River Song

[River Song]

River Song

“Everybody knows that everybody dies, but nobody knows it like the Doctor.”

Basic Info!

Full Name: Melody Pond
Aliases: River Song, Melody Malone, Child of the TARDIS
Age: Unknown (most likely 30's)
Occupation: Archaeologist
Current Residence: Traveler
Species: Human with Time Lord Characteristics
Face Claim: Alex Kingston

Appearance:

Spoiler:

Personality: River was frisky and cheeky like her mother, Amy. Like her father, Rory, she was stubborn, responsible and fiercely compassionate. She enjoyed showing off for the Doctor. She teased him and liked using the word "spoilers" whenever the subject turned to the Doctor's future. This began when the Doctor assigned her to document their adventures in the TARDIS diary. She adopted the word from the Doctor, who had picked it up from River's later self, creating a stable time loop.

River was very confident in her abilities and she was very hard to intimidate, showing no fear when faced with the Weeping Angels, the Silence or the Vashta Nerada. She was also very good at hiding her emotions, and didn't like to show weakness. She was devastated when her parents were stolen by a Weeping Angel but unlike the Doctor she encouraged Amy to go to be with Rory and didn't break down after the Angel transported Amy away, showing a far greater level of self control than her husband.

River was deeply in love with the Doctor, even though she had been raised to kill him. She teased Madame Kovarian about the mistake she made by kidnapping her since Kovarian was partially responsible for her falling in love with the Doctor in the first place. In her younger years, River was rather selfish since she was willing to sacrifice the entire Universe in order to protect the Doctor. However, as she matured she grew into a much more selfless person and showed a willingness to sacrifice herself, eventually giving her life to save the Tenth Doctor.

River appeared to have a certain amount of rivalry against Clara Oswald. When River last met the Doctor, she implored him to find a new companion. However, she was visibly displeased when Clara eagerly confirmed herself as the Doctor's "companion". However, she also was willing to put that aside to guide and help Clara when The Doctor went to the Field of Trenzalore, even going as far as revealing some secrets of how she came to be.

I would like to add: River became an echo after the library when she had saved the Tenth Doctor, but there were ways found to bring her back to life. When she had returned, she had learned more and more about the Doctor and his adventures and had eventually learned to let go.

History and Family

Parents: Amelia Pond and Rory Williams
Siblings: n/a
Important Figures: The Doctor
Home Town/Planet: Earth
History: Despite her parents being married, Melody's mother Amy insisted using her maiden surname, Pond, for Melody. Amy opined that "Melody Williams" was a name of a geography teacher, whereas "Melody Pond" evoked a superhero. Amy told the infant Melody that she would never be alone, that her father was coming for them and not even an army could stop him. The centuries old Last Centurion would never let them down.

Within a month, Melody was replaced with a ganger and taken by Madame Kovarian to the 20th century to be reared to kill the Doctor. She was chosen for this task because of her conception in the Time Vortex. This gave her the potential for great strength and regeneration, to pilot the TARDIS and understand complex principles of time and space.

It was through her Ganger avatar that Melody first met her father and the Eleventh Doctor. Melody's connection to her ganger was severed, and her ganger thus liquefied, while her father and others fought to save her from the Headless Monks.

Melody was trained by the Silence to kill the Doctor; she later claimed this part of her life was "a bit of a jumble" to remember due to their memory-erasing powers. As a little girl, she ended up in an orphanage in 1969 Florida, under heavy security.  Melody was forced into an Apollo astronaut suit that the Silence upgraded with alien technology. The suit could move autonomously and would insert Melody into itself both for control and to provide sustenance. The suit's artificial intelligence and communication faculties automatically put the frightened Melody in contact with the highest authority it could find: President Richard Nixon, at whatever telephone was closest to him at a given moment. Melody repeatedly rang Nixon, asking for help and describing the "spaceman" (the suit) going to "eat" her (autonomously place her within itself), but not knowing what help she needed or where precisely she was.

These telephone calls led to her first physical meeting with the Eleventh Doctor, and the earliest contact with him which she would presumably remember. From his and her parents' perspective, however, they had yet to meet via her infant Flesh ganger on Demon's Run. She approached the Doctor whilst in the space suit, prompting her mother to shoot at her in fear of the Doctor's impending death; the suit's visor was damaged, but Melody was unharmed.

She returned to Graystark three months later, to discover her mother in her room. Melody begged her for help, but Amy was confused because of a picture of herself with Melody as an infant. With the arrival of the Silence, Melody forced her way out of the suit and fled; she lingered long enough to see the Doctor once more.

During the next six months, she made her way to New York City. She developed a terminal illness but knew she could "fix it" by regenerating. She was in an alley when she finally succumbed to her ailment in January 1970, and regenerated.

By the 1990s, she was a child in Leadworth, still using the name Melody, going by Mels for short. Melody's regeneration into Mels left her a toddler in the middle of New York. Mels grew up a close childhood friend of her parents, who had no idea she was their daughter. She was often in trouble, with outbursts of reckless criminal behaviour into her adolescence.

Mels held the school record for confiscated property. She once had Amy and Rory cause a distraction so she could sneak her confiscated items out of the teachers' supply closet and then escaped over the roof and through the window of the teachers' loo.

Ironically, Amy largely reared Mels without knowing she was doing so. Amelia would wait for Mels outside of the headmistress' office and lecture her after these incidents much in the way a mother customarily would. Mels was obsessed over Amelia's "Raggedy Doctor", dreamt of marrying him and claimed in school that historical disasters were his fault because he did not intervene; all of these negative views of the Doctor came from her conditioning by the Silence. All the while, she knew Amy and Rory were her parents and that she intended to kill the Doctor. Mels was also involved in stealing cars and buses.

Mels eventually helped Amy see that Rory loved her after she spent an entire decade thinking he was gay; she thus ensured her own existence. By missing her best mates'/parents' wedding on 26 June 2010, explaining later "I don't do weddings", Mels delayed her first meeting with the Doctor by more than a year while also avoiding interaction with a future version of herself.

Autumn 2011, Melody stole a car (again) and followed her parents to the cornfield, where the Doctor had arrived, having got their "message". Introducing herself, Melody held the Doctor at gunpoint to get away from the police. Demanding to be taken to kill Hitler, Melody shot the TARDIS, causing it to crash into Hitler's office in 1938, inadvertently saving him from the Teselecta. She was then accidently hit by a stray bullet Hitler fired at the Teselecta, forcing her to regenerate; her new form was recognised as River Song by the Doctor and her parents. As programmed, River killed the Doctor, using a lipstick containing an incurable poison. Cheerily calling herself a psychopath, Melody ran amok in Berlin, stealing clothes from patrons at a posh restaurant.

The Teselecta (which had taken her parents on board) decided to punish her next, but the Doctor stopped them from harming her. When her parents were in danger of being killed by its antibodies, Melody was suprised to see the Doctor ignore his pain for the sake of saving them. She also became jealous of the "River Song" he kept mentioning, demanding to know who she is. However, the Doctor had her pilot the TARDIS (which taught her how) to save Amy and Rory. Melody then agreed to give a message to River Song from the dying Doctor, and he whispered it in her ear. Asking who River was, Amy had the Teselecta turn into Melody's new incarnation. Melody realised that she was the person the Doctor kept calling for help. Amy asked Melody what the Doctor whispered in her ear. Instead of answering that question, Melody asked her parents if the Doctor was "worth it." Upon being told "yes," Melody reawakened the Doctor and kissed him, using all her remaining regenerations to bring him back to life. She passed out in the process.

The Doctor took River to the "best hospital in the universe" to recover. Knowing of her future as an on-and-off companion, he left a TARDIS-shaped diary as a gift, hoping to avoid "spoilers", foreknowledge that might wreck the universe. After recuperating, River found the clothes her parents left for her; she believed Amy bought them as there were too many short skirts.

Hoping to find the Doctor once again, River entered the Luna University in 5123. When asked why she wished to study archaeology, River said she was "looking for a good man". Her studies would lead to her knowing some of the Doctor's locations in the past. However, any kind of recorded mention of him would later be erased by the Doctor himself, leading to a paradox.

The day River received her doctorate, Kovarian appeared with agents of the Church and the Silence. They seized her, forced her into a modified astronaut suit, took her to Utah on 22 April 2011 and submerged her in Lake Silencio to await the Doctor.

When the time came to kill him, River drained her weapon pack to defy a fixed point in time. Time shredded into a reality where all history happened at once. She initially refused to rectify her error. River confessed to Kovarian that she had fallen in love with the Doctor. She also confessed this to the Doctor himself. At the top of the Great Pyramid with the Doctor, Amy and Rory, River said to the Doctor that she cannot let him die and it will be her who will suffer the most if she kills him. After marrying the Doctor and sharing a kiss, she went through with his apparent murder to restore the timeline, knowing he was really safe inside the Teselecta.

River was sentenced to twelve thousand consecutive life sentences in the Stormcage Containment Facility in the 52nd century for the Doctor's murder. She served the sentence to make the Silence believe him dead, but starting with her first night, often escaped to spend time with her husband, then returned to her cell. (TV: First Night) River would also escape from Stormcage on her own using her Vortex manipulator. During one such adventure, five years later her imprisonment, she encountered several Sontarans who shot at and chased her halfway across the galaxy after she asked them if they were on a "hen night." She escaped into the TARDIS where the Doctor returned her to Stormcage via her vortex manipulator to prevent her from interacting with her past self and her future self.

Minutes after Kovarian had fled with her first incarnation at the end of the Battle of Demon's Run, River appeared, announcing her presence with a prompt "Well soldier, how goes the day?" and revealed her identity, first to the Doctor and then to her parents.

On receiving an invitation from the Doctor, River escaped from Stormcage to meet Amy, Rory and him in Utah in America on 22 April 2011. The Doctor, inside a Teselecta double of himself, took them on a picnic where the Teselecta was shot by River's younger self. Amy, Rory and River went to a cafe to find a version of the Eleventh Doctor two hundred years younger than the one inside the Teselecta.

River secretly revisited her childhood when she accompanied her parents, the Eleventh Doctor, and Canton Delaware to Florida on 8 April 1969 to find the little girl who kept ringing Richard Nixon. Adhering to the Doctor's rule against "spoilers" which could collapse time, she feigned ignorance of her childhood self's identity. The only information she gave the Doctor about her old spacesuit was that which she could have reasonably determined by her inspection of it and she offered Amy and Canton no forewarning about what they would find in her old orphanage. Any knowledge she may have retained about the Silence she kept to herself.

River, Amy, Rory, Canton, and the Doctor split up to investigate the Silence over the next three months. By July, River was in New York City. She showed her reliance upon and faith in the Doctor and his TARDIS being in the right place and time to rescue her as she dove backwards out of the 50th floor of a building and into the TARDIS' swimming pool. She helped the Doctor defeat the Silence by using their brainwashing of humanity against them, while making sure she did not meet her first incarnation. River killed all of the Silence who were holding her mother hostage. At her request, the Doctor returned her to Stormcage, where she kissed him. He was shocked and she realised that from his perspective, it was their first kiss.

In 5145, the TARDIS rerouted a phone call for the Doctor from Winston Churchill to River. She escaped to warn the Doctor of a prophecy of the TARDIS exploding. She blackmailed a Time Agent's vortex manipulator off Dorium Maldovar and stole a painting from Liz Ten showing the TARDIS exploding and space-time coordinates. She graffitied a diamond cliff at the dawn of time with the co-ordinates, then travelled to England in 102 AD to meet the Eleventh Doctor and Amy.

The Pandorica lay under Stonehenge, transmitting a signal to summon an alliance of the Doctor's enemies. The Doctor got them to back off and sent River to fetch the TARDIS. Instead, it took her to Amy's house on 26 June 2010. When River told him the date, the Doctor realised the TARDIS was about to explode and told her to escape. Unable to leave, she was trapped in a time loop of the first moments of the explosion. The Doctor rescued her in 1996, told her his plan to use the Pandorica's restoration field to reverse the Total Event Collapse of the universe and was shot by a stone Dalek. River told the Dalek to look in its data banks for her, taunted it into begging for mercy, then killed it.

After the Doctor had restored the universe by erasing himself, River left her now blank diary at her parents' wedding so Amy could remember him back into existence. After a brief conversation about her marital status and identity, River told the Doctor he was "going to find out very soon now and I'm sorry, because that's when everything changes", and left him wondering.

In 5145, River escaped from her cell in the Stormcage Containment Facility using her hallucinogenic lipstick, after receiving a phone call saying that the Doctor needed her help. She located her vortex manipulator and used it to travel to London in 2012 where she rescued her stranded husband.
She helped the Doctor fight off Cybermen, Daleks, Silents, and Silurians in different eras of London; each had a piece of the fabeled Eternity Clock to fuel their plans against humanity. She and the Doctor collected the pieces and brought them back to the TARDIS, which was at the heart of a temporal storm being caused by the Eternity Clock pieces trying to pull themselves together.

River discovered, much to her shock, that there was an entry about the clock in her diary that she hadn't written; the Doctor explained that it was due to the temporal anomalies the clock was causing to time. No sooner had this been explained, the clock began tracking all fixed points in time and began attempting to rewrite them. Adding to the insanity, the TARDIS was towed away with them inside for the ride.

River was put in Father Octavian's custody in the 51st century for a mission to earn her pardon. She infiltrated the Galaxy class Byzantium to find its Home Box, into which she carved "Hello Sweetie" in Old High Gallifreyan and her temporal coordinates. This attracted the Doctor's attention twelve thousand years later, leading Amy (who at this point in time, had not met River before) and the Doctor to her and Alfava Metraxis. They defeated an army of Weeping Angels who had awakened in the planet's Maze of the Dead.

Following this adventure, she visited Amy and Rory after the Doctor's "death" and exposed some of the truth behind her many lies to her parents. River was later pardoned and released from the Stormcage Containment Facility after it was discovered that there was no evidence of the man she had murdered having ever existed. This was due to the Doctor erasing himself from all databases as part of his return to the shadows. As a result of this, she returned to Archaeology and became a professor.

River arrived in 1938 New York City via her vortex manipulator and set up the Angel Detective Agency where she was the sole employee, investigating the Weeping Angels' invasion of New York. During this time she went by the alias "Melody Malone." She was there for at least a month before a man named Rock Railton hired her to investigate what he feared to be a murder plot against him involving "the kiss of an angel." The following day, while attending a Starlight Studios party, she encountered an old man claiming to be Rock Railton, but believed him to a bum. When she encountered the man she recognised as Rock, he had no memory of their meeting in her office the previous day.
After dealing with two thugs that were hired to kill her, River returned to her office only to receive a call from head of Starlight Studios, Max Kliener. She agreed to meet him at his studio the next afternoon, where she was reintroduced to Rock, who claimed to remember their prior meeting. However, River knew he was lying when she asked about giving him coffee and he pretended to remember this although it never happened. She also noted that Giddy Semestre, Rock's co-star, also did not remember meeting her the day before at the party.

Max then led River down a block from the main studio and revealed to her a room full of giant bell jars filled with what appeared to be clones of Rock Railton, Giddy Semestre, and of Max's bodyguard, Hank Sissy. Max explained that they were not clones so much as everyday people who had had their flesh redistributed in their bodies to make them look identical to their template bodies. To do this, he had used "the kiss of an angel." The duplicates did not live very long, however, and were in fact growing old and dying out faster and faster because the Weeping Angel he was using to create his duplicates was growing stronger and therefore absorbing more and more of the victims' energy. Max planned to transform River into a copy of Giddy Semestre, but River kissed him using her hallucinogenic lipstick and managed to escape by killing the Hank copies and pushing Max into the arms of his Weeping Angel, who kissed him and turned him to dust.

As River was reversing the process to turn the other transformed victims back into themselves and escort them to safety, she was unaware that the Weeping Angel was being stolen from behind the curtain it was sitting behind via an escape hole that had been cut into the wall. She returned in time to see a van speeding off, presumably with the Angel inside.

After River's run-in with Max Kliener and his Angel, River met her husband in Manhattan, along with her parents. Rory was sent back in time to 1938 New York City by one of the Angels and met River. Amy and the Doctor had difficulty following him since all the time energy the Angels had consumed made time travel difficult. With the help of a Chinese vase as "landing lights", they managed to get through but found River trapped in the grip of one of the Angels; she had to break her wrist to escape and the Doctor used up some of his regeneration energy to fix it. Rory was locked in a cellar with a group of baby Weeping Angels but instead of sending him back in time, they just sent him to Winter Quay. When River, Amy and the Doctor found Rory, they also found an older version of him, dying in a bed. After that they heard loud thumps, made by the Statue of Liberty, which had become a Weeping Angel.
With the Angels closing in, River, her husband and her parents were forced to flee towards the roof and got separated on the way up. The Statue of Liberty was waiting for them and Rory and Amy decided to sacrifice themselves to create a paradox which would poison the Angels food source and kill them. River and the Doctor watched in horror as Amy and Rory threw themselves off the roof, and the paradox killed all the Angels except one, who somehow managed to survive.

The group found themselves in a graveyard that had a gravestone with Rory's name on it. As they were preparing to leave, a surviving Weeping Angel ambushed them and sent Rory back in time. Because of the paradox, and all the poisoned time energy, the Doctor couldn't take the TARDIS to find him. Amy decided to allow the Angel to touch her so that she could be with Rory. After a tearful goodbye to River and the Doctor, Amy turned away from the Angel and allowed it to touch her so that she could live with Rory for the rest of her life.

The devastated Doctor asked River to travel with him. River said she would go with him anywhere, but "not all the time", as there was "only room for one psychopath" on the TARDIS. Under the name "Melody Malone", River went upstairs to write the book that led the Doctor to 1930s New York and said that she would get Amy to write the afterword when she sent it to her for publishing, in hopes that the Doctor would listen to Amy.

She figures out a way to help Amy and Rory come back to the present time, but it would cost them to be separated for  some time before the Doctor would find them. She could not tell the Doctor about this, she could only hope that he would find them.

The Doctor took River to Darillium to see the Singing Towers. Along the way, she met an earlier version of the Doctor and just missed two earlier versions of herself; apparently, the Doctor had been "promising for ages". She later said he had wept as he said goodbye. He knew, although she did not, that her death was imminent. He gave her an upgraded version of his sonic screwdriver.

In the 51st century, River was hired by Strackman Lux for an expedition to the Library to learn what had happened there a hundred years earlier. A cryptic message had been sent: "4022 saved. No survivors." Expecting trouble, she contacted the Doctor by psychic paper. The version of the Doctor who turned up, then in his tenth incarnation, had not yet met her. Bewildered, he agreed to help River's team.
River still had her battered diary of her life with the Doctor. She tried to use it to find the Doctor's place in his timeline, but realised he was a far younger version who neither knew nor trusted her.

As the threat of the Vashta Nerada worsened, River knew she must prove she was someone he would come to trust completely. With profuse apologies, she whispered his true name into his ear. The Doctor was stunned and River had won his trust.
Time was running out. The Doctor was about to sacrifice himself to rescue Donna and more than four thousand others trapped in the Library datacore. River knocked him out, handcuffed him and took his place. She pleaded with him to not change their history, not a moment of what had or would come for them. She said he had always known this was coming. The Doctor began to babble questions. River smiled, said, "Spoilers" and was killed as the countdown reached zero.

The Tenth Doctor later remembered her death when Davros asked him how many people had died in his name.

The Doctor reasoned his future self had given River his sonic screwdriver for a purpose. Inside it was a "neural relay" data chip holding her data ghost. The Doctor saved River by uploading her into the virtual world in the Library's data core, CAL. CAL had also saved the data ghosts of her archaeological team, giving her company in the virtual world. River would take care of her two virtual children and Charlotte (the girl wired into the mainframe) in the virtual world, reading out her diary of her many adventures with the Doctor and how sometimes "everybody lives" when the Doctor comes to call.

After River's death, she, Vastra, Jenny, Strax and Clara were brought into a dream-induced "conference call". There, she learnt that the murderer, Clarence DeMarco, had said "The Doctor has a secret, you know. He has one he will take to the grave. And it is discovered." and showed Vastra the co-ordinates to where the Doctor's tomb was. The Great Intelligence, having kidnapped Vastra, Jenny and Strax, told Clara to take the Doctor to Trenzalore, the place of the Doctor's death, if the others wished to be saved. River kept in contact with Clara through keeping the link open, though only Clara, and unknown to River, the Doctor, could see and hear her.
When Clara and the Doctor arrived at a gravestone bearing River's name in Trenzalore, Clara again saw the echo of River, which guided her. She also explained to Clara about her death and what the Doctor did for her, and later saved the Doctor's friends by giving in to the Great Intelligence's demands and opening the Doctor's tomb by saying his name.

After Clara entered the Doctor's time stream, River tried to stop him from following her, even though she believed that he could not see her. When she went to slap him however, the Doctor caught her hand and explained that he was able to see her all along, and they shared a kiss. River requested that the Doctor say goodbye to her but he didn't know how, so she said the only goodbye she would accept was one where he would see her later. Right after he granted her request, she revealed that she was mentally linked to Clara, and would not still exist if Clara had died. When he asked how, she said, "Spoilers!" and her last words to him in this encounter were, "Goodbye Sweetie."

I would like to add: When visiting the library, a group of close companions to River had found her echoed interface within the savings of the library, to which they had decided to download and revive her with. They were able to save her body, restoring her, and giving her back all her memories so that she could then be alive and well once more. Although she had realized that the Doctor had been given time to move on from her, she had decided it would be best to continue her studies as an archaeologist and to leave the travels behind her. She had to move on from the Doctor.

You, the player!

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Roleplay Sample: Although it wasn't something River was accustomed to, the woman found herself within a Victorian dinner party, having to show manners and be as tasteful as possible, despite the fact that everything about this place seemed rather strange and different. She knew that there was something terribly wrong, and it was only a matter of time before it would show itself. Still, she had to hold her tongue and keep her gun locked away before she could say or do anything.

Sipping at her wine as she sat at a table, she watched around the ballroom, looking to the servants who seemed far too pleased with themselves to be low-paid management. That was when the lights began to flicker, and a smile curled on River's face. "Well, it was nice to catch up with everyone, but I really must be off," she spoke as she stood up, pulling her gun out and shooting the chandelier. It dropped to the ground, shattering as people began to scream and scatter from the area.

"Once a zygon, always a zygon," she laughed lightly as she approached the host of the party, who was standing quite still and calmly. "Now then, where exactly is the real Madrigal Marigold?"

[The Pariah]

Very well done! I love the stuff you added to. Great explanation as to why she is still alive!

Approved, m'dear!