#// middle name can/might change i just saw rory’s was harleen and the first thing i thought was batman villains as a theme lmao

[howlingwind]

RIVER SELINA MARSHALL who strongly resembles OLIVIA HOLT, has been spotted in Pandæmonium. The CISFEMALE is a EIGHTEEN year old INHUMAN, and has been in Pandæmonium for TWO WEEKS. I hear they’re KIND & DARING and HEADSTRONG & MOODY. If you’re lucky you may catch them working at PHANTOM PARK as a GAME HOSTESS or at NYU as a STUDENT. 

younger sister to rory & reese marshall. middle child of the six total siblings.

lovingly referred to as the moody middle marshall.

absolutely adores her older siblings, roreo & reese’s pieces, annoying big sis to the “lil rye’s” as she calls them.

she’s an inhuman with empathic (emotional) powers and atmoskinesis (steam manipulation). was never in very good control of them in the first place but the big life change of moving to pandemonium as made them even more out of control.

developed her powers at the same time as reese & rory despite being states apart. (more on this below)

loves saunas, okay? loves em. she wishes she could spend her whole life in the sauna.

also fond of partying, video games, and comic books. when she was little, river used to always sneak and read reese’s comics when he was done with them, but she’d deny ever having touched them. she’d also pester rory to play video games with her practically nonstop. 

she discovered her love for partying in high school after reese and rory had already graduated and left. now she was the oldest sibling in the house but the lil rye’s were much closer with each other than her, so she had this sort of lonesome independence thing going on that made her seek out ways to not feel so alone. she ended up always attending the parties the richer, more popular kids threw, and it was one of the few times she’d really let her hair down. mostly thanks to an abundance of weed, booze, and the occasional drop of acid. while she’s definitely beginning to settle down a bit, at the time the partying did help her cope with the loneliness and get through the difficulties of managing her new powers.

freshman at nyu, majoring in psychology, minoring in creative writing.

game hostess at phantom park because what’s a better job for an empath than being near the most excited, happy little kids ever, and giving them prizes for winning at a game and making them feel even more over the moon?? she practically gets high on happiness the whole time she’s at work lol

keeps a diary, a dream journal, and a separate journal dedicated to her writing.

pretty new to her powers, so even the stuff she’s “good” at, she’s not really good at. (aka if she had any decent control over this shit she’d be way op so she’s gotta be clueless)

empathy:

heightened emotions — experiences every emotion far more intensely than most people.

emotion detection — can sense or interpret a person’s emotions, and experience them herself. best controlled and most precise through touching another person, although river can also get a more general sense of a person’s emotions by just being in their general vicinity.

emotion projection — river can make a person feel what she’s feeling. with more experience, she would even be able to project specific emotions that she’s not feeling at the time. however, she’s not very skilled at this technique and will often fail if she tries.

empathic echoes — can send or receive glimpses or flashes of mental imagery associated with a memory or past event.

empathic inundation — overwhelms a target with a flood of emotion that can render them unconscious or even cause aneurysms depending on the strength/severity. river has not experimented with this yet. 

lie detection — lying causes slight changes in emotion, and river can pick up on this if she’s focused. however, she’s inexperienced at this, and the more comfortable and experienced the person is at lying, the more likely it is that the lie will go undetected by her.

clairvoyant empathy — after forming a strong emotional bond with someone, river is able to innately sense their emotion, location, and sense whether or not they’re in danger, even across great distances. she has a bond like this with each of her siblings, and it’s that bond that allowed her to sense what was happening to rory & reese as they underwent their torture and terrigenisis, and awaken her own powers.

empathic conversion — an empath with enough skill, training, and experience can essentially overwrite another person’s emotions and desires into anything they’d like, most commonly to create a loyal follower to carry out their will. unfortunately (or perhaps just fortunately), river has none of the above and is currently incapable of this.

empathic combat — with training, river could theoretically use empathy to her advantage in combat by predicting attacks through her opponent’s emotional state and instincts, or by using emotion projection or empathic inundation as her own form of attack.

atmoskinesis – steam manipulation

whereas empathy is something innate and automatic, steam manipulation is not. thus, river is not very skilled with these techniques, and would likely fail to perform most of these at all.

heat generation / boiling — river can create heat, but as far as she’s aware, can only increase the temperature of water molecules.

steam generation & calo-hydrokinesis — using the powers of heat and water manipulation in conjunction, river can control steam and even create it from water. she cannot use her heat or water powers individually. she can only control the heat levels in water, and to control water, it must first be made hot enough to enter a gaseous state.

geyser creation — can create blasts and eruptions of steam from bodies of water, big or small.

steam constructs — can create object shaped constructs out of steam, the way a water manipulator can for example create a trident out of water, or an air manipulator can create a spinning ball of air.

steam based telekinesis — can use steam to propel herself or other objects into the air, as if in flight, or “surf” on the water by heating the surface into steam.

asphyxiation & internal boiling — can asphyxiate a victim by filling their lungs with steam. can boil a victim from the inside by heating the blood and other water molecules in their body. obviously these are both pretty gruesome and haven’t even really crossed river’s mind. yet. don’t piss her off?

heat resistance — obviously, river has a very high resistance to heat to be able to control and touch boiling water and steam. the heat resistance isn’t just water based, however. she is also very resistant to high temperatures and fire.

when rory left town, river missed her, of course, but she didn’t feel alone. she still had reese. but that year without rory passed by so fast, and before she knew it, reese had left too, and river just felt abandoned. that feeling of abandonment never truly went away, but over time it got easier to forget for a few moments here and there, and when she thought about it, what once felt like a gaping hole in her stomach had become a sort of numbness. she was able to move on for a while, focus on being a good older sister to riley and ryan, getting decent grades, catching up on the latest video games and movies… all the stuff that she’d admittedly put on the back-burner in favor of any and every opportunity to hang out with one of the older siblings she idolized. the keywords however, were for a while. 

river was alone in the school’s bathroom that day. it was a rare occurrence, but fortuitous in the fact that no one saw what happened to her. it started mildly, a dull pain in her side that progressed into a searing, throbbing nightmare against her ribs. a dull ache in her head that grew into a brain melting electric shock. difficulty breathing that quickly started to feel like someone had filled her lungs with water, then reached through her chest and squeezed it out of them. she didn’t even scream – probably couldn’t if she tried. she just collapsed into a ball of agony on the disgusting bathroom floor and endured, sure she was about to die. the face of evil incarnate flashed through her mind, and for a moment when she closed her eyes she was no longer in the bathroom, she was hallucinating a nightmare. reese and rory in chains, each on the receiving end of the torture she was experiencing. she reached out and called to them. they didn’t notice. she ran to the large, evil, man and pounded on his chest and face, but he didn’t react. it was like she wasn’t even there. she cried out, desperate for the man to stop, but all that did was pull her back from wherever she’d gone, the reality of the exploded sinks and scalding water shooting from the pipes all around her surprising her just enough to make her snap out of the delusion.

the water was hot, boiling even, but as it sprayed onto her it barely felt lukewarm. she stood from the floor, a soaked, dripping mess, and took tentative steps at first, squeakily exiting the girl’s room. she wandered lost and confused through the halls, dizzy as so many different emotions flooded through her mind. she was certain she was going crazy, and she had no idea how she’d explain where the screams had come from and why she was soaked from head to toe, so she simply left the building, drifting home in a daze. she barely made it up to her room before she passed out. when she awoke the next morning, she realized she hadn’t been hallucinating, and she wasn’t going crazy, this was all really happening. she reached out to her older siblings to check on them of course, but deep down she knew that somehow they were alright.

river adjusted to her new normal fairly quickly. she wasn’t very good at controlling her powers, but she got used to them. she started partying more and worrying less, and her feelings of abandonment felt so distant now that she could substitute her own feelings with those of someone who was truly happy. things were actually going really well for her, until the college acceptance letters came. stanford, harvard, surprisingly, she was accepted to both. she was also accepted to nyu, and when she saw that, there was no choice to make. for all her growth and new independence, and claims that she’d been fine without them, the second she had a chance to rejoin rory and reese, she took it without hesitation. graduation came and went, and the very next day river had a bag packed and she was heading out to her new school, her new town, and her new life.