River Ward

River Ward is a detective with the NCPD, an honest cop in a department where bribes often carry more weight than evidence. His sense of justice was shaped in childhood, when his parents were killed during a robbery of the family’s grocery store. The police never caught the men responsible, and River and his sister Joss ended up in an orphanage. He joined the force to solve the kind of case that was never solved for his own family.

V reaches him through Jefferson and Elizabeth Peralez, who doubt the official account of Mayor Lucius Rhyne’s death. Not long before the mayor died, River had stopped a cyberpsycho at City Hall, and his superiors had already told him to drop his suspicions. Their joint investigation in the side job I Fought the Law ends with River suspended. Soon after, he turns to V again: his nephew Randy has gone missing, and River is convinced a serial kidnapper took him. The search, told in The Hunt, leads them to an NCPD lab experimenting with braindances recorded from dreams.

River is a romance option for a V with a feminine body, and his storyline is the shortest of any romance in the game. Depending on how The Hunt plays out, it continues with Following the River, an evening with Joss and her kids at their trailer home in the Badlands, just outside Santo Domingo.