Ensign Elegy Nascimento
Highlight Posts:
The Stealing Saga
Let’s Steal Fire From The Gods!
Rank: Ensign
Position: Chief Science Officer (Future 2XO)
Species: Human
Age: 34
Elegy Nascimento was born to an artist-in-residence at the Kohan Commune in Heliopolis City on Vega Colony. Elegy’s mother, Fukumi, insisted on a stable family home –nestled in Vega’s art commune– for Elegy and his older brother. This meant Elegy’s father, Fortunato, was often a fly-by parent, given his travels for the United Earth Diplomatic Corps. There were always Starfleet Officers orbiting around Fortunato, but they remained in Elegy’s peripheral vision for most of his childhood. By Elegy’s estimation, Starfleet was all bold commanders and wary security officers.
Elegy was born deaf and he learned to communicate through lipreading and United Earth Sign Language with his family and his neighbours. It was only after he was fitted with a cochlear implant that he began playing too-loud music at all hours, whether he was deep in his home schooling studies or deep asleep. He collected what few battered and gently used instruments he could get his hands on, given the remoteness of Vega Colony, and he taught himself to play each of them obsessively. In his community, it became an expectation that Elegy would become a singer or a composer or a curator of musical art installations. That expectation festered with him, driven by dark perfectionism. Elegy only left the comfort of home to complete a Bachelors degree in musical arts at Kwantlen University, in Canada on Earth. All his adolescence, Elegy wrote his own music prolifically, but he found himself stumped. Everything he had composed, everything he was motivated to write, it all had the stench of derivation. His studies of music history proved what he’d always feared: nothing he composed sounded original.
After university, Elegy expected himself capable of writing a musical. Something manageable, with a small cast and big heart, that he could produce in Vancouver or back on Vega Colony. But he didn’t. He procrastinated. He stared at blank screens, at blank paper, at blank canvas, and he didn’t know what to write about. He couldn’t even start. After week after unproductive weeks went by, he feared that he would never write even a bagatelle or an advertisement jingle. His indecision spread to every part of him. He couldn’t decide where to go next. He was struck dumb with abulia. That inability to make a decision compacted exponentially, and it got to the point where he couldn’t decide whether to take the stairs or the elevator. He couldn’t leave his apartment and couldn’t decide what to eat for breakfast.
Before he starved to death, he made one decision. Just one. To save himself, he stripped away his agency all together. He gave himself over to a lifestyle that would tell him what to do and would tell him where to go. Elegy recognized, in himself, that he had lived a sheltered life of privilege. He had been afforded the freedom of art for art’s own sake. He questioned if he had lived enough to know anything strongly enough to write about it. He needed to go boldly. Elegy applied to the Starfleet Training Command. Naively, bombastically, Elegy supposed they needed musicians in space. He surrendered to destiny.