Keth En’ves
Caitian Male

Place of Origin: Beta Antares

Slightly built with bright blue eyes. His pelage usually looks pure black, but catch him under just the right lighting, and one might notice that he does have leopard-like rosettes covering his body—they are simply so dark that they almost never show.

Like many smaller Caitians, the slightness of his build is deceptive. He’s much heavier than he looks; under his short fur is a brick wall of dense, corded muscle, solid as a rock.

Strengths:

• Always prepared: Count on En’ves to be the one member of the away team to beam down with an undetectable weapon concealed on his person.
• Resourceful: From picking locks to deciphering hieroglyphs, or simply knowing someone who could be of use and how to get them to cooperate, En’ves is a cat of hidden talents, constantly surprising others with the breadth of his knowledge and experience.
• Sense of humor: Sometimes, it’s the only thing keeping you alive.
• Poetic: Although he wouldn’t recognize this in himself, one reason that his theories and writings became so popular is that they are so hauntingly and captivatingly written. He has a real talent for putting words together.

Faults:

• Birds and bees: He would consider this a strength, but really, he has a bad habit of thinking with his glands.
• Vain: He’s spent his whole life trying to make others see him a certain way. He’s learned to partially recognize this failing in himself—although perhaps not in time to prevent his life from being ruined by it.

Anyone who has ever studied the Lohalian Dynasties has heard of Keth En’ves, the famed ethnohistorian and xenoarchaeologist whose work has virtually defined the field. His early work, reconstructing the chronology of Lohalian history from archaeological remains and the folk tales of a dozen pre-warp worlds, has become the seminal work on the subject, propelling him to Federation-wide renown as one of the most respected archaeologists of modern times.

The only problem: it was all a lie. Motivated by an intense yearning for accomplishment—in particular, a desperate wish to live up to the expectations of his family—Keth falsified the data on which his early work was based. His fraud succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. As yet, no one has uncovered the deception. But he is haunted by the certainty that someone, sooner or later—probably sooner—will unmask him as the imposter he is, by piecing together the true history of the Lohalian Dynasties—and so he has determined that that someone will be him! The only way he can escape total and eternal disgrace as a scientist, is by making enough genuine discoveries, before he is unmasked, to wipe out the shame of his earlier crime. Perhaps, by being the one to make the real discoveries that overturn his earlier ones, he might even avoid the shame of unmasking altogether. Thus motivated, En’ves has used his influence with the Federation Science Council to inveigle himself a ship, and that ship is the USS Tanjura.

It’s all in my book.