Novaya Gates

Novaya Gates is a tribute created by PerniciousFabrication. An abusive past has left this strong girl emotionally lacking, but overwhelming ambition drives her and may help her to victory.

Full Profile
Name: Novaya Gates

District: 0

Age: 17

Gender: Female

Weapon: Throwing Knives, Tomahawks

Personality: Novaya is a calm and composed girl. She’s unfriendly and out of touch with her emotions, but she believes this to be a good thing, as she rarely feels hurt. She’s not incredibly intelligent, only doing sub par in school, but tries to make herself seem smarter when confronted. While she never feels truly happy, she enjoys being alone, especially in nature, and has been known to be artistic at times, etching little things into the trees. Her desire to improve herself in the form of strength and trivial (though not to her) accomplishments is what really drives her to do most of what she does.

Appearance: Novaya can best be described as just colorless. Her skin is very pale, and her hair is an almost unnatural shade of platinum-blond. She has large eyes, an upturned nose, and pale pink lips. She never seems to look happy, possessing an ever-present “bitch face” if you will. She’s of average height, and on the thin side with modest curves

Backstory: She was born to the broken home of Anthelia Gates, her mother. She had 3 half siblings, all of whom were much older than her, and not very connected to the family. She never knew her father, and neither did her mother really. Her mother later remarried to an abusive man who bore her another child. The two were very much in love, but he was a monster to Novaya, leading her to often retreat to a small shack in the woods by her house. Her time spent there created a lonesome personality out of what had once been an over-friendly goofball. She bided her time there, taking up target practice with knives and tomahawks, and it became a sort of stress relief for her.

Strengths: Survival Capability, Great Eyesight

Weaknesses: Unfriendliness, Emotional Distance

Fears: Blood, Dirt, Swimming/Water

Induction: Reaped, but she is not upset or scared, almost happy in fact

Extended Backstory
Novaya was born into extreme poverty, Anthelia, her mother, barely able to scrape by as it was. And while having enough food to eat, or shelter from the cold of District 0 was always a worry for her, she was content in her family.

Anthelia is a worn woman. She had been exquisitely beautiful in her youth however. She herself came from a broken home, and while she always wanted her children to live a good life, harsh times forced her into a less wholesome line of work: prostitution. She became well known in the brothels around the district, and has had multiple children with multiple men.

Anthelia put all her other children into an orphanage but had managed to secure a stable enough home by the time she gave birth to Novaya that she opted to keep her. Just as Novaya had begun to mature Anthelia met and soon married a man whom she had met while streetwalking. The man, who Novaya knows simply as “Jones”, seemed to be a suitable father figure for the family, but slowly turned abusive.

Jones's abuse is generally of the verbal kind, constantly yelling at Novaya for the smallest things when Anthelia is present, but will resort to physical and even marginally sexual abuse when the who are alone. This led Novaya to cut herself off from everyone, not that she had connection with many people before, and spend most of her time alone in deep thought.

As Novaya transitioned into her teen years she began venturing off into the deep forests of the rural district. She found an old lumberjack’s shack deep in the wood stocked with many old knives and axes and started to retreat there often, developing an affinity for throwing, whittling, and etching into the trees and shack with the knives and axes.

Novaya barely turns 17 before being reaped.

Other Information

 * Her sexuality is heterosexual though her capacity to love, like the rest of her emotions, is buried deep
 * Her fear of blood and dirt is less so about the things themselves and more about the general impurity they represent, her being quite obsessive about keeping clean
 * Her fear of swimming basically is only because she has never done it before

Trivia

 * Novaya is named after the "Novaya Zemlya effect", an astronomical allusion in which the sun appears to rise sooner than it actually does
 * "Novaya" also means "new" in Russian
 * "Anthelia" are halos around the sun