strange little girl || basic info
Character's name: River Tam
PB: Summer Glau
Age: 17
Height: 5'6"
Weight: 120 lbs
Born on: Osiris, Central Planets
Recent home: Serenity, the Firefly class transport
Mannequin: Impaired Prodigy
Personality:
River is a beautiful girl with a visible crack running through her. As a child she was always very cheerful, if a little overbearing, the sort of little girl who would grow up to be charming and scathing and absolutely crush the hearts of men all around her without a second thought. That changed, of course, when she turned 14 and left for The Academy.
Since her rescue, River had been a fractured human being. There’s a decided ‘good, bad, and ugly’ factor. On a good day, she’s a charming person to be around. River loves to laugh and play, particularly when pulling pranks on her friends. More than anything, she loves to dance, forgetting her troubles by throwing her body into breathlessly airy movements that exceed her years of training into the realm of surreal expressions of joy. She can be childish at times, her extensive vocabulary and biting intellect aside, exploring things with a real sense of wonder and expecting the world, perhaps, to treat her as though she were still on the opening cusp of her teen years, before she lost track of time. Unlike other children, however, she has a distinct dislike for the fictive, preferring real facts to fairy tales and logical games to dress up.
A bad day can come out of nowhere. Sometimes it comes from an identifiable source-her moody days are often preempted by a dose of her brother’s medication, which leaves her more mentally present but far from physically healthy. More often, however, the moods come out of nowhere, sparked by things only River could know (that is, if she were in enough control of her own mind to know them). Her tantrums are destructive, from small acts of deviance like ripping ‘contradictions’ out of the Bible to large outbursts of violence which, in the past, have included stabbing a fellow crew member in the chest without provocation. Less violent and more frequent are her outbursts of general hysteria, hits of rage and terror which devolve her into a mass of emotional breathlessness and cryptic morbidity.
The worst days, well… they’re the days people don’t walk out of alive. Although she hates violence as a rule, fragile emotional creature that she is, anyone actually on River’s bad side has to deal with a cold, ruthless killing machine coupled with one of the most brilliant minds of a generation-always the two steps ahead with brutal force.
At the end of the day, River is simply a teenage girl with a broken brain. She has a vast capacity for warmth and love, often overshadowed by the enforced mental deterioration but always glittering beneath the surface. Once described as ‘a little whimsical in the brain pan,’ River tends to flit through life with the detachment of someone dancing the line between genius and mental case. She craves the comfort of her brother’s protection but always lands on her own feet when push comes to shove. Her interpersonal skills are lacking but her childish charm often wins friends; on the other side of the coin, her harsh disconnect from reality sometimes pushes away others with gentle personalities. The world is a puzzle to her, and she’s unlocking the answers to it one person at a time, for better or worse.
Likes:
Serenity, Simon, dancing, playing pranks, space-walking
Dislikes:
Blue, blue hands, Blue Sun, being afraid, being alone, having to hurt people because they've been bad
Trivia:
+ Although they are problematic, River adores Ice Planets.
+ One of River's favourite games is hide and go seek.
Abilities:
It has been noted that River Tam can kill you with her mind. Although that has not strictly been shown to be true, it only takes a slight stretch of the imagination to believe it completely without question.
One of the reasons River was selected for the Academy was her latent psychic abilities. The experimental surgeries performed on her enable a broad range of ‘intuitive’ abilities which have been hinted at as being psychic to the point of full-fledged mind reading. What is fully understood is the fact that River ‘reads’ people. She has an extraordinary capacity for assimilating and recalling data and a depth of empathy beyond the typical human compassion. Although she doesn’t always express herself clearly, she often makes allusions to things she should not be able to know-often dark secrets or hidden thoughts that a best friend would barely know, picked up from mere moments with a person. River has also been known to have vaguely clairvoyant abilities when it comes to divining the future. How much of this is true ‘ability’ and how much is simply her amazingly astute observational skills projecting forward is unclear.
Beyond that, River has been developed during her Academy years into a human weapon. Her body is hardwired to respond to distress with a blend of kung-fu and kickboxing which combine into a ‘balletic’ and highly dangerous hybrid. She is virtually unstoppable in hand-to-hand combat, on more than one occasion having emerged both victorious and uninjured from large melees against 30 or more simultaneous opponents. Her light frame and dancer’s flexibility also make her an amazingly agile fighter; it is not out of character for her to hang from the ceiling waiting to drop down and finish off an opponent, or to simply hide from detection in inhumanly cramped spaces.
As if her hand-to-hand was not enough, she has also been mentally programmed into proficiency with firearms. Although she doesn’t care particularly to use them, she is a surefire talent, known to shoot accurately with her eyes closed after only momentary observation of a field of combat. Needless to say, most weapons put into her hands-from swords to staffs to pencils-all become lethal if she flies into a rage.
Weapon:
River is a weapon, if a human one. If one had to put a label on what exactly about her is weaponized, it comes down to a tossup between her mind and her body, always a deadly combination but each lethal in its own right. After all, whatever River can get her hands on become a weapons, and she always has her hands on her fists.
Background:
River was always what most people call a genius. From a very young age her aptitude for everything she came into contact with, mental or physical, was unparalleled on her home planet Osiris. A child prodigy, she even overshadowed her older brother Simon’s mental prowess-and he ended up in the top 3% of his prestigious medical institution. She enjoyed a stimulated and luxurious upbringing, with doting parents who lavished everything money could buy on their children. The Tam children were nearly inseparable, always playing together despite River’s sometimes intolerable desire to make the world fit her level of intellect. Some found it bratty; Simon usually found it charming.
Life was very simple and straightforward for River until the age of 14, when she and the esteemed institution known as The Academy found each other. The Academy was a magnet for the brilliantly gifted, meant to nurture the Alliance’s finest into the leaders of tomorrow, a place her parents and brother where proud to say they’d sent the girl. Unfortunately, ‘The Academy’ was far from anything so sweet and cuddly as the image it projected. Instead, River discovered far too late, it was a government front to harvest talented minds and experiment with them, most likely on the quest to create a breed of super-soldiers or spy-assassins. Along with other gifted children, River was treated as a lab rat, repeatedly undergoing delicate brain operations and being pushed to the mental and physical limit until her bounds simply… slipped. Losing her mind rapidly, the girl sent her brother a letter riddled with imaginary creations and poor spelling; given that she had been correcting his spelling since the age of 3, she hoped that it would tip her ‘idiot brother’ off to the fact that it contained a coded plea for help.
Unfortunately, it was a few years before her brother was able to come to her rescue. The continued torture of experimentation and mental duress left River completely shaken, at times simply a shell of the girl she used to be and hypersensitive to the world around her. The trauma, coupled with the removal of most of her amygdala, had completely destroyed her brain-to-mouth filter and left her vulnerable to severe empathic fits-her mind had become such an open receptacle that she could no longer select what came in or control what spewed out.
River was kept in stasis for the escape from The Academy and only reawakened when her brother had gotten her stowed onto the Firefly transport ship Serenity under her brother’s protection. The crew was wary of the siblings, given that it took little time for the Alliance to make itself clear that the Tams were wanted fugitives. Being too far gone to defend herself, much of the credit for keeping River safe initially fell onto her brother’s shoulders. Despite his best attempts both to persuade the crew of Serenity to keep them and to keep his sister docile with medication, however, Simon was unable to prevent the discovery of the more worrying side effects of his sister’s treatment. River’s moments of irrationality were marked with a penchant for violence; not only did she react with viciousness in a bad mood, but with the strength and precision of a highly trained warrior. At first marking her as a threat to all on board, River slowly adapted herself into more of a tool than loose cannon. Her deep, unrestrained love for her brother and growing affection for Serenity’s crew eased her into a life of uneasy harmony with the others as her outburst became more and more aimed at those seeking to harm the crew than the crew themselves. Some apprehension remains about her ability to keep control over herself, but for the most part she has finally found the people she belongs with and will kill mercilessly to defend.
Timeline of Past Events:
Age 0 - Born on Osiris, ten years younger than her brother Simon
Age 3 - Precociousness undeniably evident
Age 14 - Sent by parents to The Academy
- Tortured and experimented on for 2 years
Age 16 - Rescued by Simon
- Taken aboard the vessel Serenity as fugitive cargo
Age 17 - Gained co-pilot status on Serenity
- CURRENT TIMELINE BEGINS
Relations:
Family
- Gabriel Tam - Father
- Regan Tam - Mother
- Simon Tam - Older brother by 10 years
Other Significant Acquaintances (Pan Fan)
- Ammy (Okami) - The first "person" River's took a real liking to. They've chatted over the crystal and River's eyes are completely peeled to find and pet this lovable divinity ASAP.
- Darc (Arc the Lad) - They bumped into each other in neutral territory, and he decided to treat her in a way vaguely reminiscent of the crew she knew and missed. And then he PINKY PROMISED that if he ever gets his wings back he's taking her flying. She is not unhappy to have met him.
- Jill Valentine (Resident Evil) - Jill popped up on the crystal one day and they talked forever about war and ethics. It made River flash on Zoe--a lot. She's vaguely curious to find out more.
- Kain (Legacy of Kain) - The person River woke up next to. He's big like Jayne, which she thinks is just super. She doesn't, you know, trust him very much (he's like Jayne), but she has every intention of following him around like a shadow, at least until someone else comes along to take care of her.
- Solidus Snake (Metal Gear Solid) - Mind-altered buddies! Solidus launched a mannequin of himself at her in neutral territory. Apparently her quick dispatch of the creature caught his attention. She's fairly curious about him.
- Terra (Final Fantasy) - One of the people who's gotten very good at calming River down with a few choice words. She isn't horribly logical, but her idealism and devotion to Cosmos are oddly familiar and reassuring. River is fairly certain Terra's a Companion.
- Tifa (Final Fantasy) - Yet another person who's figured out how to hit River's calm-down buttons. She actually attempted a proper conversation with River at their first meeting rather than talking down to the slightly garbled Tam-speech, which gives her a special gold star.
- Toothless (How to Train) - Another "person" River's found herself easily able to get along with. She is perturbed by the idea of facing him in battle, but also mildly glad to know he's out there.