Rika Kim

Rika Kim (birth name: Mina. foster name: Serena Kim), is the main antagonist of Mystic Messenger. She is the founder of the RFA and fiancée of V who tragically "died" 18 months before the events of the game. Rika is a beautiful, slender, pale-skinned young woman with wavy waist-length blonde hair that transitions to a lighter color, with bangs hanging on the left side. She has bright lime-green eyes, and she is shown to be smiling most of the time. On normal occasions, she is seen wearing a brown knee-length dress with a large cream colored bow just below her collar bone on her left side. She has also been seen wearing a formal suit with her hair placed in a high ponytail when hosting the RFA parties. In Another Story, she wears a halter top open chest black dress and a black masquerade mask. In Secret 01, she is seen wearing a long-sleeved dress adorned with rather intricate and elaborate designs. Rika was known to the RFA members as strong-willed and charismatic woman who wanted to help those around her to the best of her abilities. Due to her incredible ambition for helping anyone in need she created the RFA to raise funds to donate to several charity organizations and give money to these who need the most. She touched hearts and improved the lives of countless strangers. She was also capable of hosting great parties and managing to invite a large number of guests from all different backgrounds thanks to her tremendous influence on other and splendid persuasiveness, which is mainly because of her phenomenal speech skills, described by others as “having a way with words”, even going as far as saying that she can make anyone follow her blindly in a matter of minutes simply by speaking to them. Since she was abandoned and was repeteatly abused, tortured, and treated like a demon by her fervently religious adoptive parents. Rika is still suffering from the scars of her abusive upbringing, and the inumerious traumas she suffered that made her highly mentally unstable, paranoid, mistrusful, angry, inadequate, and violent, giving her a very low self-esteem, believing that she doesn't deserve to be loved, that she’s a devil who was born a ball of darkness, viewing herself as mere filth, and a stupid, good-for-nothing orphan. She desperately craves loves from others. This drawns her to V's photographic work which is subtextually about the unconditional love the sun provides, a kind of love she never experienced growing up and wishes to give to others so they won't suffer like she did. As stated by her, it was painful to act like the person she wasn't, so she always found herself avoiding people who “lived in the light”. According to 707 and Unknown, she always looked uncomfortable around people that didn't need her help. And always looked scared that people will leave her, which is the main reason that driven her to use people’s trauma as a way to brainwash them into thinking Mint Eye is where they'll find happiness, so that they'll stay by her side. Mika, who was Rika’s childhood friend, took advantage of her dreams to help others and manipulated Rika into thinking that her methods weren’t good enough and that she needed to do more to save others from the cruel world they live in, by nurturing their insecurities, giving love to the strong and not abandoning the weak. And thus the concept of Mint Eye was born. Due to Rika’s fear of abandonment and not being loved, she always doubted V’s love for her. Her paranoia was worsened when Mika gaslighted Rika into thinking the V is a liar who only needs a victim to “play savior for” and that he will eventually leave her because of how dark she is. her condition worsened after Sally’s death, which she blamed herself for. only for it to be immensely intensified by the death of Mother Choi, which completely shattered her mentality. after Mika’s death, Rika becomes extremely paranoid that Mika was right and that V was a hypocrite and that he never actually loved her. Which caused a huge fight between the two that led her to injure V’s eyes before fleeing to go after Mika’s plan to start the Mint Eye, to prove to herself and Mika that V will love her regardless, no matter what she does to him or other people. Her fears greatly decayed her in morals and sanity. Subconsciously consumed by the anger and violence of the abuse she had suffered growing up, she becomes abusive to her own believers rationalizing it as "saving" them, due to her fragile ego. She inflicts her own trauma of abandoment and betrayal onto Saeran, whom she ends up manipulating and abusing the most for her own goals, to use him as a weapon, a slave that will do whatever she wants. Rika’s fear-induced torture went to a greater extent in Ray’s AE. She goes as far as to kidnap the twins and sell them out to Saejoong Choi, the same person she was supposed to protect them from all these years, knowing how much trauma and pain he inflicted on his sons. In exchange for robbing the twins of their freedom and keeping them as her “own sons” to selfishly lives a “happy family life” with them. After multiple protests from the two, she drugs and chains the twins in V’s house, replicating the same abuse and fear their Mother and Father had put them through. Rika regained her moral compass in several cases and grew to regret what she did to Saeran deeply. In V's AE she's shown to be ashamed after seeing how her actions in Mint Eye were heavily disapproved by the RFA and how much disappointment and pain she caused. In Ray's AE, She realizes her actions and that she should be condemned. In both After Ends, she turns herself in to the law to repent for her actions. In Secret End 1, the shock of V's death irreversibly breaks her mind. Her manipulation towards Saeran didn't save anyone, it was the opposite. It resulted in him killing one of the people she admired the most (despite the troubled relationship with him). And upon this horror she loses all manners of speech and most of her memories, reverted to the state of a toddler. Yoosung takes her in, not knowing about her dark past nor Mint Eye. It is still pointed how she finally seemed to have found happiness though, as she is no longer tormented by the inumerous traumas of her childhood. She mostly has the happy memories of the sun that V left her with.