Reggie Hawthorn

He’s a problem solver: hasn’t met a problem he’s not being able to get his head around with time and questions.

“Ain’t no problems ‘cept the ones stopping you from solvin’ the first one. Big old reactor like this, why it ain’t nothing but a ball of math. Man counting with his toes can get his head around it with time. Solve that problem, then the next, and before you know it you’re breaking the laws of physics and seein’ things that are downright fantastical.”

He’s from Montana…

“This ain’t steak. Oh, you can address me on the topic of matter just being protons and electrons and all their bonds and what not. But this here reconstituted matter from a replicator ain’t no side of Montanan prime steer. You want me to talk about the power of a divine being, you just find me an open flame and a good piece of flank steak, and I’ll write up a sermon for you and the crew.”

He also has a deathly fear of spiders and other animals with more than four legs and skitter. He has said, on occasion, that they are also proof of a divine being: and that it hates us dreadfully.

Reginald Madison Hawthorn was not born on Earth.

In fact, the light from Sol would take nearly seven hundred years to reach the land of his birth. Montana was settled during the early days of warp travel, and so in current times is a well established and charter member of the United Federation. Settled by a mix of Thai and Chinese colonists, there had only been seventy Texan’s in the original colony make up riding herd on a hundred head of cattle.

The accent and mannerisms of the Lone Star State turned out to be viral, and within three generations the drawl of a Montanan doesn’t match with their appearance.

Montana is known for its business in cattle, as well as exporting minerals and precious metals from the Montana systems lucrative asteroid belts. It is also a planet steeped in tradition, from a work ethic of honest exchange to its elaborate tea ceremonies. It biggest cultural faux pax is its honour code, a piece of Montanan heritage taken as seriously as Klingon Warriors.

That and many other mannerisms make Montana’s good friends, and powerfully frightening enemies. It has also led to numerous blood feuds, skirmishes, and in the founding years of the colony nearly wiped itself out in a civil war called The Unsettlement. Vulcan philosophers suspect that the darker aspects of mankind’s past were excised from their homeworld, and deposits on Montana as a survival strategy. A Montana would say they’d just matured like good sipping whisky.

Or cheese.

Reggie ‘Mad’ Hawthorn was born to one of the founding families, and little was expected of him save to take on his father’s legacy and run the family ranch (Minor interstellar trading house that it was). But Reggie wanted more to life than spreadsheets, the refined company (Well, refined by Montana standards) and the docile life his father had enjoyed.

He wanted the stars.

Starfleet Academy, academically speaking, was easy enough for Reggie to handle. His mind was keen, his enthusiasm for every aspect of his chosen field of study evident. But his temper, when riled, got him in more fist fights and brawls with fellow classmates than was deemed healthy. His graduated near the top 10% of his class, but with his black marks weighing him down he was not assigned the most plum of assignments.

But he was in space, which was the win had been looking for. Not bad for a farm boy from the ranches of Montana.

But it was the rustic background of still untamed Montana, and his skills as an engineer, that would see him go further still.