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16 Dec 2013 @ 1:03pm
Lieutenant Lilou Zaren
Name Lilou Zaren
Position Chief Engineer
Rank Lieutenant
Character Information
| Gender | Female | |
| Species | Trill (Joined)/Human DNA Inhibited | |
| Age | 26 | |
| Date of Birth | October 3, 2363 | |
| Place of Birth | Qin-Harbinger Federation Research Station |
Character Type
Starfleet ID
| Serial Number | SR-771-8653 | |
| Security Clearance | Level 6 | |
| Duty Watch | Alpha |
Physical Appearance
| Height | 5'3" | |
| Weight | 127 lbs | |
| Hair Color | Dark brown | |
| Eye Color | Grey-blue | |
| Physical Description | Lilou is a wiry 5’3”; what she lacks in strength and height, she makes up for in athleticism and dexterity. She is an intent young woman with full high cheek bones, one naturally grey-blue eye (the right), and one bulky cortical implant courtesy of time spent with the Borg. Her demeanor is one of hurried chaos; even when she's in full uniform, there's something not quite right - a wrinkle, a smudge of dirt, a sleeve rolled up. Her dark hair is unkempt; wavy when down, but she generally winds it into quick and simple braids or buns to keep it out of the way. Her torso is long and built more like a runner’s body - though not quite as thin or muscular. Her skin is pale and there are two rows of dark brown spots running from her forehead around the sides of her face, across her shoulders and down the sides of her torso, hips, and legs to her heels. Her feet are narrow-heeled and hammer-toed. Her ankles and wrists are very narrow. Her fingers are lengthy “pianist’s” fingers - a fact her father often laments since she can’t play a pleasant note on any instrument. Instead, she puts those dexterous fingers to work tinkering with mechanics and tapping information into her data pad. She dresses haphazardly, rarely paying any mind to what she’s putting on so long as she’s covered. She only dresses in uniform when there's absolutely no excuse otherwise. She generally appears rather ragged, her cheek smudged with grime or her fingers nicked and bleeding from finding her way around behind a panel. Scars: Her left arm has been broken in two places, making it slightly weaker than the right. Her hands are peppered with pock-marks from cutting herself on grates, wires, soldering irons, and a myriad of other items. Note: Her extremities tend to be colder than a human's, thanks to her Trill heritage. Handshakes and physical contact can feel a bit like touching someone just in from the snow. |
Family
| Father | Hanor Peers, a retired Trill diplomat and active physicist (Trill exile) | |
| Mother | Ellie May Paxton-Peers, Security Officer (Terran, British citizen) |
Personality & Traits
| General Overview | Lilou sees the universe as an overcomplicated system that is greatly in need of simplification. Unfortunately, she hasn't the least idea how to go about fixing it. Instead, she relies on the ideas and opinions of those around her for solutions to the problem - though those, in concert, seem to complicate the problem even more as none of them appear to agree on anything. She cares deeply about the well-being of others; starting from a young age, she found herself feeling responsible for the well-being and happiness of those around her and despite age, experience, and the logical knowledge that she is not, in fact, she still feels that way. Unfortunately, she has no idea what to do about this. She is creative, but shy about her creativity. Shy, actually, about most things, including her intellect, which she sometimes blames (privately) for the sense that others distance themselves from her. She has a deep need to feel close to other people, but has a very difficult time figuring out exactly how one goes about accomplishing such a thing. She genuinely tries to be kind but she doesn't entirely understand what the concept is. She prefers to be a listener more than a talker, but she has a tendency towards nervous rambling. Like everyone else, she thinks that her opinions are right and sometimes she wants other people to come along and agree with her for once. |
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| Strengths | Her imagination is expansive, detailed, and often spotted with graphic and violent imagery - a fact she keeps to herself. This is the imagination of a mostly solitary child who took to reading ancient books like Joyce and Hugo so she wouldn't feel so alone. While not a strong young woman by most standards, she is flexible physically and emotionally. She is in the process of developing a series of skills to help her adapt to every situation, which means bending in strange ways and learning to hide her feelings. The physical aspects are far easier and therefore get much more practice. She has a clearly defined sense of what is right and what is wrong; a moral compass that she was taught and then revised herself according to experience. She’s spiritual, but not religious. In fact, she finds the idea of organized religion decidedly unappealing, as she thinks that humans as a race would be far more open and good if they were allowed to discover the truths about life for themselves rather than being indoctrinated by someone else. |
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| Weaknesses | She finds it hard to find the middle-ground in relationships; that is part of the reason why she finds so much comfort in the hierarchy of the fleet. One of her greatest flaws is a deeply ingrained sense that she must be perfect at all things in public; the act of appearing imperfect in front of other people (whether she knows them or not) shames her to the point of (carefully choked back) tears. She can be forgetful about certain things, like where she left her glasses or the fact that she needs them to see farther than a couple feet from her face or the necessity of food. She is painfully shy, and the simplest resolution she has found to circumnavigating this is by being outwardly decisive. Unfortunately and in opposition to her intent, this often comes across as anti-social and a bit dismissive. |
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| Ambitions | Lilou's greatest wish is to become as skilled as she possibly can be. She is utterly enamored of starships and the freedom and sense of exploration they represent. In her mind, the logical progression of accomplishing that goal would be to eventually design and build greater and greater starships for the fleet, not merely patching up problems or gently adapting them to something better, but inventing ships that will go further and do more for the sake of the Federation. |
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| Hobbies & Interests | She loves to write and is always piling designs, and notes, and various and sundry thoughts. Interests: books, starships, people-watching, parkour, tinkering with and building new machines, target practice, running. |
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| Vernacular | Lilou's voice quiet, almost breathy, and lodged mostly in her head-voice. She doesn't speak in a very high pitch, but even when she's being in control and decisive, her voice never quite drops into her. She uses some British-isms, as picked up from her mother, but her dialect is largely Federation with just the barest of British rounding. She is a nervous talker. If she feels ill at ease, she tends to ramble, often falling back into detailed specifications about ships or some other esoteric subject. Or falls silent and rambles internally, appearing to be either dismissive or distracted. On task, she is direct, specific, and not easily distracted. When comfortable, she is often sarcastic; her humor is dry and quite often oblique; it derives mostly from an amusement at inaccuracies, misconceptions, and a variety of data that she finds personally incredible. Most people don't understand she is joking when she is and often think she is when she isn't - another little part of her life that keeps her on her toes. She uses this dry wit as much as it uses her, hiding behind it as a means of testing the waters on whether she can get close to someone or not. |
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| Orientation | Bisexual | |
| Language(s) Spoken | Trill, Federation Standard, Bajoran, Cardassian, Ferengi |
| Personal History | Lilou Catherine Peers was born three weeks early on the Qin-Harbinger Federation Research Station (Stardock Class Starbase) in Alpha Centauri to Ellie May Paxton and her husband, Hanor Peers - a retired Trill diplomat and active physicist. From the moment of her birth, Lilou's parents knew that she would be a special child. For the first four months of her life, she observed her surroundings in a blinking, bewildered silence. Then, having assessed her new place of habitation, she began a rapid assimilation of all data within her grasp. It was a frustrating next few years. Her mind was years ahead of her body and it took careful, repeated practice to train her little body to do what she wanted it to. She was speaking in full, grammatically accurate sentences in Federation Standard and Trill by the time she was six - and she was speaking to the television, the radio, and the hologram machine. At first, her parents were concerned she might crazy. She wasn't, not completely, the specialists her parents consulted promised. But she was showing signs of having an IQ that could potentially prove problematic if she wasn't given something to keep her overactive brain busy. Her father elected to enroll her in training to begin preparing her for her application to the Symbiont Commission. Meanwhile, her mother decided that Lilou could put her brain to work on learning a new skill, one that required she use her body in addition to her head. So began Lilou's training in firearms and gymnastics. For a while, this seemed to be enough. Lilou threw herself headlong into learning her new skills and was rarely seen whispering to the house electronics any more. Then, a few weeks before her twelfth birthday, she took apart her father's mitigated particle accelerator and tried to reconstruct it using parts of two phasers. She wasn't allowed to finish. Hanor Peers had made some connections at the Starfleet Academy during his time with the Qin-Harbinger and, ignoring Ellie May's strident protests, he took Lilou to them and begged them to give her something to do that did not involve blowing things up or shooting things. Or let her do it, but somewhere other than a vital and very fragile research station. Impressed by her testing scores and natural talent, she was accepted into a youth training program at Foxcroft Academy in New York, where - her father hoped - she could study in a place where they could understand her particular way of looking at the world. Lilou maintained ties with her parents via hologram visitation, but over time those visits became less frequent as they all became immersed in their own projects. By the time she was fourteen, she was only seeing her father's face for further mentoring in Initiate studies. It was like taking a class, not speaking with a parent. The fact that her distance from her family didn't bother her - bothered her. She had an epiphany that becoming so overwhelmingly involved with machinery had made her lose sight of who she was and where she came from. Her experiences at the Foxcroft Training Academy encouraged her to enjoy the company of people as much as she enjoyed playing with machines, though it was an increasingly difficult shift to make. And, though she knew the right things to say and do to fit in, people could usually tell that she was not interested in what they were saying to her about the weather or the seedy politics in South America. At the age of seventeen, she was shipped to San Francisco to undergo another round of testing - this time for entry into Starfleet Academy to train as an engineering officer. [Again, Ellie May expressed her irritation. However, Lilou had made this her first real choice on her own.] She passed her testing with flying colors (for the most part) and five years later, she emerged from Starfleet Academy as an Engineering Specialist. Her first action was to contact the authorities on Trill to notify them of her completion of her degree from Starfleet and of the rigorous private training her father and his acquaintances had put her through for eligibility. Her missive was summarily dismissed, returned without being read. Almost immediately, in the absence of a reply, she was assigned to the Qin-Harbinger Federation Research Station. This assignment, she was sure, was a result of her own parents nudging more than it was a result of her own achievements. Zaren's Host History: Zaren has, from the very beginning - even before its first host, been an eager soul bound to understanding and discovery. (2234-2244) Velen Vayo, housed discreetly and quietly at the Trill Institute of Sciences, had been thrust into a course of study she would not have chosen for herself. She was a kind, generous woman whose mind might have been suited for the joint fields of Botany and Biology which she researched, but her heart was not. When she Joined with Zaren, she was infused with Zaren's joy at the smallest molecules and largest lifeforms. But she was also infused with the newly joined symbiont's inherent need for experience and that need inspired her to set out to do what she'd always longed to. Velen left the Institute with the support of her husband Toran, then applied and attended the Chi'tar Academy of the Arts for two years. Her ink-wash paintings were extraordinary and her history in the field of botany gave her style a depth of realism and understanding of shadow and motion. Some of her work can be found at the Academy, and also at the Devritane Museum, Teirsa Art Museum, and the Academy of Arts and Sciences in both B'tar and Karel. Velen had two children before she Joined and two after, but her fifth and last pregnancy encountered complications and she died, still young, a mere ten years after her Joining. For the next host, the Commission elected to Join Zaren with twenty-nine year old medic Selik Spalen. (2244-2313) Unfortunately, despite Zaren's best efforts to make the transition easy, Selik's lover, Timor Chara, couldn't handle the changes in Selik, nor could he overcome his jealousy over not being selected for Joining himself. After they split, heartbroken Selik Zaren could no longer bear to live in the city where so many memories waited around every corner. Despite his love for his homeland, Zaren traveled to Bajor and began anew with an emergent medical facility in Dahkut. During his life post-Joining, he worked with med-evac victims, emergency medical teams on the Federation/Cardassian border, helped starship security and Bajoran military with field forensic examinations, and taught three generations of new emergency medical personnel - human, Bajoran, and Trill alike. When Selik was 98, he died peacefully in his sleep in his home on Bajor, and Zaren transitioned into a new host - a pilot with a thirst for adventure named Arjin Lan. (2313-2373) Arjin Zaren took his small scout ship and wandered the stars as single-run merchant, wreckage scavenger, and purveyor of information, pod-hopping between ships, stations, moons, and planets. In his time circumnavigating the Federation/Cardassian border, Zaren was independently recruited by Trill, Cardassian, and Federation Intelligence services and found himself in a far deeper web than he'd anticipated when he'd first begun his travels. He aided the Bajoran rebellion by smuggling information, weapons, food, and medical supplies to the rebels, carried messages between Intelligence agents in opposing factions, and eventually found himself in a Cardassian prison block for his troubles. With luck and timing, he was smuggled out and returned to Trill before he could be put to death for actions against the Cardassian Union. Back on Trill, he spent a great deal of time in quiet contemplation, seriously considering the depth and breadth of mortal corruption. The longer he spent surveying the savagery of nation against nation, the more he longed for the quiet days when he had simply had a studio, some paint, and a dream; something small and lovely - a little piece of the universe whose mysteries had not yet been decoded and the time and freedom to interpret those mysteries as he liked. At the age of eighty-seven, Arjin Zaren was stung by a bee while tending the garden of the home he retired to on Trill and died almost instantly. Fortunately, plans had already been made for Zaren's next transition, and he was moved safely and swiftly to a new home with Raifi. (2373-2389) Raifi Cahil and Zaren were made for one another. They both yearned to find the connection between what could be and what was, and they did so together by exploring. Raifi Zaren's journey took him all over, seeking out new stories, new experts, new possibilities, and new experiences - and sharing those with whoever would listen. He traveled with freighters, cataloguing information about crew life for those that were planet-bound, then disembarked and did the same - telling the stories of men and women who spent their entire lives on a single planet to those who had only ever known the stars. He followed the stories that everyone was covering, but he approached them from a different angle - more interested in the individual's experience than rattling off the details of an event. He was fascinated with local cultures and flavors, but only until the end of the story. Then he was ready to move on to something new. When news came that a new star had been discovered, and new planets for potential colonization, Raifi felt compelled to go and share what he could of the new discoveries with his viewers, which was how he eventually landed aboard the USS Venture. From there, he transported aboard the USS Galileo where his path crossed with a shy young half-Trill by the name of Lilou Peers... Previous hosts: Raifi Cahil (male) - Journalist/Activist Arjin Lan (male) - Pilot/Merchant Selik Spalen (male) - Emergency Medical Technician/Forensics Velen Vayo (female) - Botanist/Biologist/Artist |
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| Starfleet History | Lilou spent two years on board the Qin-Harbinger, despite her reservations over nepotism. She had her orders, regardless of why she had them, and she would do her duty. She'd grown up on the starbase, had studied it from when she was tiny, and, in spite of her irritation, she appreciated seeing her parents again. And it was on board the starbase that she discovered her one of her particular gifts in action - a deep appreciation and understanding of structural systems. Still, two years later when the opportunity presented itself, she accepted a job as a Structural/Environmental Systems Specialist on a Federation Cheyenne Class starship (the USS Algonquin) running in conjunction with Tekne Mining Corporation. She spent the next years learning the ins and outs of the Algonquin as well as performing necessary maintenance on the drills and air systems on board the Tekne Star mining vessel. Her engineering acumen and intuition aboard the Algonquin and the Tekne Star led her to be reassigned - first as a structural/mining specialist and then, additionally, an emergency response specialist. That unique ability to respond to an emergency situation with calm and precision made her invaluable to both ships. And yet, doing as she was told and following her skillsets, she watched those with more political acumen, presentation, and less skill climb the ranks above her. She had just come up for contract renewal when the opportunity to join the crew of the Galileo came up; she took a gamble and requested reassignment, hopeful. Another ship - a Nova, nonetheless - to learn and love. The Nova was a smaller ship, it was true. Less durable, far more needy. But the size of the ship meant the crew was smaller, giving her more opportunities to prove her usefulness in an environment (hopefully) not overrun by power-games. Another opportunity to climb the long, winding staircase to her hearts' desire. Aboard the Galileo, Lilou had the good fortune to work with one of her idols - Markum Quinn. Working with and for him, she learned much - not just about the workings and potential of the ship, or ships in general, but also about people and - by extension - herself. Thanks to the support and honor of her fellow crew-members, Lilou is beginning to re-learn how to trust. |
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| Medical History | A recent stay with the Borg subjected her to an unanesthetized cortical implant, Trill symbiont transplant, and electroconvulsive interrogation techniques. She has burns on her scalp and the sides of her face, a Borg cortical implant replacing her left eye, and carelessly handled transplant scars. Family history of breast cancer, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. Lilou's official medical history is a series of scrapes and cuts and bruises and broken things, from too much clambering around unsafe surfaces (among other daredevil activities). |
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| Service Record | 2373 - Enters Foxcroft Academy (Starfleet Preparatory) 2379 - Enters Starfleet Basic Training - Eng Spec. 2381 - Advanced Enlisted Engineering Training: Crewman 2nd Class 2383 - Qin-Harbinger Federation Research Station (Stardock Class Starbase) Assigned as an Engineering Specialist. 2384 - Transfer: Structural/Environmental Systems Specialist 2385 - USS Algonquin (Cheyenne-Class Starship) Assigned as Structural/Environmental Systems Specialist. 2385 - Transfer: Structural/Mining Systems Specialist 2386 - Transfer: Structural/Emergency Response Specialist 2389 - USS Galileo (Nova-Class Starship) Assigned as Engineering Officer Promoted to Assistant Chief Engineering Officer, under CEO Markum Quinn. -Rank Promotion: Ensign Promoted to Chief Engineering Officer of the USS Galileo. |
Character Progression System
| CPS Option | DISABLED |
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