PO3C. Kitsuragi Sanae

Kitsuragi Sanae is a Starfleet baby through and through. She has no homeworld of her own, instead hailing from the medical bay of the old Excelsior-class heavy cruiser USS Semillante (NCC-14480), the daughter of, at the time, the ship’s chief tactical and operations officers. She spent most of her childhood aboard Semillante, especially as her father took the ship’s center chair when she was 11. She was noted as being an active kid who learned best with hands-on experience, having a short attention span for schoolwork and lagging behind her peers with regards to things like science and math, but good with her hands and quick to pick up more physical things when demonstrated to her. Perhaps this is why her favorite people on Semillante were the engineers. Always happy to show their little hyperactive shadow a thing or two to keep her entertained or occupied, it’s primarily their fault that she became something of a tinkerer from a young age.

Joining Starfleet was never in doubt, but exactly how well she’d fare in Starfleet Academy was more of a concern. Sanae was no academic, and while she was good with machines, things like quizzes and paperwork were not her strong suit- and she most certainly did not have the attention span or the self-control to last four years in the Academy without becoming something of a delinquent. The shorter Starfleet Technical Services Academy was a better fit, and Sanae didn’t particularly crave command opportunities, so the inability to become a commissioned officer was no loss to her.

Console work proved to be a bit hard for her to grasp, but Sanae was a whizz with the more physical side of things, rewiring and bypassing and jury-rigging, more akin to a mechanic than a typical Starfleet engineer.But a specialization in physical maintenance and repairs paired nicely with Bolian trainee Virasina Kramin, a computer nut who felt right at home behind a console. The two became tight friends in the Academy.

Neither Sanae nor Virasina were particularly exceptional amongst the collection of newly-minted junior engineers who graduated the TSA in 2369, both ending up relatively middle-of-the-pack, but they left without any marks or blemishes on their records either. Their assignment was a familiar one to Sanae; while she was no Semillante, the Vincennes, hullcode NCC-42264, was almost identical to her older sister, minus some more up-to-date phasers. These phasers proved to be somewhat problematic, as they were designed with isolinear circuitry in mind, and Vincennes was still running on mostly duotronics. These problematic phaser arrays were a constant headache for the engineering teams, and in their three years aboard, Sanae and Virasina became no exception to that rule.

Beyond the troubles with trying to squash isolinear-based tech into a mostly duotronic computer system, Vincennes had a relatively quiet service career in the early 2370s, spent on the fringes of known space in the Alpha Quadrant cataloguing nebulae and studying supernova remnants. Secretly- or maybe not-so-secretly, because all of her friends onboard seemed to know- Sanae developed maybe a little crush on Virasina, but was always too worried about rejection to speak up about it- and far too oblivious to notice Virasina crushing on her, too. Their friends found their mutual oblivious pining far too funny to interfere with.

Ultimately, this meant it lead nowhere. In 2372, Vincennes went into Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards for a full long-term refit and overhaul, and her crew was reassigned across the fleet. Here, Virasina and Sanae were split up, the former to the Galaxy-class USS Dauntless (NCC-71879), and the latter to a significantly more humble posting; the Miranda-class frigate USS Diamantina (NCC-31914).

Initially more than a bit upset over being shoved onto an old Miranda, Sanae had largely changed her tune by New Year’s 2373. There was a reason Starfleet still used these vessels, and Diamantina was a prime example. She ran smooth, she rarely had serious engineering problems, and was surprisingly stoutly built. She wasn’t a fancy or stately, or even a pretty, ship. But she was a solid, heavily refined design, that got the job done without any fuss and could take most tasks handed to her.

But in 2373, Dominion and Cardassian aggression exploded into a full-out, quadrant-wide war- the Dominion War kicked off into full swing. Diamantina, due to her age and small size, wasn’t initially put into the fight- the closest she ever came in the first few months was border patrol and the occasional search-and-rescue mission. But by early 2374, Starfleet was hemorrhaging ships, and the little frigate was written into the battle plans for Operation Return.

Diamantina performed about as well as a Miranda-class starship could perform against the Jem’Hadar starships and the Cardassian Defense Forces, emerging unscathed mostly by not being shot at much and laying down what fire she could herself contribute. With Deep Space 9 retaken, Diamantina was reassigned to convoy escort duties, protecting supply lines in Federation territory. Over the next few months, Diamantina made some 26 runs back and forth between safer Federation worlds and pivotal frontline stations, engaging Jem’Hadar raiders on two occasions and yet never losing a transport under her protection. It was mostly quiet work, but nerve-wracking and tense.

But in early September, the little ship’s luck ran out. She’d just finished a convoy run and had docked over Betazed for some R&R when a massive Dominion strike force arrived in-system. The battle lasted less than half a day. Though Betazed’s defense forces, including Diamantina, rallied and put up a spirited defense, the Jem’Hadar had made landfall on the planet within a few hours. Diamantina was gutted by a volley of torpedoes from a Cardassian cruiser, leaving the shattered hulk of the little frigate to join the debris field of Betazed.

Of the 276 crewmen aboard at the time, 153 were rescued by the Ambassador-class USS Iphigenia (NCC-26524), fleeing the system before Betazed fell under total Dominion control. Sanae almost wasn’t one of them. While attempting to aid other survivors in getting to the escape pods, a damaged power conduit exploded in her face, knocking her unconscious. She had to be dragged off the ship before Iphigenia scooped up Diamantina‘s pods and booked it out of the system. Sanae awoke on Iphigenia, unable to see out of her left eye, but once she was up and proved to have all of her mental faculties in one piece, she was shooed out the infirmary door in order to free up her spot for another wounded survivor.

Without an official reassignment, bereft of her crew- who were quickly so scattered about that Sanae never did run into another engineer from Diamantina– and half-blind but physically able, Sanae half-volunteered, half-pressed-ganged into a nearby shipyard’s repair team. The installation was stretched beyond its limits to handle the unending stream of damaged starships, and was taking anyone who could hold a wrench to go help make repairs- and no real distinction was made between the healthy and the walking wounded. There wasn’t enough space to treat everyone anyways, so the lightly injured made themselves useful.

Thus, ending up aboard the Nebula-class USS Denver (NCC-72016) was more an accident than anything else. Sanae was deep inside the cruiser doing some maintenance on the power supply for the ventral phaser array, when the announcement came that the ship was soon to leave dock. Perhaps vastly overestimating how quickly she could get her job done, Sanae decided to focus on her work- she’d be done before they left anyways, wouldn’t she?

Instead, when she finally emerged, Denver was already at warp.