Talia Inger is an agent with the CIA.
A rookie agent, to be exact. In fact we are on hand when in the first recorded adventure she is completing her training at the Agency's facility. And it is in this training session that we learn one very important aspect about Inger that will guide her day-to-day activity, even when it causes her some trouble: "Miss Everything by the Book" is the way her fellow trainees think of her. Not in a nice way, either.
This attitude is an interesting one for someone as smart and gifted as Inger. She knows quite well that "The book was for the übernerds at the FBI. But how quickly would good guys cease to be good when they crossed every line?" She became so concerned with rules and regulations as a small girl. She never knew her mother who dies in childbirth and her father died when she was young: "Some piece of seven-year-old Talia had scrawled an idea on the brick wall her mind had built around the memory-the idea that she had done something wrong. Little Talia had committed some sin, and God's uncompromising punishment had been to take away her dad. So Talia had become uncompromising as well. She lived a moral life and stayed out of God's way, hoping he would stay out of hers".
Since Inger enjoys/suffers from having an eidetic memory and remembers everything about her life since that moment, being able to forget it and move on has always been beyond her. Even when later learning that her father had not been just a civil servant but was in fact a CIA like she would become does not help.
Good Lines:
- Regarding the fact that no graduate of the CIA training ever revealed the nature of the final test, "They were spies, after all, and what good were spies who couldn't keep secrets?"