Ariennye t'Aenikh

Ariennye was born on Romulus in 2359 to a small family in a rather diminutive settlement outside of one of the larger cities on the Romulan home world. Her parents both worked long hours to ensure they could maintain the meager things they possessed, every aware that should their dedication to the Empire be questioned, they could lose everything, to include their daughter. This meant that while Ariennye was loved by her parents, they were seldom around to express such emotions to her.

Just before her teen years really started, her parents were taken into custody on charges of sedition against the state. As fate would have it, her parents had sent her to visit one of their relatives a few months prior to the incident, which meant that Ariennye wasn’t on Romulus when everything happened, leaving her unaware that anything had occurred. When word got out that her family had been charged with high crimes against the Empire, her relative put her on the first trade ship out of the system so as not to be associated with her parents and similarly accused. Her life became that of a refugee and fugitive despite her ignorance over why.

Her life as such was a brutal one, forcing her to adapt to conditions that most children her age gave up in and chose death over continued existence. While she had several brushes with death during those tumultuous years, she never once gave up on living. It was by sheer luck that the transport she’d been crammed into after being dumped off on a merchant who really had no use for the girl, Ariennye found herself crossing the Neutral Zone and being deposited on a somewhat backwater Federation world.

Ariennye was first taken in by the local orphanage, then later adopted by a foster family who had lost a child recently and wanted to help a child in place of the one they hadn’t been able to. Ariennye found their overtures of warmth uncomfortable at first, but she was adaptable enough and pragmatic enough even in her mid-teens to understand that the family meant no real harm and that she wouldn’t be stabbed in the back like she might otherwise have among her own kind. This was a critical turning point in the young girl’s life, when she began to trust people for the first time in her short but eventful life.

When she came of age, her foster family handed her a transit permit and a boarding pass for a transport bound for Earth, a place Ariennye had only heard in passing from time to time on the little backwater world she called home. Her foster parents explained that the child they had lost had always wanted to go to Earth and start a grand adventure there, where possibilities were limitless, unlike on their world. She tried to refuse at first, saying she was content with her life, but her foster parents argued that she should at least go and see for herself if it was truly a place of opportunities or not.

Several weeks later, Ariennye found herself staring up at the reception building for Starfleet Academy, and a few days later she was starting her education as a future member of Starfleet. She hadn’t walked in the doors with a plan, and she hadn’t been expecting to be welcomed given her heritage. If someone had asked her at the time if she actually expected them to allow her to join, she’d have said no and that she’d only done it to hear them say so. Her expectations were betrayed, as the recruiter didn’t even hesitate to hand her a contract and schedule her for classes. It was so surreal that the shock of it didn’t wear off for almost a month.

Cadet t’Aenikh made her way through the entire first year in the Academy without choosing a specialty. A few of her instructors commented that she lacked any real focus and while she wasn’t a particularly bad student, her determination didn’t seem to be there. It wasn’t until half-way through the second year of Academy courses when Ariennye found herself. One of her classes focused on xeno-anthropology, something that she’d never even heard of before the class. When they started to touch on proto-Vulcan and proto-Romulan artifacts, the woman suddenly hit upon something she could grab onto. Deep down inside, she wanted to know who she was, and such pursuits could help her find it.

After her epiphany, Ariennye found herself drawn to the sciences, and she finished out her remaining two and a half years following that path, ending up with a Commission as a Science Officer. Unfortunately, by the end of her time at the Academy, her zeal for discovering her own past had waned, and she turned her eye to more ambitious projects.

Her first vessel was an Excelsior Class ship that had a modest science crew who spent the majority of their time examining things that had long been picked up by the old vessel but left in storage or forgotten about for long periods when the ship had been in its heyday. Her tenure aboard was uneventful but also somewhat unfulfilling, leading her to seek a posting elsewhere after her first two year assignment was over.