Sylvie Hardt - Surrat Gallery
Name Sylvie Hardt - Surrat Gallery
Position Proprietor
Character Information
| Gender | Female | |
| Species | Human/ Cardassian | |
| Age | 41 |
Physical Appearance
| Height | 5'8" | |
| Weight | 140 Lb | |
| Hair Color | White | |
| Eye Color | Violet | |
| Physical Description | Tall and ashen skin toned, Sylvie looks Cardassian, but the human genetics from her father dull the harder lines of the Cardassian bone structure. Silvering hair began in her twenties as it did to her mother. Her hair is very long, kept wrapped in traditional styles with a sweeping fringe in the front. She wears some cosmetics coloring in the shallower depression in her forehead. Sylvie has a simple style sense but wears high quality. |
Family
| Father | Martin Hardt | |
| Mother | Jurazel Surrat (deceased) |
Personality & Traits
| General Overview | Sylvie is accustomed to wealth and attention. although she lived for a time in hiding and relative lack. She had designs on being a designer of world and cultures and following in the footsteps of ancestors who had founded her homeworld, and in particular, fancied herself a leader as her mother had been before her. There have been some setbacks and now, she is stepping back and taking stock. Value statements Sylvie might make: I make deals with devils. Nobility of birth comes with responsibilities to society. My time and attention is too valuable to waste on life's common minutia. I want to live up to my family legacy. I seek a union of ancient tradition and modern sensibilities. I try to avoid being physically endangered. |
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| Strengths & Weaknesses | +Independent +Money +Connections +Creative +Educated +Classy +Strong coping abilities -Anxious (internalized) -Demanding -Stubborn -no technical knowledge -limited skills -Personally a little prickly |
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| Ambitions | The Cardassian ancestors to Sylvie were original founding members of her homeworld. They were pioneers and visionaries and greatly respected enough to launch the family into influence for generations. Sylvie has sworn off politics, but longed to build something lasting from the ashes of her family's remaining fortune and influence beginning on a new frontier. She gave it the good old college try. And there were some very interesting results. Sadly, one outcome was the revocation of her system's charter and the liquidation of her holdings leaving her adrift, without a vision or a home. Presently, Sylvie intends to open and run an Art Gallery. She also plans to explore and share meditative and musical arts from her family history. |
| Personal History | Born into money, Sylvie took for granted as a child that anything she wanted was there for the having. She was naturally spoiled and wholly incapable of much of anything. Her grandfather, Degan Surrat was Minister to the colony and his roots went back to the founders, the original Cardassian founders of the colony, when it was known as Niala. Sylvie's Mother, Jurezel, was involved in the governing house in the tradition of the family as well. Niala became Iries Colony, a holding of the Federation which attracted new settlers – particularly those displaced by the drawing of the DMZ. Sylvie's mother married one of the displaced settlers named Martin Hardt, who she had previously interacted with in trade agreements with his original home colony. Martin brought little to the Surrat estate except for name recognition with the refugee population. Thanks in no small part to his wife's political channels, Martin championed a lot of provisions to support the refugees and to offer programs for their resettlement. He sat on the boards of various organizations dedicated to the work of helping these people move on to other planets where they had ties or put down roots. Jurezel and Martin were high profile in the burgeoning society, embodying the new demographic and the old order of things in one beautiful, happy coupling. So when they had a daughter, little Sylvie Hardt, she was well celebrated, lauded as the new child of Iries and pictured and announced broadly. Sylvie was relatively sheltered. Although she was expected to perform to high academic standards as a child, she soon learned that nothing was enforced on her. There were rarely repercussions for her defiance or noncompliance. Anything she wanted she had. She didn't go out of her way to treat people poorly, but she was naturally a manipulative child and cared mostly for getting her own way. The girl had a firm grasp on the silver spoon she'd been born with- right up until the Dominion war. There had always been Marquis sympathizers, ever since the refugees came. The official word was that Iries harbored no terrorists and offered them no aid while the reality of private support was a different story. During the Dominion war, there was a significant amount of sentiment pressuring the government to fly in the face of Federation leadership and recognize the marquis, or at least to put pressure on the Federation to change it's policy about the 'freedom fighters' to oppose the now common enemy together- the Cardassians. Racial tensions mounted and politics became more polarized than ever. Claims against Cardassian “originalists” made them out to be spies for the Cardassians. It didn't help that a couple of the accusations were true. There were tribunals, undue imprisonments, torture, and even quietly performed executions. When Legow Sorcha, a man famous in the Iries media, openly sided with the Marquis, tried to get the Iries government to harbor an incoming Marquis ship, Iries' ruling house voted to turn them away, condemning the small band to most certain death at the hands of the Cardassians. Sure enough, the Marquis space craft was destroyed just outside of the system. The media, siding with Sorcha and also driven by it's Marquis-sympathetizing ownership, demonized those in the government, claiming there had been families on board and that those who had turned them away had condemned the innocent to death, effectively undermining a decade of peace and cultural fusion. Fellow officials began to go missing or turn up dead and investigations into the deaths were held up or poorly run. Martin pleaded with his wife to flee the situation. He feared for her life and for his daughter. But every attack and lost colleague only served to make her more bull headed and outspoken. Martin disguised his now 12 year old daughter and aquired false identification for them, blending into the society at large. Not many days later, Sylvie watched her mother giving a policy speech when the transmission was cut out abruptly. When it came back there was a news report about a bombing in the capitol. The whole council chamber had been center to the thermal blast and there was not a lot of evidence to reconstruct. Sylvie was badly distraught. She watched her father go into a darkness and she looked around her homely surroundings. The tiny city apartment never repainted and waterstained around all of the ancient fixtures, the poor furniture and the complete lack of support staff. She was no longer rich or enjoying any notoriety. She had been give the pseudonym Lourlie Rhodes. Lourlie would become a very different person than the young Sylvie. She was sullen and internalized. She had to learn to care for things herself and to do with out. She despised her father for taking her away from her home and blamed him for letting her mother die, even though it made little sense to be angry at him for either of those situations. Her father was nervous about nearly everything. He prevented Sylvie from ever going out, except to the most basic of things. She was enrolled in a public school and her teachers suffered none of her non-compliance. She was no one special there and had to turn in her work, on time and complete. She was especially offended by snobbish kids who made life difficult for her and internally maintained a martyred princess narrative: that one day they would find out who she really was and boy would they be sorry then. Only gradually she realized that who she really was... was just like them. She had been wanting to see them suffer – socially and emotionally – the way that she did. But maybe they were more like her in other ways too. She paid a little more attention and discovered the terrible situations those girls were in with their own private lives. As Lourlie, Sylvie learned to be sympathetic. The dominion war ended, but it had taken it's toll on Iries Colony, not only due to bombing runs, but also having gutted the economy and left resources concentrated with a few surviving industries, leaving the government fractured with a small but powerful minority of the house having written itself laws overpowering the other parts government. A few of the founding dynasties survived by bribery and coercion or collusion with the Marquis supporters, but the house and holdings of the Surrat family were a mess, having been vandalized, resold or otherwise laid claim to. Sylvie shed her anonymity when she graduated and discovered her world bleaker than she had remembered it in her childhood. Something stirred her to rebuild. She decided it was the legacy of her mother, of her grandfather, of her home. For years she pursued regaining her family property. Assuming she could find any justice, her father signed away property rights to her, except for a modest home and a substantial account to support him in retirement. He remained cynical and fearful, living in a place of sorrow and mourning, but always treasuring Sylvie. He had a palpable irrational fear for her life although the danger had primarily passed with the war ended. Many tried to encourage Sylvie into politics but she shunned the very idea. Politics had eaten her family alive and she wanted no part in it. The courts, influenced by the government financiers and bankers, made it difficult to reclaim what was rightfully hers. It had been legally auctioned off, they claimed. She tried to fight and they conceded very little to her. The original (albeit vast) estate and the deed for the dry empty fields on the second moon, as well as an asteroid mining operation in the system were all she could manage to win back. Miffed at the unfairness, Sylvie decided to become a pioneer in kind with her ancestors. She sold off most of her recovered holdings and sunk the money into buying a space station in a nearby desolate system. To commemorate memories of better times, she named it after a favorite family vacation spot called Lacuna. It bore very little resemblance to the tropical isle save for the fact that it was a resting place in a vast ocean of space. The station was Formerly a Cardassian civilian way point, but it had been abandoned after landing in redrawn Federation territory and then used during the Dominion war as a supply depot and space port, up until it had sustained damage to easily half the structure. But it was in Sylvie's price range, and she was convinced it could be rehabilitated by planning to open up in stages and do business to fund the repairs piecemeal. Through a series of uncanny events, supernatural forces, and the fine tuning of opposing non-corporal influences, The site of Lacuna became a supernatural battlegrounds, an extra galactic, and extra dimensional coalition known only as The Ascended, attempted to used alignments to ignite an old iconian gate highway and over take the corporeal beings of the Milky Way. But for the series of little decisions inspired by other non-corporeal beings with interests in the milky way, the pieces to prevent the sucess of the Ascended might not have been in place. The resulting remaining iconian gateway and the supernatural monsters left on a planet in the Iodora Star system were enough to cause Star Fleet to insist on revoking Sylvie's Charter and closing the system, making it off limits and ending all of her dreams of founding a new world. She thinks she might start an art gallery. |