contritumella | [ somebody else might take my place ]

when I wake up I'm afraid

what is river like?

At first glance, River seems like a severely emotionally unbalanced young woman with no brain-to-mouth filter who has a rather short attention span and a penchant for thinking things are games when they are, in fact, much more dangerous and put herself and others at risk. Prone to mood swings and bursts of shouting rage and throwing things, it is easy to say that the initial understanding of her personality is accurate.

But it's incomplete.

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River isn't so much mentally ill as she is traumatized; several years of experiments, brain surgery, and mental conditioning turned a genius teenager who was bored with the typical schooling and somewhat psychically sensitive into a young woman who cannot stop herself from feeling, saying, thinking, doing whatever comes into her mind. This includes information from the minds of other people, things they never have told her aloud or never intended for her to know. She deals with this the best way that she can; when she is lucid and happy everything is a game, even dangerous situations until they become glaringly obvious and must be dealt with. Because when she is not lucid, or when she is not happy, she can't stop remembering and hearing things that she doesn't want to remember or hear. When she's not happy or when she's scared she has even less control over the mind that's been altered to give her as little conscious and subconscious control as possible.

This changes when she's with Simon, her older brother. Because he is ultimately the person who spends the most time with her, the person she trusts, and the person who took her out of the hell she was trapped in, a lot of the River from before everything goes wrong shined through in his presence; the genius child, the bratty little sister.

I mention her shift around her brother because without someone directly in that role River will gravitate towards people who fill that space either in parts or whole, and the people she comes to trust will see more of the personality that River has when she is with her brother in canon than the one she has while interacting with strangers.

She has an active (and highly understandable) phobia of medical situations in which her brother isn't involved. Even when he is, that bratty part of her will come out unless she's triggered, in which case she will panic and flail and try to get away. If something is serious (to her) then River does what she understands needs doing, though it takes a lot for her to get to that particular point of action. In River's case? That means dealing with it with her own two hands, and with whatever weapon is nearby. And thanks to her own inherent abilities and what has been done to her, River Tam can do absolutely anything she puts her mind to - and quite a few things it puts itself to on her behalf.

She loves to dance, hates wearing shoes, loves wearing dresses, and has absolutely no sense of when not to be nosy.

what she can do

River is a psychic: in her case, this means she is a telepath with very little by way of control and can only receive information - meaning she is incapable of doing any telepathic projection outward. At times her ability makes it very difficult for her to tell the difference between what is actually happening in front of her and what other people are merely thinking about/remembering/associating with the moment. She can't turn this ability off at all - it controls her a great deal more than she controls it, even at her most lucid points. She can perceive secrets, desires, lies, and sometimes anticipated actions.

That's just what makes her weird. Special. Different.

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The girl is real smart, y'all. There aren't many limits to what River can do if she found a way to approach a problem. Be it dancing, fighting, or mathematics, River is able to understand it and improve upon it (to the annoyance of others, at times, in regard to religious texts and other things that are not generally considered in need of improvement) with very little effort on her part.

This also goes hand in hand with her fighting and balancing abilities; to her, it's all math and art, which means she's efficient and graceful no matter what she's doing.

She can dance, shoot a gun, and engage in close-quarters combat without much conscious effort on her part.

Name era TIMEZONE EST DISCORD spacewitchery PB lana condor • CODE