Bravo Fleet
Summary
Ensign Lyrakkiton Parze is a medical student studying at the Starfleet Medical Academy teaching hospital on Caelum Station. Her ambition is to become a psychiatrist.
Appearance
As a Saurian, Lyrakkiton Parze has an oval-shaped head with a snout, bulbous eyes, and a down-turned frown of a mouth. Standing 160 cm, her otherwise humanoid-shaped form is dense and compact at 68 kg. Her skin is covered in pink scales, in patterns reminiscent of a lizard, and her eyes are reflective black, with both vertical and horizontal eyelids. Saurians are physically robust, evolving on a world with greater gravity than earth and more variables in the air content than what most humanoids can tolerate. Parze speaks in a kind but raspy voice, sounding like burnt caramel.
Personality
Parze is studious and polite to a fault. As a Saurian, Parze is accustomed to humanoids looking at her with a shadow of vestigial fear behind their eyes. She uses her politeness as a shield to manage social situations that exhaust her. An introvert by nature, Parze appreciates unending hours of alone time to process and problem solve, but she doesn’t let others talk over her if she knows she has a better solution.
Something of a classic introvert, Parze frequently has no desire to socialize with others, but she has no inhibitions about doing so. She sinks into solitary pursuits and recharges her energy by being alone. Fiercely intelligent, but reserved, Parze genuinely experiences joy from studying and essay writing. She has limitless storage capacity for trivial data points and drawing correlations between them. However, she’s more likely to know seven things about the mating practices of frogs than she is to know the given name of her professors.
In classrooms and social situations, Parze presents herself as cheerful and polite. Many humanoids experience visceral reactions to her scaly Saurian exterior –even if they don’t say anything about it– and her defence mechanism has become to kill with kindness. While her politeness can seem charming at first, it can grow dull over time. She most often uses it to deflect from revealing anything about herself, rather than to connect. Parze becomes nervous in situations where she is expected to reveal any of her actual feelings.
Parze’s intelligence has borne great pride in her. She has a borderline entitled personality, sometimes feeling under-appreciated. As good grades have become common for her in the academy, she fears her accomplishments will become expected as a given, rather than effort-laden things of wonder. Over her years at the academy, Parze has been known to have limited patience. She has a temper that can lash out unexpectedly. She’s a little too concerned with being right, for its own sake, and will always speak up if she thinks she has a better idea. Worse, if someone underestimates her or misrepresents her, Parze will find the thing they’re most insecure about and loudly sing a song about it.
History
Early Life
Raised goblets and raucous laughter coming deep from the diaphragm. Tailored black uniforms punctuated with pops of primary colours. A buttery soft leather boot hugging a well muscled calf. Those were Lyrakkiton Parze’s earliest memories of Starfleet. It was the uniforms that got her. Over the years, Parze has found other things to love about Starfleet — the aspirations, the duty, the excuse to research— but it all started with those boots. Some combination of watching Starfleet officers on the promenade, and an animated holoprogram with characters in similar costumes, were the original seeds of her desire to serve Starfleet.
Hatched as the youngest of six siblings, Parze could only obtain the affections of her parents through competition. As she wasn’t the most adventurous, the most creative, nor the most talented at athletics. By the time she could talk and read in full paragraphs, she had established herself as the listener and the observer; her role in the household was that of the conflict mediator. She remained neutral during family conflict, more interested in understanding than in picking sides of her own. Parze’s parents operated a restaurant on the promenade of Deep Space 12. Her mother was the chef and her father ran the front of course. All of the kids washed dishes and served tables when they weren’t in school.
In her education, Parze did well enough without needing to be doted over or tutored. To her detriment, she was easily distracted or bored by subjects that didn’t align with her interests. For the most part, she excelled the most in fields of study that were impractical and self-indulgent. As an adolescent, Parze’s temperament took a turn for the taciturn. She leaned into her observational tendencies and only chose to speak when it was absolutely necessary. Even then, she tended to sum up her expression into as few words as possible. Parze was often accused of being too introverted. She had few problems with socialising, but her teachers worried that she lacked awareness of her surroundings. This afforded her a heightened awareness of her own self. There was a part of her that assumed she would never be fully accepted by her classmates of mammalian origins, and so she kept a pre-emptive distance to avoid different treatment because of her Saurian heritage.
Starfleet Academy
From the very start of her Starfleet training, Parze immersed herself in the wide range of fields — pre-med, first contact, education, diplomacy, human resources management, sociology, mediation, recreation — that suggested a certain path for her career. She was establishing patterns in behaviour to suggest what she wanted without necessarily stating it out loud. Even as she’s progressed through the years at Starfleet Academy, she hasn’t been able to decide if she wants to spend her career attending to crew mental health as a counselor or continue academically as a sociology researcher.
Socially, Parze fell through the cracks. Determined to succeed in the academy, Parze attended classes and she studied and that was often the end of the story. She overstuffed her days with extra curricular readings and hobbies, and she didn’t notice it when her classmates formed friend-groups and cliques. In team projects, she was helpful and polite, and she got along well with other cadets. They generally assumed she had other friend-groups they didn’t know, and she didn’t think about it.
At the close of junior year, Parze applied for Cadet Squadron Bravo. It only took three years, but Parze started to notice that her academy experience didn’t quite match what she’d expected from holo-programs. She had a strong desire to feel a part of something –to feel connected– and the squadron was the most elite family she could join. Parze’s grades and determination served her well in being selected for the squadron for her senior year at the academy.
Frontier Day and Beyond
After graduation from Starfleet Academy, Ensign Parze shipped out to Avalon Fleet Yards to begin her career aboard the USS Constellation as a research psychologist. Like many young ensigns, Parze was overcome by the Borg tele-assimilation on Frontier Day 2401 and participated in the Borg’s attempt to assimilate the fleet yards to their own needs. After the extreme losses experienced by Starfleet across the Federation, Parze decided a career of research wouldn’t satisfy her. She applied to Starfleet Medical Academy and was accepted into the master’s degree program on Caelum Station.
Service Record
| Date | Position | Posting | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2397 - 2398 | Freshman Psychology Cadet | Starfleet Academy, Mellstoxx III Campus |
 Cadet |
| 2398 - 2399 | Sophomore Psychology Cadet | Starfleet Academy, Mellstoxx III Campus |
Cadet |
| 2399 - 2400 | Junior Psychology Cadet | Starfleet Academy, Mellstoxx III Campus |
Cadet |
| 2400 - 2401 | Senior Psychology Cadet | Cadet Squadron Bravo, Starbase Bravo |
Cadet |
| 2401 - Present | Medical Student | Caelum Station |
 Ensign |