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19 Apr 2024 @ 9:51pm
Commander Calliope Zahn
Name Calliope Zahn
Position Executive Officer XO OOC, IC progression in progress
Second Position Executive Officer
Rank Commander
Character Information
| Gender | Female | |
| Species | Human/Orion | |
| Age | 37 |
Physical Appearance
| Height | 5'6" | |
| Weight | 135 | |
| Hair Color | Dark Brown | |
| Eye Color | Dark Brown | |
| Physical Description | Calliope is not overly tall, has a fairly average build, and keeps up with some fitness. Since her last physical therapy she's taken up swimming regularly, and gets a jog in, preferably on a machine with low impact. She’s solidly covered in freckles and has a kind of mottled greens skin tone. Calliope switches between uniform, practical wear, and evening wear depending on the occasion without much fuss. She is good at social situations in general, although it's mostly because she is flexible and adapts to many situations, and not because of any kind of chameleon personality. Calliope’s big dark eyes tend to look like they are seeing through others- she’s a good listener and a sharp observer and can read between the lines when she’s at her best. Has her mother’s dense, frizzy hair. Her mother's roots come from Earth's Caribbean region and a melding of global ethnicities. Her Orion father has never been in her life, but the affects on her genes are obvious. |
Family
| Mother | Jacinta "Heather" Zahn | |
| Other Family | Ex-husband - Lance Quinn |
Personality & Traits
| General Overview | Instead of becoming a specialist, Calliope skill-stacks. She gains skills that will support other applicable skills for her work life, giving her a broad base of understanding. She also pursues various personal interests and diversifies. 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 Calliope took a prescription hormone blocking drug called Vamiraxil. The drug allowed her to manage socially without strong pheromone influence on others, and was originally prescribed after a very traumatic series of events in her Freshman year of highschool, to help her cope and recover. Calliope became dependent on the drug to function, and it was continually prescribed to her through Academy, until further research showed that long term damage could result in some individuals from long term use. Calliope insisted on having her prescription, as she was afraid of how her natural pheromones might affect her career and personal life if they went unchecked. She never learned how to operate in life with the effect on others and didn't want to be problematic for anyone. Recently, the piper came calling for her continued use of the Vamiraxil, as her various bodily systems began to experience dysfuntion due to the forced hormonal imbalances. As a result she's not only had to handle medical trouble, but also career problems caused by her gray ethical behavior in trying to continue her medication against medical orders. Presently, she must adjust and learn to manage her Orion pheromones in the company of others. She can't necessarily control her pheromones as such. They tend to rise and fall with her moods, obviously being most strong when herself aroused or flirtatious, but also fairly heavy when she is simply enjoying life or highly emotive, which she naturally is as an emotive person. The pheromones are at their lowest if she is genuinely cool or indifferent— unfortunately a state of being most naturally opposite to her personality. She also finds it tempting to play to her strength of persuasion when the need arises, but finds that thinking also repulsive and has yet to figure out how to manage the temptation to control others without hating herself for just having the thought. 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. Thanks to her upbringing on a multicultural colony on the border, and a number of opportunities to practice speaking other languages during her time in service, Calliope speaks some functional Klingon, a little passable Rhihansu, and a smattering of Orion, and knows how to swear or order food in a few other languages like Bolian and Ferengi, but isn't really gifted with languages. Since working in the Loki system, she's learned a few words in the common Kalaran language from Obsidian. |
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| Strengths & Weaknesses | +Working with others +Management & Training +Optimist/ Persistent +Supply chain and logistics planning +Improvisation -+Will run big risks -+A scrapper -Mistakes to overcome in reputation -Not good at being alone -Deep knowledge -Complex tactical strategy or nuanced diplomacy or subterfuge |
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| Ambitions | 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 alongside and to protect the Federation and uphold the principles and promote exploration and diplomacy. | |
| Hobbies & Interests | Her hobby is probably having hobbies. Trying almost any new skill, she’s a starter of many things. With a few exceptions, 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). Has taken up swimming and stretching exercises for her physical therapy. 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. |
| Personal History | 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. Over the years on Valus, 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. 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 Cadet named Corvus DeHavilland. 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 set 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 was coming to realize that 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, occasionally, 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. 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. With her adaptability, she proved a regular selection for special assignments, as her hospital ship tended to sit in orbit for extended periods while she would be tasked to short missions in the surrounding systems. As a result, she is highly connected with many other service members and has a lot of contacts to call on. She and her CO on the Paracelsus worked extremely well together, but when Calliope was contacted by Corvus DeHavilland— her Academy friend whom she had also had the privilege of serving with on the Challenger— and was offered a new opportunity on Obsidian Command as first officer, 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. Since her arrival on OC, her overuse of the Vamiraxil has taken its toll, both on her body and her career. She was removed from her role as Executive Officer after only a couple of weeks, following a physical breakdown rooted in a couple of decades of use of hormone blockers that led to extensive creeping dysfunction. At first, during her recovery she made efforts to led her own one-woman operations looking for the culprits behind the attack on OC and seeking out the root of the rumors of genocide, and rooting out pirates in the Loki-system. Although she had successes in all of these efforts, none really served to overcome the damage she had done to her own reputation with the Vamiraxil use. Calliope ultimately made a full confession concerning not just the Vamiraxil use, but gray ethical behavior in obtaining the dosage over the years. As a result, Admiral Sepandiyar assigned her to the Pathfider as Corvus' First Officer for the duration of a Recon mission. During the away mission on the Pathfinder, Calliope and Lance's relationship was sorely tested, leading to Calliope questioning the entire basis of their marriage. Ultimately she decided to move out and file for a divorce. As she parts ways with Lance, Calliope finds unmarried life not unlike life as it was before- mostly on her own, but no longer with the illusion of a future together to look forward to. |
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| Service Record | Graduated 2381 2381-83 USS Scorpio (Sovereign 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 2397- Present Obsidian Command Executive Officer—> Unassigned. |