Diruga Orliss
Trill Male

Place of Origin: Trill

Diruga is in robust physical condition for a man his age (forty-five), other than a few old injuries and the numerous consequences of excessive revelry. Physical work and semi-regular exercise keep him fit, particularly Nausicaan boxing techniques and weightwork. After six different bodies, he knows how to keep himself looking and feeling good with the least possible effort.

His hair was a dark brown most people called black but is now greying. His eyes are brown with reflecting points of burnt orange and he has a few discrete tattoos of Bajoran and Deltan design. Despite years of hard living, he looks better preserved than he should. He shaves every day but he can’t grow much facial hair. He’s on the tall side of average height.

The Orliss symbiont is in good condition for a two-hundred and sixty-eight year old trill and could be distinguished among others by its dark flesh and luminous orange-blue stripes.

THE SELF

Diruga (Iru to his friends) is a people person. He’s chatty, charming and can get along with just about anyone or anything he can communicate with. As someone on Earth once told him, he could talk the legs off a chair. He’s rough around the edges from his time among civilian spacers and finds himself sometimes forgetting the manners and courtesies expected of Starfleet.

Rarely the first to arrive but often the last to leave, when you can hold his attention, Diruga is energetic, curious and never says no to opportunity. He has a hard time not speaking his mind, but he knows well enough to respect the chain of command and how to behave in someone else’s house.

THE LIFESTYLE

He loves a joke and a good time of any description, but he prefers simple, manual activities. He’ll take a deck of cards or an inflatable ball over a holosuite any day of the week, and he’d rather acquire or replicate ingredients and cook them when there’s time to do so. He likes to tinker, disassemble and modify anything he can acquire, rarely found with empty hands. He also reads voraciously, preferring technical manuals.

THE GOOD

He is prone to having too much of a good time and maintains some bad habits that while not forbidden for Starfleet officers, would certainly be discouraged. To start with; recreational substances, regular festivities, loud music, gambling, unhealthy food and travel at unsafe velocities. In spite of his many preferred excesses, he remains a consummate professional on duty (usually thanks to the variety of rapid-onset detoxication solutions known to current science) and does not allow good times to interfere with work.

THE BAD

He can be rather harsh to subordinates and less frequently, colleagues, who don’t meet his expectations and has a slightly less empathetic personal philosophy than most Federation citizens of the day, being from the era before the Prime Directive and interplanetary utopia. He is cynical in ways he usually doesn’t reveal to others and does not trust easily. Friendly as he is, it takes him a while to consider anyone a friend, and that can be easily influenced by how useful he considers them. Being almost 300 and having done just about every job under the suns, he’s quietly judgemental about how well anyone else does their work, but gives credit where credit is due.

THE FUTURE

He has few goals beyond having the greatest most enjoyable adventure that anyone has ever had.

Diruga is the sixth host of the Orliss symbiont.

YOUTH

The symbiont Orliss began life in 2131, the same year as the first host, Ablann Tam.

THE FIRST HOST

Ablann was a rather quiet and ostensibly unremarkable Trill with poor eyesight who later served in the Trill Star Corps. It was two years into his service that he was joined with Orliss. Owing to his new symbiont-based skill in languages, he was quickly inducted into the Trill Intelligence Apparatus. During his career he was briefly assigned to infiltrate the Earth Starfleet after the launch of Earth’s first Warp 5 ship.

ADOLESCENCE

Ablann died at the age of 40 after a short illness. Orliss was reimplanted in a boisterous musician named Epidian Iodas, already in his thirties and one of the most successful Trill artists of his era. Despite the success he’d previously enjoyed, his popularity waned after the joining, and he seemed to have lost his knack. After a decade of profligacy, Epidian Orliss went on an itinerant pilgrimage and eventually found religion on the then-mysterious and distant world of Bajor, with the belief lasting the rest of Epidian’s life.

YOUNG ADULTHOOD

Epidian was host for 32 years before his death. The next host was Texate Jinn, a gardener and family-man who Orliss was joined with for 58 years of simple, honest living. After Texate came Viloro Uplaan, a Starfleet Lieutenant whose career ascended rapidly thanks to Orliss’ experience. Viloro Orliss became a Captain of great renown, and after eighty years joined, Orliss passed next to Tyell Meche, a diplomat who went on to become Federation Ambassador-at-Large to the Gamma Quadrant.

MIDDLE AGE

When Tyell was critically injured in an assassination attempt on a visiting Federation Councillor in 2376, Diruga Bamf was by chance the only eligible trill within a hundred light-years, and he was chosen for joining to preserve the life of the three hundred year old symbiont. He would later admit to being too sauced at the time to really know what he was agreeing to, but having no regrets for it.

Before the joining Diruga had been a chef, oiler and deckhand in the merchant marine since leaving his secondary education. After numerous insubordinations and scandalous celebrations he found himself a freelancer working his way through Klingon space for more than a decade, eventually reaching the gamma quadrant. While he was free of concerns, his aimless, hedonistic wandering would later be looked back on after the joining as a purposeless and self-destructive era, largely because of how much he couldn’t remember.

In the twenty-three years since the joining, Diruga has joined Starfleet as an enlisted ops/engineering crewman and found his speciality in auxiliary craft repair and maintenance, becoming a useful member of any shuttlebay deck crew. His vast experience learned through Orliss made him a capable leader, and before long he was given his first Chief of the Deck post on the USS Hemmer.

MID-LIFE CRISIS
His skills for command were quickly recognised and he found himself serving as both Chief of the Deck and Chief of the Boat, given the respect and camaraderie of enlisted crew he had maintained.

He served brief tours in this dual role where his desire for the unique combination could be accommodated, and in 2398 he was reassigned to the Hou Yi.