User Profile

Character: River Tam
Aliases: River, known by Simon and Kaylee, as “Mei mei” - or little sister, in Chinese.
Series/Fandom: Firefly, pre-Serenity.
Original or Alternate: Original
Age: Approximately 16.
Gender: Female
Sexuality: Undeveloped, but likely heterosexual.
Species: Human

Appearance:

River is a slight young girl with an athletic, but undeveloped figure. She's approximately five foot two. Her attire consists of clothing scrapped from the female crew of Serenity – Kaylee and Inara especially, which simply means her style of dress is quite eclectic. Skirts matched with combat boots, pink jumpers laid over graceful dresses and the like. She seems to have an artistic fashion sense when she is lucid. Along with being small of frame, she is extraordinarily pale, with long strings of dark hair that never quite seems to be clean or well kept hanging around her heart-shaped face. Her large brown eyes are very expressive and are the dominant item of her features. Most of the time, when walking about Serenity, she does not wear shoes – a quirk perhaps from her days in her childhood as a dancer. Those feet are as pale as the rest of her, perhaps paler, bony and long-toed.

She moves with an otherworldly grace, slow and careful in her actions. When she speaks, her voice is typically soft, almost an undertone. Occasionally, she finds it amusing to take on the accents and speech peculiarities of the people around her and does so with alarming accuracy.

Personality: INTJ

River exemplifies the INTJ archetype. When lucid, she is extremely pragmatic, and extraordinarily brilliant – she is deeply concerned with the function of things, of people and of objects. She has a deep sense of empathy, capable of reading others simply by their body language and a few words. While usually she tends to keep to herself, River cares very much for a few select people, namely at the time of her disappearance, her older brother Simon and the ship's mechanic, Kaylee. She is also incredibly protective of the entire crew of Serenity, as evidenced in Objects in Space – where she takes on an Alliance-hired bounty hunter and outwits him to protect the crew.

Unfortunately, due to the Alliance scientists cutting into her brain, River's amygdala was stripped, robbing her of the ability to control her emotions. This makes her exceptionally volatile. She can be lucid and brilliantly spouting off technical specifications, poetry, calculus, and suddenly descend into childlike-gibberish or experience an entire disconnect from reality. She's extremely unpredictable and hard for others to read, speaking in riddles and cryptic phrases most of the time.

Abilities/Strengths:

River is exceptionally intelligent, practically a prodigy. Everything she takes to doing comes naturally to her. Math, art, poetry, dancing – anything. She is exceptionally curious and inquisitive when she has her wits about her, and is known for being able to see all sides of a situation fairly and evenly. While these things are typical of her as a young girl, she has a few other abilities for which the Alliance hunts her for up until she's taken into Econtra.

River Tam is psychic, though not in control of her ability. She can see into people's minds, into places they do not want her to see – [in game, this ability would be curtailed to a request for information, rather than a meta-gamed knowledge]. She is also empathic, picking up on the emotions of others and being completely unable to block them out. In the words of her older brother, “She feels everything. She can't not.” More often than not, these abilities manifest in brief flashes of precognitive visions. River is also very limber and athletic, gifted with physical grace.

Her skill as a fighter and with firearms is nearly superhuman, as evidenced in War Stories, where she memorizes where three opponents are on the battlefield, and shoots all three of them with her eyes shut.

Weaknesses:

River is bat-shit, raving, out of her mind crazy. She has absolutely no control over her emotions or over what she feels or picks up through her psychic abilities. This, understandably, makes it very hard for her to communicate her ideas to anyone else aside from those who know her very well. Often, she receives psychic visions of the precognitive kind that are more like epileptic seizures with absolutely no rhyme or reason to the circumstances. Most of the time she speaks in half-poetic sentences, in abstract phrases and imagery.

Before River was taken from Serenity to Econtra, her brother Simon administered a great number of drugs and neural suppressors. These were the things that were keeping her remotely under control. However, now that she has been removed from her brother's company, her symptoms are likely to get far, far worse.

River does not sleep very frequently or very, well, has a deep, abiding fear of needles and has frequent nightmares when she does sleep.

Notable Possessions:

River does not have any notable possessions aside from her clothing, save a set of jacks and a rubber ball.

History:

River grew up with her elder brother Simon, with whom she was very close, as part of the wealthy Tam family on the core, Alliance-dominated planet of Osiris. Having a high intellect and a ready grasp of complex subjects, she was sent to a government learning facility known only as “The Academy” at the age of fourteen. While there were other schools, River wished to attend this one in particular.

While her parents and Simon believed the Academy was a private school meant to nurture the gifts of the most academically talented children in the Alliance, it was in fact a cover for a government experiment in creating the perfect assassin. While in the hands of the Alliance doctors and scientists, River was secretly and extensively experimented on, including surgery that removed most of her amygdala (which acts as a filter for emotions), preventing River from being able to control her emotions.

She descended into insanity, nurturing psychic and intuitive abilities, although the personal files on River in the Alliance database imply that she may have already had some form of latent psychic abilities prior to being inducted into the Academy. How and when this translated into her full-fledged psychic ability is unknown.

The Alliance attempted to isolate River from her family, though she managed to send a call for help by putting a coded message in the letters she wrote to her brother. Simon decoded the message and successfully set out to rescue his then 16-year-old sister, despite his parents' insistence that he was simply being paranoid. Simon paid a number of anti-Alliance agents to rescue River from the compound and had her put into cryogenics for ease of transport. When Serenity landed on Persephone (another “core” planet) for repairs and to fetch their Companion, Inara Serra, Simon paid for his passage and brought his then-cryogenically frozen sister on board.

When the Alliance learned of River's rescue, they promptly froze all of Simon's monetary accounts, leaving him with nothing but his med-kit. He was once a successful trauma surgeon on Osiris – now he and his sister were mere fugitives. A warrant for the Tams arrest was put out on the massive computer network called, “The Cortex” for their arrest.

A complicated situation lead to Mal opening the cryogenic box River was kept in, which lead to her discovery. A government agent tracking Simon shot the ship's mechanic, Kaylee. In order to keep the Captain from selling out himself and his sister, Simon refused to operate on Kaylee to save her life unless the Captain turned tail and ran from the Alliance cruiser that had come to take River back. Captain Mal Reynolds valued his mechanic more than he valued the approval of the Alliance, and changed course. Simon saved Kaylee's life, and saved himself a position on Serenity as a medic, earning himself and his sister safe passage and protection from the Alliance.

River and Simon Tam held residence on Captain Malcolm Reynold's Firefly-class transport ship Serenity, where Simon worked as a medic, and River as an occasional medium, when she was clear-headed enough to function in the outside world.

By the end of the Firefly series, River became well respected by the majority of the crew. The Captain viewed her as a capable pilot and a brilliant girl. Kaylee and Inara became something of a pair older sisters to her, and the Shepherd Book and she gained an understanding.

This is River immediately following the last episode of the “Firefly” series, prior the comic and the “Serenity” movie.


This is a role-playing journal for econtra_rpg by kokoroverboten.
[River Tam] © [Joss Whedon / Mutant Enemy].
All content is fictional and for entertainment purposes only, not for profit.