Alexandria Farron
Male

Place of Origin: Venus (Sol II)

Alexandria looks like a high-speed, low-drag kind of gal, fitting characteristics given her former profession. She has a slender, athletic figure, too short for willowy but not quite petite. She’s attractive, if in a somewhat manufactured kind of way. Her nose looks a bit too symmetric, and her eyes… blue with monolids? The verdict on natural seems unlikely. One of Alexandria’s best features is her smile, but ironically, few ever get to see it. Clashing with Alexandria’s good looks is her graying, black hair. She looks too young for gray, and it’s obviously not a natural feature. It seems unnecessarily long, and is either stowed in an awkward ponytail or left loose and slightly unkempt. One can only wonder how or why she puts up with it.

Uniforms and work clothes aside, Alexandria’s taste in fashion seems rather limited. She harbors general disdain for cosmetics or fancy jewelry, and only owns three pairs of shoes. Even on leave she will never wear anything she can’t run or move freely in, or have to put up with wearing under a hastily donned jumpsuit. Close fitting base layers, tee shirts, gym shorts, leggings and/or pajama onesies aren’t exactly fashionable or imaginative, but they do complement her high-speed, low-drag image.

Alexandria is a reserved, cool customer at first glance, but it usually doesn’t take long for her to be reclassified as all-around strange. She’s clearly intelligent and confident in her abilities, but also quite introverted and socially inept. The latter tend to mask the former to the casual observer. She’s a terrible judge of character, and tends to assume the worst in people, partly to reinforce her own shortcomings, but also as a defensive measure. Despite her formidable defenses Alexandria does care very deeply about the feelings of others and how they feel about her, but she’s generally clueless about affecting or interpreting either in any meaningful sense; her natural instinct is to distance herself from an emotionally charged situation than to engage in one and risk a crash & burn.

Most people quickly learn that Alexandria has an aversion to physical contact, but sometimes she can give off the opposite impression due to chronically underestimating the general need for personal space. She sees the value in one-on-one friendships, but can be expected to try and wriggle her way out of most social gatherings and personal encounters she isn’t ordered to attend.

Alexandria Farron was born on Venus (Sol II). Her parents, both scientists working on behalf of the University of New Berlin, made it their life’s work conducting long-term feasibility studies of terraforming Venus. Alexandria has the dubious distinction of being the first—and to date, only—person to be born on that planet.

That distinction is marred by the fact that life on Venus is not what most people would see as something conducive to a healthy childhood environment. Besides having a highly toxic atmospheric composition, Venus is universally regarded as inimical to Human life in almost every measurable way possible. Because of this, Alexandria was forced to spend the vast majority of her childhood confined to her family’s small three-room apartment. Access to other parts of the science complex was limited, due to the sensitivity of the research, and trips to other habitats were few and far between. To say she experienced a very isolated upbringing would be an understatement.

Alexandria had loving parents, but both were driven scientists with a shared goal that went beyond mere ambition. The perceived importance of their work often clouded their judgement and indeed, they somehow saw merit in keeping their only child in such a limited and potentially dangerous environment. The fact that their daughter was the first to be born on Venus did not go unnoticed, and there were many other doctors and scientists who were eager to study her development and the effects Venus might have on it. Without the concept of a typical upbringing to use for comparison, Alexandria grew up seeing no problem with the notion that to most, she was just another experiment.

One personal upside to Alexandria’s unconventional upbringing was that for the most part she was left to her own devices… in some ways quite literally. Computers and technology were her best friend—her only friend—growing up. She’d always been a bright girl, perhaps too bright for her own good. Technological mastery over her environment was a skill she learned from her parents, and she learned it quite well. By the age of ten, Alexandria managed to break through her habitat’s secure communications firewall, and connected her personal computer to the Sol II comm-sat network. Besides being able see exactly what her parents were up to, she was able to interact with the outside world for the first time in her life. A year later, she’d widened her reach to the rest of the Sol System’s comms network and then beyond. She made the most of it, and it took years for anyone to grow the wiser.

Alexandria’s secret came out when she was fifteen, and it made a big mess when it did. She’d always been very interested in and good at certain computer games, and once she found out she could play them with and against other people there was no turning back. She quickly got heavily involved in e-sports competitions. Her parents were not exactly thrilled when they found out that she’d won the core sector championship for Galaxy Invasion Force X… and with good reason: in breaching the station’s firewalls to secure her own connection, Alexandria had potentially compromised the security of her parents’ research, and almost single-handedly doomed their combined life’s work to failure.

Once the full extent of Alexandria’s activities became known, the decision was made that she could no longer stay on Venus. Either she had to leave, or her entire family did. Her parents tried to trade off responsibilities, juggling their work, parenting, and trying to keep the dream of one day terraforming Venus alive. They couldn’t do it, and decided that the dream had the biggest impact and had to come first. Alexandria was initially sent to live with her grandparents in the lunar colony of New Berlin, but she quickly proved herself to be too much for them to handle and within a short time she found herself sent off again, this time to a juvenile military academy on Earth—there she only lasted five weeks.

Despite all of the childhood studies, doctors were never quite able to fully prepare Alexandria’s body for life outside of her sterile childhood environment. Three months in the domed lunar colony did quite a bit of hidden damage, and life on Earth quickly sought to finish her off. Most of her organs had begun to show serious signs of burnout, and Alexandria learned that without a series of elective surgeries to replace her organs with hardier synthetic counterparts, she likely wouldn’t live to see twenty. What choice did she have?

For Alexandria, the next few years were not worth remembering. The surgeries, the recovery, the acclimatization to Earth that lasted well into adulthood, all were unpleasant enough to be buried deep. The only good thing to come of it was a newfound desire to become something… anything more than someone who could barely survive on Earth. The new organs helped though, and she’d never felt stronger or healthier in her life. She wanted more.

By itself a career in Starfleet never seemed particularly interesting, but it did seem to be the place to be for the smart and talented who wanted to make a name for themselves. Getting in was never the problem, but fitting in was. Alexandria wasn’t used to being around lots of unfamiliar people, and socializing had never been healthy for her to begin with. She made few friends, but plenty of rivals and associates as she competed for prominence. She became particularly notorious when she capitalized on her birthright and competed in the 2390 Interstellar Olympics, held in Xinxian, Alpha Centauri. As the only eligible competitor to represent Venus, Alexandria was able to game the system and successfully qualified in several of the more obscure events. She performed poorly in most of them, but actually won the gold medal in table tennis in a stunning upset victory.

The medal seemed to bring more trouble than it was worth, as jealous competitors accused her of overclocking her synthetic organs to gain advantage. Those accusations were never proven adequately enough to strip her of her medal, but Alexandria was banned from future participation on those grounds. Ironically, she’d never considered overlocking her organs to gain an edge, but after the finding she began doing so openly.

Alexandria graduated from Starfleet Academy in 2391 with a degree in Mathematics, and an officer’s commission to do… something. No one seemed quite certain where to put her, Starfleet least of all. Alexandria didn’t really seem to care. She seemed primed for a career in Operations, or perhaps Flight Control, but she’d also excelled at every starfighter training simulation put in front of her. In the end she was assigned to the Aerospace Corps with no say in the matter, or any real interest in the job. It seemed the right choice though, as Alexandria immediately took a shining to the job.

Strangely, Alexandria found the small confines of a starfighter cockpit to be very comforting. And for the most part her performance and survival were ultimately in her hands. It was notoriously hard for underperformers to remain in the Aerospace Corps, so she didn’t really have to worry about problem individuals hiding in the ranks. She took well to the competitive nature of being a fighter pilot, and her career looked promising.

Unfortunately, it wouldn’t last.

One day in 2392, barely a year into her career, Alexandria got her first taste of combat. Her ship’s task group had finally managed to track down and corner the Orion pirate fleet they’d been chasing for a month. She and her squadron were deployed as part of an aggressive fleet action to neutralize the threat. Her first kill happened to be the pirate ace Kevl xen’Ador, and she and her squadron-mates stupidly boasted about it. Within a week Alexandria learned of the bounty on her head… four hundred bars of gold-pressed latinum and growing.

Starfleet removed Alexandria from active duty following knowledge of the bounty, and a routine investigation into her background and conduct only made things worse. A discovery was made that at some point very early on in Alexandria’s career, a marriage certificate had been forged in her name. A Betazoid scam artist known as Mierin Kel had been taking advantage of living and travel benefits to jet-set all over the Federation. Investigators were ultimately unconvinced that Alexandria hadn’t known of this fraudulent arrangement.

Just like with the Olympics investigation, Starfleet couldn’t tie Alexandria to an instance of misconduct or crime, but they did see her continued service as a disaster just waiting to happen. She was given the choice to quietly leave Starfleet with an honorable discharge, or to dare and stay on with the knowledge that she would never get anywhere, or be trusted with anything important again. Thankfully she’d never been too thrilled with the job to begin with, which made the choice easy.