Character Profile - Calliope Zahn

Calliope Zahn
Orion/ Human Female

Place of Origin: Valus VI, Novex Colony, UFP

Physical Description

Instead of becoming a specialist, Calliope skill-stacks.

Calliope likes to give people the benefit of the doubt and second chances, but she’s experienced enough that she’s also not interested in being played for a fool. Her discernment is matured, though her primary desire to think best of others remains her baseline.

Since highschool and continuing through present day, Calliope privately takes a hormone blocking drug when she’s worried about unintended influence of pheromones on others. She can be overly sensitive about Orion female stereotypes, her most triggering being any rumors of sleeping around for favor or having connections to the Syndicate.

Has a tense relationship with the in-laws, torn between her innate desire to please others and feeling like there are impossible expectations of class. She has moments where she feels they accept her and others where the chasm is just far too wide.

Speaks a little passable Rhihansu and a smattering of Orion, but isn’t really great at languages.

Personality Profile

Instead of becoming a specialist, Calliope skill-stacks.

Calliope likes to give people the benefit of the doubt and second chances, but she’s experienced enough that she’s also not interested in being played for a fool. Her discernment is matured, though her primary desire to think best of others remains her baseline.

Since highschool and continuing through present day, Calliope privately takes a hormone blocking drug when she’s worried about unintended influence of pheromones on others. She can be overly sensitive about Orion female stereotypes, her most triggering being any rumors of sleeping around for favor or having connections to the Syndicate.

Has a tense relationship with the in-laws, torn between her innate desire to please others and feeling like there are impossible expectations of class. She has moments where she feels they accept her and others where the chasm is just far too wide.

Speaks a little passable Rhihansu and a smattering of Orion, but isn’t really great at languages.

+Working with others
+Management
+Optimist/ Persistent
+Supply chain and logistics planning

-Being left alone
-deep knowledge
-complex tactical strategy or nuanced diplomacy or subterfuge

Calliope has achieved what she was after in terms of finding and meeting needs, spearheading expeditions, exploring places and meeting people. From this point, she’s interested in continuing to make herself useful to the Fleet and the people she works with, and to make a life together with Lance.

Her hobby is probably having hobbies. Trying almost any new skill, she’s a starter of many things. Each one is usually abandoned somewhere in the basics to intermediate stages and not mastered. Often she chooses hobbies that will help her interact with others or are tangential to her work-life.

Does regular light PT and plays games like tennis and springball (pick up games, not competitively)

Enjoys social gatherings, music, plays, sports— anything out, or with friends. Is not usually very cerebral about any of this, however, leaving that to others to explain to her and enjoying their enjoyment or critique of things.

Early years Biography

Calliope grew up the child of a single mother who worked as a Starfleet recruiter on the UFP Colony of Novex, on the planet of Valus Six. Her mother, Heather Zahn, was a non-com in starfleet with adventures all her own, but when an indiscretion led to pregnancy, Heather settled planetside to raise the baby. Calliope knows next to nothing about her biological father. Her mother married, divorced, remarried, divorced, and present day, lives with a boyfriend. Heather’s own parents had been a wreck, and she didn’t fare much better in terms of relational stability, but for her own part, as much as she was able, Heather was very present in Calliope’s life. Calliope kind of feels like she grew up watching her mother mature emotionally, and in a way, they share a friendship as much as a mother-daughter relationship. If Calliope has other extended family, she doesn’t know of them.

Calliope’s colony was newly established but burgeoning, and diversely populated. She was a personable kid from the start, and if she had a failing, it was her trouble understanding why anyone wouldn’t want to be friends or engage in her creative play, even to the point of fretting if she thought anyone disliked her. As a teen she cycled through many random odd jobs, from pet sitting, hair cutting, lawn care, service counter jobs, and answering comms. She didn’t favor anything except staying active and filling needs when people asked her to. She was fairly independent, and managed her own school, work, and social life.

She performed average or high average in most of her high school courses, aside from the sciences and higher maths, and her mother, forever a proponent for Starfleet, kept dropping hints that Calliope would have a promising career in the Fleet.

History

Calliope decided she didn’t want to enlist- she was a little more ambitious than that. She wanted to attend Academy and become an officer and lead daring and groundbreaking expeditions. She wanted it bad enough that she worked her tail off in her senior year of high school to get her grade point averages up in the sciences, which she was always a little shaky on in places. But it was enough for SF Academy’s Registrar’s office.

In spite of pressure to specialize or choose a track, she didn’t know what she wanted to major in. Her advisor put her down for Operations, assuming it could be switched out later, when Calliope found her passion.

Operations was admittedly a little dry, but it was the practical side of mechanisms, systems, computer operations, and day-to-day in space. She was able to master it in-so-far as it had a use. She enjoyed some of the more hands on training with gear, phasers, and piloting, but didn’t especially want to pursue either security or CONN. If she liked anything most of all, it was generalizing. Calliope loved all of the different personalities she found throughout the variety of studies and she had the sort of mind for drawing connections between diverse topics and helping to organize interdepartmental projects.

Calliope was befriended in Academy by a Senior student everyone knew as LRC or Corvette. Calliope liked spending time with students coming back from their first cruises and hearing what they had to say about service. Some had taller tales than others. But while she had her hopes on the future, her present reality was not looking good for her in Academy. Just as she had struggled with sciences in Highschool, she was struggling all over again. In spite of her very best efforts, in her third year, by midterms, Calliope’s marks in computational sciences and spatial theoretics for non-engineering majors were ugly enough that she was getting scared. The computational sciences course was already a retake and she knew she wasn’t going to be able to carry off three sciences in her final year. She might not be able to graduate on time. She even wondered if she could graduate at all.

No more willing to give up on herself than she was on anyone else, she cast around for someone she could convince to help her, honing in on a lab recluse named Lance who had a snobbish reputation with his fellows. They spent long hours together, first in the labs, then out in public. She made friends with others in Lance’s track and enjoyed getting them to talk about their ideas and theories and seeing them light up. Her grades in general engineering and general sciences made huge improvements, but more importantly, thanks to Lance’s help, she was finally able to grasp concepts that had always eluded her and would become invaluable during her career in StarFleet.

Lance and Calliope’s relationship grew romantic and they remained close after Lance graduated a year ahead of her. After a couple of years, when the relationship seemed to be weathering well in spite of the distance, they convinced themselves they could carry on together and married, both of them understanding that the demands of each of their careers would make the marriage a largely Long-Distance one. It worked for Lance, allowing him the focus he needed on his research and it mostly worked for Calliope because it allowed her both the security of the committed relationship and the freedom to travel broadly and be fully engaged in her work. Choosing to focus on their own careers spared them the guilt of holding the other back or the pain of compromising their own careers. The visits the couple were able to finagle together throughout the years Calliope thought of as a repeated honeymoon. They shared passion and complemented one another well, but maintained no continuous life story together. Calliope sometimes was love-sick from long separation, particularly when missions took her out of communication for longer than usual, but she avoided burdening Lance by talking about it. She also tended to downplay talking about any dangerous engagements, in the interest of not worrying him.

Calliope has spent most of her years of service in Operations, where she was happiest complementing the needs of other departments and helping to organize what needed to get done for each unique circumstance, project, or mission. While she began mostly as a small fish in a big pond in her department, midway through her career she found herself more often assigned to away teams and more active support roles. Once she certified as a bridge officer, she became more often selected by senior staff and was included in more briefings, outings, and training opportunities.

Many of Calliope’s missions were to assist with the settlement of and supply to new Romulan colonies in the former neutral zone. As such, Calliope is very sensitive to Romulan affairs and has a number of contacts with the new settlements. Later on, these connections led to her selection as First Officer aboard a hospital ship, from which she contributed to Task Force efforts to coordinate both state and private aid to new settlements. She and her CO worked extremely well together, but when Calliope was contacted by her Academy friend, Corvus DeHavilland, (whom she had also had the privilege of serving with on the Challenger) about a new opportunity on Obsidian Command, Calliope was not only impressed by the scope of the opportunity but also by the chance to try making a life together with Lance for a change.

Graduated 2381
2380-82 USS Scorpio (Sovereign Class), Operations Officer

2382-83 USS Eldridge (Prometheus Class) Operations Officer

2383-86 USS Takahari (Akira Refit) Ast Chief Ops

2386-89 USS Challenger (Galaxy Class) Chief Operations Officer

2389-96 USS Paracelsus (Olympia Class) Chief Ops/ 2XO —> First Officer

2396- Present Obsidian Command Executive Officer