REFERENCE: AU HISTORY
Born 1988 in Kitakyushu, Japan to a Japanese father and a Welsh mother, Ryo Akiyama grew up trilingual (speaking English, Japanese, and Welsh) in the County of Cardiff, Wales, though his family also made roughly bi-annual trips back to Kitakyushu, his father's hometown. He was content to be a computer nerd with a penchant for chatrooms and RPGs and nothing stopped him from doing so.
Though he got on well with the other kids at school, Ryo preferred the anonymity of discussing alien sightings and other strange occurences (for example, odd weather patterns on New Year's Eve 1999) in online chatrooms and escapism into other worlds in console RPGs, and he only ever made two close friends, a pair of brothers named Sam and Ken. He first encountered Sam when a teacher forced the boy genius to help him with English and Welsh, and initially met Ken, three years younger than Ryo and Sam, in one of his chatrooms. Unfortunately Sam was killed in a hit and run accident when the boys were eleven. Ken's family, overcome with grief, soon moved away from Cardiff. Ryo was informed by a senior student at the school that "real men don't cry" and the remark stayed with him from then on, so he withdrew to his aliens and video games, needing something more to occupy him and distract him from his best friend's tragically early death. He always felt there was something more out there and, living in Cardiff, home of weevils, occasional blowfish, and generally weird stuff, he was right.
The twenty-first century is when everything changes, and at first, Ryo was too busy discovering card games to see it coming. After running through a range of monster anime tie ins, which he was oddly fantastic at for a n00b, Ryo discovered Magic: The Gathering in 2001 (he was almost thirteen) and got very good at it very quickly. His parents, however, thought he should have been concentrating on his schoolwork, as he'd started high school by then, and were unsupportive of his new hobby. Ryo persisted, however, and was allowed to travel to London to compete in a Magic Grand Prix tournament when he was fourteen. He placed third, winning an invitation to a Pro Tour, but his parents didn't allow him to participate as it was overseas.
Things continued in this vein until Ryo was sixteen, when his interest in aliens was renewed by the news of a spaceship smashing through the Big Ben and crashing in the River Thames. He began following Sarah Jane Smith's journalism online, as well as Clive Finch's website Who Is Doctor Who and the work of the group LINDA until their lapse into mere socializing and their unfortunate disbanding. He also started looking into a possible career with Torchwood. Again, his parents were unimpressed, given the Institute's mysterious if not slightly dubious reputation within Cardiff, and urged him to try and look for a proper career. That year he did however manage to compete in another Grand Prix, this time on a family visit to Kitakyushu.
He competed again in the March 2006 Grand Prix in Cardiff, placing second, and this time, as the World Championship invitation was to Paris this time, his parents allowed him to go provided he paid for it himself. (They hoped he would be disillusioned about pro card playing by the trip and would settle down and concentrate on his upcoming GCSEs.) As such, Ryo was quite pleased when the new Lord Mayor of Cardiff, Margaret Blaine, released plans to build a new nuclear power plant for Cardiff named Blaidd Dwrg in September 2006, and planned to get a job in its construction. He had a bad fall during a sudden, huge earthquake in the city caused by Blaine's tribophysical waveform macro-kinetic extrapolator latching onto the TARDIS and opening the spatio-temporal rift under Cardiff, and broke his arm. Amid the chaos, the mayor disappeared, and her replacement found flaws in Blaidd Dwrg's design that could lead to a nuclear meltdown bigger than Chernobyl, so the plant was never built.
Ryo proceeded to place fourth at the Paris World Tournament anyway, paying off his airfares and accomodation with his winnings as well as putting away some of it for university, though he hadn't quite decided what to go into. The following Christmas saw the invasion of earth by the Sycorax. As Ryo's blood type is A+, he found himself and his mother on a roof ready to jump off thanks to the Sycorax's control of the type, but never actually jumped because the human instinct to survive is too strong to be overriden by hypnosis. Instead, once the Doctor released the blood type from Sycorax control, Ryo was confused and helped his mother off the roof. He was surprised by the destruction of the Sycorax ship later broadcast on the news, but had little opinion on the pending vote of no confidence in Prime Minister Harriet Jones.
The following year, 2007, Ryo for the most part buckled down and concentrated on his A Levels, doing respectably and earning a place at Cardiff University with plans to study computer science, as he'd taken to experimenting with computer hardware as well as card games. Though he contemplated going to medical school in memory of his childhood friend Sam, who had wanted to be a doctor, ultimately he didn't test well enough to make medical school a viable option. That said, he was both startled and somewhat thankful when what was apparently Sam's ghost began appearing to him for a few minutes every day. Luckily Ryo was in class on the other side of the city when the ghost turned out to be a Cyberman, and thus avoided being converted into a Cyberman himself. Though he was horrified hearing about the Battle of Canary Wharf and Cyberman conversions took many people throughout the city, this did not in any way diminish his interest in aliens; if anything, one taking on the form of his childhood friend interested him further, as did the mass denial of the Battle by the government, which blamed terrorists putting psychotropic drugs into the water supply to cause mass hallucination.
Ryo's first year at university, after the Battle, was fairly average. He went to classes, worked part time at Starbucks, flirted with pretty girls, and made friends that he was sociable enough with, if never friends he was close to. He continued to discuss aliens and time travel online, finding the Doctor in an apparent Easter egg on one of his DVDs and joining forums discussing these messages with Larry Nightingale. Without major Magic tournaments nearby, the most exciting things that happened to him (that he remembered) were witnessing a meteor streaking over Cardiff one night, and on a visit to the market in Splott with a girl who was interested in him, he thought he saw a man coughing up rose petals. However, the girl distracted his attentions away from the man. Ryo later greatly enjoyed a lecture on "Black Holes and the Uncertainty Principle" hosted by Aberystwyth University.
When Owen Harper of Torchwood opened the spatio-temporal rift, things from all over space and history entered the world through it. Ryo was harrassed by a Roman era soldier who was decidedly out of his time, and, though fascinated, called the police to get him out of his hair. Alas, Ryo did not speak any Latin. Later, when the beast Abaddon came out of the rift, Ryo was caught in its shadow and killed as the monster fed on his life force. However, Torchwood's defeat of the monster and subsequent closing of the rift restored the timeline so that this never happened to Ryo.
In another erased timeline, with Harriet Jones quite thoroughly out of Parliament, Ryo voted for Harold Saxon as the new Prime Minister. He was rewarded for his vote when Saxon turned out to be the Master and took over the world from the Valiant, instructing the Toclafane to kill a tenth of the world's population. Ryo was among this unfortunate tenth. Luckily, once again, the timeline was erased, this time by the efforts of the Doctor and Martha Jones.
After these near misses, Ryo's second year of university looked set to continue in much the same vein as the first, though this year he unwittingly had more close misses with alien life. On a night out on the town with his friends, he saw a blowfish drive a sports car past but was too drunk to do much about it or, later, remember the encounter at all (this blowfish was subsequently pursued by Torchwood). He broke his arm again in one of several suicide bombings around the city. He purchased a second-hand car for himself and had an ATMOS installed inside it to eliminate its carbon emissions. In an attempt to pay off the car and the ATMOS, he signed up to be a test subject at new medical research institution the Pharm, but never underwent testing himself before the institution was shut down by Torchwood. When his mother forced him to the reopening of the Electro cinema in a fit of nostalgia, it did not occur to Ryo that the persistent playing of the circus tape was anything out of the ordinary. At Christmas 2008, just over a week after his twentieth birthday, he gawked at a replica Titanic almost crashing into Buckingham Palace from above, but London and its Christmas oddities seemed far away from Cardiff and its blowfish in sports cars.
Ryo once again had a near miss when the ATMOS in his car, along with all ATMOS worldwide, suddenly began to release poisonous gas: He was in class. Because of this, he also completely missed the Doctor's subsequent blowing up all the gases the ATMOS had released into the Earth's atmosphere. Cardiff later suffered a rash of disappearances, claiming a friend of Ryo's friend, but Ryo was not close to the young man anyway.
He was not nearly so lucky one evening the following spring, when fifteen bombs exploded around the city, cutting off all broadcasts, communications, and major access routes to the city. This time Ryo was caught in the fallout of one of the blasts, breaking his almost healed arm again and suffering from second degree burns as well as various cuts and bruises. The streets were in chaos as people searched for help and for answers, and Ryo struggled on sheer adrenaline through the crowds of would be refugees (no one was able to leave the city via the main routes) until a police officer found him and took him aside for first aid. Ryo finally passed out on the officer and he was taken inside, where he was lucky enough to avoid a flood of Weevils throughout the city. Later, once things in Cardiff were settled a bit more and power was restored to the hospitals, Ryo was taken there and treated for shock, smoke inhalation, and burns, as well as having his arm reset.
Mere days after this, on a Saturday morning in the northern hemisphere's spring of 2009, a violent earthquake hit as Earth was teleported by the Daleks into the Medusa Cascade in a pocket universe one second out of sync with the rest of time and space. Once again, Ryo fell over in the earthquake, but he was not injured this time, and quickly grew interested in the suddenly dark sky though it had only been 8AM. Looking outside, he noticed unfamiliar constellations and planets in the sky, and quickly hit his usual chatroom to discuss this. He watched live news reports online of a fleet of spaceships coming towards Earth and the Pentagon releasing a report about them, and this added fuel to the fire of discussion.
While online, he heard metallic shrieking: Daleks had invaded the earth and taken his parents to their ship the Crucible. Neither of his parents mentioned Ryo to the Daleks in the hopes that he would get away unscathed. Shocked, Ryo went back inside to hide in case they returned. In hiding, he returned to the chatroom to discuss the Daleks' appearance as well as the planets in the sky, though they came to no conclusions, even presumably losing some of their members to the Daleks (some members of chat suddenly stopped responding to messages; those they were closer to reported they weren't answering the phone either). Ryo did not realize his landline was being used by Sarah Jane Smith's supercomputer Mr. Smith to call the Doctor. Later, Ryo experienced another earthquake as Earth was towed back to its usual position in time and space by the Doctor and his companions.
Ryo's parents never came home, killed in the Reality Bomb test on the Crucible. But life goes on with or without your parents. Ryo inherited the house, paid for with his parents' life insurance, among other things. He arranged the funeral, the cremation, his father's traditional Japanese burial. He got a temporary job helping rebuild Cardiff and, eventually, he went back to school. But there was a deeper grief in him now: Ryo stopped speaking more than was strictly necessary. Though as usual he turned to the Internet for answers on the aliens that had killed his parents and the oddities that continued to come through the rift, offline he was as silent as possible. The shallow friendships he had formed faltered as the people he'd never been overly close to anyway were unsure what to make of Ryo's voluntary muteness.
It was a girl that shocked Ryo out of his silence, her quiet humming outside the varsity library inexplicably drawing him in. Ryo began to work through his grief properly and open up (as open as he had been since Osamu's death, at least) again. He returned to Magic, winning more open and professional tournament in North-Western Europe and making something of a rival of a cute up-and-coming player named Rika, who was four years younger his junior. And he began seeing Mimi, the girl at the library. Though as usual there was no great depth to their relationship, things quickly progressed to the physical. Ryo readily bought her apparent allergy to water, thinking nothing of it.
He should have. One date saw the pair at a karaoke bar. Though Ryo happily sang a few songs, Mimi had to be coaxed into it. Ryo and all the other males in the bar were spellbound by the chorus. After Mimi finished the song, Ryo found himself at the head of a pack of men following her to Cardiff Bay.
The procession attracted the attention of the Doctor, who was visiting Cardiff to refuel his TARDIS from the rift mere days after the Dalek invasion (by the Doctor's personal timeline), as well as that of Torchwood. As Torchwood tried to apprehend the crowd, the Doctor took the domestic approach and pulled aside Ryo, asking him what was going on. Not having had anything to drink, Ryo was the most lucid man there and was able to help the Doctor deduce she was an alien, effectively a highly evolved mermaid.
Sensing her spell over the crowd from the karaoke bar was weakening, Mimi sang again. This time she also caught the attention of the Doctor and the men of Torchwood and managed to lure everyone to the Bay, tempting them to jump into the harbor and drown themselves. Here Gwen Cooper opened fire on the girl, killing her and thereby breaking her spell over the menfolk in the area. The confused randoms were sent home by Torchwood with a healthy dose of Retcon; Ryo, as the closest to Mimi, underwent a debriefing with Torchwood but the Doctor insisted he not be Retconned.
He returned to the Bay afterwards, in shock over Mimi's betrayal and losing yet another person in his life. This was where the Doctor found him after some words with Torchwood and something of a catchup with Captain Jack Harkness. The Doctor gave him explanations on Mimi's alien nature (she was an adapted Dax from the long destroyed planet Daxus) and the standard "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry" speech, upon which Ryo finally recognized him as the man on his DVD. The Doctor explained this also. Seeking a distraction, Ryo started asking how the Doctor knew about Mimi's species, which prompted further babbling about aliens, including the ones that had killed his parents.
Ryo was bereaved of his girlfriend and clearly interested in the world beyond twenty-first century Earth. The Doctor was lonely and still reeling after the loss of Donna Noble. Seeking to make amends for the loss of Mimi, the Doctor offered to take Ryo on board for "just one trip" and even promised to put in a word for him at Torchwood once he finished university. Without much to really tie him to Cardiff, Ryo readily accepted.
One typically bumpy ride on the TARDIS later, Ryo and the Doctor landed on the planet Chloris in the distant future. Formerly a primitive jungle planet with little metal on the Doctor's last visit, the planet was now largely developed, though still reliant on the forests that still covered much of the planet's surface. On a whim, the Doctor decided to drag Ryo on a train tour of the main continent. Still gawking at his surroundings, Ryo was powerless to resist.
Though he got on well with the other kids at school, Ryo preferred the anonymity of discussing alien sightings and other strange occurences (for example, odd weather patterns on New Year's Eve 1999) in online chatrooms and escapism into other worlds in console RPGs, and he only ever made two close friends, a pair of brothers named Sam and Ken. He first encountered Sam when a teacher forced the boy genius to help him with English and Welsh, and initially met Ken, three years younger than Ryo and Sam, in one of his chatrooms. Unfortunately Sam was killed in a hit and run accident when the boys were eleven. Ken's family, overcome with grief, soon moved away from Cardiff. Ryo was informed by a senior student at the school that "real men don't cry" and the remark stayed with him from then on, so he withdrew to his aliens and video games, needing something more to occupy him and distract him from his best friend's tragically early death. He always felt there was something more out there and, living in Cardiff, home of weevils, occasional blowfish, and generally weird stuff, he was right.
The twenty-first century is when everything changes, and at first, Ryo was too busy discovering card games to see it coming. After running through a range of monster anime tie ins, which he was oddly fantastic at for a n00b, Ryo discovered Magic: The Gathering in 2001 (he was almost thirteen) and got very good at it very quickly. His parents, however, thought he should have been concentrating on his schoolwork, as he'd started high school by then, and were unsupportive of his new hobby. Ryo persisted, however, and was allowed to travel to London to compete in a Magic Grand Prix tournament when he was fourteen. He placed third, winning an invitation to a Pro Tour, but his parents didn't allow him to participate as it was overseas.
Things continued in this vein until Ryo was sixteen, when his interest in aliens was renewed by the news of a spaceship smashing through the Big Ben and crashing in the River Thames. He began following Sarah Jane Smith's journalism online, as well as Clive Finch's website Who Is Doctor Who and the work of the group LINDA until their lapse into mere socializing and their unfortunate disbanding. He also started looking into a possible career with Torchwood. Again, his parents were unimpressed, given the Institute's mysterious if not slightly dubious reputation within Cardiff, and urged him to try and look for a proper career. That year he did however manage to compete in another Grand Prix, this time on a family visit to Kitakyushu.
He competed again in the March 2006 Grand Prix in Cardiff, placing second, and this time, as the World Championship invitation was to Paris this time, his parents allowed him to go provided he paid for it himself. (They hoped he would be disillusioned about pro card playing by the trip and would settle down and concentrate on his upcoming GCSEs.) As such, Ryo was quite pleased when the new Lord Mayor of Cardiff, Margaret Blaine, released plans to build a new nuclear power plant for Cardiff named Blaidd Dwrg in September 2006, and planned to get a job in its construction. He had a bad fall during a sudden, huge earthquake in the city caused by Blaine's tribophysical waveform macro-kinetic extrapolator latching onto the TARDIS and opening the spatio-temporal rift under Cardiff, and broke his arm. Amid the chaos, the mayor disappeared, and her replacement found flaws in Blaidd Dwrg's design that could lead to a nuclear meltdown bigger than Chernobyl, so the plant was never built.
Ryo proceeded to place fourth at the Paris World Tournament anyway, paying off his airfares and accomodation with his winnings as well as putting away some of it for university, though he hadn't quite decided what to go into. The following Christmas saw the invasion of earth by the Sycorax. As Ryo's blood type is A+, he found himself and his mother on a roof ready to jump off thanks to the Sycorax's control of the type, but never actually jumped because the human instinct to survive is too strong to be overriden by hypnosis. Instead, once the Doctor released the blood type from Sycorax control, Ryo was confused and helped his mother off the roof. He was surprised by the destruction of the Sycorax ship later broadcast on the news, but had little opinion on the pending vote of no confidence in Prime Minister Harriet Jones.
The following year, 2007, Ryo for the most part buckled down and concentrated on his A Levels, doing respectably and earning a place at Cardiff University with plans to study computer science, as he'd taken to experimenting with computer hardware as well as card games. Though he contemplated going to medical school in memory of his childhood friend Sam, who had wanted to be a doctor, ultimately he didn't test well enough to make medical school a viable option. That said, he was both startled and somewhat thankful when what was apparently Sam's ghost began appearing to him for a few minutes every day. Luckily Ryo was in class on the other side of the city when the ghost turned out to be a Cyberman, and thus avoided being converted into a Cyberman himself. Though he was horrified hearing about the Battle of Canary Wharf and Cyberman conversions took many people throughout the city, this did not in any way diminish his interest in aliens; if anything, one taking on the form of his childhood friend interested him further, as did the mass denial of the Battle by the government, which blamed terrorists putting psychotropic drugs into the water supply to cause mass hallucination.
Ryo's first year at university, after the Battle, was fairly average. He went to classes, worked part time at Starbucks, flirted with pretty girls, and made friends that he was sociable enough with, if never friends he was close to. He continued to discuss aliens and time travel online, finding the Doctor in an apparent Easter egg on one of his DVDs and joining forums discussing these messages with Larry Nightingale. Without major Magic tournaments nearby, the most exciting things that happened to him (that he remembered) were witnessing a meteor streaking over Cardiff one night, and on a visit to the market in Splott with a girl who was interested in him, he thought he saw a man coughing up rose petals. However, the girl distracted his attentions away from the man. Ryo later greatly enjoyed a lecture on "Black Holes and the Uncertainty Principle" hosted by Aberystwyth University.
When Owen Harper of Torchwood opened the spatio-temporal rift, things from all over space and history entered the world through it. Ryo was harrassed by a Roman era soldier who was decidedly out of his time, and, though fascinated, called the police to get him out of his hair. Alas, Ryo did not speak any Latin. Later, when the beast Abaddon came out of the rift, Ryo was caught in its shadow and killed as the monster fed on his life force. However, Torchwood's defeat of the monster and subsequent closing of the rift restored the timeline so that this never happened to Ryo.
In another erased timeline, with Harriet Jones quite thoroughly out of Parliament, Ryo voted for Harold Saxon as the new Prime Minister. He was rewarded for his vote when Saxon turned out to be the Master and took over the world from the Valiant, instructing the Toclafane to kill a tenth of the world's population. Ryo was among this unfortunate tenth. Luckily, once again, the timeline was erased, this time by the efforts of the Doctor and Martha Jones.
After these near misses, Ryo's second year of university looked set to continue in much the same vein as the first, though this year he unwittingly had more close misses with alien life. On a night out on the town with his friends, he saw a blowfish drive a sports car past but was too drunk to do much about it or, later, remember the encounter at all (this blowfish was subsequently pursued by Torchwood). He broke his arm again in one of several suicide bombings around the city. He purchased a second-hand car for himself and had an ATMOS installed inside it to eliminate its carbon emissions. In an attempt to pay off the car and the ATMOS, he signed up to be a test subject at new medical research institution the Pharm, but never underwent testing himself before the institution was shut down by Torchwood. When his mother forced him to the reopening of the Electro cinema in a fit of nostalgia, it did not occur to Ryo that the persistent playing of the circus tape was anything out of the ordinary. At Christmas 2008, just over a week after his twentieth birthday, he gawked at a replica Titanic almost crashing into Buckingham Palace from above, but London and its Christmas oddities seemed far away from Cardiff and its blowfish in sports cars.
Ryo once again had a near miss when the ATMOS in his car, along with all ATMOS worldwide, suddenly began to release poisonous gas: He was in class. Because of this, he also completely missed the Doctor's subsequent blowing up all the gases the ATMOS had released into the Earth's atmosphere. Cardiff later suffered a rash of disappearances, claiming a friend of Ryo's friend, but Ryo was not close to the young man anyway.
He was not nearly so lucky one evening the following spring, when fifteen bombs exploded around the city, cutting off all broadcasts, communications, and major access routes to the city. This time Ryo was caught in the fallout of one of the blasts, breaking his almost healed arm again and suffering from second degree burns as well as various cuts and bruises. The streets were in chaos as people searched for help and for answers, and Ryo struggled on sheer adrenaline through the crowds of would be refugees (no one was able to leave the city via the main routes) until a police officer found him and took him aside for first aid. Ryo finally passed out on the officer and he was taken inside, where he was lucky enough to avoid a flood of Weevils throughout the city. Later, once things in Cardiff were settled a bit more and power was restored to the hospitals, Ryo was taken there and treated for shock, smoke inhalation, and burns, as well as having his arm reset.
Mere days after this, on a Saturday morning in the northern hemisphere's spring of 2009, a violent earthquake hit as Earth was teleported by the Daleks into the Medusa Cascade in a pocket universe one second out of sync with the rest of time and space. Once again, Ryo fell over in the earthquake, but he was not injured this time, and quickly grew interested in the suddenly dark sky though it had only been 8AM. Looking outside, he noticed unfamiliar constellations and planets in the sky, and quickly hit his usual chatroom to discuss this. He watched live news reports online of a fleet of spaceships coming towards Earth and the Pentagon releasing a report about them, and this added fuel to the fire of discussion.
While online, he heard metallic shrieking: Daleks had invaded the earth and taken his parents to their ship the Crucible. Neither of his parents mentioned Ryo to the Daleks in the hopes that he would get away unscathed. Shocked, Ryo went back inside to hide in case they returned. In hiding, he returned to the chatroom to discuss the Daleks' appearance as well as the planets in the sky, though they came to no conclusions, even presumably losing some of their members to the Daleks (some members of chat suddenly stopped responding to messages; those they were closer to reported they weren't answering the phone either). Ryo did not realize his landline was being used by Sarah Jane Smith's supercomputer Mr. Smith to call the Doctor. Later, Ryo experienced another earthquake as Earth was towed back to its usual position in time and space by the Doctor and his companions.
Ryo's parents never came home, killed in the Reality Bomb test on the Crucible. But life goes on with or without your parents. Ryo inherited the house, paid for with his parents' life insurance, among other things. He arranged the funeral, the cremation, his father's traditional Japanese burial. He got a temporary job helping rebuild Cardiff and, eventually, he went back to school. But there was a deeper grief in him now: Ryo stopped speaking more than was strictly necessary. Though as usual he turned to the Internet for answers on the aliens that had killed his parents and the oddities that continued to come through the rift, offline he was as silent as possible. The shallow friendships he had formed faltered as the people he'd never been overly close to anyway were unsure what to make of Ryo's voluntary muteness.
It was a girl that shocked Ryo out of his silence, her quiet humming outside the varsity library inexplicably drawing him in. Ryo began to work through his grief properly and open up (as open as he had been since Osamu's death, at least) again. He returned to Magic, winning more open and professional tournament in North-Western Europe and making something of a rival of a cute up-and-coming player named Rika, who was four years younger his junior. And he began seeing Mimi, the girl at the library. Though as usual there was no great depth to their relationship, things quickly progressed to the physical. Ryo readily bought her apparent allergy to water, thinking nothing of it.
He should have. One date saw the pair at a karaoke bar. Though Ryo happily sang a few songs, Mimi had to be coaxed into it. Ryo and all the other males in the bar were spellbound by the chorus. After Mimi finished the song, Ryo found himself at the head of a pack of men following her to Cardiff Bay.
The procession attracted the attention of the Doctor, who was visiting Cardiff to refuel his TARDIS from the rift mere days after the Dalek invasion (by the Doctor's personal timeline), as well as that of Torchwood. As Torchwood tried to apprehend the crowd, the Doctor took the domestic approach and pulled aside Ryo, asking him what was going on. Not having had anything to drink, Ryo was the most lucid man there and was able to help the Doctor deduce she was an alien, effectively a highly evolved mermaid.
Sensing her spell over the crowd from the karaoke bar was weakening, Mimi sang again. This time she also caught the attention of the Doctor and the men of Torchwood and managed to lure everyone to the Bay, tempting them to jump into the harbor and drown themselves. Here Gwen Cooper opened fire on the girl, killing her and thereby breaking her spell over the menfolk in the area. The confused randoms were sent home by Torchwood with a healthy dose of Retcon; Ryo, as the closest to Mimi, underwent a debriefing with Torchwood but the Doctor insisted he not be Retconned.
He returned to the Bay afterwards, in shock over Mimi's betrayal and losing yet another person in his life. This was where the Doctor found him after some words with Torchwood and something of a catchup with Captain Jack Harkness. The Doctor gave him explanations on Mimi's alien nature (she was an adapted Dax from the long destroyed planet Daxus) and the standard "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry" speech, upon which Ryo finally recognized him as the man on his DVD. The Doctor explained this also. Seeking a distraction, Ryo started asking how the Doctor knew about Mimi's species, which prompted further babbling about aliens, including the ones that had killed his parents.
Ryo was bereaved of his girlfriend and clearly interested in the world beyond twenty-first century Earth. The Doctor was lonely and still reeling after the loss of Donna Noble. Seeking to make amends for the loss of Mimi, the Doctor offered to take Ryo on board for "just one trip" and even promised to put in a word for him at Torchwood once he finished university. Without much to really tie him to Cardiff, Ryo readily accepted.
One typically bumpy ride on the TARDIS later, Ryo and the Doctor landed on the planet Chloris in the distant future. Formerly a primitive jungle planet with little metal on the Doctor's last visit, the planet was now largely developed, though still reliant on the forests that still covered much of the planet's surface. On a whim, the Doctor decided to drag Ryo on a train tour of the main continent. Still gawking at his surroundings, Ryo was powerless to resist.