While in the hands of the Alliance doctors and scientists, River was secretly and extensively experimented on, including surgery that stripped her amygdala. While her parents and Simon believed the Academy was a private school meant to nurture the gifts of the most academically talented children in the Alliance, it was in fact a cover for a government experiment in creating the perfect assassin. It was at this point that she was sent to a government learning facility known only as ' The Academy'. By the time she was 14 years old, she had grown “bored” with her studies and was already in the graduate program for physics.

She has been portrayed and described consistently as having always had both a strong thirst for knowledge and a love for and intuitive grasp of dance. It is remarked often that she was extremely gifted intellectually from a very young age (she is noted as having “corrected Simon's spelling since she was three”), and also very graceful. Almost all of her time on the run was spent with the crew of the Serenity, who became her extended family.ĭuring River's early childhood, she grew up alongside her brother, Simon, part of the wealthy Tam family on the ' Core' planet of Osiris. She was rescued at great cost by her brother Simon but tracked relentlessly by several agents of the Alliance, primarily Lawrence Dobson, two blue-gloved men, McGinnis, the bounty hunter Jubal Early, and finally the Operative. Mathias on behalf of the Parliament – the Alliance ruling body – River was partially transformed into a mentally unstable psychic weapon intended for secret governmental use. She is considered a child prodigy, intelligent beyond her years and athletically gifted. Simon Tam, both of whom took refuge aboard Malcolm Reynolds' Firefly-class transport ship known as Serenity. Everything she did, music, math, theoretical physics-even dance-there was nothing that didn't come as naturally to her as breathing does to us.' ― Simon Tam

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