Brendan D’Agostini

Brendan was born to Luca and Lillah D’Agostini on the Federation colony of Relva III, where his parents worked as a geologist and storekeeper in the capital city of New Alexandria. He is the middle child of three and growing up was always in a competition with his older brother Matthew, who being the stronger of the two would resort to bullying to win a fight. As a boy, Brendan was smaller and appeared to take more after his mother than his formidable father, who pushed all his children to be athletic. This was heightened by the fact that many of the other citizens of Relva III were volunteering for duty in the Dominion War, which Brendan’s father believed was a calling for any young person. In primary school Brendan demonstrated great aptitude for mathematics and science, and earned the respect of his teachers, who routinely had to give him additional work to keep him satisfied. It was at this young age that friends of his started calling him “B”, a nickname that has stuck with him over the years.

Two months before his twelfth birthday his father was killed doing fieldwork in a nearby mountain range when he fell through an unstable rock formation. This wounded Brendan severely, and though he would not admit it to anyone, he grew angry and bitter at his father for leaving the rest of the family alone. By the age of sixteen, his brother Matthew had left home to work as a miner off planet, and Brendan’s marks have dropped off significantly, he considered dropping out of school entirely to go and work like his older brother. His mother, after a very emotional argument, was able to convince him to stay and reapply himself at school. With the encouragement he needed and with a lot of studying Brendan was back at the top of his class in math and science, as well as developing an interest in history along the way. In light of all of the childhood memories, and stories of the Dominion War, he decided against applying to Starfleet Academy, and instead opting for a university engineering program. With his high marks, he was accepted wherever he applied, and despite his mother’s urging to remain at home and go to the lone university on the planet, Brendan went to McGill University in Montreal on Earth.

At McGill, he finally developed the love of sports which his father had tried so hard to instill. He started playing ice hockey recreationally, and although it took several years it proved to be the only sport he took to naturally. While he did not mind playing the game in a holosuite he much preferred it on real ice, as he complains “that the holographic just doesn’t feel the same as the real stuff”. During his time at the university he also developed a closer relationship with his siblings, and was always writing both of them. Academically, his natural abilities came to forefront, and he excelled in the environment where he was surrounded by so many other keen students like himself. Brendan specialized in materials engineering for four years, where he gained an appreciation for the complexity of material structure and worked on a team project analyzing atomic collision enhancing materials for intermix chambers. Despite his initial reservations about Starfleet, it was in his third year that he first considered applying to the academy, since he wanted to work with the technology and materials firsthand as opposed to doing R&D. His professors encouraged him to join after he was done his bachelor of engineering, which he did and just after he turned 22, he traveled to San Francisco to enter with the new class of cadets.

His first year at the academy was an intense one as he struggled to keep up with the physical demands that went with the training. Brendan believes that if it were not for his love of hockey and the exercise it gave him before joining the academy he would have never had been able to keep up with the other cadets. Already having a bachelor’s degree in engineering many of the required engineering courses for cadets were waived, which gave him the chance to take up level courses and training, although for the first time in his life this appeared to be more than he could handle, and he had to slow down and take a reduced course load to focus on the challenging subjects like basic flight and law. It was, however, in the beginning of his training that he began a relationship with an upper year Betazoid cadet named Ellana Tallas. She was an exceptionally talent musician, which Brendan was not in the slightest, but they shared an appreciation of the sciences as she was in training to be a stellar cartographer and astrophysicist. After two years together though she admitted to having at times accidentally read his mind and angered by what he felt was a betrayal of trust and privacy he broke up with her immediately only to regret the decision too late as she left the academy. Unable to deal with the loss he compartmentalized it, and only when extremely lonely and depressed will he even mention her name.

Despite the setback he made a number of close friends that he maintains a correspondence with, and nothing meant more to him than the encouragement and advice of Professor O’Brien at the academy who taught him the importance of trusting his instincts, and to be flexible when solving unusual problems that often happened aboard a starship. After three grueling years of academy training he completed a program in engineering and awarded the rank of ensign. Originally he expected to receive a posting working with the Starfleet Corps of Engineers and on one of the shipyards to start with, but his assignment to the USS Bismarck came through instead. After being trapped on an alien planet during a hostage situation, D’Agostini attempted to subvert the hostile forces, however, was wounded in the process. For his efforts he was promoted to lieutenant junior grade. He continued his rapid accent aboard the Bismarck for several years eventually reaching the rank of lieutenant and becoming the ship’s ACEO. Shortly thereafter he transferred to a smaller posting aboard the USS Polaris, a Nova-class survey ship, as the chief engineer. It was aboard the Polaris that he met his future wife, an Andorian field geologist, named Talia Reyak. The two fell headfirst into love, but their passion for one another was matched by the passion of their fury when they fought. For five years, three of which together in wedlock they fought and made up, until finally unable to continue any longer they finally called it quits and separated, with Brendan finding himself working a dead end post aboard the Dyson Observatory with no prospects after having soiled his career trying to manage his crumbling marriage.