( application for abaxrpg )
player information.
name: Jules
are you over 18?: Yup!
personal lj: hydrium
email/msn/aim/plurk/etc: sopledged → aim, skygrace → plurk
characters in abax: N/A
in character information.
series: Firefly/Serenity
name: River Tam
sex: F
age: 17
race: Human
height: 5’4
weight: 100 pounds* [headcanon. although she is mentioned as being a '90 pound girl' in canon, I believe that number was used flippantly and as an exaggeration]
canon point: 1x14 → Objects In Space
previous cr: N/A
history:
river → fireflywiki
personality:
❝Played with Kaylee. Sun came out, and I walked on my feet and heard with my ears. I ate the bits, the bits stayed down, and I work. I function like I'm a girl. I hate it because I know it'll go away. The sun goes dark and chaos has come again. Bits. Fluids. What am I?❞
One of the more important things to keep in mind when trying to understand River Tam is that her current mental state is something that was done to her and that despite this, she’s more than simply the sum of her apparently nonsensical babbling. But more on that later.
Simon says that River was not simply gifted, but a gift. From the flashbacks and anecdotes we have seen and the aid of supplements such as the River Tam Sessions, it is possible to gain an insight into who she used to be. A playful, energetic girl who was a genius and knew it fully, a girl who could be somewhat of a teasing brat sometimes, especially towards her brother, but was for all intents and purposes like any other young girl at heart.
Cut to the Academy. One of the things the alliance did to her (that we know of) was cutting out her amygdala, the part of the brain that controls emotional reactions. In the series it is described as the “back of your mind” in which people often push unpleasant truths or fears in order to stop thinking about them. The implications of this are huge - it means that she can’t filter anything. That she is literally forced to feel everything and in short, it means that River Tam lacks even the most basic emotional coping methods that others possess, and this makes her incredibly unstable. She can be at polar opposites in a matter of seconds, moving from happy calm to screaming and crying hysteria at the slightest negative stimuli and is easily overwhelmed. It does not take very much to trigger this behavior in her.Her brother Simon had mentioned that he was putting her on medication, but their effectiveness varied and the side effects were unpleasant. At any point in time, River can be struck by a flashback to her Academy days, and the trauma they induced in her can still be easily seen in her tendency towards nightmares - more often than not, she wakes up screaming or crying.
Not all of what River does, however, is arbitrary. She speaks in riddles for the most part, a mixture of scientific babble, psychic cues and random musings. Likewise, some of her actions are cryptic and inscrutable and yet, if analyzed on a deeper level, contain meaning. A great example of this is her constant refrain at the beginning of the series: two by two, hands of blue, which was later revealed to be in reference to the blue surgical gloves that Academy agents wore. The problem is that River isn’t always adept at communicating anymore, and sometimes the things she wants to say become jumbled up in memories and erstwhile thoughts. In Ariel, River’s reluctance to follow Jayne is because she knows of his plan to betray them but is unable to pass this message on to Simon adequately, and he assumes that her distress is simply caused by something else. However, that doesn’t mean that everything River says has some sort of hidden meaning, and in Serenity she tells her brother that she never knows what she’s saying, right after asking him to kill her and it’s true. Sometimes, the gravity of her words is lost on her and she’ll speak without thinking, as evidenced by one instance in which she revealed that the head of a village killed his predecessor and took power. It was the catalyst to mobilizing a mob that was already suspicious of her nearly caused her to be burnt at the stake as a witch.
As a psychic, she is sometimes able to glean an entire lifetime’s worth of secrets from a person in one glance. In Objects in Space, we are treated to a look into River’s perspective as she wanders the ship and hears the thoughts and motivations of the main characters in contrast to what they are saying (or not saying) out loud. One could say that she understands people better than they understand themselves, but at the same time her understanding of the world in general is a little skewed. While picking up a gun, she sees it instead as a tree branch and whispers, "It’s just an object. It doesn’t mean what you think." Guns have inherent meaning to the rest of the characters on the show, as weapons and certainly as dangerous objects. But to River, it isn’t like that, and this displays her ability to divorce concepts from their original meaning and likewise, in Safe, she claims that the cows they have herded "weren’t cows inside. They used to be, but they forgot." Unlike the rest of society, River’s thought processes and perspectives differ from those of the norm. The most frightening aspect of this is that sometimes River fails to realize the seriousness of certain situations. After shooting three men dead in War Stories, she turned to a horrified Kaylee and smiled, proclaiming that "no power in the ‘verse’" could stop her, which was an extension of a game they had played earlier in that day. When Alliance soldiers were searching the Serenity for her in Bushwacked, River had considered their hiding a game and had giggled the whole way through. Her unique perspective is best summated with this quote: "She understands. She doesn’t comprehend." River is a genius with vast amounts of factual and technical knowledge, but it’s the comprehending and putting together of subjective variables that stumps her at times. She has this need for everything to make sense despite the irrationality of some of her own actions and those of the other characters on the show. When things aren’t logical, it irritates her. She tries to "fix" Shepherd Book’s Bible by trying to impose scientific models ("early quantum state mechanics") on it, for example.
Through it all, River still manages to act like a kid at times. She likes to play with Kaylee, and tease Simon and she can’t understand how to eat an ice planet despite being a mind readin’ genius. And in the end, that’s all River really wants to be. Not a genius, not a weapon. Not a tool to be used. Just herself. And these people, the ones on the Serenity that have allowed her to do this? She will gladly defend in her own way. Family is important, after all.
abilities/powers:
READER →
As Mal Reynolds put it, River ❝Sees the truth into things.❞ What that really means is not quite clearly outlined within her canon, but essentially, River is a telepath. She can read the thoughts and memories of the people around her, although she’s not often shown as doing it consciously. Instead, River seems to simply know things that she could not possibly know, often sensitive information regarding character’s pasts or current motivations. She slips in and out of this power, and her control over it is unstable at best. River is shown to be able to use this power without face-to-face contact, such as through a communicator.River also shows some instances of empathic ability, although once again, it is not outrightly stated. Her psychic abilities can also serve as a detriment to her - for example, hearing too many thoughts overwhelms her, and hearing extremely violent, disturbing, or chaotic thoughts such as those of the Reavers upsets her.
WEAPON →
The Academy had literally attempted to make a living weapon out of River. In battle, she is able to single-handedly defeat rooms full of adult opponents - and more impressively, Reavers. However, although she is quick and moves with a dancer’s grace while fighting, River is still a human girl, and therefore her strength only goes so far.
She is also able to handle weapons such as guns and blades with ease, and uses her telepathy and knowledge of probability to her advantage. In one notable case, River shot three men dead with her eyes closed, after taking only a brief glance in order to judge the angles of their position. The characters later labelled it as killing them - with math.
River’s mind has been ‘programmed’ by the government and can be ‘triggered’ by special code, which in canon was broadcasted using subliminal messages. If she is triggered, she will then go on an indiscriminate killing spree, and no amount of reason will be able to stop her because she is beyond the reach of words. While in this state, she will also not be able to differentiate between people - friend from foe, for example. She can be made to fall unconscious instantly with the use of the ‘safe word’ also programmed into her mind: Eta kuram na smekh, a phraseword that translates into gibberish - thus ensuring that it would not be used casually
GENIUS →❝River was more than gifted. She was a gift. Everything she did, music, math, theoretical physics - even dance - there was nothing that didn't come as naturally to her as breathing does to us.❞
The reason why the Academy wanted River in the first place - River’s intellect is enough to make her extraordinarily gifted brother, Simon, look like ❝an idiot child. ❞ While she has vast knowledge of everything from physics to anatomy, River’s mind is damaged enough that she cannot always access these parts of her brain, which leads to many instances of random fact spouting. Despite how inconsistent her mind is currently, her intelligence cannot be denied - at 14 years old, she was already in an accelerated graduate program for physics, finding it ‘unchallenging’. She was also intelligent enough to hide encoded messages in her letters to her brothers that were not detected by the Academy, which in turn led to her rescue.
She’s also a great dancer.
first person sample:
[ One would think that River was used to looking out her window and seeing nothing, but that wasn't true. The Serenity landed often enough for her to see the sun, and cities and desert dust. She also understands on some implicit level that when they were moving, they were safe.
Her voice is tired, small, drawn. She's tired of darkness already ]
Used to dance to call the rain home. On earth-that-was. Rain dances. But it won't work with the sun. I understand. An axial tilt of 23.5 degrees, the completion of one full cycle every 24 hours, but things are different now.
We aren't turning. Stuck, static. Don't belong. I'm half sick of shadows, she said.
[there's a pause - a long one]
I want my brother.
∞
[ extra samples found: here and here, along with all of the entries found in the second journal: though they took place at a game with induced memory loss.]
third person sample:
What was four was one and now is two. Family means trust and security, but River only believes in brothers. Brothers and Captains and Companions and Mechanics and Shepherds and Pilots and First Mates and sometimes even Mercenaries but not really. But Brothers are first and foremost in her mind.
It’s a good day today. The Serenity is flying, and their lives are simple for now. Eat, sleep, talk and sometimes do petty crime on the border planets. It’s a simple life, and River appreciates simplicities as well as complexities. They’re not so far apart as one might think. She would like to feel the sun on her face but the light from the stars will have to do.
She spoke with cows today. Crouched near them, mooing underneath the blue sky and realized why they were different. The sky makes all the difference. The cows had forgotten what they were, trapped in the belly of the ship with steel nuts and bolts around them. They weren’t in their home. The sky brings remembrance of all things past. The sky lets you be moulded into whatever you wanted to be, not crammed and forced into boxes that didn’t suit you.
As she watches patiently out a porthole, watching the great expanse of sky slowly start to disappear into the black puddle of space, does she remember what she is? If she peeled back the steel that covers her, would she find the soft inner parts of a girl, or just more of the same? She almost doesn’t want to find out.
But she’s home now. Just like the cows are home under the sky grazing on grass. She knows every nut and every bolt in this ship, she feels its soul in the metal that’s cold to her touch. The ship is just an object. It’s what’s inside that matters. Like all things.
Simon gets worried if she wanders by herself for too long. He’ll leave his sanctuary of needles and salves (she likes one but not the other) to come find her. Just like he always does, looking after his flock of one. And she’s a wayward sheep indeed. So she turns and feels the ship humming under her bare feet, and heads back towards the infirmary, towards her brother.
She would say towards home, but home is all around her. What was four was one was two and now is nine. River counts herself among them. She didn’t always.
case no: 1 - 1 - 11
name: Jules
are you over 18?: Yup!
personal lj: hydrium
email/msn/aim/plurk/etc: sopledged → aim, skygrace → plurk
characters in abax: N/A
in character information.
series: Firefly/Serenity
name: River Tam
sex: F
age: 17
race: Human
height: 5’4
weight: 100 pounds* [headcanon. although she is mentioned as being a '90 pound girl' in canon, I believe that number was used flippantly and as an exaggeration]
canon point: 1x14 → Objects In Space
previous cr: N/A
history:
river → fireflywiki
personality:
❝Played with Kaylee. Sun came out, and I walked on my feet and heard with my ears. I ate the bits, the bits stayed down, and I work. I function like I'm a girl. I hate it because I know it'll go away. The sun goes dark and chaos has come again. Bits. Fluids. What am I?❞
One of the more important things to keep in mind when trying to understand River Tam is that her current mental state is something that was done to her and that despite this, she’s more than simply the sum of her apparently nonsensical babbling. But more on that later.
Simon says that River was not simply gifted, but a gift. From the flashbacks and anecdotes we have seen and the aid of supplements such as the River Tam Sessions, it is possible to gain an insight into who she used to be. A playful, energetic girl who was a genius and knew it fully, a girl who could be somewhat of a teasing brat sometimes, especially towards her brother, but was for all intents and purposes like any other young girl at heart.
Cut to the Academy. One of the things the alliance did to her (that we know of) was cutting out her amygdala, the part of the brain that controls emotional reactions. In the series it is described as the “back of your mind” in which people often push unpleasant truths or fears in order to stop thinking about them. The implications of this are huge - it means that she can’t filter anything. That she is literally forced to feel everything and in short, it means that River Tam lacks even the most basic emotional coping methods that others possess, and this makes her incredibly unstable. She can be at polar opposites in a matter of seconds, moving from happy calm to screaming and crying hysteria at the slightest negative stimuli and is easily overwhelmed. It does not take very much to trigger this behavior in her.Her brother Simon had mentioned that he was putting her on medication, but their effectiveness varied and the side effects were unpleasant. At any point in time, River can be struck by a flashback to her Academy days, and the trauma they induced in her can still be easily seen in her tendency towards nightmares - more often than not, she wakes up screaming or crying.
Not all of what River does, however, is arbitrary. She speaks in riddles for the most part, a mixture of scientific babble, psychic cues and random musings. Likewise, some of her actions are cryptic and inscrutable and yet, if analyzed on a deeper level, contain meaning. A great example of this is her constant refrain at the beginning of the series: two by two, hands of blue, which was later revealed to be in reference to the blue surgical gloves that Academy agents wore. The problem is that River isn’t always adept at communicating anymore, and sometimes the things she wants to say become jumbled up in memories and erstwhile thoughts. In Ariel, River’s reluctance to follow Jayne is because she knows of his plan to betray them but is unable to pass this message on to Simon adequately, and he assumes that her distress is simply caused by something else. However, that doesn’t mean that everything River says has some sort of hidden meaning, and in Serenity she tells her brother that she never knows what she’s saying, right after asking him to kill her and it’s true. Sometimes, the gravity of her words is lost on her and she’ll speak without thinking, as evidenced by one instance in which she revealed that the head of a village killed his predecessor and took power. It was the catalyst to mobilizing a mob that was already suspicious of her nearly caused her to be burnt at the stake as a witch.
As a psychic, she is sometimes able to glean an entire lifetime’s worth of secrets from a person in one glance. In Objects in Space, we are treated to a look into River’s perspective as she wanders the ship and hears the thoughts and motivations of the main characters in contrast to what they are saying (or not saying) out loud. One could say that she understands people better than they understand themselves, but at the same time her understanding of the world in general is a little skewed. While picking up a gun, she sees it instead as a tree branch and whispers, "It’s just an object. It doesn’t mean what you think." Guns have inherent meaning to the rest of the characters on the show, as weapons and certainly as dangerous objects. But to River, it isn’t like that, and this displays her ability to divorce concepts from their original meaning and likewise, in Safe, she claims that the cows they have herded "weren’t cows inside. They used to be, but they forgot." Unlike the rest of society, River’s thought processes and perspectives differ from those of the norm. The most frightening aspect of this is that sometimes River fails to realize the seriousness of certain situations. After shooting three men dead in War Stories, she turned to a horrified Kaylee and smiled, proclaiming that "no power in the ‘verse’" could stop her, which was an extension of a game they had played earlier in that day. When Alliance soldiers were searching the Serenity for her in Bushwacked, River had considered their hiding a game and had giggled the whole way through. Her unique perspective is best summated with this quote: "She understands. She doesn’t comprehend." River is a genius with vast amounts of factual and technical knowledge, but it’s the comprehending and putting together of subjective variables that stumps her at times. She has this need for everything to make sense despite the irrationality of some of her own actions and those of the other characters on the show. When things aren’t logical, it irritates her. She tries to "fix" Shepherd Book’s Bible by trying to impose scientific models ("early quantum state mechanics") on it, for example.
Through it all, River still manages to act like a kid at times. She likes to play with Kaylee, and tease Simon and she can’t understand how to eat an ice planet despite being a mind readin’ genius. And in the end, that’s all River really wants to be. Not a genius, not a weapon. Not a tool to be used. Just herself. And these people, the ones on the Serenity that have allowed her to do this? She will gladly defend in her own way. Family is important, after all.
abilities/powers:
READER →
As Mal Reynolds put it, River ❝Sees the truth into things.❞ What that really means is not quite clearly outlined within her canon, but essentially, River is a telepath. She can read the thoughts and memories of the people around her, although she’s not often shown as doing it consciously. Instead, River seems to simply know things that she could not possibly know, often sensitive information regarding character’s pasts or current motivations. She slips in and out of this power, and her control over it is unstable at best. River is shown to be able to use this power without face-to-face contact, such as through a communicator.River also shows some instances of empathic ability, although once again, it is not outrightly stated. Her psychic abilities can also serve as a detriment to her - for example, hearing too many thoughts overwhelms her, and hearing extremely violent, disturbing, or chaotic thoughts such as those of the Reavers upsets her.
WEAPON →
The Academy had literally attempted to make a living weapon out of River. In battle, she is able to single-handedly defeat rooms full of adult opponents - and more impressively, Reavers. However, although she is quick and moves with a dancer’s grace while fighting, River is still a human girl, and therefore her strength only goes so far.
She is also able to handle weapons such as guns and blades with ease, and uses her telepathy and knowledge of probability to her advantage. In one notable case, River shot three men dead with her eyes closed, after taking only a brief glance in order to judge the angles of their position. The characters later labelled it as killing them - with math.
River’s mind has been ‘programmed’ by the government and can be ‘triggered’ by special code, which in canon was broadcasted using subliminal messages. If she is triggered, she will then go on an indiscriminate killing spree, and no amount of reason will be able to stop her because she is beyond the reach of words. While in this state, she will also not be able to differentiate between people - friend from foe, for example. She can be made to fall unconscious instantly with the use of the ‘safe word’ also programmed into her mind: Eta kuram na smekh, a phraseword that translates into gibberish - thus ensuring that it would not be used casually
GENIUS →❝River was more than gifted. She was a gift. Everything she did, music, math, theoretical physics - even dance - there was nothing that didn't come as naturally to her as breathing does to us.❞
The reason why the Academy wanted River in the first place - River’s intellect is enough to make her extraordinarily gifted brother, Simon, look like ❝an idiot child. ❞ While she has vast knowledge of everything from physics to anatomy, River’s mind is damaged enough that she cannot always access these parts of her brain, which leads to many instances of random fact spouting. Despite how inconsistent her mind is currently, her intelligence cannot be denied - at 14 years old, she was already in an accelerated graduate program for physics, finding it ‘unchallenging’. She was also intelligent enough to hide encoded messages in her letters to her brothers that were not detected by the Academy, which in turn led to her rescue.
She’s also a great dancer.
first person sample:
[ One would think that River was used to looking out her window and seeing nothing, but that wasn't true. The Serenity landed often enough for her to see the sun, and cities and desert dust. She also understands on some implicit level that when they were moving, they were safe.
Her voice is tired, small, drawn. She's tired of darkness already ]
Used to dance to call the rain home. On earth-that-was. Rain dances. But it won't work with the sun. I understand. An axial tilt of 23.5 degrees, the completion of one full cycle every 24 hours, but things are different now.
We aren't turning. Stuck, static. Don't belong. I'm half sick of shadows, she said.
[there's a pause - a long one]
I want my brother.
∞
[ extra samples found: here and here, along with all of the entries found in the second journal: though they took place at a game with induced memory loss.]
third person sample:
What was four was one and now is two. Family means trust and security, but River only believes in brothers. Brothers and Captains and Companions and Mechanics and Shepherds and Pilots and First Mates and sometimes even Mercenaries but not really. But Brothers are first and foremost in her mind.
It’s a good day today. The Serenity is flying, and their lives are simple for now. Eat, sleep, talk and sometimes do petty crime on the border planets. It’s a simple life, and River appreciates simplicities as well as complexities. They’re not so far apart as one might think. She would like to feel the sun on her face but the light from the stars will have to do.
She spoke with cows today. Crouched near them, mooing underneath the blue sky and realized why they were different. The sky makes all the difference. The cows had forgotten what they were, trapped in the belly of the ship with steel nuts and bolts around them. They weren’t in their home. The sky brings remembrance of all things past. The sky lets you be moulded into whatever you wanted to be, not crammed and forced into boxes that didn’t suit you.
As she watches patiently out a porthole, watching the great expanse of sky slowly start to disappear into the black puddle of space, does she remember what she is? If she peeled back the steel that covers her, would she find the soft inner parts of a girl, or just more of the same? She almost doesn’t want to find out.
But she’s home now. Just like the cows are home under the sky grazing on grass. She knows every nut and every bolt in this ship, she feels its soul in the metal that’s cold to her touch. The ship is just an object. It’s what’s inside that matters. Like all things.
Simon gets worried if she wanders by herself for too long. He’ll leave his sanctuary of needles and salves (she likes one but not the other) to come find her. Just like he always does, looking after his flock of one. And she’s a wayward sheep indeed. So she turns and feels the ship humming under her bare feet, and heads back towards the infirmary, towards her brother.
She would say towards home, but home is all around her. What was four was one was two and now is nine. River counts herself among them. She didn’t always.
case no: 1 - 1 - 11