Sydney Wick

By the time Sydney Opal Wick reached the age of 20, she was already a practicing MRI tech. She operates the powerful, expensive, and potentially dangerous MRI machine in the Hospital of the Templars in Las Vegas, Nevada. She takes images of the inside of her pateints’ bodies with the insane power of helium-cooled magnets. By combining each image, or “slice”, an MRI can give a three-dimensional look of a patient’s body. 

Her family moved from New Jersey to Vegas when she was in kindergarten. She enrolled in college at 16 years old in an MRI program. While in college, she worked at the Luxor Las Vegas and later Caesar’s Palace. In 2019, she also attended the Storm Area 51 event with her boyfriend at the time. She earned her associate’s degree months after graduating high school and less than 2 weeks before her 18th birthday. 

Sydney then spent the rest of that year becoming certified by the American Registry of Radiologic Technologists. This was followed by an internship until February 2023, when she transitioned into a full, practicing MRI technician. But she broke up with her boyfriend when he moved away from Vegas.

In July of that year, she was nominated for the Röntgen award for Best Newcomer in MRI. This is an awards ceremony for medical imaging techs held in Boston every July. She bought a $700 red dress for the ceremony and carried it in a separate suitcase when she flew to Boston. Though she didn’t win the award, the trip to Boston was a memorable experience.

Hospital of the Templars is where Sydney spent her internship and is now employed. This facility is owned by the Knights Templar and located in Las Vegas at the southeast corner of the interchange between I-215 and the Vegas Strip. The hospital seems like any other. But on the inside, a fierce rivalry is brewing within the imaging department. On a daily basis, the X-ray, CT, and MRI teams all argue over funding and prestige. It has even escalated to prank exchanges at times. HoT also has a disproportionately high number of HIPAA violations compared to other hospitals across Nevada, but members of the Knights Templar have infiltrated the HHS or given contributions to its agents, keeping the hospital and its staff unpunished.

As an MRI tech, Sydney cannot wear or bring anything metal to her work area. This includes her phone, any jewelry, and even makeup. The 15,000 gauss magnet in an MRI scanner can violently suck any metal object towards it, something called the missile effect. Sydney is also cautious about the −452 °F liquid helium in the machine that could give her instant frostbite. There is a quench button to deactivate the magnet but if Sydney needs to use it, it will cost the hospital tens of thousands of dollars to buy the liquid helium to re-energize the magnet.

Sydney has golden-blonde hair. Her eyes are olive with a hint of brown towards the pupils. She wears gray short scrubs and purple shoes. She also has other sets of scrubs of different colors and sleeve lengths. In fact, scrubs make up a quarter of Sydney’s closet. Her fingernails are shorter than the tips of her fingers and she can‘t wear nail polish because it may contain metal. Her favorite color other than gray is pink.

Sydney lives in an average-sized house on the south side of Vegas. Besides being a few blocks away from her workspace and the famous casinos, there is a Target store across the interstate. She lives with her parents and her little brother Baker, who is 6 years younger than her. Baker can play the electric guitar.

Sydney has two pet rats: Butter and Pancake. They are both female. Butter is an albino rat, while Pancake is brown with a white head and belly. They live in a pastel pink cage by the door to Sydney’s room at her mom’s house. As someone who lives in Las Vegas, Sydney lets her rats chew on and play with old poker chips and cards from casino dumpsters, in addition to toys she makes or buys at Target or Petco.

Sydney adopted Pancake after becoming board-certified in MRI. Later, it was during her internship that she was doing a scan on a patient, and stopped to look at her phone to find out that Queen Elizabeth II had died. She almost fell out of her chair upon reading it. She felt nauseated for 48 hours afterwards and was drained of energy after coming home. The whole experience motivated her to get her second rat, Butter.

On Sydney’s desk in the back corner of her bedroom is her personal PC. This is a Carrington Mark IIIx. The case has a steampunk design of fake brass and analog temperature gauges. Sydney chose the computer for its outlandish look. On the inside is a AMD Ryzen 9 7950X CPU with a Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU. The IIIx is offered with 32, 64 (which Sydney has), or 128 GB of RAM. There is a 4 TB hard drive. Carrington also sells a monitor, keyboard, and mouse that carries the steampunk theme. Sydney has wrapped the power cables in an old piece of leather in case her rats escape and gnaw on them. 

By some studies, surgeons who play video games make less mistakes. She personally believes the same may also apply for other medical professions. Sydney plays Team Fortress 2 on her machine. She first played TF2 on her family’s low-end computer when she was 11. She is also into Minecraft and Forza Horizon 5. More recently, she has played Starfield.

Sydney’s real life car is a Factory Five Mk4 Roadster kit car. When she bought this fake Shelby Cobra, it was partially assembled except for the body and seats. Its first owner had opted to put a V8 Ford Coyote engine in the build. Sydney, her dad, and a guy he knew worked for 5 months to finish the car. It has a license plate “SYD’S 427” (The car doesn’t actually have a 427 engine but the original Cobra did.) and is gray to match her scrubs. There is a pink band around the cockpit, and Sydney has also bought a Dashie screw-on nose extension and removable roof for her car. Her car is often noticed by people passing by it parked outside the hospital, at least until they notice the Factory Five badge. Sydney has also recreated her car in Forza. Almost ironically, Shelby American’s headquarters is in Las Vegas, while Sydney’s car is a kit replica.

Hospital of the Templars gives its imaging techs 10 days of vacation time a year, with its RNs getting even more. Sydney uses this time to take road trips or, rarely, do some camgirling. Her favorite road trip destination is Los Angeles, but she has also driven to San Antonio before. During her trip to San Antonio, she stopped in El Paso to have her oil changed, and reached 150 MPH on I-10. The farthest east Sydney has driven by car is Fort Smith, Arkansas.

The hospital has its own fitness center and pool. Sydney does some occasional swimming in it in a hospital-provided blue swimsuit or one of her own swimsuits.

Sydney drinks healthy energy drinks and unsweetened tea. Her favorite energy drink is Flux, a Japanese energy drink with no sugar or metals. She even owns some Flux merch such as a black sports bra. But she hates mainstream, sugary soda, calling it “liquid cigarettes”. She even literally believes soda should be treated the same way as tobacco by the government, with excise taxes, warning labels, and even needing to be a certain age to buy it. To Sydney’s dismay, her brother Baker drinks 2 or 3 Pepsis a day.

Sydney still remembers her high school locker combination.