Captain Zedd Sykes

Character Information

Gender		Male
Species		Human
Age		34
Birthday		3/28/2045
Clearance Level (assigned by Command)		Delta 7
Quarters Assignment (assigned by Command)		Captains Quarters, Deck 2
Roommate Assignment (assigned by Command)		Private Quarters

Physical Appearance

Height		6' 2"
Weight		220 lbs
Hair Color		Black
Eye Color		Blue
Physical Description		Zedd is tall with the kind of build that comes from years of physical work rather than anything deliberate about it. He keeps his dark hair brushed back which gives him a cleaner look than the rest of him usually suggests, and his blue eyes have a way of shifting from easy charm to sharp assessment fast enough that most people don't see it coming. He usually has a beard, well kept but not precious about it. His clothes are practical first and everything else second. A leather jacket that has seen enough use to earn its wear, cargo pants with pockets he actually uses, and boots that have done real work. On his belt he keeps a mix of small engineering tools and whatever else he figures he might need, nothing fancy about how they're arranged but always where he can get to them fast.

Financials - In Gold Pressed Latinum

Share Payout Percentage (% received per job) (Command fills out)		63.50 %
Current Amount Received (Paid out so far, Command updates after missions)		0 Bars
Other Funds (Latinum you want your character to have prior to joining ship, player may fill out)		152 Bricks

Family

Spouse		None
Children		None
Father		Jaxon (62)
Mother		Lara (56)

Personality & Traits

General Overview		Zedd has never had much patience for authority and has never really tried to hide it. He says what he means, usually faster than is strictly diplomatic, and has a sharp enough tongue that most people decide not to push back twice. It suits the life he has chosen well enough. What surprises people who only see the rough edges is how seriously he takes his crew. Once someone has earned his trust he doesn't give it up easily and he expects the same in return. He has his own sense of what's fair and he'll act on it whether or not it lines up with anyone else's rulebook. He has little tolerance for people who oversell themselves. If someone claims a skill he'll give them the chance to prove it and if they can't he considers that a problem for everyone aboard, not just the person who came up short. But he's not unreasonable about it either. If someone needs to learn something he'll teach them, he just won't carry them. More than anything else Zedd runs on the thing he can't quite name but recognizes immediately when it's in front of him, the next difficult thing, the run nobody else wants to take, the situation that needs someone willing to think sideways to get through it. That's where he tends to show up at his best.
Strengths & Weaknesses		**Strengths** Zedd knows engineering and computer systems well enough that most problems he runs into he has seen some version of before. The neural dataport at the base of his neck lets him interface directly with secure systems, which has gotten him in and out of situations that would have stopped most people cold. Years of working under pressure have made him quick to read a room and figure out what needs doing, and people tend to follow him not because he demands it but because he usually turns out to be right. He works well with others when the situation calls for it and is genuinely good at finding solutions that get everyone out in one piece. He can handle himself in a fight and he can talk his way out of one just as easily, sometimes in the same conversation. **Weaknesses** His instinct to push back against authority has a way of tipping into impulsiveness at the wrong moments. Years of dealing with pirate factions left him with a paranoia that doesn't fully switch off, and he is slow to trust even people who have given him no reason not to. He keeps a lot of himself locked away and most people who think they know him well would be surprised how much they don't. The dataport is useful but it cuts both ways, lean on it too hard against the wrong system and it can hit back, and the thing sits on his neck like a reminder of every debt he has ever owed. His sink or swim approach to crew works well enough for people who are ready for it and can be genuinely brutal for those who aren't.
Ambitions		More than anything Zedd wants to be done with owing people. No factions, no debts, no one with a claim on what he does next. Just him and a crew he trusts, moving through the galaxy on their own terms and answering to nobody. He thinks about the kind of captain he wants to be, not the kind that rules through fear or hides behind someone else's flag, but one that builds a reputation worth having. A privateer who takes good work, rewards the people who stick around, and is known for actually delivering. He wants the Dutchman to become something, not just a ship that gets the job done but one that other crews know by name and respect for it. The crew matters as much as the ship to him. He is not interested in a revolving door of faces who leave the moment something better comes along. He wants people who grow with him, who are still there years from now when the Dutchman is something worth writing home about and the jobs are worth taking for the challenge as much as the pay. Underneath all of it, underneath the practicality and the paranoia and the sharp edges, is someone who genuinely loves the life. The next system over, the run nobody else would touch, the feeling of open space with no one telling him where to point the ship. The riches are part of it but they were never really the whole point.
Hobbies & Interests		In his downtime Zedd can usually be found doing something with his hands. He fabricates spare parts from scratch when the mood takes him, not because he has to but because there is something satisfying about making a thing work that wasn't working before. His belt tools are almost all customized to some degree, adjusted and modified over time until they fit the way he thinks rather than the way they came out of the box. He has a weakness for a good puzzle and an even bigger one for security systems that think they can't be beaten. Whether it is a physical lock, an encrypted network, or a game that requires more patience than most people have, he will sit with it until he figures it out. It is less about winning and more about the process of getting there. He keeps himself in shape deliberately. Regular workouts, sparring when he can find a willing partner, and a handful of holodeck programs he cycles through depending on what kind of sharp he needs to be that day. He takes it seriously without making a show of it. A good drink and a good story told around people he trusts is one of his favorite things, full stop. He is a better listener in those moments than most people expect from him. And whenever the Dutchman makes port he finds his way to whatever shadow market or back corner of the docking ring is worth exploring. Rare tech, unusual components, things that have no obvious use until suddenly they are exactly what you need. Old habit from his previous life and one he has never seen a good reason to drop.

Personal History		Zedd Sykes was born on Epsilon Prime, a remote mining colony on the fringes of Federation space. Life there was harsh and demanding and the colony's economy ran almost entirely on the extraction of rare minerals. His parents, Lara and Jaxon Sykes, were both engineers who worked the mining operations, and from the time he was old enough to hold a tool Zedd was surrounded by machinery and technology and the constant question of how things worked. His childhood was its own kind of education. The colony had limited resources but the Sykes household was never short of salvaged gadgets and makeshift devices that his parents used for both work and teaching. Zedd spent most of his free time taking things apart and putting them back together, usually finding some way to make them work better in the process. His parents kept him supplied with books on engineering and physics and technology and by the time he was ten he could diagnose and repair most of the mining machinery on the colony without much help from anyone. The technical knowledge came easy. Everything else about the place was harder. The colony ran on productivity and there was not much room left over for anything else, and Zedd spent a lot of his younger years feeling the walls of Epsilon Prime closing in around him. He thought about the rest of the galaxy more than he thought about much else. He also thought about the mining company and its grip on everything and everyone around him, and the more he thought about it the less he liked what he saw. Those questions got him into trouble more than once and never quite left him alone. At eighteen he left with a bag of personal belongings and enough technical knowledge to make himself useful. He boarded a freighter bound for the nearest starport and didn't look back. He worked his way across a string of merchant vessels, trading his skills as an engineer for passage and experience, learning the quirks of different ship classes and how to adapt fast when something broke down in the wrong place at the wrong time. That all shifted when he ran into the Black Nebula. They were notorious enough that most people avoided them on principle, but Zedd listened to the stories they told about freedom and open space and work that didn't answer to a corporate structure, and something in him decided that was worth the risk. He signed on as an engineer and didn't regret it, at least not right away. His role with the Black Nebula expanded over time. He developed a talent for hacking that he hadn't known he had, working his way into secure systems and manipulating them quietly and precisely enough that the crew could get in and out with fewer casualties and less noise than they were used to. He got good at it faster than most people got good at anything. Then the Crimson Corsairs came into the picture. They were formidable and ruthless and sat somewhere between rival and resource depending on the day, and when a critical mission came up that needed near instant access to data and processing speed he didn't have, Zedd made a decision. He needed a dataport, a sophisticated implant in the neck that allowed direct connection to computer systems at the speed of thought. The procedure was expensive and not without risk, but the Corsairs had the medical expertise to do it safely and they were willing to front the cost. He knew what he was agreeing to. The debt would not be a small one and the Corsairs would not be patient about collecting it. He agreed anyway. The dataport changed everything about how he worked. He could interface with systems faster than he could have managed any other way, manipulating data streams with a precision that felt almost like instinct after a while. To start paying off what he owed, he ran jobs for the Corsairs on the side, infiltrating secure systems and pulling data and hitting rival operations when they needed it done quietly. All of it while keeping the Black Nebula from figuring out he was playing both sides. The two factions were not direct rivals but neither of them would have taken kindly to knowing he was moving freely between them. One of the jobs that stuck was the Klingon Starbase. The Black Nebula had been captured and the situation looked bad by any reasonable measure. Zedd used everything he had learned to work his way into the base's security systems and disable enough of them that the crew could get out, and then they commandeered a Bird of Prey on the way. It was the kind of thing that got talked about and his reputation inside the Black Nebula shifted after that into something more serious. The notoriety brought its own problems. Both factions wanted more of him and the obligations started to feel less like work and more like walls closing in, which was a feeling he recognized from Epsilon Prime and had never much liked. The Black Nebula considered him invaluable and the Corsairs, who had a reasonable suspicion he was not entirely devoted to their interests, made it clear that leaving was not an option they were willing to discuss. Zedd started thinking about a way out. He had heard the stories about the Vault of Shadows the way most people in that world had, a virtual bank used by crime syndicates and corporations to hide fortunes from anyone who might come looking. The security on it was supposed to be some of the best available. Zedd spent several months quietly gathering everything he could about it, mapping the virtual pathways and studying the security protocols and working out what he would need to do and in what order. He brought in a handful of people, paid them well, and made sure none of them knew the full picture. On the night of the heist he went to the engine room of the Black Nebula's flagship, which was already heavily shielded from sensors and tracking by default, and connected through his dataport. What followed was nearly seven hours of work that he would not have been able to explain to anyone who hadn't done something like it. Layers of encryption and firewalls and AI sentinels that were built to find exactly what he was doing. He navigated through it carefully, taking his time where he needed to and moving fast where he could afford to. An AI watchdog nearly caught him at one point and he spent extra time rerouting its protocols to make the detection look like a glitch, which cost him and left him drained in a way that felt physical even though he was sitting still. He found the central vault eventually. Streams of wealth moved through his mind, credits and cryptocurrency and digitized assets of every kind. He took small fractions from several accounts, amounts that looked more like rounding errors than actual losses among the volume of transactions he could see moving around him. He transferred it out, re-encrypted it into an account he had set up well in advance, and disconnected. He was soaked through and his chest felt heavy and he sat in the engine room for a few minutes before he was sure he could stand up properly. He moved fast after that because he knew he had to. The Corsairs would come looking for their debt and the Black Nebula would not be pleased to learn what he had been doing on their flagship without cutting them in. He ran a program to wipe his digital footprints and then waited for the right moment. It came during a routine docking at a shadowport on the outskirts of Cardassian space, a place the Black Nebula visited often enough that his presence there was unremarkable. He slipped off the ship in the early morning hours using a false identity he had bought from a Cardassian broker on an encrypted data rod, changed his clothes, and disappeared into the port. By the time anyone noticed he was gone the port's reputation for dangerous routine dealings made it easy enough to assume the worst had happened to him. From there he moved across a series of shuttles and freighters as an ordinary passenger, hood up and clothes changed at every stop, working his way steadily toward New Ferenginar. The planet had grown into one of the busiest commercial hubs in the quadrant, all neon lights and towering skyscrapers and marketplaces selling everything from exotic goods to stolen technology, with the old swamps and marshes of the original Ferenginar still visible at the edges where the development hadn't quite reached yet. It was loud and chaotic and full of people who minded their own business as a matter of professional habit. It was exactly what he needed. He arrived with his stolen fortune converted to bricks of gold pressed latinum and one thing clearly on his mind. He needed a ship. Something fast and maneuverable and armed well enough to handle trouble, as long as he had the crew to back it up.
Service Record		2346 Zedd Lafayette Sykes was born on Epsilon Prime, a mining colony on the fringes of Federation space, to Lara and Jaxon Sykes, both engineers working the colony's extraction operations. 2356 to 2364 By the time he was ten Zedd was already pulling apart and reassembling salvaged tech on his own, teaching himself through trial and error what his parents didn't have time to sit down and explain. By his mid teens he could repair and modify most of the mining machinery on the colony without supervision. The more he learned about how the colony actually ran, and who it really ran for, the less he liked it. His attitude toward the corporate structure that owned everything around him hardened steadily over those years and never really softened again. 2364 to 2368 At eighteen he left Epsilon Prime with a bag of belongings and enough skill to make himself useful. He spent the next four years working as a freelance engineer on merchant freighters along the fringes of Federation space, trading his labor for passage and picking up experience with more ship systems than he could easily count. It was a good education and it suited him well enough for a while. 2368 to 2374 Looking for better pay and something closer to the kind of life he actually wanted, Zedd joined the Black Nebula. He came in as an engineer and grew into something more useful over time, developing a talent for hacking that he refined into a genuine skill set. His most notable job during this period was working his way into the security systems of a heavily fortified Klingon starbase, disabling enough of the defenses to allow a captured Black Nebula crew to escape and walk out with a commandeered Bird of Prey. 2372 to 2375 His path crossed with the Crimson Corsairs during this period and a joint mission led to an agreement that changed things considerably. Zedd agreed to have a dataport installed on his neck at the base, which allowed him to connect directly to computer systems directly at a neural level. The procedure was dangerous and expensive and left him with a heavy debt to the Corsairs. He spent the next few years running side jobs for them, infiltration work and data theft and sabotage operations, while keeping the Black Nebula from finding out he was doing it. Neither faction would have been pleased to know he was moving between them and he was careful about it. 2375 to 2380 Zedd spent months quietly planning a heist on the Vault of Shadows, a virtual bank used by crime syndicates and corporations to hide fortunes from anyone who might come looking. Using his dataport and a chain of communication relays and transmission masking systems he worked his way through the security over the course of a single night, siphoning off a substantial amount in small fractions from multiple accounts, amounts small enough to look like rounding errors in the volume of transactions moving around them. The funds went into an untraceable account he had set up well in advance and once that was done he started wiping everything he could find that pointed back to him, working methodically until he was satisfied nothing obvious remained. Then he got out. A carefully timed exit through a shadowport on the outskirts of Cardassian space using a false identity got him clear of both factions, and a series of anonymous passages across shuttles and freighters brought him the rest of the way out. 2380 Zedd arrived on New Ferenginar with his stolen fortune converted to gold pressed latinum and one clear objective. He found what he was looking for at Zorol's Stellar Emporium, a Saber class refit light cruiser that he bought after a half hour of hard negotiation and named the Dutchman. He posted a crew call through the orbital boards and Cantina Row and got to work building something that was finally his own.