Alex Rider

Alex Rider is a District 4 Tribute reaped for Arena 03 of the 75th Hunger Games. Alex became a point of interest during his first Arena due to his striking similarity to the victor of the 65th Hunger Games, Finnick Odair. Currently he is one of the youngest Tributes present.

the basics
•  birth name  — Alexander John Rider

•  nickname  — Alex, Cub

•  age  — 15

•  birth date  — February 13, 1995

•  hometown  — Chelsea, London, UK

•  occupation  — Student,

•  relationship status  — it's complicated?

•  sexuality  — heterosexual

•  languages  — (fluent) English, French, Spanish, German; (conversational) Italian

•  canon point — post-Scorpia Rising

appearance
•  height  — 1.78m (5'10")

•  weight  — 10 stone 10 (150lbs)

•  hair color  — light brown/dark blond

•  eye color  — brown

•  dominant hand  — right

•  identifying marks  — Alex has a birthmark on his left shoulder, a piercing in his right ear that's since closed, and a plethora of scars. The most notable of these is the bullet scar just above his hear and the matching exit wound underneath his left arm. On the back of his shoulders are a series of droplet shaped burn scars. On the back of his right hand is a white threadlike acid scar.

•  wardrobe  — Alex prefers to dress casually. He likes jeans, trainers, and t-shirts. He favors clothing from athletic brands, like Nike, and mall/department stores, like Abercrombie & Fitch. Alex prefers neutral or muted colors, and he doesn't like wearing bright colors at all.

presentation
Alex is very conscious of the outward impression he gives, and pays a great deal of attention to how he presents himself and how others might perceive him. However, this is not due to any vanity issues. If anything, Alex tries to seem as 'normal' a teenaged boy as possible. He goes to school, hangs out with his friends, participates in sports, and simply tries to be a 'normal' British schoolboy. And on a whole, he's usually pretty successful. To most people, Alex is an athletic schoolboy, who could perhaps perform slightly better in his classes if he applied himself more.

Alex's physical fitness is obvious. At fifteen, he stands at 1.78m, has a very athletic build, and enjoys various sports from football to rowing. His light brown hair is kept medium length and bleaches slightly in the sun, and his complexion is tanned from spending a great deal of time outside playing sports. He is considered a handsome young man by several individuals in the books, including his sort-of girlfriend, Sabina. Despite his height, he's not awkward in his body and holds himself with obvious confidence.

At the onset of Alex's involvement with MI6 it becomes obvious that Alex isn't quite as ordinary as he would like. The difference comes with how he reacts to conflict and danger in a very level-headed manner, much more maturely than most of his peers would. Even when he is fully cognizant of just how dire his situation is, he's able to think quickly and rationally to find a solution. There are only a couple times where Alex completely loses his mind due to the situation he's in, but after a brief meltdown he's able to calm himself and reexamine what's happening.

Part of the way Alex reacts to danger is with extreme sarcasm. He has a very quick and dry sense of humor that he normally uses to be witty with his friends and occasionally a bit fresh with his teachers. When faced with a madman wanting to destroy the world, however, Alex becomes bitingly sarcastic, because he knows people are more prone to making mistakes when they're angry, but also to help alleviate his own stress. As long as he can still make a joke, Alex is still in control of his own emotions and can remain calm.

Other traits that make Alex so good at spying are his observation skills and his intuition. Taught from a very young age to always be aware of what's going on around him, Alex has a pretty good track record of noticing the small details that will later be important, and remembering them. This aids his intuition a great deal as he's able to put all the pieces together quickly. Alex also trusts his instincts, and they're nearly always right. It's not that he relies on luck, despite the fact he is actually a very lucky person. He simply has a very accurate 'gut feeling' and listens to it.

motivation
In much the way Pinocchio wants to be a real boy, Alex wants to be a normal boy. But unlike other boys his age, he truly appreciates the mundanity of normal life the longer and longer he's caught up in the web of the spy world. While other boys his age might dream about being spies, Alex's dreams revolve around going to classes, struggling over homework, and hanging out with friends--the simple, mundane things of normal life.

One of the main reasons he has so much trouble with the spy world is because he's a very honest and thoughtful person. He doesn't like having to lie to his friends about why he's always missing school, but he knows they'd never believe him, and he feels guilty whenever he ends up getting pulled into yet another mission, because he knows how much Jack worries about him. It's also difficult for him each time he sees the darker side of people and society, the greediness and the callousness that humans are capable of. This leads Alex to become rather paranoid as the books progress, and he starts to have trouble trusting people's supposedly good intentions.

Alex has a very strong sense of right and wrong, even before MI6 gets a hold of him. He doesn't stand for bullying and actually met his best friend, Tom, by handling some bullies that were harassing him. People both take advantage of this and completely underestimate it at the same time. MI6 manipulates Alex numerous times by playing on his sympathy for and need to protect the innocent, and villains fail to understand why they can't swing Alex to their way of thinking. Alex doesn't care about the 'big picture' of society, because what he sees are the human lives at stake, and he doesn't believe the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. This puts him at odds with both MI6 and the villains of the books several times.

In contrast to this, Alex has a bit of a grey area where killing is involved. Alex is very averse to intentionally killing people, even if they're trying to kill him, but he isn't opposed to using lethal force. As a result, he's been directly responsible for the deaths of several people during the time MI6 has used him. He drives a snowmobile off a ramp and into a helicopter, he shoves a man out of an airplane door causing him to fall into the engines, he ties canoes to a seaplane causing it to crash. His first intent isn't always to kill the person, usually it's to preserve his own life, but his actions don't leave room for much else.yes correct jnbuf vf bwpiqrue jhcfh

Despite the toll his missions take of him, physically and emotionally, Alex always bounces back. He craves normalcy, in large part due to Jack's protective influence in his life. In the early days, when Alex was still a bit high off the danger of being involved with MI6, Jack was constantly concerned about him being able to maintain a normal life, and in time that concern becomes his own as spying disrupts things more and more. At the end of each mission he throws himself back into his school life with relish, even though he starts to get a reputation there for being a bit... weird.

His final mission, however, is extremely harrowing, leaving him more emotionally scarred that his other missions combined. Alex is resilient though and, after casting off most of his life in England, desires to make a new start.

background of awsomenes
Alex thought he lives a relatively normal life. He was just an English schoolboy who lived in a terrace house in Chelsea with his uncle, Ian Rider, and their housekeeper, Jack Starbright. He liked football, video games, riding his bike, playing snooker, and hanging out with his best friend Tom. Sure, his uncle was often away on business trips, but they still spent time together and sometimes his uncle took him on interesting vacations. Besides, he had Jack, who was more like a big sister than anything else.

And then the police came, at 3 AM in the morning. Which is never a good thing. They said his uncle had been killed in a traffic accident. A truck hit his car, and he'd been killed because he wasn't wearing his seatbelt (which was weird because Alex's uncle was a stickler for wearing his seatbelt). It was only after his uncle died that Alex realized he didn't really know his uncle. He'd been a banker, or so Alex had thought. But Ian had never talked about his work, and sometimes he'd come home with odd injuries.

And then there was the slightly creepy funeral, where words like 'patriot' and 'hero' were slung around. For a banker? And when Alex met his uncle's boss at the funeral, why did he spot a gun on one of the aides? Then, to top it all off, when he and Jack arrived home afterwards, a moving truck sped away from the house after emptying out Ian's office, the office that was always kept locked and that Alex could count being inside with the fingers of one hand.

So Alex started poking around. He found the junk yard his uncle's car was taken to and almost got crushed inside of it. But he learned that his uncle hadn't been killed by a truck, because trucks don't use bullets. So when the bank asked him to come in so they could 'discuss his future,' he took the opportunity to sneak into his uncle's office, jumping from one windowsill to another... over fourteen floors up. The files in his uncle's desk were definitely not about banking, but before he could finish looking them over, he was caught.

As it turned out, his uncle was a spy for MI6.

And they wanted him to complete his uncle's last mission.

Alex thought they were insane, but Alan Blunt, the head of MI6, quickly blackmailed him into agreeing. The 'Royal and General', the bank the agency used as a front, was now his legal guardian and they suggested they'd have to send Alex to a rather unpleasant boarding school and deport Jack as her visa was expiring. Reluctantly, Alex agreed to do the mission. For twelve days he trained in the Brecon Beacons with the SAS (Special Air Service, a special forces unit of the British Army AKA serious badasses) before being sent to Cornwall to investigate the Stormbreaker, a new computer that was being gifted to the UK.

Always look a gift horse in the mouth. Always.

The computers were pretty sweet, by all standards. Except for the vial of a deadly virus that was inserted into each computer just before it shipped out. Oh, and then there was the part where, Herod Sayle, the madman 'giving' these computers to all the school children of Great Britain, had a massive hateboner for the Prime Minister and planned to kill all the school children in the country in revenge for some childhood bullying. Naturally Alex had to stop him, though this involved almost getting killed a number of times, one incident even involving a Portuguese Man-O-War. But he stopped the evil plan (and accidentally shot the Prime Minister in the hand, but who's counting?).

So MI6 got Jack a new visa and let her stay with Alex as his legal guardian (though they still hovered menacingly in the background). Except Sayle, the crazy asshole who hated British school boys, came back and tried to kill Alex in revenge for ruining his diabolical plan. But then Yassen Gregorovich, the assassin who had been working for Sayle (who, incidentally, was the individual who killed Alex's uncle), killed him, due to some higher ups deeming him incompetent as a bad guy (which, considering he was stopped by a 14 year old boy, he was). Alex asked Yassen if he is going to kill him next, but Yassen said he hasn't been told to, and advised Alex to stay away from MI6.

Frankly, Alex agreed.

But it wasn't to be.

Alex kind of dropped a boatload of drug dealers on a convention center and got arrested by the police. So MI6 forced him to infiltrate a private French school that was supposed to be reforming 'troublesome' rich kids into... untroublesome ones. Nothing wrong with that, unless it involved clones of evil scientists, kidnapping, and plastic surgery. Naturally, Alex almost died, again, as snowboarding down a black rated piste with an ironing board strapped to your feet while being chased by snowmobiles mounted with machine guns is not advisable. But he stopped the evil plan and made it home in one piece. Only to realize he'd forgotten about one last clone, who had been surgically altered to look like him. Alex, meet evil!Alex. The ensuing fight to determine who would be the real!Alex destroyed the brand new science wing of Alex's school.

Obviously Alex survived, otherwise there'd be no more books.

Next, Alex was asked to quietly investigate the Wimbledon tennis tournament. This was pretty awesome, as he got to be a ball boy at center court, within spitting distance of some top-notch athletes, not to mention make the acquaintance of Sabina Pleasure, a hot babe who thought he was pretty fit. Unfortunately, there was something going on at the tournament, and Alex had to put a stop to it. Drugging athletes so the underdog won in order to rake in gambling odds was illegal after all. Except putting a Triad member on ice had consequences. Consequences like another Triad member chasing him down on a jet ski when Alex was trying to surf the mother of all waves in order to impress Sabina (it did end in lip action though, as Sabina had to fish him out of the ocean and give him mouth to mouth).

Consequences that lead to Alex getting shipped off to the United States, and on loan to the CIA, in order to give MI6 enough time to get the Triads off his case. Of course, what should have essentially been a free vacation on the sunny sands of Cuba, while a couple CIA agents did their thing... went horribly wrong. As in, underwater cavern filled with giant metal spikes horribly wrong. And once again, Alex became the prisoner of a severely unhinged man with far too much money available to him, General Alexei Sarov. After being minorly mindfucked, Alex still managed to keep said madman from blowing up ancient nuclear subs in Russia and plunging the world into a nuclear winter. But he also got to see Sarov blow his brains out right in front of him.

After the last fiasco of a 'mission', Alex thought he might have MI6 off his back for a while. He even went to hang out in the south of France with Sabina. Score. Except while out getting his tan on, he spotted Yassen. He decided to ignore the guy, only to regret it later when the house he and Sabina's family were staying in was blown up and her dad ended up in the hospital. Of course, he thought it was for him, which just pissed off Sabina, because... really Alex? So Alex went after Yassen and tried to shoot him, but he couldn't pull the trigger. He got caught, then chucked into an arena with a very angry bull. Naturally, he escaped, and as he wound up his snooping (as, seriously, almost getting gored by a bull was enough for one night) Alex discoverd that Yassen had the phone number of some really popular celebrity, Damian Cray, on his cell phone. Um... what?

So Alex attempted to enlist the help of MI6 to get Damian Cray checked out. But they told him to fuck off, as the guy was not only loaded and well connected, but he kissed babies and helped poor hungry children. And he'd been knighted by the queen, and he was a bestselling, chart topping singer, who was releasing an awesome new game console in a few days. So Alex told MI6 they could kiss his arse and decided to investigate Cray himself.

And it turned out Alex was right. Take that MI6. Except... Cray was tired of all the crime and misery in the world and wanted to hijack a bunch of American warheads in order to destroy all the drugs in the world (more or less). And it didn't matter to him at all how many innocent lives would be lost, just as long as the drugs ware gone. And because Alex kept getting underfoot and kind of stole an important flash drive, Cray kidnapped Sabina and threatened to cut her fingers off. Seeing as missing fingers would put a serious damper on his relationship with Sabina, Alex did his best to rescue her, and failed. She didn't lose her fingers though. After gloating and telling them all about his evil plan, Cray took them along to witness him blowing up the world. From Air Force One.

Obviously, Alex stopped him. But in the process, Yassen (who'd been working for Cray, for the money) got shot protecting Alex. ...What? Apparently, he'd known Alex's father, and apparently Alex's father had also been an assassin and saved his life once upon a time. (Fans speculate on whether or not Yassen had a massive mancrush on Alex's dad.) And then there was some shit about Scorpia and Venice and destiny and then Yassen died in Alex's arms. Not really, but he's dead. Oh, and Cray died, messily. And Air Force One crashed (it wasn't far off the ground). And Sabina finally believed Alex about him being a spy, but she was going to move to the States with her family, as her dad had had enough of England and its fucking madmen (not really, he got a nice job offer instead).

So it's still summer vacation and Alex decides to go hang out with his best mate, Tom, who is going to Italy to hang out with his super cool older brother (as their parents are going through a messy divorce and who wants to be in the middle of that?). Italy is where Venice is, and Venice is where Yassen told Alex he could find this Scorpia. So Alex talks Tom into stopping over in Venice for a few days before going down to Naples. Obviously, Alex finds Scorpia. But Scorpia decides they don't like teenage boys snooping around their fabulous parties with celebrities and rockstars and dump him in a cellar that floods when the tide comes in. Luckily there's a well in the cellar that leads into the Grand Canal that is just big enough for Alex to swim through and just short enough that he doesn't drown in the process.

One would think almost drowning would put anyone off investigating a suspicious organization. But no. Not Alex. He wants to find out more about his dead daddy. So, after heading to Naples with his mate, he BASE jumps off a cliff onto the roof of a pharmaceutical plant to snoop around. And he gets caught, by the same assassin who dumped him in the cellar in Venice, Nile. Great. But this time Nile is glad to see him (???) and takes him to meet the HBIC, Julia Rothman. She gives Alex some nice expensive clothes, feeds him dinner at an equally pricy restaurant, and then tells him that SCORPIA is an organization based on Sabotage, CORruPtion, Intelligence, and Assassination. And then she tells him how MI6 killed his father.

Alex decides he's had enough of MI6 and tells Rothman that he wants to join SCORPIA. So she sends him off to their secret assassin school, which is like regular school except the history classes are about the history of weapons and the science classes are about explosives and poisons. But, as well as he does (which is actually... kind of scarily well), Alex doesn't have the instinct to kill, which is rather necessary to be an assassin. So SCORPIA sends him on a special mission, to kill the one person he should want to kill: Mrs. Jones, the deputy head of MI6 and the person who orchestrated his father's death. However, he gets caught, because MI6 security is no slouch, and there's bullet proof glass in the deputy head's apartment.

And he really isn't a killer.

Alex's loyalty to SCORPIA is about as much as his loyalty to MI6, meaning non-existent. So when Blunt starts questioning him, Alex tells him everything. And then Blunt tell him that SCORPIA has threatened to kill a lot of school kids in London, and something Alex saw while poking around Italy might just explain how they're going to do it. So Alex gets to attend a super-secret meeting with the prime minister and other important people. And it is Alex who figures it out, that SCORPIA put poison in the inoculations administered to some of the students. Someone else explains how the poison is contained until a particular frequency is broadcast, but what it boils down to is satellites and finding them in time.

So MI6 sends Alex back to SCORPIA, as he is their only sure link to finding the right satellites (because SCORPIA isn't stupid and put up some fake ones). Following a spectacularly staged motor accident, Alex is picked up by SCORPIA and taken right to the satellites, because Rothman is a cold-hearted bitch who wants to watch Alex die right in front of her (as he was injected with a 'vitamin booster' in Italy). But he stops the transmission just in time and saves not only himself but a good chunk of the kids in London. And when everything is over, MI6 finally tells him the truth: his father was a double agent, an MI6 spy sent to infiltrate SCORPIA, and his death on the bridge had been faked. (Except then he got blown up a little while later anyway, as SCORPIA somehow found out they'd been tricked.)

Because SCORPIA never forgets, and SCORPIA never forgives.

So when Alex leaves the MI6 office, a sniper shoots him in the chest from across the street.

Obviously, Alex survives, as there are still three more books to go.

Thanks to a little luck and the fact he's a very healthy teen, Alex pulls through and gets put up in a swanky hospital for celebrities, millionaires, and government VIPS. Next door is Paul, the son of Russian multimillionaire Nikolei Drevin, recovering from appendix surgery, and the night before Alex is supposed to be discharged, some thugs come to kidnap Paul. Alex intervenes and ends up getting kidnapped instead. The thugs have a beef with Nikolei Drevin and Alex only just convinces them they have the wrong boy before he loses a finger. Instead, they dump him in a room and set the building on fire. Using a trick his uncle taught him about tightrope walking, Alex escapes.

Drevin is of course grateful that Alex saved his son, and offers to take Alex on vacation with him for a couple weeks while he continues to recover from his surgery. Alex is a bit reluctant but finally agrees. While he likes Paul all right, he quickly realizes Drevin is a bit of an asshole. So he decides that when they fly to New York, he's going to skip out and go join Jack in Washington D.C., where she's visiting her parents.

Except the CIA grab him, and they tell him that Drevin is a giant crook with ties to the Russia mafia, the Japanese yakuza, the Chinese... you get the picture. The CIA has been building a case against him but they're worried about him skipping town, and they can't grab him until they have a solid case against him, because he's partnered with the British government in building the first luxury hotel in space. So they want Alex to keep an eye on him. In the end Alex more or less has to agree as the CIA has his passport.

So Alex goes with Drevin and Paul to their island just off of Barbados. He has a pretty good time until some of Drevin's thugs try to drown him while scuba diving. Luckily Drevin's hot personal assistant, Tamara Knight, turns out to be a CIA agent and saves Alex just as he's about to run out of air. They sneak across the island to figure out what's going on, and get caught. Turns out the space hotel is sucking Drevin dry and he wants to crash it into the Pentagon to get rid of the evidence the CIA has been building against him, then collect the insurance money. Two birds with one stone. Oh, and the kidnappers? They were a fake terrorist group Drevin created so the blame would be shifted onto them. Yeah, the guy was going to cut off his own son's finger. Nice dad.

Alex escapes, with a little help from Tamara and wind surfs to Barbados to warn the CIA what's going on. But Drevin launches a rocket with a bomb on it to blow up the space hotel before they get back. And while the CIA storms the island, Alex kind of accidentally kills Drevin. Turns out, Drevin locked the computers so the CIA can't disable the rocket. Luckily there's a second rocket! Equipped to take an orangutan into space. Guess who gets voted to be the first kid in space?

It's only once he's up in space that Alex realizes what everyone else forgot. Launching a primed bomb into space would have been impossible, so someone had to have gone up on the first rocket to set and place the bomb. Which means the second rocket is actually that guy's ride home. So now Alex has to find the bomb and move it, and keep the thug who set the bomb from taking the second rocket. Alex does this, despite having absolutely no experience with zero gravity. Escaping the space hotel just in time, Alex reenters the Earth's atmosphere and splashes down... off the coast of Australia.

After getting picked up by the Americans, Alex is forked over to the Australians who stick him on one of their army bases in Perth. One would think they could just pop him on a plane and ship him back to the UK, but nooooo now the Australians are giving him the run-around for being in the country without a visa. Overall they don't treat him badly, if you ignore the little barbeque beach party that ended with Alex wandering into a mine field.

As one might guess, the Australians want to use Alex for a mission. They have a bit of an immigration problem, but they can't figure out how the snakeheads are getting people into the country, and every time they try to get someone into the organization, they wind up dead. So they want to stick Alex into the pipeline with one of their agents disguised as father and son Afghan refugees. Normally, Alex would have told them where they could shove their heads, but the agent they want to stick him with... is his godfather.

Alex hadn't even known he had a godfather.

And so, in order to learn more about his father (again) and himself (as always), Alex agrees to help out the Australians. Naturally, everything that could go wrong does goes wrong from the very start. Alex gets forced into a cage fight with a bloodthirsty Muay Thai fighter, he's almost captured by the Kopassus (Indonesian SAS), he plays a game of deadly hide-and-seek on a container ship, and then, just when he finally gets to Australia, he gets caught by the bad guys and hauled off to a secret hospital deep in the Australian jungle where he's going to have his organs harvested for transplant.

Alex, being the resourceful bugger he is, escapes and uses a float from a seaplane to kayak down whitewater rapids while dodging a sniper before going over a 50 meter waterfall. After getting rescued, Alex fills in the Australians on the big picture. SCORPIA is at it again and has stolen a bomb from the UK and is planning to detonate it in a fault under the ocean in order to create a tidal wave that will kill a whole lot of people, because someone hired them to get rid of eight celebrities holding a peace rally on a little island. Talk about overkill.

And as Alex had managed to scan his handprint into the controls for the bomb while on the container ship, he's the only one who can deactivate it. So of course he gets to go along when the Australians storm the drilling platform the bomb is being released from. However there's one more surprise left for Alex. His godfather is a double agent for SCORPIA and is the reason why the Australian agents kept getting killed when they tried to get into the snakehead. Oh, and he planted the bomb that killed Alex's parents. Yeah.

Alex manages to stop the bomb and is finally allowed to go home to England. As a bonus, Sabina shows up and she wants to spend time with Alex.

So Alex and Sabina hang out and Alex gets invited to spend New Year’s with the Pleasures up in Scotland. They even get invited to some swanky party hosted by Desmond McCain, an ex-con do-gooder reverend who runs an international first response charity. The party was pretty boring though, as Alex and Sabina were pretty much the only non-local teens there. Alex accidentally beats McCain at Texas Hold'Em and, figuring this is a major part faux pas, donates his 'winnings' to the charity. They leave the party early though, as Sabina's mum has the flu and wasn't able to go to the party with them.

But as the fireworks are set off at midnight, the SUV Sabina's dad is driving suddenly swerves off the road and into the FREEZING COLD LAKE. Fantastic way to start the new year. Alex keeps his cool though (LOL) and everyone make it to shore safely. Of course, they're soaking wet and it is winter in Scotland, so they'd have definitely frozen to death if some random person hadn't been on the road as well and seen them fall into the lake. So the nice guy takes them to the hospital. Suffice to say, Alex and Sabina's family decide Scotland and its snow can fuck right off and they head back to London.

But life likes to laugh at Alex, and while he's visiting his uncle's grave on the way home from school some goons try to jump him. He quickly hands them their asses and heads home. Except then some reporter shows up and says it was a set up and that he wants to do a story on Alex for all the papers. That is the last thing Alex wants and he goes to MI6 to ask them to get this reporter off his back. They're not going to do it for free though, and he has to investigate a laboratory working on genetically engineered crops while on a school trip. After spotting McCain at the plant, Alex only barely manages to escape, hitching a ride on top of the school bus.

Naturally, Alex gets suspending for a day for 'falling out the window of the bus'. So he decides to go check out a location he heard McCain talking about the day before, an old abandoned movie studio in London, and almost gets burnt to a crisp when McCain's people torch the place. Having had enough, Alex is all ready to let MI6 carry on without him, but he gets kidnapped on his way to school the next day. Drugged and disguised, Alex is whisked off to Kenya. And there, he finds out the truth: that McCain has been engineering a massive crop failure in Kenya in order to get people to donate money to his charity. And then he plans to run off with the money while millions of people starve.

After managing to avoid being eaten by crocodiles, with some help from Rahim, a RAW operative (Research and Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency), Alex blows up a dam and floods the fields of contaminated wheat before they do any harm. McCain is pissed off, shoots Rahim, and is about to shoot Alex, when Alex uses the last of his gadgets to blow up McCain. He gets badly burned in the process and has to spend yet more time in the hospital.

And for a while, it looks like MI6 is going to leave Alex alone. He doesn't hear anything from them for over four months, four glorious months in which Alex thoroughly enjoys being a schoolboy. He even goes to visit Sabina in the States over Easter. But then a sniper takes a couple shots at Alex while he's sitting at his desk in school. Jack forces Blunt to come to Alex this time, and MI6 suggests that maybe Alex should leave the country (again) while they sort out the sniper business. Apparently, there's a school in Egypt that MI6 wants to look into...

Jack is livid and insists on going with Alex this time, tired of having to wait for Alex to come back more beat up than the last time. But Egypt is just a horrific trap for Alex. Once again SCORPIA is up to their old games, and this time, they want to use Alex to force the United Kingdom to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece. They will document him on a 'mission gone wrong' and then use the documents to blackmail the English government, threatening to tell the public about the teenaged spy MI6 got killed. Oh, yes, they're totally planning to kill him.

But first, SCORPIA breaks him. After everything he's been through, all of the fights and brushes with death, all of the emotional trauma and the physical pain, Alex finally breaks. But he's not down. He can't let SCORPIA have their way, and for the third time, he ruins their plans and defeats them. But when everything is all over, when SCORPIA's plans have been averted, when the strongholds have been broken into and all the necessary villains killed... Alex is just as ruined. Psychologically, he's completely traumatized by what happened in Egypt, and as Blunt is forced out as head of MI6, in part because of Alex, Mrs. Jones permanently closes Alex's file and finally resolves to never, ever, use him again.

skills & abilities
Thanks to the way his uncle raised him, Alex has been exposed to a wide assortment of activities and skills. He has been practicing karate since he was six years old and is a first-grade dan black belt. He is a certified scuba diver. He knows how to drive manual transmission and how to ride a four-wheeler. He likes playing tennis, basketball, football (soccer), rowing, and snooker. In fact, he's captain of the first team at soccer and represents the junior team at his local snooker club. He enjoys outdoor sports like mountain climbing, abseiling (rappelling), white water rafting, and skiing/snowboarding. He's parachuted twice from a plane, once during the day and once at night. He executed a successful BASE jump with very little preparation. He knows how to pickpocket, walk on a tightrope, and use a handgun. He speaks French, Spanish, and German fluently, and knows a little Italian. His best subjects in school are science and maths, and he has a natural talent for physics in particular. He also enjoys drama, though he doesn't think he can sing all that well.

miscellanea
•  tribute token  — Chelsea dog tags. Alex received the dog tags as a gift from Jack shortly after Chelsea won the Double (winning both the Premier League and the FA Cup) in May 2010. The tags commemorate the historic win and are engraved with Alex's name on the backside. Alex wears the tags underneath his shirt as his tribute token and rarely shows them to anyone.

permissions
There are two series named specifically in the books: Harry Potter and Assassin's Creed (I'm probably missing other random series mentioned as cultural references in conversation). I don't really picture Alex as a huge Harry Potter fan, but more as someone who read the books mostly because they were in vogue and entertaining enough. Once and that was about it. However, Alex is a big video game player. He owns a PS3 and a DSi, and probably owned previous models of those consoles, if not other consoles like the Xbox 360, Wii, or the PSP. So, it's very likely that Alex played some of the video games that are commonly RPed from. I see Alex more as someone who enjoys RPGs rather than FPSs. However, I don't play video games myself, so all I know about them is through fandom osmosis. So, if you'd rather Alex not have played the game your character is from, say so HERE! If you don't mind him being familiar with your game on the other hand, feel free to say that, too. Also, Alex is from 2010, so any games that came out in Europe after... July of that year, he wouldn't know anyway.

Here's a short list of the video games/franchises that I think he might have played (in addition to Assassin's Creed): Ace Attorney, Devil May Cry, Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls, Fable, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, Halo, Legend of Zelda, Mass Effect, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Star Fox, Super Mario, Trauma Center Alex rider relatives :john rider his dad, helen rider his mum,Ian rider his uncle