Zel Rohan

Zel’s story really starts with his mother.  She was born Laika Torim, daughter of two prominent Cardassian scientists.  Her parents took her to Bajor when she was 2, researching the fertility of Bajor soil, in an effort to use Bajor’s resources to revitalize Cardassian colonies.  They were killed in a resistance bombing, and Laika was left behind when the  Cardassians pulled out of Bajor.

Rohan Alise was a woman who lost her family to the Cardassians, seeking to find sense in the senseless killing.  She adopted Laika Torim, and changed her name to Leka (mostly because it was all the young child remembered).  Alise was a devout woman who saw it her holy duty to retrain Leka in the ways of the prophets.  She was a caring mother, but a suffocating one as well; training her adoptive daughter to completely dismiss her Cardassian heritage.

Rohan Leka grew to be an extremely shy, religious young woman; a clerk in the Bajoran records offices.  Kirne Altero was an angry young man that wanted to get back at the Cardassians for everything they had done.  He started his relationship with Leka out of morbid curiosity and continued it because controlling her gave him a feeling of power.  He dropped her and ran when he found she was with child, and Leka returned to her adoptive mother, shamed and afraid.

No one quite knew why, but Leka was never well after that.  She bore a healthy son, named him Rohan, and then seemed to fade away, slowly getting ill as the boy grew.  Leka passed away while Rohan Marco was still a child, and Alise decided to raise him.  Once again she subscribed to her old theory of training the child strictly in the ways of the prophets.  She hoped it would raise a pious grandson.  Instead, it raised a rebellious one.

Some might say Rohan Marco had a bit too much Cardassian in him, but he never really accepted that he was fully Bajoran.  Cardassians frightened him, but they fascinated him as well.  Constantly pulling against Alise’s will, he finally decided that he would never feel settled or whole if he stayed on Bajor.  At the tender age of 17 he ran away from home, stowing away on a Bajoran freighter, and he hasn’t been back since.

While young Zel was easily caught up in other people’s idealism.  He joined a group made from the dregs of the Maquis resistance, still carrying on their outdated zealousness against anyone they could justify as oppressing them.  He liked the idea of being a part of something fighting for a cause, but he soon found that the idea of a ‘crusade’ wore thin.  While he liked chasing whatever ‘bad guys’ the group had on their hit list, he found that he actually hated killing them.  Or anyone for that matter.  At first he wondered if it struck a little too close to home for him as Cardassian colonists remained an ever popular target, but later he started to see the hollowness in the ‘truths’ of the Maquis and every other rebel group he got caught up with.

He ended up keeping silent… very silent about his beliefs lest they decide that he would be next on their list for eradication, until he got the chance to steal and jerry-rig a shuttle and flee to an outer colony.

From there started a long odyssey of flirting with danger.  He took readily to the more unsavory side of life… spying, gambling, smuggling and all manner of petty crime, but when it really got down to it, he didn’t have the heart to dive fully into it.  He didn’t really like wallowing in darkness and he certainly didn’t like hurting other people.

He enjoyed the thrill of danger and the creative plotting of new schemes to make an illegitimate strip of latinum or two, but he refused to delve deeper into the underworld.  This won him enemies both from legitimate authorities who considered him a petty thief (which in many ways he was) and criminal syndicates who found his discouraging overflow of morality to be a dangerous liability.  It kept Zel moving from world to world and role to role.  Waiter, gambler, faith healer, actor, janitor, and pilot…he’s been all that and more.