Caspin Shimmer

This is a tribute by Pippycat. Please don't use her without permission or steal her, as she belongs to Pippycat.

Caspin
Name: Caspin Arya Shimmer

Age: 15

Gender: Female

District: District 1 (District 4, District 2, Capitol)

Weapons:  Caspin would use a hatchet, second to a dagger.

Appearance: Caspin has shoulder-length, soft-cinnamon colored hair, which is slightly messy all the time, but if she brushes it out, is completely stick-straight. She has big, light brown eyes, and is tall and slender.

Height: 5’9

Personality: Caspin, on the outside, looks like a normal girl who just avoids people. But really, on the inside, there is much more.

Caspin never really learned how to love. Love her parents, love her family, even love other things that aren’t alive. On the inside, she feels frozen, unable to love anything. She feels like someone who is just dragging themselves through life, going through the motions and pretending to be something. She wants to be set free, know what it’s like to love, and feel something that is real.

She is very serious, and doesn’t ever seem to have fun, and seems to always be concerned. If the saying “better safe than sorry” could apply to one person, it would be her. She’s very fearful to go off track, and do things that aren’t “normal”, and is struggling to fit into the cookie-cutter shape everyone in the Panem society of her district is supposed to fit into.

She has depression, and sometimes will curl up into a ball and cry loudly for a long time, or quietly, so no one will know what’s wrong. Sometimes, she’ll cry until she can’t cry anymore, and then she’ll be exhausted from crying so much.

Because she can’t love or feel emotion towards others, she can be very cruel and mean, without realizing it, which gave her the reputation of being the outcast; the one no one wanted to be with for fear of getting hurt somehow. She’s used to being alone in life, but really, all she wants is to love, and to make friends. To know she isn’t alone.

She just wants to learn how to love.

Skills: Despite how scared and uneasy she can be, Caspin is very smart, and has quick reflexes, along with being fast.

Weaknesses: Caspin isn’t very strong, and her inability to love or feel emotion towards another human being can make her overly cruel, even if she doesn’t realize it. She also never learned how to swim.

Alliance: Caspin would fit in with the Careers, with her odd cruelness towards others, but if not, she’d ally with a small alliance of outcasts, and if it came to it, would be alone.

Fears: Caspin is scared of fire, ever since her thirteenth birthday. Fire, to her, is what took away the one thing that used to matter to her: love.

Token: The ripped-off, burnt part of her father’s jacket that she still has from the house fire. It’s the last she has of her dad, and it means a great deal to her.

Reasons for Winning: Caspin wants to win so that she can make her parents and her district proud, and prove that she isn't just an outcast. She can have emotions, and she can feel love... even if she hasn't yet.

Family Members:

Mother (Alive)

Father (Deceased)

Backstory
Caspin Arya Shimmer.

Daughter of Arya Shimmer, the esteemed Career Tribute trainer. Daughter of Caspian Shimmer, the man who sacrificed himself for love and for his family.

Named after both of my parents, Caspin Arya Shimmer was born on a cold, winter’s night, with a storm raging on outside. The next morning was sunny, but clouds blocked the way of the bright sunbeams, and light rain poured down onto District (#).

Caspin had a nice childhood, growing up as an only child. There was one thing about her, though. She never gave her parents kisses before bedtime, and when she got her knee scraped, she treated it by herself, putting the band aid on and starting to play again. When she got hurt, she fixed it herself. When she needed help, she solved her own problems.

As Caspin got older, she started to grow more independent. She was around ten years old, when her mother asked her if she wanted to start training to become a Career Tribute.

At first, Caspin thought that it was a foolish idea. Why would she want to train to hurt people? But when she went to her first lesson, she felt something inside… joy. She didn’t know why, and was quite scared of herself. Is that really what she wanted in life?

Caspin grew up, controlling her own life. She tried to show love to her parents, but she just could never grasp the idea. By the time she was twelve, she wanted to volunteer, but her parents said they couldn’t let her go yet, because they loved her too much.

“What do you mean you love me?” Caspin asked, sniffing back her own tears after her parents tried to stop her.

Her parents tried to explain it to her, but Caspin just shook her head. She didn’t get it… she didn’t realize what it meant to be attached to someone in that way. She didn’t volunteer, because she knew it would hurt her parents, but from then on, she grew a bit more violent, and kind of out of control. If she got mad, she wouldn’t hesitate to act out on it. She soon became the top student in her Career Tribute class, practicing with surprising violence. While other girls whispered about boys they liked, Caspin stood to the side awkwardly.

“Who do you like, Caspin?” One girl asked her.

“No… no one. I don’t like boys that way.” Caspin answered quietly. She didn’t like talking to other girls; they were always just looking for friendship. Caspin never wanted friendship. She only wanted success in life.

“Do you like girls that way instead?” The girl asked sweetly.

“I don’t… no…” Caspin answered. “I don’t love.”

Caspin became an outcast, and she hated it. She hated herself. She hated everyone else. Soon, in school, she was “the chosen one”, the one who got picked on constantly, and was given nothing but constant suffering. Some kids were jealous of her weaponry skills, others just thought she was a worthless outcast.

One year, on her birthday when she was turning 13, she came home to see that her parents were throwing a birthday party for her. It was a small thing to do, really, but it made her happy. And Caspin realized, that even if she felt cold-hearted and unable to love, her parents loved her. Two people loved her, and that was what mattered.

But the happiness wouldn’t last long.

It started as a cold-hearted prank by a few of Caspin’s bullies. They set her lawn on fire, and were intending to put it out, but the fire spread. It burned until it was out of control, and the water bucket that the bullies had brought with them had had no effect. Soon, the house was in flames.

Caspin started crying; she knew there were only a few people in the world who would do this to her. When her family was going to escape, her father ended up staying behind. “Daddy!” Caspin screamed, tears forming in her eyes. Her mother had already escaped, and was shouting at Caspin and her father to leave.

“Caspin, go.” He said. The way out had been blocked by falling parts of the house, and he couldn’t fit through without catching on fire.

Caspin clung to her father’s shirt, kneeling on the ground. That one moment of her life is what she remembers the most; what haunts her nightmares, and what forms her fond memories. She sat there, a single, stinging tear falling onto the floor, as her father squeezed her in a tight embrace. The next moments were a blur. Her dad threw her off of him, and a small ripping sound could be heard. The next thing she knew, Caspin heard devastated sobbing, and turned around and realized it was her dad. She started to bawl, too, and ran as fast as she could to the exit, before the fire closed in on her.

Caspin thought of running back to her father, so that they could die together. The sobbing of her dad, the screaming and shouting of her mother, and her own sorrow confused her, and the next thing she knew, everything went black.

Caspin woke up in the hospital. She had fainted from the trauma of the situation, and the fumes of the fire. When she woke up, her mother was crying in the corner of the hospital room. “Mommy?” Caspin asked faintly, “where’s Daddy?” She didn’t remember much, until a few days after the fire.

Caspin clung to one item the rest of her life… the piece of her father’s shirt that she had ripped off when she ran in the house fire. Her father had died, for her, for her mother… for love. And as Caspin thought of his heroic moment when he stayed behind to help his daughter escape and live, she realized that for once, she had felt love.

Whenever she remembered that moment, and thought of the good parts, she could feel a certain feeling in her heart, and she knew that it was close to love. She didn’t want her father to go, so did she love him?

Caspin became horribly depressed after that, and struggled with depression and misery. Once, she took a knife, and made a few large gashes on her left arm, and was found crying and bleeding in the bathroom, saved by her mother.

“Don’t hurt yourself…” her mom said, “don’t volunteer. Stay with me. I love you.”

But Caspin would stay up at night crying until she couldn’t cry anymore, and then fell asleep. She would curl up into a ball and think of giving up on life, but then she remembered her father, and that one fleeting moment when she had felt what she believed must have been love. But that didn’t stop her from volunteering at 15. She had felt enough misery, and she had trained to be violent, and that was all she was… a depressed girl who had turned herself into a cold-hearted monster. A monster who couldn’t love.

Song (Inspiration)
Title: How do You Love Someone

Artist: Ashley Tisdale

Video by: Chassidy R

Lyrics that inspired Caspin the most: When I have more time cuz AINT NOBODY GOT TIME FO DAT