Sydney Rahal

Not long graduated from Deveraux College, Sydney Rahal is nonetheless an agent who has been through a lot despite her young age. Having lost her mother early on, Sydney saw her small Lebanese-American family destroyed for good when her father was killed and she became an orphan at the age of fourteen. She subsequently accepted an offer to attend Deveraux and it wasn't long before the college became her substitute family. After graduation, Sydney was stationed in Boston until she was assigned to infiltrate the organisation known as The Delegates of Themis. Themis was ultimately taken down, but not before Sydney found herself seriously questioning her own values and wondering whose side she was really on. Having spent some time in hiding in Beirut, Lebanon, she subsequently returned to her role as a Silver agent and is now stationed in Miami.

Standing at a modest 5'3", Sydney has over time learned to accept her fairly average figure and somewhat meagre height. Her dark brown, wavy hair is often worn down, although she frequently has to smooth it with serum - it has a tendency to frizz, particularly in damp weather. Although never to the point of excess, Sydney will frequently be found wearing make-up over her golden skin, enhancing her pale green eyes with mascara and her otherwise unremarkable lips with a pink sheen of lip gloss. Her father always told Sydney her most distinctive feature was her dimpled chin, although Sydney always privately suspected that was only because it reminded him of Lucinda Rahal, her mother. In terms of function versus fashion, Sydney's attire falls somewhere between the two - while she puts a little bit of effort into how she dresses, it's never been her first priority. Her style is mostly casual, although she doesn't have a problem with dressing up if the occasion requires it.

If you ask three different people about Sydney Rahal's personality, depending on who they were they would probably give you three very different answers. Someone who's known her since she was a young girl in Elementary School would tell you she was very bright and chatty, often the first in class to ask questions and make comments. Ask somebody who knew Sydney when she lived in Lebanon, however, and you'll be told that she was a very shy girl who always kept her head down in class and, to some people, even came across as arrogant. Talk to Sydney herself, or anybody who knows her well at present, and the answer you'll get is that she has been both those girls - now, however, she's an odd mixture of the two. Living in a country where she barely spoke the language made the more outgoing Sydney retreat into her shell somewhat, as she found it hard to express herself and only felt embarrassed when she did. Once she came back to the United States, despite her now being able to communicate perfectly well, the old Sydney never truly came back - perhaps because, due to her years spent in Beirut, she no longer felt she belonged completely in Connecticut either.

One thing that has never changed about her, however, is Sydney's tireless dedication to any task she's given. Having realised at Deveraux that she would never excel at any subject in particular aside from Tactical Planning, she decided early on that she'd have to work hard to be reasonable at as many of them as she could. And, to her credit, she managed it, even scraping a pass in her worst subjects, History and Geography.

Sydney's very analytical and critical mind leads her to be, above all, a very good strategist, very aware and capable of seeing flaws - especially, but not exclusively, in herself. She is also incapable of leaving loose ends untied; if there's a problem, Sydney has to fix it, and usually by herself. Not very good at working with other people, there was always an unspoken tension and conflict between Sydney and her Solo Team Leader back at Deveraux. In part also due to her very stubborn nature, even as a graduate she rarely listens to her Field Handler, preferring to do things her own way. However, anybody who underestimates Sydney's loyalty to Deveraux is very much mistaken - having moved into the school very soon after she became an orphan, Sydney adopted it as her substitute family. Her teachers were her role-models, her fellow students were her siblings, and the Deveraux building itself was the one thing Sydney had always craved, even when her father was alive - a place where she felt at home.

Sydney was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Lebanese father Samir and American mother Lucinda Rahal. Sydney has always maintained that she remembers very little of her mother, who passed away when she was a mere three years old from lung failure brought on by cystic fibrosis, although in truth she remembers more than she would probably admit. The Rahals had never had much money, but with her mother no longer working the family income was particularly bad whilst Sydney was growing up. At the age of ten, Sydney was caught stealing money from somebody at school to buy lunch, at which point her father decided something had to be done and moved to Beirut, Lebanon, with his daughter, despite the fact that Sydney could speak hardly any Arabic. Samir didn't have family who could support him in Lebanon - they had all passed away long ago - but he believed experiencing life in a different country might help Sydney get back on track and away from the existence she was threatening to lead. If anything, however, things only got worse. During the four years that she was there, Sydney often engaged in petty crime and was even arrested on one occasion after having stolen a man's wallet at the age of thirteen. She was issued with a very severe warning, but it wasn't anywhere near as effective as how guilty her father managed to make her feel by crying in front of her when he found out.

By the time Sydney had turned fourteen, her father was rising up in the ranks of the corporate firm he worked at, and Samir managed to secure an interview for a job that would allow him to move back to the United States. Leaving Sydney at a friend's house, Samir took a flight to New York for what was intended to be only two days. He never returned, and Sydney soon received a call telling her she was an orphan - her father had been found beaten to death in New York, in what the police suspected to be a racially motivated crime. Around the same time, Sydney was approached by her neighbour - who actually turned out to be a Selector Agent - to attend the 'prestigious Deveraux College'. Sydney herself had never heard of it, but considering the alternative was an orphanage in Beirut, she quickly accepted. Using Deveraux as the stable pillar to rely on whilst she was coping with the death of her father, Sydney dedicated herself completely to the organisation and was always one of the hardest working students even in the classes where she wasn't the most academically intelligent. Terrible at History and Geography, Sydney found it easier to relate to Math, Biology, Chemistry and Physics, but also could hold her own in International Insight and found her calling in Tactical Planning. Although not particularly good at playing sports, Sydney gained a fondness for watching baseball and has become a Red Sox fan whilst living in Boston. Having graduated, she was very happy to become Sydney Silver - at least it meant she didn't have to be too far away from Deveraux.