Ripley Quinn

## Bio

*Ripley Quinn (she/her). District Six Tribute. 21. Ayo Edebiri.*

Ripley Quinn was an unstoppable girl.

As a child, she was restless, always keeping her hands and mind busy. She couldn’t stand silence nor stillness, she had a voracious appetite for everything the world had to offer her to experience. She alternated between parents and older siblings to bother with a flow of thoughts and ideas, but they always quickly tired of her. When she went to school, most teachers were exasperated by her, her peers couldn’t keep up with her. All except Hart– she’d met him on the street they shared, he was a couple of years older than she was, but he had that same spark within him, the one that kept him always moving. For the first time in her life, Ripley felt truly understood, matched, challenged, and they became fast friends.

As she got older, her quick mind found it readily immersed itself in the all-encompassing problem solving of car engineering, a useful skill somewhere like Six. The tasks started small, but the more she learned, the more intricate her projects became. By the early teen years, she was working part-time in train and car repairs to earn some extra cash, though the truth was she’d do it without pay, too. It kept her mind and body busy, and she was able to take (or… smuggle) the junk parts home for her own projects, more than one created with the intention of sowing some mischievous chaos. She often showed them off to Hart, with a new bashful heat in her cheeks when he paid her handiwork any attention. The potential for being Reaped always hung over the both of them, but Ripley preferred not to discuss it, she always had the sense she could outrun the nightmare of them if she resolved to never slow down.

Then he left. Ripley was devastated, confused. There was no explanation, not even a goodbye, Hart simply disappeared like it was nothing. At first, she had herself convinced something terrible happened to him, but when he returned for the next Reaping, the disappointment and betrayal sank bone-deep.

She threw herself into her projects; after all, if her thoughts were going to race like this against Hart, she’d have to force her body to keep up in hopes she might catch up to them, reign them in. With her new heated dedication came payoff, too– she was noticed. She was awarded with a position as an engineer for Panem’s rail system.

Ripley, though, never did well with restriction and structure. She was equally brilliant as she was unreliable, and as much as some of the aspects of her jobs interested her, many didn’t, too. She daydreamed, she worked on her own things, she played sick a few times. She wanted to work on her own things, do things her way. She struggled to connect with other people her age, they never understood her, not like Hart ever had. She was well and truly alone. Most Reapings came and went. She fidgeted her way through all of them, and the 133rd Reaping was no different. She wasn’t paying any attention, distracted by the slightly uneven laying of the bricks under her feet, jolted back to earth at the sound of a name she hadn’t heard in a very, very long time.

*Hart Harriman.*

She thought no other name could shock her more as she stood on her tiptoes and craned her neck to peer over the lines of twenty-one year olds into the line of twenty-threes. *Ripley Quinn.*

She jolted. At first, she thought she might have made it up. But no, there were people who knew her now turning to stare at her, their own eyes wide with a combination of pity and relief. Normally, she might stare back, but she couldn’t keep her eyes from returning to Hart, now joining the stage. Soon (she wasn’t even fully sure how), she was up there too, staring back at the lines and lines and lines of Reaping aged children. What were the odds of this?

Ripley’s token is a choker necklace she made for herself, a simple black cord with a silver washer from one of her first projects around it. The DIY skateboard hadn’t lasted, and it had been a real threat to both herself and everyone in the vicinity, but when it imploded she held onto the pieces out of some strange sentimentality, refusing to reuse any of it to respect it. She didn’t remember exactly when the necklace idea came along, but it had, and she rarely went a day without wearing it since.

Ripley is not a fan of the Hunger Games and feels that she’s the appropriate amount of nervous about it, although Hart being there is really getting in the way of her focus. It’s weird, it’s confusing, it means he might kill her, or worse, she might have to kill him. But what do engineers do if not work the problem?

(+) intelligent, earnest, curious

(-) eccentric, hasty, obsessive

***PENNED BY: KAYE***