I am deep down and I do not make

bytwo — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 19:48:50 GMT

(folie à plusieurs; therapy)

bytwo — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 23:44:29 GMT

If you listen closely, you can hear.

Here – in this place, the cave of horrors. Her fingers catch hold and catch nothing, and her thoughts drift like fireflies in the night sky. They light her way, the other burning suns in their towers. Their souls shattered lamps for her to follow, drawn as a moth to the scorching heat of their fire. She can’t remember if she hears screaming anymore, if the sounds of their fear are voiced or only echoing from mind to mind.

“What do you hear,” they ask her. As if she could categorize, quantify. As if it was that simple. She laughs, and it sounds like crying.

“I hear you.”

At rest, the average adult human heart beats between sixty and a hundred times per minute. Their lungs expand and contract between twelve and twenty times in the same span. If she shuts her eyes, she can hear it, the beating of their hearts, the whisper of their breath. They’re at rest, in chairs too hard and hard on the back. Back. It’s been a long day.

He smiles – he, singular, in the third person – and his eyes flick to the clock. The minutes pass at a rate of sixty seconds per, seconds defined precisely as 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state caesium 133 atom. “What do you mean by that?”

Her hand clenches, forms a fist. She sets it on her lap, very gently, like rocking a baby, doesn’t look up. His eyes are black holes, and if she lets him in too long, she’ll be sucked through and forever gone. She tilts her head upwards and away, watching the cameras, the eyes in the walls. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try to help me understand, River –“

“You don’t feed us.” The plural, first person. Accusatory, her verbs thrown like knives. His throat is bare and vulnerable to attack (it’s okay to think about killing, River; we teach efficiency in this course). Her fist unclenches but it’s still sharp, still dangerous.

He misunderstands. Her words bounce off him harmlessly, ballistics falling and failing. “If you’re unsatisfied with your meals, you can always –“

“We aren’t full!”

All through the Academy, the students are crying out in agony, their need for need. It pounds in her head, it pounds in the halls. Eating them inside out, pulsating and contorting in their stomachs, rejecting traditional forms of sustenance. “You’ve pulled out our hearts!” The doctor (my brother is a doctor) yells, calls for back-up, she’s clawing at her stomach, has to - rip them out with her fingernails. “They’re eating us!”

She falls back and she cries, and everyone cries with her, and the sun rises, and the sun falls, but they never see it because there’s never any light. There’s just blackness, all and forever, a sucking black hole holding them in, their masses adding to its gravitational pull and binding them together and together. It takes more energy to achieve exit velocity. They hold her arms but she kicks like she’s been told and they break, little dolls scattering.

And it hurts.

There’s an empty girl shape in the world and it’s called River; and it’s called Celia and Thyme and Nathan and Summer and every name in-between and every name beyond, and it hurts because they’re in there, they all are, and they will never be full or fully alive. A needle breaks her skin and they muffle her screams so she doesn’t disturb the other patients who are screaming just as loud as she.

She aims a kick and stumbles and the force of her motion interrupted throws her deeper into the arms that bind, struggling to hold her in. “Put us in the pool, the common denominator – throw us out when you’re done –“

Someone grunts, but doesn’t let go. She expends more energy but the results are diminishing, finishing. Vanishing, the corners of her vision going out like little lights. They lower her to the floor almost tenderly, letting her slide into sleep. Shh.

If you listen, you can hear.

She’s having a bad day, they say.

We’ll resume tomorrow.

let there be

bytwo — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:38:13 GMT

but the darkness had not understood it.

Madness (we’re doing such good work)

comes in shards of light. Creeping in the dead of night (two by two)

In the beginning was the word, and the word was

(What do you feel?) light, she whispers, voiceless; the nightingale in the cage can’t sing in the daylight. The story goes: hot pokers in their eyes, and all is endless night. But the nightingale in endless light will whisper tuneless phrases; her feathers will molt, her skies will fall. They stick red-hot needles in her eyes, ask her what she sees: red, yellow, blue – all the colors together make white, nothing. She sees nothing, and everything. It’s sunk into her skin, glowing like starlight.

They don’t understand. They’re doing such good work, whispering in her ear. Shining lights in her eyes until she can’t see, until there’s nothing but fractal shards of rainbow, the colors scattered in her mind. She is the crystal through which they separate, she is glass, she is shattered. They have blinded her over and over, and ask her what she sees.

let there be sight.

I can see you, she tells them. They shift in their chairs, they whisper her name in their minds. They can’t hide; they have given her light. Light everlasting, like a bubbling fountain. It chases the shadows of their faces away, strips them bare so she can see what lies underneath. They have made her this, this creature of light and grace; they have painted their faces black to hide their true intent, but she can see beyond.

Always, always. They cannot hide, there is no darkness to cloak her. They are terrified of darkness, but light is infinitely more terrifying; in light, we cannot hide our true natures. In light, we are every color, and one; and she can’t not be aware of everything it illuminates.

I can see you.

mother, may I? [permissions meme]

bytwo — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 22:11:56 GMT

SO GUESS WHAT. River is a psychic, which necessitates that I know a few things about the people she's interacting with.

Is there anything that would prevent River from picking things up from your character ~~via the Devil~~ psychically? (If the answer to this question is yes, you can pretty much forgo the rest of the meme. Go find a cookie and pat yourself on the back.)

Is there anything in particular I should know about your character? Any deep, dark secrets? Mental problems? Pathological love of chocolate?

So do you mind if I stalk your application/wikipedia for infostuffs on your pup? How about the narration, or should I siphon information directly from you? OR ALL OF THE ABOVE?

Is there anything else you feel the need to tell me that isn't covered here already?

Dŏng ma?

I'll go where secrets are sold, where roses unfold (I'll sleep as time goes by). [realityshifted]

bytwo — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 19:54:39 GMT

Character: River Tam
Series/Fandom: Firefly/Serenity
Deviance: Canon [d1]

Age: River Tam
Gender: Firefly/Serenity
Species: Human.

Canon Used: All the canon I can get my hands on, basically – series, movie, graphic novels.

Appearance: 5’6”, skinny, very athletic. She wears lots of dresses/skirts/bicycle shorts or something. And hiking boots. Fear them. Have a picture!

Psychology: ahahahahaha how long do I have.

River is crazy. The most immediately visible symptom is often in how her speech patterns are disjointed and difficult to follow. In part, it’s a form of denial and self-protection: her tendency to talk in jumbled sentences and riddles will often increase when she’s discussing something that upsets her, or that she doesn’t want people to understand, deep down. If people can’t understand her, then it makes what she’s talking about less real. (Other times she’ll make things difficult consciously, because she’s in a playful mood/just being a brat, but she doesn’t admit it and therefore would be difficult to substantiate.) To make her even more confusing, River has difficulty telling what’s real and what’s not. She experiences auditory/visual hallucinations both as a result of what’s going on in her head and others. As a result, she can’t always tell if what she’s seeing is real or out of someone else or just made up.

She’s suffered large amounts of trauma at the hands of the Academy, both physical and psychological. She has epic amounts of PTSD, because that’s just what happens when people fuck around with you. She has nightmares, flashbacks, anything and everything you’d expect. The Academy was trying to turn her into a weapon for the Alliance, and they did it through a combination of mental manipulation, both conscious (via sessions with a ‘therapist’) and subconscious (monitoring and implanting their patterns while she slept, possibly also sensory deprivation), brain surgery, etc. Unfortunately, there isn’t much canon regarding what, exactly, they did to their students there. (She’s understandably not the biggest fan of doctors/therapists now, but luckily she can generally tell if the one she’s talking to is secretly a sociopath, so that’s all right then.)

The doctors at the Academy also removed her amygdale, which left her completely unable to control her emotions. (Presumably it was to heighten her natural psychic ability.) Understandably, this also extends to a certain lack of impulse control in other areas. Show her an ugly truth, and she’ll tell all within earshot about it, regardless of the consequences, because it’s there and it has to be known. If she’s pissed off at someone, she’ll show it – see River cutting a ~~bitch~~ Jayne as an example. She didn’t like what he was saying/doing, she sliced him with a knife, problem solved.

Underneath all the psychosis, though, River’s really just very young. She was fourteen when she was first admitted to the Academy, and only sixteen or so when Simon broke her out. Outside of the Academy’s influence, she feels like a real girl again, not just a mass of tissue and shattered psyche for people to implant their thoughts into. She likes to play and draw and dance and be a brat with her older brother and friends. She especially loves to dance, and has since a young age.

She’s also a genius. Like, really really really. She’s so far taken to every field of knowledge thrown at her like the proverbial duck to water, to mix metaphors shamelessly. Simon admitted she could be a brat about being smarter than everyone (let’s be honest, what little sister wouldn’t take advantage of knowing more than her big brother?), but she’s not particularly spoiled or mean about it. She’ll get a little impatient with people who don’t catch on to things as quickly as she can (let’s be honest, that’s pretty much everyone she’s come in contact with so far), which is… especially interesting since now she often doesn’t make sense even when talking about a subject as mundane as, say, strawberries. Mmm, strawberries.

Other Skills/Abilities: You do not want to come up against River in a fight. Ever. She’s canonically taken out the majority of a bar in a fight, along with a mob of crazed, aggressive human hybrids. In one episode, she took a gun, glanced at her targets for about a second, then turned her face away so she couldn’t see and shot them all point-blank. She’s also capable of wacky gymnastic feats like balancing on a pair of railings and holding herself in place on the ceiling by pressing her legs against the walls.

And did I mention she’s psychic? The kind where you have no control over what you pick up. Bits of people’s thoughts, emotions, memories, whatever. She doesn’t even seem to have to be picking them up from a live person (such as from the ship taken over by Reavers, and the former inhabitants of Miranda). At times, she even seems clairvoyant, though until such time as I am joss’d, I tend to assume she’s just hyperaware of what’s going on around her, and can make the probability calculations necessary.

Other Weaknesses: I’m not actually certain whether to call this a strength or a weakness – it’s a little of both – but there are certain triggers the Academy planted in her brain. So far, we’ve seen a trigger placed in a commercial that caused her to fight everything in sight, regardless of who or what. There’s also a phrase that triggers immediate unconsciousness.

Also, despite the fact that River is capable of wiping the floor with most sentient life doesn’t mean she can. Thanks to her zero emotional control, she’s often overcome by whatever she’s feeling to a crippling degree. And there’s the obvious ‘if you do this to a human, they will break/die/whatever’.

History: River was born the youngest child of wealthy Gabriel and Regan Tam, on the planet of Osiris. She grew up in an upper-class, sterile, technologically advanced environment where she was doted on by her family and given everything feasible for her growth, both mental and physical. The finest teachers, the finest material, only the finest for her. Then she was approached by a government-run Academy that offered to maximize her potential through an educational program better suited to her needs. Her parents consented to her moving to the Academy, despite her only being fourteen at the time.

And they proceeded to turn her into a weapon. River was kept in isolation from her family and resorted to writing coded letters to her brother begging him to get her out. It took him two years and estrangement from his parents to rescue her (canon has contradictory explanations of how, exactly, it happened, so who even knows). He smuggled her onto a Firefly-class smuggler’s ship called Serenity. Luckily for them, they fell in with Independents (colloquially known as Browncoats), a faction group that opposed the Alliance’s control over the civilized/borderline worlds. The Captain, Malcolm Reynolds, and first officer Zoe had no love for the Alliance, and allowed them to stay on, rather than turn them in or sell them back to the Alliance.

Since then, she and her brother occupied their time getting her better and fitting into the crew, the latter coming easier than the former. In addition to getting kidnapped by crazy hillfolk who needed a doctor, and then decided River was a witch and needed KILL IT WITH FIRE, Simon hired the crew to sneak them into a hospital so he could get a brain scan of her head. Which revealed that her amygdale was gone, hurrah. Since then, he’s had her on anti-psychotics/whatever meds he deemed right for her situation, and she’s… marginally more sane..

Canon Point: Betwixt and between Heart of Gold and Objects in Space.

Reality Description: You can’t stop her cause she’s sailing on a boat!

…Ahem. Yes. River lives during an unspecified future year when Earth is abandoned and the whole of the human race is all spread out over the galaxy. It is, ironically, pretty much cowboys in space – with the civilized Alliance controlling the most technologically advanced planets, and everyone else on the outer fringes, making do with a combination of a few futuristic technologies and a lot of old-school getting their hands dirty. The culture is a mix of American and China, the two most dominant cultures by the time the human race started branching out. There isn’t any aliens, time travel, or magic (that we know of). (Also, given that she’s really crazy her reality may be less than stable.) (Just sayin’.)

There’s also a constant tension between the Alliance and the Browncoats – the meddlers and the people who don’t want to be meddled with (usually people who live on the border worlds, the ones that don’t receive as much technological/general support). When River was a child, they waged a war against each other, which the Browncoats lost. Understandably, people are bitter, and this provides a lot of Serenity’s work: smuggling supplies/medicines/livestock to borderline planets.

River’s immediate surroundings usually consist of a Firefly-class ship, so basically a tiny boat which happens to float in space.

☆ Threadhopping with this character - yes/no/maybe so?: Sure! The more, the merrier and all that. Just use your judgment re: whether or not what’s going on is something you should be barging in on.

☆ Backtagging with this character - yes/no/maybe so?: I live in the Happy Land of Tagging Whenever, where all the people are joyous and their heads end in an angle– wait, no, that’s The Point.

☆ Hugging this character?: D’awwwww. Go for it. Depending on how she’s doing at the moment, she might freak, but whatever. SHE NEEDS HUGGING.

☆ Giving this character a kiss?: …Well, she’s sixteen. All things considered, it would probably be the least skeevy if you aim for her cheek or something.

☆ Punching this character: Hey, if you want to be the douche who goes around punching 90-pound girls, who am I to stop you? All I ask is that, unless it was arranged before, you at least leave whether or not the punch lands up to me. River can be very good at defending herself (see: SPACE NINJA).

☆ Is there anything ought not be mentioned near this character?: Don’t say eta kooram nah smech (Russian, slang term for approx: that's ridiculous). At least, not without clearing it with me first, because that’s the phrase that will make her fall asleep automatically. Incidentally, I have no idea who picked that for River's trigger phrase. Possibly someone realized how weird having a 16-year-old weapon/assassin is.

ANYWAY. Other things that are not banned, but that you should be aware are very touchy subjects: surgery, mental illness, gifted programs, and… a bunch of other things. You’ll figure it out.

☆ Is there anything you need us to know about interacting with this character? Special physical features, fighting abilities, STUFF: See her application. And the permission meme that doesn’t exist quite yet. SHE WILL READ YOUR MIIIIIND~

☆ Anything else, please mention here: I don’t actually speak Chinese, so if you do and you notice something funky, please to be pointing and laughing at the stupid American. I use a combination of this, this, and this site. Alternatively, ping me for the translations.