Sydoni is pureblooded human, but at the same time she seems to bear a quality of agelessness or youth in her looks. Her age is almost impossible to determine, past 'young'. Her pale skin, the redhead's curse, is free of blemish and dotted with tiny freckles across her nose and cheeks. Her face is ovalshaped, with the dark lines of a simple tattoo stretched across the right cheek below her eye. Her clear voice is operatic soprano in range, high without, somehow, seeming whiny.

Standing at 5'8", Sydoni is taller than average for a woman, and possesses a fit, sensual build. Neither as slim as a boy nor as outrageously stacked as most models, her body, like her face, recalls descriptions of the sidhe without having their otherworldly elegance or inhuman beauty; Sydoni's appearance is all human. Another tattoo, comprised of more fluid lines than the one on her face, marks the curve of her left shoulder. Everything about the way she moves and appears is fluid, elegant.

Sydoni's hair is the pure shining tone of copper, inherited from her Celtic blood. Summer lightens it to brilliance, while in winter it darkens to a more tarnished shade. Naturally parting slightly to the right of center, it hangs in loose lines to the middle of her back, framing a face delicate in its seeming innocence. The bangs she possessed as an adolescent have now grown out, falling around her face in shorter lines.

Her wide eyes are the same shade as the living sea, rising and falling in colour with the tone of her moods. Now the pure bluegreen of the warm Caribbean, now a stormy bluegray, sometimes, strangely, a deep olive green, Sydoni's eyes capture the attention. A faintly haunted look lives in the back of them.

As to clothing, Sydoni wears lots of tanktops and blue jeans. Even though she doesn't need the extra inches, she often wears heels on her sandals. She always, but ALWAYS, wears a pair of gloves. Typical shades are a curious mix of the brilliant colours of the tropics and the equally brillant, more muted colours of autumn leaves in the northeast states. If the weather is cool, she can add a button shirt like a jacket to her ensemble. Jewelry is usually gold, with lots of semiprecious stones like peridot, garnet, amethyst, and citrine. Her ears are double pierced.

One of the first things you notice about Sydoni is her pride. She carries herself like nobility and has an intense, visible pleasure in everything she does. Pettiness, snobbery, and slighting are not in her nature, however; her pride is the function of knowing exactly how good she is, where her limits are. False pride or pettiness on others bothers her a great deal, but she's not one to let on to that person in public. When she speaks to people, you feel as though she's bringing you up to her level, not stooping to yours.

Sydoni is silk and velvet over a steel core, pride and determination hand-in-hand with an extroverted and caring nature. She needs people, no matter how much she distrusts them, and reaches out to them. It's easy for her to keep up in complex or unexpected situations, and it's rare for her to commit a faux pas. She can be diplomatic as well, although having to be irritates her, and when she does compromise she manages to make the other party think she's the only one bending.

Sydoni's bearing is very open and warm. She's a people-person, and it's a very obvious thing. She is naturally caring, gentle, and loving, and her circle of friends is large. She gives everyone as many chances as it takes, and believes everyone has some good in them. She is caring and supportive, but expects the same from the people she knows. A great deal of her prode stems from being liked and knowing that she is liked, cared for and useful. It's important to her to be noticed and have her feelings returned.

She is charming and likable, and yet there is always a sense of distance about her. Although she believes in the good of people, there is an element of distrust about her; she is not the person who will trust someone right away. Her natural optimism allows her to give any person a lot of chances to obtain her trust, but she feels that such a thing should not be lightly broken and is always a little wary of people, fearing that anyone could hurt her.

It's easy for Sydoni to read people, drawing them out in easy conversation, and she can tell someone's strengths and flaws quickly. She is very cautious about those she lets into her heart's inner sanctum, and those people must have few weaknesses; she doesn't want to be attacked through someone else. A natural caution makes her suspicious of the way people say things and how she interprets that. Caution and toleration inform all her dealings with those not extremely close to her.

With those who are close to her, a different side emerges. Sydoni feels safe in letting her emotions show to those who are her closest friends, and her moods can be quite volatile. Fortunately, her friends and lover have come to realise that her emotional displays are a sign of extreme trust and tend to take them in stride. At the first sign of threat from one of these trusted people, she shuts herself inside herself and becomes very prickly.

Her trusted people are extremely important to her. Since she's away from her family, these people have become her other family, and she treats them that way. She loves them, scolds them, spoils them, and would throw herself in front of a car for them. She needs her people for her own mental and emotional stability. Her very life revolves around her friends.

The other thing that is key in Sydoni's life is money and her job. She is a hard worker, and runs her business with a firm hand. Dedication is something she expects and gets from her employees, but they know that she won't ask anything of them she won't try herself, and she respects their skills. She's frugal without being a pennypincher, but her desire for and sense of luxury comes out in her home.

The single most overriding quality in Sydoni is her need to be secure, in her friendships, her loves, her home, and her job.

[sekrit] First, a little bit of family history: Sydoni traces her female heritage way way back to the Basques of northern Spain. When the Celtic tribes came through Spain, her family line intermarried with those. During the Inquisition, the family fled to Brittany in France and married into the old Celtic bloodlines there. This line came to the Americas in the early 1800s, and came with the Gold Rush to California. Sometime back in this period, family legend holds, a sidhe married into the line, but there's no way of knowing for sure now. [/sekrit] They've been in Gibraltar as long as there was a Gibraltar.

Willow, Sydoni's mother, left Gibraltar at the age of 18 to seek her fortune on the stages of New York. She despised the small town and this small-town feel, and looked down on her parents for staying there in the town that time forgot. When she finally got her big break (and it was a really BIG break), she set herself to forget Gibraltar completely, although she did fly her parents to New York for her wedding.

Sydoni herself was born to the aging Broadway actress and her Israeli immigrant husband in the Big Apple. Willow had never planned to get pregnant in the first damn place, and even though she didn't believe in abortion, she still felt like she couldn't give the child the loving home it deserved. Obviously, they couldn't ask Adriel's parents to help out -- it would be cruel to send the child all the way to Israel.

But Grandmama and Big Papa Renard were just across the country. Plane tickets weren't that expensive, they told themselves, she'll be fine in Gibraltar. Accordingly, Sydoni spent her first five years with her maternal grandparents in sunny Gibraltar, CA. Then Willow decided to retire from Broadway for good and actually have a family. She summoned Sydoni back from the shore of California, and the growing family settled in Savannah, GA.

It didn't take Sydoni long to realise that she hadn't spent much time as first in her mother's heart. She was a sulky child, and had fits of homesickness, but Adriel ruled the house with a stern hand, and Sydoni got secretive with her feelings. She tried the whole wild-child thing during high school, but that didn't work out so well, and her more flamboyant, dramatic siblings constantly overshadowed her even at that age. When she announced that she was going to attend the University of Colorado and major in business, the whole family engaged in a massive facefault. By the time they rallied enough to talk her out of it, it was too late.

During college, her power abruptly matured, forcing her to wear gloves and avoid touching. Her peers marked her off as eccentric, her professors generally thought she was odd, but as long as she did the work ... and the counselors frankly labeled her nuts. Nothing she tried helped except for the gloves. She even tried getting a wiccan she knew to cast a spell to make it go away, but that had about as much effect as skinning a live cat.

Sydoni doesn't really like her family, and after college she went right back to Gibraltar, although her memories of the town were now hazy with distance. She discovered that her grandfather was dead of this or that natural cause, and she shrugged her shoulders and settled down to open up a coffee shop with her grandmama. Through Grandmama, she discovered the details not only of her psychometric power, but of the fae and the battle between Above and Below.

Grandmama told her that their family had always stood Between, holding with neither Emperor nor Queen. For a long time, she told the girl, the women of their line had been considered witches, and their powers were worshipped. Obviously that was long gone in this modern age, but all the same the Rose girls (apparently the whole town called Sydoni's matrilineal line that) were known to have powers, and she'd do better to use them for the good of people. Grandmama warned her about using the powers for evil. It only led to trouble, she said.

The next year, Grandmama died, leaving Sydoni with a tidy little independent fortune, the Renard house, an assortment of trinkets, tokens, and possibly magical what-have-you, and a flourishing business. She hired the two Rainault sisters, distant cousins of hers, to help out in the coffee shop, and settled down to life in Gibraltar. She wrote her family once a year. Life was quiet.

Then she met Auberon Kingsley, and her life turned upsidedown again. Within a week they were dating steady, and within 18 months they were engaged. Sydoni keeps trying to put off the wedding, even though the pair has been engaged for over a year now. how she got involved with Above and Below and Between