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Ripley’s Anachronistic Mix Tape
Birthday: June 14th
Ripley is a 27 y/o working at her local Blockbuster video store. Taken in around the age of 14, she recalls nothing from before this time. She spent some time in what seemed like a foster system, moving from house to house, all fuzzy memories now, their names just lines in a book. The moving seemed to stop after a tragic accident at the Weir’s residence, an unfortunate house fire that killed her foster father, and she was placed in the loving care of her permanent family with the Rivera’s. She started school, never did well, not because she didn’t try but because she was always an outcast; for eating egg and banana and liver sandwiches, for never really getting social cues, for always being somewhere else, for being ‘poor’. Nothing ever really kept her attention, except for whatever hobby she fell into at the time. (all things teenagers like to try: skateboarding, guitar, poetry, arcade games) She tried dating, but nothing ever stuck, she blamed her cold clammy hands but her partners blamed her inability to open up.
As Ripley got older she was able to better navigate herself through life, after highschool no one really cared that what she had for lunch and she got better at modeling her behavior to fit those around her. She learned the social conventions of her peers and while she didn’t understand why they were that way, she could at least to pretend to be one of them. She had a family that loved her and while they never understood her, they accepted her. She even went on a few dates, though still had trouble maintaining a long term relationship. There were just something’s she didn’t want to talk about.
For one, Ripley Rivera was out of this world, literally, a somewhat slimey, green skinned, three-eyed alien from a place that not even she was sure of. The only thing keeping her from the truth was a woven choker necklace. She’d always had it, as long as she could remember, though it’s appearance had shifted to fit the times. It was technology she didn’t understand from a home she didn’t know.
Since Ripley’s memory from before her adoption is so completely missing, she is determined not to forget things, and by all accounts her memory IS pretty good. Still, at the end of each day she writes an entry in her journal, Always a black composition book, with the dates written on the cover and the spine. She also carries a small camera in her bag for taking photos , that she then tapes into her journal and a tape recorder for any verbal notes she wants to take during the day. She even keeps the negatives from her photos in a shoebox under her bed and the older composition books have their own shelf next to her VHS collection.
Ripley isn’t sure what kind of alien she is and even then, until recently, she wasn’t exactly sure she was an alien at all. She just felt monstrous and other worldly, with an appetite for things she couldn’t accept, and an uncanny ability to predict the endings of movies.
Everything she knows about aliens and outer-space and most of life even comes from movies and other media, her guide to life outside of the small portion of the world she called home. Her first name even comes from the first movie she ever watched. She can still vaguely remember sitting in that stuffy strange office, full of toys for younger kids, the tv playing Aliens on one of the cable channels, no sound only poorly timed subtitles. She left before the movie was over, and yet she still remembers how it ended. She also remembers the man in the rumpled suit who drove her to her new family, she can’t remember his face but she can remember that wrinkly suit jacket.
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Ripley currently is just trying to survive, make enough money to keep existing and maybe someday learn where she came from. She doesn’t have many friends, but she’s come to know a decent amount of people where she lives. She watches people, it’s just part of how she operates, and sometimes the best way to watch someone is to get to know them. She doesn’t have a car, but she gets around. She skateboards if she has to, or rides the bus when the schedule isn’t too inconvenient.
Most recently she’s been drawn to the Arcade, a great place to people watch, and no one really approaches you unless they want to use the machine you’re sitting at. She likes the games too, but she’s not particularly great at them. She’s also noticed something strange about some of the less conventional games, a logo that she swears she’s seen somewhere before...
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Note: Anachronistic references are intentional!
Icon by Dew
