CaliforniaNightmares:Riri
Played by TigerBunnyMark
Riri is a slightly round-faced, soft-featured Asian-American girl with her black hair in a single braid. She wears round glasses, and self-consciously “little-girly” dresses (procured for her by Prof Daulare). She is probably around 15, but looks younger.
If you sit down with her for a while, and ask her sideways, while she’s on another topic, Riri will tell you that her name is Marie Chu. But she’s been Riri her whole life, and that’s what everyone still calls her. Including her.
When she’s nervous – which is most of the time when she’s with more than 1 person, or people she hasn’t become very comfortable with – Riri dissociates a bit. Speaking in the third person is the most obvious sign of this, but she also tends to lose most of her affect. People who haven’t gotten to know her think she’s cold, shy, and emotionless. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Riri is a prodigy. Brilliant, able to absorb massive amounts of information, insatiably curious, and endlessly creative. But she’s also badly broken. Something awful must have happened to her.
She turned up in the Library one day 3 years ago. It took Prof Daulare weeks to coax her out of hiding enough to give her some fresh food and clean clothes, and weeks more before she would talk to him. When she finally opened up, though, he was amazed.
Riri *understood* the aliens. She had notebooks full of scrawled observations, speculation, even experiments. Some she wouldn’t show him. This little girl had spent almost every waking moment since Bliss Day obsessively learning about the Bliss and the monsters. How had she survived?
She doesn’t talk about it. Best as the Prof can piece together, she had an older companion for most of the time before she came to the Library who helped protect her and find her supplies, and she lived in a building that was fairly secure and had a generator for power. It seems likely that her companion’s death (or Bliss? She’s not clear about that) was the catalyst for her giving up her direct research and coming to the Library.
It’s her work that led to the development of the ANIMa. The Prof and others supplied the technological know-how, but Riri is the one who purified the Interface Virus from the “brains” of the monster. She says they’re not the real aliens – just sort of a living machine that the aliens control through the dream. According to Riri, the monsters might have already been here down deep in the ocean for a long time, and the aliens are just using them somehow, changing them and making them into half-machine horrors.
Riri hardly ever leaves the Library. She is very lonely, but she is also terrified of being around other people, for reasons that she can’t explain. She also suffers an irrational fear of open spaces and particularly the open sky.
Relationships
Brian Robeson 2/2/0 - "My most successful Pilot so far, but now that we understand more about the Interface Virus, I worry about his isolation from others."
Raymond Mitsuda 2/1/0 - "Be careful, be careful. He has to stay away from Riri. Riri might tell him things."
Katie Dalton 2/4/0 - "Riri has a friend. Poor Riri. Poor friend. Innocent girls do terrible things. I need her to do terrible things. So Riri's friend isn't really Riri's friend."
Stephen Daulare (undefined) - "Riri misses Papa. Stephen isn't Daddy, but he helped me - he believed what I found out - and he doesn't ask questions. And Riri misses Papa so much."
