‏‏‎this is ultimately a stopgap and will be updated yet

[beagoodgirl]

abilities:

Riley is what is known in setting as a Tinker, someone who can create wondrously and impossibly advanced technology. She, in particular, is widely regarded as one of the best in the world, and definitely the best one who specializes in biology, or “wet” tinkering. The breadth and depth of her specialty is extremely vast, being able to create prions that induce agnosia, keep people alive for multiple hours while they’re being tortured to death using nothing other than household supplies, replacing so much of her own body with prosthetic enhancements as to survive being horizontally bisected, engineering plagues so deadly that she was generally considered one of the greatest threats to humanity, alter another person’s powers via neurosurgery, fuse two people into one abomination, and more. If it’s something to do with the biological, anatomical, or physiological sciences, she can probably do it.

She’s also specifically notable for being adept at integrating the works of other Tinkers into her own, though the less “wet” it is, the more difficult it becomes. Generally, the further what she’s trying to do strays from the idea of “biotech,” particularly surgeries, the more difficult it becomes, swiftly becoming complete inability for entirely “dry” projects. It’s genuinely easier for her to jury-rig an eyeball into functioning as a webcam than to just make a webcam.

The main weaknesses are that without any enhancements, she’s just a notably shrimpy 14 year old girl, the typical Tinker issue of needing time to snowball (or, build the tools to build the tools), and that her more complicated and impressive creations (such as fusing two people) require regular maintenance or they quickly degrade, which serves to limit how many big projects she can have active at once due to time constraints.

personality:

Riley is chiefly defined by her drive to “be a good girl” and her 8 years as, arguably, the greatest publically known threat to the existence of the human race.

From the latter, we get the meat of her personality. Ever since she dropped the up-beat act, Riley has become an outwardly very blunt and sarcastic person, who is extremely open about her opinions and acts with very little in the way of shame or hesitance. She's overall prone to irreverent casualness in most interactions, that can very wildly swing into an overbearing inquisitiveness if something actually sparks her interest. Fundamentally, this tactlessness comes from the fact that her ability to empathize with others is extremely limited and that her social skills are severely underdeveloped, unless you count “horrific super torture” (something she’s very good at) as a social skill. Given that she’s trying not to use that one, this leaves her social toolkit as mostly compromised of “thoughtless honesty,” “sardonic mockery,” “bizarre oversharing,” and “obvious deflection via shallow humor.”

From the former, we get her motivations for her actions. Riley was, and on some level still is, obsessed with fitting the mold of the ideal daughter and younger sister. She’s a very passive person, finding it easier to follow someone that she’s internally designated as a source of familial affection and validation, having a particular desire for sorority. The primary cause of her decision to try and change is because of a changing understanding in what “being a good girl” entails rather than dropping the framing, and a disillusionment with her previous source of familial belonging.

These two aspects are in deep tension with one another. The knowledge that she should feel remorse for what she did presses against the fact that she barely has even a drop; the frustration of how people don’t trust or let her help to the full extent of her ability clashes with the understanding that she is getting a second chance so lenient it’s frankly ridiculous; her attempts to be normal sabotaged by the fact that she’s only really comfortable around other “artists” and monsters, former or otherwise.

Riley is keenly aware of this tension, of how so much of who she is was the design of malicious actors, but has no idea how to resolve it beyond simply attempting to power through it and relying on the few friends she has as external checks on her impulses. Primarily, she relies on one Amy Dallon, who just so happens to also be her currently designated source of familial validation and belonging.