Oh dear, one thing I can't do is writing good descriptions of characters, but I'll try it with dialouge+description. I can't seem to manage to pile up descriptions like everyone else- my pen always deserts me halfway when it thinks I'm not writing stories.

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The forest clearing was quiet, save for the chirping of cicadas and crickets, stirred by the warm summer breeze wafting through the leafy canopy and slowly downwards, suffusing the ground with energy when it reached the grasses.

The youth was sitting in face of a large oak, legs crossed in meditation. Dappled patches of fading sunlight washed over his shoulders with every movement of the branches above. The breeze flowed around him in a relaxing gust, tossing up some strands of his long hair into his face. The white silken robe he was wearing spilled out into the ground beside him like a pool of white dye. He was silent and motionless, the breeze and sunset making him one with the clearing.

His closed eyelids twitched slightly as steps sounded behind him, and the crunching of fresh grass stopped not far from his back.

"A14." 

"Yes, doctor?" The youth asked, not moving from his posture, not turning his head. "Do you need me to do anything?"

A pause. "No...Tell me, A14, what are you doing here?"

A14 hesitated, his smooth forehead creasing slightly. "I'm confused, doctor. I came here to think things out."

"What things? I programmed you to ask me anything you don't understand." 

A14 shrugged. "Your last order was to leave you alone while you were working, so I did." 

He stopped to organize his thoughts, and continued. "When I was trying to act under Trinity's identity, I acted out of character. It was only for an instant, but Arul still noticed my problem and corrected it for me. Yet, my calculations insist my reaction was faultless. I find it curious that it often turns out to be a human being who understands other's characters better." He sighed and gathered his flowing white robe around him and sat up straighter. "I have been pondering the matter for this whole afternoon. What is character supposed to be?"

Ceres did not hurry to answer. He walked over to A14 and sat down behind the youth with a sigh. A14 kept his back straight as the doctor leaned his back against his. "Character, A14, is something we all have. It's the unique way we express our emotions and actions, our attitudes and interests. It's the thing that makes us us. Everyone is special in their own way, and that is not something that your algorithms can predict accurately."

"But, doctor, then-"

"Yet you also have your character, robot you are." Ceres continued, pushing his protective goggles higher up his forehead. "You are as unique as any one of us. I created you to be better than those emotionless machines, don't you worry about that. Understand?"

"...Yes, sir." A14 nodded, raising his eyes to the towering oak before him. "Sometimes, you are much better than me when it comes to locating the important parts." 

Ceres gave him a side-eyed glance. "Of course I am. You still have a lot to learn in the world, A14."

A14 nodded once more. The clearing fell back to silence, and the two figures sitting back-to-back contented themselves with watching the sun set, and moon rise.

all right, heres my belated entry

Bad luck in a moving truck

Alex Hawthorne looked like no other kid in the world.

He had a prominent nose, which was generally the first thing you’d notice about him. It jutted out from between two wide eyes with deep black bags. He blinked rarely, and this combined with his long nose, and tendency to turn his head to the side while thinking, gave him the impression of being a large bird. His skin was pale, almost anemic, except where splotches of freckles dotted his face. He had thin, ropy arms and legs, which looked even smaller than they were, due to his love of puffy oversized clothing. When he talked, he made lots of quiet clicking noises, and low hums. He had only recently been made aware of this fact, and had attempted to stop doing it. He had failed. He had a resting face that was generally read as “judgemental.” The fact that he was, in actuality, a very judgmental person, did very little to help soften this impression. He wore a faded orange beanie hat constantly. Oftentimes, he wore it while sleeping.

When he woke up, these were some of the first things he’d do.

He would try to fall back asleep.

Failing that, he would get up and go to the bathroom mirror.

He would practice making the facial expressions that he thought the day might require. He would work at making them until it was muscle memory. He wasn’t entirely sure as to whether anybody else did this, and he was too afraid to ask anyone.

He would the put his clothes on for the day.

The facial expressions he had practiced were often quite useful later.

There were several events that had happened early on in Alex’s life that greatly impacted the person he became. This is true of all people. However, the individual is often unable to pick out exactly which  events had molded them into who they are. 

When Alex was younger, he had briefly been split up from his friends in a haunted labyrinth that a local charity had put on for the halloween season. The “labyrinth” was incredibly cheap and sparsely staffed, but this only meant that he had been forced to wander completely alone for a longer time. 

Before then, he had met a silent man dressed as Santa Claus in a near deserted street. Alex was seven then. The man showed no sign of having seen Alex, he simply lurched slowly down the street.

When Alex was only a few months old, he watched his mother walk through a glass door. She recovered quickly, although she lost an eye. (she wore an eyepatch as a result.) 

Alex was reserved and quiet by nature. When he moved to Emerald Springs, he became even more reserved and quiet, in part due to the things he saw in the forests around his house.

He made friends easily, but anyone who wasn’t his friend likely was unaware that he existed. He just blended in. It was the way he was.

Thank you so much for 2nd place! Here is my submission for Character.

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On the desk lay an album, wrinkly and yellow with age. The edges were upturned from ages of rotting away in the sooty black attic, yet now it had emerged, and it was not going to die again. They were not going to die again. 

If you sat quietly; say, in the plaster-framed windowsill overlooking the fields of dying grass and scraggly trees, you may even hear their voices whispering in the wind. Screaming to get out of the book. Pulling and pulling on the strings of time. Why am I stuck here? They cry. Why must you keep me? 

They beg for mercy, yanking on the neat white frames. Clutching for anything other than the trees they were born into, dreaming of color and light. Wishing for a childhood they can't remember, and fantasizing of growing old. Where did their memories go? Did they ever have a life other than this? Who is this man beside me, and why does he wear a ring on his left hand?

Life is at a stand still, caught in a freeze frame. All of them yearn for control of their minds again, yet there is nothing. Blankness, emptiness. Cold for eternity. All they know is that one moment, that one person, that one glimpse of sun. They know no warmth, spiraling away into a vortex of gray and black and white. Swimming through a scene in a story lost to time, lost to them.

As they are forgotten, so to do they forget

Though you can't see them. Their voices are nothing but the cracking of the birch's branches, the gusts circling through the hollows in the far out moor. Their stories are nothing but words, nothing but a fairytale of the past. Perhaps they are only a figment of your imagination in the first place! Perhaps you aren't even sitting in that decaying window at all!

Maybe none of it is real. Photos, faked and stages, forced to tell a story that never was at all. Lighting, darkness, obscuring the face, the truth. Studios, snapping lenses, paparazzi. People; flooding the streets and frightening the mind. Shot after shot, shot after shot. Actors, actresses, characters in someone else's play. Was one of them ever a main character? Were they ever truly seen by something other than the eye of the camera? Did they have someone to write their story, or were they just filling in the roles in others'? 

Who are they? Who are you? A face, a nose, eyes of black and white. Black and white…all you ever see is black and white. A monotone world, stuck in a frame…

Don't you hear them screaming? 

Do they hear you screaming, too?

No. Don't you see? There may be photos in the book, pieces of stories before you. But that doesn't mean you aren't in one of your own. Ah, now you see. You're under another's control. Mind and body, written and composed. Following a script, taking the form that a stranger intended for you. You have no will but theirs. No conscience but theirs'. You are nothing. Nothing but a character in their story.