[OOC] Application~
PLAYER
NAME: RM
JOURNAL: zinthos
IM: EpicFailNinja
E-MAIL: ishidaaaugh[at]gmail[dot]com
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: River Tam
FANDOM: TV Series/Movie
CHRONOLOGY: Post-movie.
BACKGROUND:
When Earth-That-Was got all used up, humanity took to the stars. America and China, being the two most powerful superpowers at the time, ended up working together to create an interplanetary system of government called the Alliance. There were a few hiccups along the way -- like a old Unification War, and a whole passel of folks who just aim to misbehave -- and a few ... less than moral choices on the Alliance's part. Like the Pax, which was a chemical intended to pacify the population of an unruly world, but ended up killing almost everyone involved. Or River.
River was born on the planet of Osiris, to a pair of wealthy, influential parents. She and her brother Simon were abnormally intelligent children, although River had always been the smarter of the two. Just before her brother went off to medical school, she received an invitation to attend the Academy, a secret school for the best and brightest. She adored the place, at first. She could finally use her genius to good effect, rather being stuck in classes that were "slow" or otherwise far below her intelligence level. However, the Academy had other plans for her. Under the guise of entering her in a "special program," they began to experiment on her. They mixed extreme combat training with mental conditioning, so that they could turn their weapon on or off with the appropriate coded message. They cut deep into her brain, to develop her latent intuitive abilities into full-blown telepathy. River was the Academy's best student: a masterwork assassin.
... or she would have been, if she hadn't managed to send a coded letter to her brother. Several months and a lot of money later, he snuck into the compound, found River, and spirited her away. Trying to sneak his crazy sister onto a ship as-is would have been both dangerous or impossible, so Simon put her in a box (albeit a cyrogenic storage box) and got her aboard Serenity, a Firefly-class spaceship with a certain amount of disregard for the law. However, said spaceship's captain was not exactly pleased with having a crazy fugitive girl and her equally fugitive (though not crazy) brother on board his boat. He intended to kick both of them off the ship ASAP, but somehow, that never quite happened. And so Simon and River eventually became a part of the crazy family aboard the good ship Serenity.
But it hasn't been all sunshine and rainbows. Serenity wasn't exactly the richest of vessels, and had been on the wrong side of the law even before she took on a pair of wanted fugitives; they had several close calls with the Alliance and criminals alike. River in particular spent most of the time terribly unstable, fluctuating between a girl who could smile and play jacks with Kaylee to an unstoppable killing machine. Overall, though, she tended to get more sane rather than less as the months progressed. And after she managed to take care of a bounty hunter that had infiltrated the ship, she was basically accepted as part of the crew. From then on, she'd occasionally help with jobs, especially the ones that required her unique psionic expertise. She and the group ran into Reavers (cannibalistic zombie-like bad guys) during one of these jobs. And while she came back unharmed, the incident infuriated her brother, who'd been opposed to her participation in this kind of thing to begin with. The ensuing fight with the ship's captain finally got them tossed off the ship... briefly. Because mere moments after the siblings touched down planetside, something happened. The Alliance finally found River.
... in a manner of speaking. An Operative working for them sent out a signal, which had been designed to trigger River's subconcious conditioning and turn her back into a killing machine. Which it did. She flattened an entire bar's worth of people before her brother could say the safewords and turn her off. And after that outburst, it was only a matter of time before the Operative tracked the girl down. She and Simon returned to Serenity, which in turn began its flight away from the Alliance's agents. This eventually took them to the planet Miranda, where the crew finally figured out the reason why the Alliance wanted her back so badly, other than the obvious advantage in getting their assassin back. Miranda had been the text site for the Pax, a type of neurotoxin intended to pacify the planet. And it had worked, sort of ... if you counted a planet full of dead people as "working." This had been the secret burning at the bottom of River Tam's mind. The crew decided that the only thing they could do was get the signal out to the rest of the world -- which they did, but not without significant losses.
PERSONALITY: River is a strange, strange young girl. Before her modification at the hands of the Academy, she was an incredibly bright, innocent little thing, who adored dancing and quantum physics alike. As her "treatments" progressed, however, River-the-girl quickly got eclipsed by River-the-weapon, and by the time her brother came to rescue her, she was a shattered mess of a human being. River was (and still is) a person with very few filters. The Academy experiments removed her amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for filtering her emotions productively. Without it, she's extremely erratic, her mood swinging wildly in the slightests of emotional breezes. It's normal for her to be completely happy one moment and then utterly depressed in the next. While she's doing much better nowadays, especially now that the secret of Miranda isn't burning at the bottom of her her brainpan anymore, she still has her moments. Plenty of them.
Even when she's feeling particularly lucid, River is still quite the eccentric. Almost everything she says is vague, cryptic, strange, or all of the above; she often sounds like she doesn't have a clue about where she is, or what she's doing. In fact, the opposite is true. River knows too much about what's going on, at all times. She can't keep it out. All the details about her surroundings mix with her unique repository of knowledge and the readings she gets off of other people, and the result is distinctly odd. There's a method to her madness that only she is privy to. The words that come out of her mouth are a tiny, tiny cross-section that doesn't make sense unless you see the whole pattern, which she does; it's just that nobody else gets it.
River can be nice enough. Sweet even, when she's having a good day and the medicine keeps her whole long enough for her to be a girl rather than a weapon. Those are the days when her former personality shines through the brightest, like sunlight through a mesh screen. On her darker days, she becomes paranoid and more than a little scary. She might get a knife and take a swipe at a crewmate (or was that just the shirt he was wearing?) or wander down to the cargo hold with a loaded gun in her hands. When she's in combat mode, she is utterly and completely ruthless, making little distinction between friend and foe. And when she has a breakdown, she really, really breaks down. Screaming fits and weeping render her incapable of doing anything except curling into a ball and waiting for it to pass. (Or wander away on her own agenda yet again.) She rarely does it on purpose. Her own intentions tend to be a little too oblique to include things like nervous breakdowns.
River can also be very distant, depending on how the mood strikes her. While she's still quite capable of ordinary emotions like love or friendship, especially with her brother, she tends to be detached with people until she gets to know them better. They tend to be either interesting or uninteresting until they're important enough that it doesn't matter either way. She views a lot of her life in the same way: distant, but interesting. The experimentation couldn't strip her of her curiosity, which she retains in full force; she's the sort to poke around and spy on things occasionally if they prick her interest. (Like watching her brother have sex, for example.)
All and all, she's a lot more stable than she was at the beginning of the series, and better than she was at the end, thanks to Miranda's secret being resolved... but she's still deeply unstable. No one knows what she'll do next, including herself. Maybe she'll go on a murderous rampage! Or maybe she'll just go rub soup in her hair. When the wind is southerly, she can tell a hawk from a handsaw.
CLASS: Hero-ish. If she gets involved in this mess, she'll be on the side of good.
SUPERHERO NAME: Serenity
ALTER EGO: River Tam, girl. Everything else flucuates.
POWER:
Canon:
Psychic: River is a "reader," which the in-Verse term for someone gifted with psionic capabilities. She has a tendency to pick out the most "interesting" bits -- things people don't want to say, things that she really shouldn't know. These things tend to get a bit garbled, especially when she's feeling multiple people at once, but she can still sense people's minds and "hear" all sorts of interesting things. Every now and then she'll get a flash of seeming clairvoyance, but that's mostly due to her genius-level intellect extrapolating an outcome rather than any sort of supernatural effect.
Combat Ability: River was designed to be a killing machine. Though not physically strong, she is fast and extremely flexible, traits that are only enhanced by her psionic abilities. She's especially good at mass combat. Still, it takes an extreme situation to really kick her into gear; all of her previous displays occurred after someone was injured or after she'd been deliberately triggered.
Genius: River is one of the smartest people in the 'Verse, hands down. This means she's good at just about any skill she puts her mind to, from mimicking accents and playing jacks to hacking the ship's comm system and pretending she's possessed the ship. She's a fully capable pilot in addition to being a hell of a dancer. Too bad she's still out of her mind half the time.
Non-Canon
The range of her "reading" has expanded slightly: she can peek at people's brains if she's talking to them over the comm, a feat that would normally be a bit too distant for her. Otherwise, no non-canon abilities.
COMMUNITY POST SAMPLE: They’ve lost their heroes. Put all the little green army men away in a box, for safe-keeping, but they forgot where safe-keeping is. Lost behind the bed and the socks and the quilts, where no one can find them. They asked mama for more. Can’t play cops and robbers with only robbers. No story. No game.
But the new toys don’t match. Different colors, different shapes. These are too big. Cut off their arms and legs to make them fit, exactly six feet tall. Weapons and girls and everyone is an alien secretly. From the Black. Like me. Osiris is 36.521 light years away at aphelion. Small step for men, very small step for aliens. They pulled me across the black in one breath, before I could say goodbye. They asked if I am good or bad, if I am magic or science, hero or a villain. Don’t know. People don’t know; they’re too difficult, even with themselves. Sufficiently advanced bad is indistinguishable from good.
I want to go home. We want to go home. We are not toys.
THIRD PERSON:
Today, River is a spaceship.
It wasn't her first choice. She wanted to be a girl, like she is when the sun is out and her brain shines brightly enough to keep all the messy bits of herself tucked neatly in the shadows, out of sight. But the machine wouldn't let her. Wanted River-the-weapon, the River it had called into the black and back out again before her 'Verse even knew what it had lost. A hero. A weapon.
It's raining tonight, and she stops to admire an earthworm as it squirms along the pavement.
River tricked them. Tricked the machine, though she couldn't hear it talking the way Kaylee does. She only hears people-whispers. She is a people-whisperer. She bent in close to the microphone and whispered "Serenity" and recieved it in shiny metal letters, to be placed around her neck and over her heart. A talisman. Make the sign of the cross and ask Buddha if he can send a superhero along with that pony. But it’s not her weapon name. It’s Serenity’s name. Serenity won’t mind if River borrows it for a while. She’s done it before. Protection.
The worm crawls languidly, squelching through the shallow puddles like the sound of River’s bare, mud-flecked feet-
Finding her way out was hard. And it will be harder, without her brother or the rest of the crew there to hold her. She missed Simon before she’d gone five steps away from the Porter building; Kaylee took seven, Mal ten, and everyone else following after in leaps and bounds. She had leaned against the building for a long time, until the pieces of her came back together enough to let her walk.
- and her hair drifts down, away from her shoulder, while the metal bits of her talisman (dog-tags, for dogs, but River is not a dog either) clink and glitter in the light from an old-fashioned street-lamp.
River Tam. Serenity, it says without saying, in the secret telepathy that words have. She lets them hang above the earthworm, who is entirely unconcerned about the River-spaceship hovering over him. “We come in peace,” she tells it, both for herself and the bits of crew she holds inside herself, to keep her flyin’. “Take us to your leader.”
NAME: RM
JOURNAL: zinthos
IM: EpicFailNinja
E-MAIL: ishidaaaugh[at]gmail[dot]com
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: River Tam
FANDOM: TV Series/Movie
CHRONOLOGY: Post-movie.
BACKGROUND:
When Earth-That-Was got all used up, humanity took to the stars. America and China, being the two most powerful superpowers at the time, ended up working together to create an interplanetary system of government called the Alliance. There were a few hiccups along the way -- like a old Unification War, and a whole passel of folks who just aim to misbehave -- and a few ... less than moral choices on the Alliance's part. Like the Pax, which was a chemical intended to pacify the population of an unruly world, but ended up killing almost everyone involved. Or River.
River was born on the planet of Osiris, to a pair of wealthy, influential parents. She and her brother Simon were abnormally intelligent children, although River had always been the smarter of the two. Just before her brother went off to medical school, she received an invitation to attend the Academy, a secret school for the best and brightest. She adored the place, at first. She could finally use her genius to good effect, rather being stuck in classes that were "slow" or otherwise far below her intelligence level. However, the Academy had other plans for her. Under the guise of entering her in a "special program," they began to experiment on her. They mixed extreme combat training with mental conditioning, so that they could turn their weapon on or off with the appropriate coded message. They cut deep into her brain, to develop her latent intuitive abilities into full-blown telepathy. River was the Academy's best student: a masterwork assassin.
... or she would have been, if she hadn't managed to send a coded letter to her brother. Several months and a lot of money later, he snuck into the compound, found River, and spirited her away. Trying to sneak his crazy sister onto a ship as-is would have been both dangerous or impossible, so Simon put her in a box (albeit a cyrogenic storage box) and got her aboard Serenity, a Firefly-class spaceship with a certain amount of disregard for the law. However, said spaceship's captain was not exactly pleased with having a crazy fugitive girl and her equally fugitive (though not crazy) brother on board his boat. He intended to kick both of them off the ship ASAP, but somehow, that never quite happened. And so Simon and River eventually became a part of the crazy family aboard the good ship Serenity.
But it hasn't been all sunshine and rainbows. Serenity wasn't exactly the richest of vessels, and had been on the wrong side of the law even before she took on a pair of wanted fugitives; they had several close calls with the Alliance and criminals alike. River in particular spent most of the time terribly unstable, fluctuating between a girl who could smile and play jacks with Kaylee to an unstoppable killing machine. Overall, though, she tended to get more sane rather than less as the months progressed. And after she managed to take care of a bounty hunter that had infiltrated the ship, she was basically accepted as part of the crew. From then on, she'd occasionally help with jobs, especially the ones that required her unique psionic expertise. She and the group ran into Reavers (cannibalistic zombie-like bad guys) during one of these jobs. And while she came back unharmed, the incident infuriated her brother, who'd been opposed to her participation in this kind of thing to begin with. The ensuing fight with the ship's captain finally got them tossed off the ship... briefly. Because mere moments after the siblings touched down planetside, something happened. The Alliance finally found River.
... in a manner of speaking. An Operative working for them sent out a signal, which had been designed to trigger River's subconcious conditioning and turn her back into a killing machine. Which it did. She flattened an entire bar's worth of people before her brother could say the safewords and turn her off. And after that outburst, it was only a matter of time before the Operative tracked the girl down. She and Simon returned to Serenity, which in turn began its flight away from the Alliance's agents. This eventually took them to the planet Miranda, where the crew finally figured out the reason why the Alliance wanted her back so badly, other than the obvious advantage in getting their assassin back. Miranda had been the text site for the Pax, a type of neurotoxin intended to pacify the planet. And it had worked, sort of ... if you counted a planet full of dead people as "working." This had been the secret burning at the bottom of River Tam's mind. The crew decided that the only thing they could do was get the signal out to the rest of the world -- which they did, but not without significant losses.
PERSONALITY: River is a strange, strange young girl. Before her modification at the hands of the Academy, she was an incredibly bright, innocent little thing, who adored dancing and quantum physics alike. As her "treatments" progressed, however, River-the-girl quickly got eclipsed by River-the-weapon, and by the time her brother came to rescue her, she was a shattered mess of a human being. River was (and still is) a person with very few filters. The Academy experiments removed her amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for filtering her emotions productively. Without it, she's extremely erratic, her mood swinging wildly in the slightests of emotional breezes. It's normal for her to be completely happy one moment and then utterly depressed in the next. While she's doing much better nowadays, especially now that the secret of Miranda isn't burning at the bottom of her her brainpan anymore, she still has her moments. Plenty of them.
Even when she's feeling particularly lucid, River is still quite the eccentric. Almost everything she says is vague, cryptic, strange, or all of the above; she often sounds like she doesn't have a clue about where she is, or what she's doing. In fact, the opposite is true. River knows too much about what's going on, at all times. She can't keep it out. All the details about her surroundings mix with her unique repository of knowledge and the readings she gets off of other people, and the result is distinctly odd. There's a method to her madness that only she is privy to. The words that come out of her mouth are a tiny, tiny cross-section that doesn't make sense unless you see the whole pattern, which she does; it's just that nobody else gets it.
River can be nice enough. Sweet even, when she's having a good day and the medicine keeps her whole long enough for her to be a girl rather than a weapon. Those are the days when her former personality shines through the brightest, like sunlight through a mesh screen. On her darker days, she becomes paranoid and more than a little scary. She might get a knife and take a swipe at a crewmate (or was that just the shirt he was wearing?) or wander down to the cargo hold with a loaded gun in her hands. When she's in combat mode, she is utterly and completely ruthless, making little distinction between friend and foe. And when she has a breakdown, she really, really breaks down. Screaming fits and weeping render her incapable of doing anything except curling into a ball and waiting for it to pass. (Or wander away on her own agenda yet again.) She rarely does it on purpose. Her own intentions tend to be a little too oblique to include things like nervous breakdowns.
River can also be very distant, depending on how the mood strikes her. While she's still quite capable of ordinary emotions like love or friendship, especially with her brother, she tends to be detached with people until she gets to know them better. They tend to be either interesting or uninteresting until they're important enough that it doesn't matter either way. She views a lot of her life in the same way: distant, but interesting. The experimentation couldn't strip her of her curiosity, which she retains in full force; she's the sort to poke around and spy on things occasionally if they prick her interest. (Like watching her brother have sex, for example.)
All and all, she's a lot more stable than she was at the beginning of the series, and better than she was at the end, thanks to Miranda's secret being resolved... but she's still deeply unstable. No one knows what she'll do next, including herself. Maybe she'll go on a murderous rampage! Or maybe she'll just go rub soup in her hair. When the wind is southerly, she can tell a hawk from a handsaw.
CLASS: Hero-ish. If she gets involved in this mess, she'll be on the side of good.
SUPERHERO NAME: Serenity
ALTER EGO: River Tam, girl. Everything else flucuates.
POWER:
Canon:
Psychic: River is a "reader," which the in-Verse term for someone gifted with psionic capabilities. She has a tendency to pick out the most "interesting" bits -- things people don't want to say, things that she really shouldn't know. These things tend to get a bit garbled, especially when she's feeling multiple people at once, but she can still sense people's minds and "hear" all sorts of interesting things. Every now and then she'll get a flash of seeming clairvoyance, but that's mostly due to her genius-level intellect extrapolating an outcome rather than any sort of supernatural effect.
Combat Ability: River was designed to be a killing machine. Though not physically strong, she is fast and extremely flexible, traits that are only enhanced by her psionic abilities. She's especially good at mass combat. Still, it takes an extreme situation to really kick her into gear; all of her previous displays occurred after someone was injured or after she'd been deliberately triggered.
Genius: River is one of the smartest people in the 'Verse, hands down. This means she's good at just about any skill she puts her mind to, from mimicking accents and playing jacks to hacking the ship's comm system and pretending she's possessed the ship. She's a fully capable pilot in addition to being a hell of a dancer. Too bad she's still out of her mind half the time.
Non-Canon
The range of her "reading" has expanded slightly: she can peek at people's brains if she's talking to them over the comm, a feat that would normally be a bit too distant for her. Otherwise, no non-canon abilities.
COMMUNITY POST SAMPLE: They’ve lost their heroes. Put all the little green army men away in a box, for safe-keeping, but they forgot where safe-keeping is. Lost behind the bed and the socks and the quilts, where no one can find them. They asked mama for more. Can’t play cops and robbers with only robbers. No story. No game.
But the new toys don’t match. Different colors, different shapes. These are too big. Cut off their arms and legs to make them fit, exactly six feet tall. Weapons and girls and everyone is an alien secretly. From the Black. Like me. Osiris is 36.521 light years away at aphelion. Small step for men, very small step for aliens. They pulled me across the black in one breath, before I could say goodbye. They asked if I am good or bad, if I am magic or science, hero or a villain. Don’t know. People don’t know; they’re too difficult, even with themselves. Sufficiently advanced bad is indistinguishable from good.
I want to go home. We want to go home. We are not toys.
THIRD PERSON:
Today, River is a spaceship.
It wasn't her first choice. She wanted to be a girl, like she is when the sun is out and her brain shines brightly enough to keep all the messy bits of herself tucked neatly in the shadows, out of sight. But the machine wouldn't let her. Wanted River-the-weapon, the River it had called into the black and back out again before her 'Verse even knew what it had lost. A hero. A weapon.
It's raining tonight, and she stops to admire an earthworm as it squirms along the pavement.
River tricked them. Tricked the machine, though she couldn't hear it talking the way Kaylee does. She only hears people-whispers. She is a people-whisperer. She bent in close to the microphone and whispered "Serenity" and recieved it in shiny metal letters, to be placed around her neck and over her heart. A talisman. Make the sign of the cross and ask Buddha if he can send a superhero along with that pony. But it’s not her weapon name. It’s Serenity’s name. Serenity won’t mind if River borrows it for a while. She’s done it before. Protection.
The worm crawls languidly, squelching through the shallow puddles like the sound of River’s bare, mud-flecked feet-
Finding her way out was hard. And it will be harder, without her brother or the rest of the crew there to hold her. She missed Simon before she’d gone five steps away from the Porter building; Kaylee took seven, Mal ten, and everyone else following after in leaps and bounds. She had leaned against the building for a long time, until the pieces of her came back together enough to let her walk.
- and her hair drifts down, away from her shoulder, while the metal bits of her talisman (dog-tags, for dogs, but River is not a dog either) clink and glitter in the light from an old-fashioned street-lamp.
River Tam. Serenity, it says without saying, in the secret telepathy that words have. She lets them hang above the earthworm, who is entirely unconcerned about the River-spaceship hovering over him. “We come in peace,” she tells it, both for herself and the bits of crew she holds inside herself, to keep her flyin’. “Take us to your leader.”