Sylvie is an unusually tall eleven-year-old girl with dark brown eyes and long brownish-black hair. She has a round face with a strong nose, thin lips and gentle eyes. She is half-Welsh and half-Korean.

Sylvie Kang was born in Cardiff, Wales to two perfectly normal Muggle parents. As she grew up, Sylvie enjoyed an enriching childhood - an expensive Montessori preschool, a private elementary school which had entrance exams for six year olds, after-school tutoring catered to her needs and wants. Sylvie's parents were setting her up with an education that would turn her into a happy, healthy, well-rounded little girl with a bright future ahead. She wouldn't be a normal girl - she'd be an extraordinary girl who would succeed in whatever career her parents she chose for herself.

Sylvie's parents were running themselves ragged to make this a possibility. They weren't poor, not at all, but her parents often had to make sacrifices to give their daughter the best life. Healthy food, violin lessons and schoolbooks meant a much higher weekly budget, and that meant no fancy coffees for mum and dad. No expensive birthday gifts, no replacement appliances until the old ones were completely broken. But the parents had an idea in their head for what their daughter's future would look like, and nobody could stop them for moulding her to fit it.

They didn't take kindly to it when Sylvie got mixed in with the wrong crowd.

There was a boy next door the same age as Sylvie who seemed to embody everything the Kangs were trying to avoid their daughter becoming. He tagged along to his dad's work instead of going to preschool, and when he started at Sylvie's prestigious elementary school, his father never forced him to study and instead encouraged him to make friends... and yet the kid was still the second highest scoring kid in his grade. The dad himself always seemed perfectly polite and civil, but Sylvie's parents didn't like the man either way. He was always a bit too... eccentric... for their taste. Never used technology, seemed confused at words he called 'modern slang' when they were extremely common. So they kept their distance, and told Sylvie never to play with the boy next door.

She ignored their warning for a good three years before they found out. When the parents picked Sylvie up from a friend's birthday party, they noticed her hugging the boy before she left. They asked her what on earth she was doing, why was she talking to that boy, why she would go against what they said? Sylvie just shrugged and said that he was her best friend. The car ride home was silent.

Sylvie's parents tried to persuade her with gentle words and subtle fear-mongering as soon as they got home, but they had raised a strong-willed girl who could think for herself. She met their gentle words with angry shouts, asking "Why should YOU decide who I talk to?" "Why are you judging him based on being DIFFERENT?" "Why are you being so hypocritical?" They never came to a compromise, and promptly never mentioned it again. But Slyvie's father swore he saw the kitchen sink bubbling in anger alongside her angry speech.

It wasn't until years later, when a strangely dressed woman showed up at their door and had a lengthy (read: 8 hour) conversation with them about the... 'wizarding world' and their daughter's 'abilities' that it clicked for him. And when he spotted the little boy at one of the wizard shops where they were buying Sylvie's school supplies, that clicked, too.

Oh well. Maybe their plans for their daughter had been taken very, very off-course. But it was time they accepted what she wanted to do.

Sylvie was very excited, to say the least.