Bravo Fleet
Summary
As a cosmologist on staff with the New Astrophysical Academy, Laken ir-Nesthai is assigned to team of civilian Romulan Free State scientists working aboard the USS Constellation. Born from the elements of air, Laken’s moods shift like the wind. He was born on Romulus in the Romulan Star Empire, he defected to the United Federation of Planets as a youth, and he then emigrated to T’Met, joining the Romulan Free State in its earliest days.
Appearance
Laken ir-Nesthai tirelessly maintains himself in brawny physical condition for his age and species, through excessive exercise and a precisely-calculated nutritional plan. Although his Romulan heritage grants him heavy bone density and muscle mass, Laken was slight of build through his childhood. Since his young adulthood, Laken has committed to the nutrition and physical exertions required to transform his body into his sculpted physique of thick musculature. At first, training his body was an excuse to partake in solitary activities, but it has since become an obsession.
Laken’s ears and facial features all come together in sharp angles, aside from his prominent nose and the under-developed cranial ridges on his forehead. Paired with his black irises and an intense countenance, Laken is what you might call shark-handsome. He wears his dark hair shorter and shorter as he gets older, and he experiments with varying facial hair depending on the trends of the season.
Personality
From a small child to a grown man, it has been obvious to all that Laken ir-Nesthai is born from the Element of Air. He comes across as quick-witted, always says whatever he is thinking, and is usually fast on his feet. Like a gentle, lilting breeze he becomes bored easily, and can change in opposite directions most suddenly. One moment he can be flighty and bubbly, and the next he can lift a person up with effusive charm.
Of course, without warning, an ill wind can blow in. Seemingly contrary to his usual temperament, his temper can be aggressive and all-consuming like a hurricane. As an officer, he maintains a serious air while going about his duty. Laken is supremely confident in his own abilities. He possesses an almost narcissistic awareness of himself intellectually, emotionally and physically. Although he doesn’t always show it, he is very sensitive to the emotional states of others. For the most part, he keeps to himself on duty, but he spent most of his evenings of starbase life bounding from one establishment to another on the promenade.
Laken is something of an outgoing introvert. He often has no desire to socialize with others, but he has no inhibitions about doing so. He is almost always brutally honest, with little concept of interpersonal boundaries, privacy or modesty. Intimate relationships tend to bring out the hot temper in him; courtship is synonymous with combat in Laken’s experience. Past lovers have described Laken’s behaviour as self-destructive in romantic relationships, varying from unhealthily co-dependent in some relationships, while aloof and withdrawn in others.
He has limitless storage capacity for trivial data points and drawing correlations between them. However, he’s more likely to know seven things about the mating practices of frogs than he is to know the name of his commanding officer.
Borderline entitled personality: He sometimes feels under-appreciated. When he performs his profession successfully for an extended period of time, he fears that his colleagues see his accomplishments as merely meeting expectations, rather than things of wonder.
There’s something cultivated in the way he speaks. He aims to come across as intellectual, dryly funny, a little bit aristocratic, and the ultimate professional. His curated manner of speaking can feel like artifice when you first meet him, and yet it follows him through all aspects of his life, through all manner of circumstances, one can’t help believing it to be genuine after all.
History
The Rolling Hills of Romulus (2355 – 2370)
As a youth, Laken ir-Nesthai had little reason to strive for anything. He was born into a home of comfort. His mother, Betrys, and his father, Cystennin, were land owners in the township of Nesthai. His family was not especially wealthy, nor did they come from noble stock. They grew fruits on their land and they had a respectable number of servants to harvest the orchards and to tend to their home. They were comfortable.
Cystennin was a mural painter and poet with some small influence in cultural circles on ch’Rihan, and Betrys ran the business of the family orchard. Betrys only followed politics well enough to blithely agree with the policies of whichever government was ruling the planet at any given time. To his knowledge, Laken’s family never ran afoul of the Tal Shiar.
Born the youngest of six siblings, Laken could only obtain the affection of his parents through competition. And he wasn’t the most adventurous, the most charming, nor the most talented at academics or athletics. By the time he could talk and read in full paragraphs, he had established himself as the listener and the observer; his role in the household was that of the conflict mediator. He remained neutral during family conflict, more interested in understanding than in picking sides.
In his education, Laken was considered a passable student. He did well enough without needing to be doted over or tutored. He didn’t excel enough to be encouraged or congratulated. To his detriment, he was easily distracted or bored or frustrated. For the most part, he only ever excelled in fields of study that were impractical and self-indulgent.
Demilitarized Zone or Bust (2370 – 2373)
As an adolescent, Laken’s temperament took a turn for the taciturn. He leaned into his observational tendencies and only chose to speak when it was absolutely necessary. Even then, he tended to sum up his expression into as few words as possible. This abrupt change came about when his entire life was uprooted. His parents defected to the United Federation of Planets and they brought all of their children with them as refugees. They never expressly told Laken, or his siblings, what had motivated their defection, and Laken knew the unspoken rules of the family well enough to know never to ask. Whispers heard through bedrooms walls at night suggested Betrys and Cystennin were more political than Laken knew, supporters of the unification movement between Romulus and Vulcan.
At that time, the Federation was directing immigration towards the colony worlds that were transitioning from the Cardassian Union to the UFP. The ir-Nesthai family set about establishing a farm on the struggling Federation colony of Tracken II. They didn’t come to the Federation with political or military secrets; they only came with gumption and green thumbs. Their harvest was used for foodstuffs and medicinal purposes to support the parts of the colony without functioning replicators, but mostly it was exported for the Federation’s rescue and aid efforts. Their service to to this colony was a condition of their defection, and the most important contributing factor towards their application for full Federation Citizenship.
Laken and his siblings commuted into the capital city to attend the Federation school. Laken was often accused of being too introverted. He had few problems with socialising, but his teachers worried that he lacked awareness of his surroundings. This afforded him a heightened awareness of his own self. There was a part of him that assumed he would never be fully accepted by his classmates, and so he kept a pre-emptive distance to avoid different treatment because of his Romulan heritage. He devoted greater efforts into his studies, which proved useful when his school was destroyed in a retaliatory attack during the Maquis troubles in that region of space. Laken’s studies became necessarily self-directed for a time —home schooling through distance education— which proved problematic when it came time to apply for higher education.
Bar tending and other educations (2373 – 2387)
Laken was rejected by every educational faculty that considered his applications, from the University of Alpha Centauri to the Regulus II Science Academy. His siblings would say he was too dim to be accepted by academia; his classmate-friends blamed residual racism from the Romulan non-aggression pact with the Dominion; his parents were too distracted by the demands of the farm; and Laken suspected the pieced-together records of his dumpster-fire of an education (between defection and refugee-living) were to blame.
In the end, Laken chose to leave home without a destination in mind. The colony on Tracken II was failing and he knew too little about agriculture to be of use to his parents. By the time Laken’s application for Federation citizenship had been accepted, he had all of the rights and responsibilities of a citizen in this strange part of the galaxy that had taken him in when his parents had forced him out of his own home, his own world. Laken followed several of his classmates in the wakes of their destiny towards the Tri-planetary Academy. He lived just outside campus, and he took jobs at the transit hub, hospitality blocks, or in child care. Whatever would allow him time to read and to meet the expectations of Federation Citizenship. He found his way into local gymnasiums and learned a passion for lifting heavy things; it helped to fill the time amid too much solitude.
Living on the edges of a university town, Laken filled his days with books and lifting and following his friends around, until he found something he wanted enough to go chase it for himself. He managed to pull together additional records about his education (through mostly legal means) and slowly completed the mathematical preparatory programs to become accepted as a student of the Tri-Planet Academy. He studied cosmology there, because he loved how small it made him feel. In 2384 when he began to receive word of the impending supernova in the Romulan star system, Laken recommitted his efforts to his education. He made passing attempts to send his own research to Romulus, but it was all for naught.
Live Free or Die (2387 – 2400)
Laken’s education was one of the factors that made him attractive to the Romulan Free State. Administrators from the New Astrophysical Academy in orbit of T’Met made overtures to Laken around the same time two of Laken’s older brothers were investigating the possibilities of joining the Romulan Free State. When his brothers confirmed the sins of their parents had been forgiven or forgotten by the RFS regime, Laken welcomed the prestige and luxury being offered to him to prop up the Romulan Free State’s aim of governmental legitimacy through science. There are few Federation records of Laken’s employment at the New Astrophysical Academy.
However, his time in the Federation made him a natural choice for the Romulan Free State science ministry to assign him to serve as their Liaison Officer aboard the USS Olympic, representing their scientists’ interests in their joint exploratory venture with Starfleet. While assigned to the Olympic, the ship received irregular orders, ending missions abruptly and often being sent into environments too risky for an Olympic-class starship. On Laken’s recommendation, the Romulan scientists were withdrawn from the ship shortly before the Changeling influence over Starfleet led to the Frontier Day catastrophes.
Rather than returning to the Free State, Laken joined the science party serving aboard USS Constellation.