Capitol so Temple could ‘recover’ from the stress of losing a child, and she was called upon to start Mentoring for District Eight again.
Presentation: At first glance, any Tribute would be forgiven for thinking Temple was a Capitolite and not a Mentor. She’s flighty, vapid, fashionable, self-absorbed to the point of narcissism, judgmental and shallow, and she’s made an art out of namedropping people and places in a way that makes it sound as if she’s lived in the Capitol her whole life. She has perfect posture, flawless makeup and a sort of disdainful air about her, and a way of aggressively spending money when other people are around as if she has something to prove.
Capitolites likely think of her as a social climber and gold digger at worst, or a Kool-Aid-drinking philanthropist at best. Though she hasn’t been in the Capitol lately, the Stevens are a staple of the social scene; Temple makes it a point to send cards to every important family on every major holiday and to keep in touch with all the local gossip. Though Temple isn’t nice, she’s certainly capable of impeccable manners.
However, Temple has a mean streak and a tendency to verbally harangue people as her way of lashing out. She can be petty and cruel, passive-aggressive and bitchy when she’s wronged, using her station as the wife of an important man as a bludgeon against people beneath her. She also doesn’t bother to pretend she’s alright when someone’s upset her, and will instead storm off, chain-smoke, get shitfaced and snap at people. Nothing is off-limits when you’ve crossed her; she’ll drag your dead mother out of the grave and rub her in your face if it makes a point.
Temple is libidinous and has definite sex appeal, and uses that to manipulate people around her. She’s very skilled at getting her way by wheedling and flashing a little bit of thigh, and though it’s not a well-kept secret that she sleeps around behind Gowan’s back no one’s ever really caught her in the act or had any concrete details. Temple just has a naturally high sex-drive and has come to believe that sexuality is her only source of power aside from money; what she can’t get with one she will try to get with the other. She’s a manipulative schemer at heart, even if she lacks the cleverness to pull much of anything off.
As a Mentor she won’t be the most helpful to her Tributes in terms of advice, but will be eager to shower them with the gifts that she never received in the Arena. She’ll be evasive when talking about her Arena, citing not trauma but simply that hers was “tedious” and that she won by chance and therefore doesn’t have anything useful to impart. She’ll direct her Tributes to other sources of information and instead take on a role more like an Escort, using her social pull and wealth to shower her charges with material affection.
Temple is deeply self-centered, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t form human connections to people. She’s a profoundly lonely person who just wants to have someone to relate to, someone who can serve as her mirror and be as lowly as she is so she can feel a little better about herself. She’ll take people under her wing, the more damaged and unlikable the better, and try to form secretive little bonds with them where they’ll like her best and they can reassure each other of their worth.
Motivations: Temple walks a tightrope between guilt and impulse, and almost sees her impetuousness as an external force that she’s victim to. She’s terrible at taking responsibility appropriately, either projecting an avalanche of guilt onto things that aren’t her problem or completely evading fault; life is very all or nothing for Temple, a game of extremes. She’s either a saint or the devil, ecstatically joyful or miserable, bored or overstimulated, the savior of District Eight or a piece of refuse on the side of the road.
She blames herself for her rape, both in the Arena and in the Capitol, and since the guilt is too painful to bear she’s taken it upon herself to try and leave it behind and bury it. She wants to pretend that Temple Drake, the girl before the marriage to Gowan, never really existed, or if she did was a whole separate person from Temple Stevens. By staying in the same place and putting down roots, she’s actually just running away, but she’s miserable because her new self-made home is no happier. The ghosts of her trauma still follow her and a safe, shallow life as a Capitolite isn’t one that would ever work for her in the long term.
She longs to do violent, selfish, crazy things - not like typical Capitolite selfishness like starting up a vanity business in the Districts and shutting it down from boredom, but something dramatic and dangerous and self-destructive. She longs not just for excitement but for agency, which she will never have as a Districter living in the Capitol, and possibly never have at all so long as the country of Panem exists, but she lies to herself and believes that her current method is the only sensible one.
Setting: Temple is trying - desperately and artlessly - to assimilate herself into Capitol society to try and pretend her past doesn’t exist. If people start mistaking her for an actual Capitolite, that means she’s winning. When push comes to shove Temple only really cares about herself and her own angst, and will sell out anyone and everyone to keep herself safe.
She isn’t happy to be back as a Mentor, since her station alone advertises that she has a story, one which she isn’t keen to share. She’s likely rationalize it as a sort of penance she must do for failing to protect her baby.
SAMPLES
First Person Thread: An example of a first person post, at least 200 words minimum. Feel free to use introspection and scene setting if your character is not chatty. Please use one of the two following prompts:
For Tributes:
For Capitols OCs and AUs: Somehow you ended up privy to a private post just gushing about how much they just LOVE the new games, how they think they are the best thing since sliced bread. Then the poster (Your friend? Some random person from a party who decided they wanted to send you their private thoughts? A rival trying to pin you into an uncomfortable spot?) namedrops you for your opinion on the new format, versus the quaint, old-fashion style of the game.
Everyone on the broadcast is just waiting for your input.
[Temple’s mastered the art of fielding uncomfortable questions with one of those razor-toothed smiles that’s as unsettling as it is polite and benign. It’s the sort that communicates exactly to the speaker that she’s displeased with being put on the spot while looking unflappable to everyone else. It’s the expression she wears now with her red lips and white teeth.
She tries to convince herself that they were asking her opinion because they wanted to include her in the conversation as a social acquaintance, not because they were needling at her for her ‘Mentor’s expertise’. She can’t believe it, however; these sorts of circles are ones where the daggers are slipped into silk sheaths. This is exactly the sort of slight that’s textbook here.]
I think that’s a rather simplistic take on it, isn’t it? It’s not that these Games are necessarily better, they’re just different, with a bit more pizzazz and a bit more work for the Staff, too. [Not just for the Mentors; she’s fine with people mistaking her for an Escort or a Stylist out of forgetfulness.]
I mean, personally, I thought there was some rustic charm to the old ones, but I can’t pretend that these aren’t more exciting. Superpowers and aliens, what more could we want? It’s like our best novels brought to life. And on that note, does anyone have any suggestions for books? Gowan’s out of business for the next few weeks and I’m bored out of my mind by myself at home.
[It’s not her smoothest redirect.]
Prose: 200 word minimum. To mimic the style of the game, please write your third person sample based on the following prompt:
It’s Temple Drake who stands before the Gamemakers now, not Temple Stevens. Temple Drake, the weak, facile, helpless teenage girl who stood before them once before, the person Temple Stevens has been trying to excise from her soul like cutting a tumor out of cramped, healthier flesh. But Temple Drake is wearing Temple Stevens’ skin, and so she doesn’t burst into tears and crawl under the table like she did last time.
It’s not the same table. She knows that. Her memory is just projecting another image onto the room she’s in now, a reminiscence of sickening fear that’s too alike to the present to be ignored.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” She reaches a hand into her purse - they let her have her purse, and she thinks of how weak they must think she is, to not even bother to take her possessions off of her - and pulls out an old-fashioned tobacco cigarette and a lighter. Her hands shake as she brings the smoke to her mouth, the flame to the end, and she accidentally kills the light twice before managing to get it to catch.
She reaches out and steadies herself on the table, feeling faint, wishing there were a chair she could sit in. Instead, watery-eyed, she sits on the edge of the table, swallowing and smoking and barely looking up to the Gamemakers before saying in a voice that will only barely carry up high enough for them:
“I’m not going to waste your time showing you the things I can’t do. Give me the old score, if you have to.”
What is your character scored: 2. Temple sucks. Seriously though, she’s very good at asking to be taken care of, but she has no resilience, no physical prowess, and no knowledge of the outdoor world. Her survival in her first Arena was a fluke.
Token: Temple’s token is an embroidered handkerchief.
Additional information:
Past victor: I feel that I have covered Temple’s Arena in her History section, but if there are any other questions feel free to ask me. She doesn’t hate the Capitol, but she does resent ‘society’ as a general concept although she wouldn’t call it that. She hates feels limited by her station and her history more than she hates the Capitol. and she’s eager to spout Capitol nonsense if it’ll help her to fit in with her rich, carefree friends and cohorts.
Hunger Games AU and OC:
The Capitol could include her doppelgänger as a message to her to stop getting too big for her boots and pretending to be something she isn’t. Temple’s from District Eight but she rarely goes home, except to see her father and brothers, and she doesn’t visit the town she came from, feeling as if she’s somehow disappointed them or that they’ve betrayed her, she isn’t sure which. She’s mostly cut ties with her District, except for continuing to embroider as a hobby.