Medical Officer T'Vara

Character Information

Gender		Female
Species		Romulan
Age		24
Birthday		1/17/2065
Clearance Level (assigned by Command)		Beta 3
Quarters Assignment (assigned by Command)		Shared Crew Quarters, Deck 4
Roommate Assignment (assigned by Command)		Mei-Lin Zhao

Physical Appearance

Height		5' 6"
Weight		128 lbs
Hair Color		Black
Eye Color		Green
Physical Description		T'Vara carries herself with a quiet self possession that reads as calm rather than cold, which tends to surprise people who came in expecting something more typically Romulan. She is fit from working in tight spaces and moving through an environment that required being adaptable as opposed to more focused fitness. Her hair is usually kept cut short based on the work she performs, and she usually wears it without much thought put into it. The ridges along her brow line is the most visibly Romulan thing about her and she has long since stopped noticing the way people's eyes go to it when they first meet her. Her expressions are controlled without being unreadable and she has a way of going still when she is paying close attention that occasionally unnerves people who are not used to being watched that carefully.

Financials - In Gold Pressed Latinum

Share Payout Percentage (% received per job) (Command fills out)		2 %
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)		5 Bars

Family

Father		Tovar, (63), last known location Verath IV
Mother		Sela, (58), deceased
Other Family		Nara, the Bolian woman who trained her, deceased. The colony of Verath IV which functions as the closest thing to an extended family she has ever had.

Personality & Traits

General Overview		T'Vara is perceptive and self contained and has a pragmatism about people and situations that comes from growing up in a place where reading the room accurately was a practical necessity rather than a social skill. She is not unfriendly but she does not perform warmth and people who need that from someone they have just met tend to find her difficult to get comfortable with at first. The ones who stay with it tend to find someone who is genuinely interested in them and quietly loyal in ways that do not announce themselves. She has a dry humor that surfaces when she is comfortable and a directness that surfaces whether she is comfortable or not. She is Romulan enough to be perceptive and strategic in how she moves through the world and different enough from every Romulan most people have encountered to make that quality disarming rather than threatening.
Strengths & Weaknesses		T'Vara is an adaptable and resourceful medic who learned her craft in conditions that had no margin for error and no backup to call on. She is calm under pressure in the way of someone who has had to be rather than someone who trained for it and that calm is genuine rather than performed. She reads people well and uses that skill in her medical work in ways that go beyond standard diagnostics. She is also stubborn in ways that occasionally cross into inflexibility and has a tendency to manage situations quietly on her own rather than asking for help until the situation is already more complicated than it needed to get. Her Romulan background creates friction with crew members who bring their assumptions about her species into the room before they bring anything else and she has a limited amount of patience left for that particular dynamic.
Ambitions		T'Vara is not particularly driven by ambition in the conventional sense. What she wants is to keep getting better at what she does and to do it in places that are worth the doing. She has enough of her colony's pragmatism in her to know that stability and belonging are worth more than advancement and she is looking for both without entirely admitting it to herself. She would like to be genuinely good at her work rather than merely adequate and she is already most of the way there. Beyond that she has not planned very far ahead and is not sure she wants to.
Hobbies & Interests		T'Vara learned to cook out of necessity on Verath IV and has kept it up because it is one of the few things she does purely for herself without any practical justification required. She reads widely and without much system, picking up whatever is available and moving through it at her own pace. She has a passing interest in xenobiology that occasionally crosses over into her medical work in useful ways. She spends time in whatever passes for a quiet corner on whatever ship she is on and has gotten good at finding them quickly.

Personal History		T'Vara was born on Verath IV in 2356, a small Romulan colony on the outermost edge of what the Empire had ever meaningfully claimed. The Empire established it generations ago for reasons that made sense at the time and stopped making sense long before T'Vara was born, and by the time she came into the world the colony had been operating without Imperial support or oversight for nearly two decades. What filled that gap was everything the Empire would have discouraged, trade with independent merchants, integration with passing crews of mixed species, and a pragmatic approach to survival that had no room for cultural purity or political loyalty to a government that had stopped pretending to care about them. She grew up knowing she was Romulan the way someone knows they have a particular family name. It was true and it meant something but it did not define the boundaries of who she was allowed to be. The other children she grew up with were Human and Bolian and Antican and species she did not have names for until she was old enough to look them up and she absorbed their ways of moving through the world alongside whatever Romulan cultural memory the older colonists carried. Her mother Sela died when T'Vara was nine and her father Tovar, never a steady presence, became less of one after that and eventually stopped being one at all. The colony filled in around the edges of that absence in the way that small isolated communities do and she grew up belonging to the place more than to any particular family within it. The colony had no dedicated medical facility and no trained physician for most of her childhood. What it had was a rotating cast of passing medics who stayed long enough to teach what they knew before moving on and an elderly Bolian woman named Nara who had been handling the colony's medical needs on the basis of experience rather than credentials for thirty years. T'Vara attached herself to Nara at thirteen and spent the next several years learning everything the old woman knew, practical field medicine, improvised treatment, the art of working with what was available rather than what the manual said should be there. When Nara died in 2373 T'Vara was seventeen and the colony's medical needs did not stop because the person handling them was gone. She managed for two years before a passing independent vessel brought a proper medic through who formalized what she already knew and filled in the gaps that field experience alone had not covered. That medic also told her she was too good at this to spend her life on a colony that was not going anywhere and offered her a berth on the vessel when it left. She took it without much deliberation and did not look back. The five years that followed took her across the Beta Quadrant fringe on a series of independent postings, cargo vessels, independent stations, and short term contracts with crews that changed with every job. She was good at her work and got better at it and learned where her limits were which is its own kind of expertise. The Gamma Quadrant came next not because of any particular plan but because she had covered enough of the same ground in the Beta Quadrant that forward was the only direction that made sense and forward meant through the wormhole. The pay was better and the work was real and nobody in the Gamma Quadrant had strong preexisting opinions about her that she would have to spend time correcting. The privateer life was not a choice T'Vara made so much as a destination she arrived at by following the only path she had ever known. Verath IV was ungoverned and independent and operated entirely outside any institutional structure and she grew up learning medicine the same way, outside the system, on the basis of what worked rather than what was officially sanctioned. Every posting she had taken since leaving the colony had been independent, unaffiliated, and accountable to whoever was on the ship rather than to anyone further up a chain of command she was never part of. A privateer vessel is simply the most honest version of that. It has a name for what it is and does not pretend otherwise and that suits her considerably better than the organizations she has encountered that operated the same way while calling themselves something more respectable. The Dutchman in particular works for her in ways she did not fully anticipate when she came aboard. Zedd does not care that she is Romulan. The crew is judged on what they can do rather than what institution trained them to do it. And the work is real in a way that keeps her sharp rather than comfortable. She has been on ships that were safer and quieter and she has always ended up leaving them for something that felt more like Verath IV. The Dutchman feels more like Verath IV than anything else she has found since she left it.
Service Record		2356: Born on Verath IV, fringe Romulan colony, Beta Quadrant. 2365: Mother Sela passes away. Father Tovar becomes increasingly absent from her life. 2369: Begins informal medical training under colony medic Nara at age thirteen. 2373: Nara passes away. T'Vara assumes primary medical responsibility for Verath IV colony at age seventeen. 2375: Formal medical training received from visiting independent vessel medic. Credentials recognized under civilian medical licensing. Departs Verath IV aboard independent vessel, first posting as junior medic. 2375: T'Vara took a series of medic postings across the Beta Quadrant fringe, cargo vessels mostly, a few independent stations, and whatever short term contracts came up with crews heading somewhere she had not been yet. 2380: Travelled through the Bajoran wormhole into the Gamma Quadrant and ended up around New Ferenginar looking for work. 2380: Joined the Dutchman as a medic.