player.NAME/HANDLE: Reg
PERSONAL JOURNAL: ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
regasssaARE YOU 16 OR OVER?: Yes
CONTACT: e-mail: regasssa [at] hotmail -dot- com aim: regasssa
OTHER CHARACTERS: Adam Monroe
agelessinsobrietycharacter.CHARACTER NAME: Sydney Bristow
Wiki linkSERIES: Alias:
Wiki Link Episodes: A play by playCANON POINT: Season 3, episode 1 - Sydney has awoken with a whole period of missing memories - two years of them, in fact - and the world has moved on without her. Vaughn is married, Sloane is free, her father is in jail and Sydney has a strange scar from an operation on her belly. I'm taking her from her mission during that first episode, when everything is on the line for her and many of her questions are still unanswered.
AGE: 28
APPEARANCE: Played by Jennifer Garner; slim, small and brunette, compact and athletic, with straight hair and brown eyes.
PERSONALITY: Sydney's personality is primarily built out of her relationship with her parents. Her childhood informs many of her traits, and is an explanation for most of her actions, particularly those she makes on an emotional level, rather than defaulting to her training. The relationships that she has with both of them are complicated; her mother, eventually revealed to be a Russian spy, 'died' when she was young. Her father employed Sydney in sleeper agent training programs from a young age, though she doesn't recall them until confronted by the puzzles as an adult. The fact that both were carreer liars doesn't help much, particularly with her following in their footsteps.
All in all, Sydney was (and is) used and lied to by both of her parents. It isn't to say that they don't both love her - even Sydney acknowledges that fact - but it does give her a constant expectation of betrayal. Paranoid, she sees deceit whichever way she looks, which is by no means improved by her discoveries of these transgressions; the early ones, uncovered, or those made more recently. None the less, she has a strong ability to love, particularly her family and friends. It devastates her, for example, to have to shoot her friend Franzy - or at least an agent wearing her face. She is very reactionary, jumping in with both feet when she makes discoveries. Throwing accusations and endangering lives is her immediate response to hurt, and Sydney can just as easily hold a grudge for an impossibly long period of time as she can flip flop back on forth on issues. Basically, Sydney is not afraid to speak her mind; she doesn't hold punches, even with family, she tends to tell people exactly what she thinks of them, and she values honesty. Unlikely, considering she makes her living out of lies.
Dangerously for an agent, Sydney is extensively led by her heart. This applies to the aforementioned responses to hurt, but it can lead her on missions too. Sydney is perfectly capable of dropping everything to protect a civilian, of making poor judgements regarding other people's characters based on the way they work her - despite Sydney's caution in that respect - and of jeapordizing missions for love, or in trade for information regarding something personal. This can be a strong motivator for her morally, too. For instance when Sydney discovers that she has been working for the enemy all this time, and has to convince Sloane of her loyalty, she needs a strong incentive to walk back in there and endanger herself, after SD-6 had killed her fiancee. She does it for justice, for revenge; to bring Sloane and SD-6 down and work for the good guys for once. Being the good guy is important to Sydney--she hates to see good people hurt or die, and her set of ideals do threaten her cover a number of times.
Sydney is devotedly loyal, kind and affectionate. She demonstrates her affection with her friends, even with her colleagues, and comes off as genuine even when she's lying through her teeth. On her missions she can come off as hard and cold, especially when there's something which has to get done, but for example when Sydney has to work with Marshall in the field, she's cold because she's worried about him, concerned about protecting him and desperate to get him back alive. Sydney is a bleeding heart, and compassionate, hardened by her life as a spy, but deliberate in the efforts she takes not to lose herself in the process. It's why she keeps training to be a teacher even when she's working as a double agent and ought to be concentrating on that. In general, though, Sydney is good with people, no matter what she's doing.
She is smart, and her experience means that she's very aware of the dangers inherent to her job. As a result Sydney can fluxuate between wildly suspicious and much too trusting. She can grow much too attached to people much too quickly, and she can have the wool pulled over her eyes so long as other people use emotions and not intelligence to disarm her. Sydney can play the smarter than you game with anyone, she'll happily switch to physical violence, and she can resist torture, but she crumbles easily when people put her friends and loved ones at risk; other people are her greatest weakness. She just wants a normal life, why is it so hard?
Sydney is confident, even cocky, and it does get her into trouble. She wants to be the one making all the moves and taking decisive actions, and hates being benched. She gets bored easily, and prefers to keep busy and feel useful, and she resists any authority that tries to tell her how to do her job or how to feel. She would rather go off the record and fight her own battles than feel subdued by things that are beyond her control, which is without doubt why she takes such exception to Rambaldi and his prophecies.
At the present canon point, the moment where I've taken Sydney from she has just lost two years of her life, and has no explanation for what she's been doing in that time. She wears a scar on her belly from a surgery that was performed during the period during which she lost her memory, and she's scared, anxious and confused, unsually on edge and much more mistrustful of everything that's happening around her. Losing Vaughn's affection for example - he's now to all appearances happily married - knocks her confidence especially, and throws into doubt everything she thought she knew. She's more angry with him for losing faith in her. She's alone, with no more close friends (that aren't colleagues), no lover, her father in jail and her best friend in witness protection and it leaves her empty, and struggling to find direction in her life, to the point where she makes reckless decisions in order to try and win back the faith of the CIA and free her father.
Deeply hurt, Sydney defaults to her spy training and tries to protect herself by not letting her emotions show, even though she struggles with it inside. She cries when it gets too much, and her focus, her drive, goes into recovering her memories, no matter what she has to do and what she has to betray to achieve it. She should be fun to play from this canon point, excessively volatile, and she'll struggle with the fact that she can't fight to regain her memories in the meantime, at least through obvious methods.
ABILITIES: Sydney is an exceptional liar - she has to be. Using her intelligence, her charisma, and her sheer ability to talk, Sydney demonstrates her ability to convince other people of anything she puts her mind to, although for the most part what she's usually trying to convince them of is that she isn't a threat, when she is.
She is a chameleon, aided by a vast catalogue of languages, outfits and wigs, and a remarkable talent as an actress. She uses every part of herself in the act. Yes, she lies, but she can pretend to be a vixen seductress or an innocent child or a medical professional with ease, and very little or often no preparation. Sydney is resourceful, and she uses the fact that she's an attractive woman often to her own advantage. Left alone in the wild, Sydney uses what she can get her hands on; she has a great deal of training to fall back on, espionage, technology, firearms, survival training etc. She was subjected to focused training on her admission to SD-6; giving her all the skills and quick thinking of a professional spy.
Sydney can handle a variety of firarms. She's also experienced in a variety of hand to hand martial arts, particularly those that can help her against stronger or bigger opponents. Determined to stay at the top of her game, she works out daily, keeping her strength and figure. Her abilities are strictly human, not superhuman, but even when she fights hand to hand, Sydney is unendingly resourceful, using her environment to her advantage and running when it's better to run rather than fight.
Her empathy is her greatest weapon without a doubt, and her greatest weakness. Sydney relies often on gut feelings, and while sometimes they pay, most of the time they come back and bite her on the ass.
POSSESSIONS: Her .38 Sig Sauer, and the two spare clips she carries with her
The outfit she's wearing at her draw point - a short wine red wig, a red dress, red heels, red lipstick.
A petrol fed chef's flambee gun
samples.JOURNAL ENTRY SAMPLE: Just when you think things can't get any more confusing.
[
The woman in the video is a redhead with deep brown eyes. She pouts and sweeps her hair back out of her face and tries to smile at the camera. Sydney is going for vain, with a hint of damsel in distress, hoping to draw anyone at all in to help her. She's wearing a red dress with one shoulder strap, and consequently looks incredibly cold. ]
If I'd known I was going on a cruise I'd have packed a suitcase. So far I've seen no jazz lounge, no swimming pool, no deck chairs--and the state of the place! Have you seen the bathrooms? [
Her nose crinkles up slightly, and she pushes her bangs out of her eyes again, mouth downturning from her pout into something more hopeless. ] Brrr.
I'm trying to find some friends of mine. Hello?
Hello? If y'all are there, could you maybe say something? I don't know at all where I am. Can anyone hear me? Hello! [
Pause. ] Does anyone have a jacket?
THIRD-PERSON SAMPLE:Sydney felt wretched. It was enough to make any girl cry, really. Her boyfriend was with another woman, her house had burned down, her father was in jail, and her friends--she didn't even know what had happened to them. Will was alive somewhere. Franzy? Nobody had told her what had happened to the real Franzy. All she knew was that she had shot her friend three times, watched her fall. And now here she was, seasick in a stinking rot ridden cabin, and while she'd been in hideous places before, nothing really compared to this. Her stomach was twisted into knots, and she had one outfit -
one outfit. One outfit meant one identity, and who knew who else was here? She had to err on the side of caution.
But
one outfit? One startlingly red dress, with matching shoes? Sydney couldn't do anything
but stand out looking like this, and it made her look even worse the way she was now. Queasiness didn't become her; she looked like a Christmas decoration, red and green, and the food hadn't done much to improve her mood
or her stomach.
She rolled over and groaned into the moldy mattress, resisting the urge to vomit the creamed corn she'd eaten, then determinedly pulled herself up to her feet, reaching for the heels that she'd tucked under the cot. Her feet were sore from them, but she'd be damned if she was touching
this floor with bare feet. Was it too much that she longed for her bed at home? She'd never been homesick before, not in her whole life, but here on this ship, without any explanation as to how she'd got here or how she could get back, she felt lost, and worse
helpless. Helplessness was as hard to bear as the loneliness. Somehow she had to get out of here; she had to get control back, no matter what it took.
Somehow she'd find a way. Nobody here had her training, they couldn't get to the bottom of it, but Sydney was different. She was resourceful, and where others had failed she was determined to succeed. Nothing would stop her when she was like this, certainly not seasickness, blisters and a little red dress.
Her hand finding the handle, Sydney braced herself before stepping out, turning deliberately down the corridor. She'd start at one end and work her way forward; they wouldn't know what hit them.
