Bravo Fleet
Summary
Captain Ezra Vreen underwent a court-martial for disobeying the direct command of her superior officer three years ago. Despite being ultimately cleared of all wrongdoing, Vreen lost her command, and her career in Starfleet seemed likely to fade into nothingness. Until an old friend in Starfleet Command pulled some strings and got Vreen a position back in the hotseat, on one condition: that she agree to command a ship engaged in experimental scientific research. A dangerous command, a command under the radar, and a command that might see her going months (or even years) at a time without further contact with the Fleet. And yet, for someone like Vreen, the chance at her own ship again was worth any sacrifice. She is currently awaiting further orders, and notification of her new starship’s registry number, aboard Star Base Bravo.
Appearance
A tall woman, with black hair and a stern face that reminds casual observers of a hawk—watchful, proud, and deadly. Vreen adheres tightly to regulation while on duty, but also doesn’t have much of a life beyond her duty. She owns some civilian clothing that she hardly ever wears, preferring to wear her uniform undershirt (long or short-sleeved) as her way of “dressing down”. Vreen is incredibly athletic and works out for an hour every day with an intense fitness regime, and can often be seen in gray sweats coming back from the holodeck at around 3am each night.
Personality
Vreen was an incredibly angry person in her youth, so much so that her psych evaluation initially had her mandated to counseling during her second year of the Academy. She traces this anger back to the death of her whole family before she turned two. Her father died of an incurable form of cancer just seven months after her birth, and her mother was killed during the battle of Wolf 359. As she grew older, gained experience, and learned to productively channel her emotions, she found herself less prone to outbursts and more prone to introspection, and took up writing as a pastime. She never did overcome her tendency to be reactive and strong-willed, however, and this frequently saw her chafing beneath any command that expected discipline first and questions not at all. She once said that, of all the Starfleet officers she admired most, James T. Kirk was at the top of the list because he consistently flouted protocol and orders more than any other member of the Fleet in history.
Vreen’s own brush with cancer seven years ago left its mark on her in a number of ways, but the most overt is her intense ritual of daily exercise. She sleeps only around six hours a night, preferring to wake up during the off-shift to spend an hour working out (as well as some time reading or writing). Rather surprisingly, detests organized sports of all kinds. Instead, she prefers horseback riding, running, fencing, and shooting—all hobbies that can be completed in solitude. In fact, Vreen might be considered antisocial in another setting, but her self-image as a CO precludes the possibility. She makes it a point of pride to be present at as many social functions as she can, showing her support for her crew with that thing most precious to her: her time.
History
Young Life
Vreen was aboard her mother’s ship when it was called to respond to the first Borg incursion, and she remembers the experiences of that day in startlingly vivid detail for one so young. The flames, the screams… but not her mother, who died on the bridge far from the nursery. With her father already dead from a rare cancer, Vreen found herself alone in the world. With no extended family to speak of, she was placed in foster care, where she remained until she came of age. Luckily, the Federation’s policy on foster care is quite rigorous, and Vreen grew up well-loved by her foster family, who she still maintains close contact with.
In school, Vreen did quite poorly compared to her peers, only hitting her own as she entered her teens. This wasn’t due to a lack of interest, exactly, but more a lack of interest in anything apart from (in this order): horses, space, and romantic dramas. When she was thirteen, however, she met Captain Oswald Corrogigan, who had been a close friend of her mother’s. Talking with him awoke something in Vreen, and her fascination with outer space became the first true passion of her young life: she would, one day, command her own ship in Starfleet.
Teen life and the Academy
Vreen spent her teen years isolating herself further and further from her peers, worrying her foster parents immensely. Though she was always respectful, always gentle with others, she seemed to be manifesting ever-greater self-destructive tendencies. And yet, at the same time, her studies improved, and she showed a remarked increase in academic ability almost overnight. All of her attention became obsessively fixed on one goal: getting into the Starfleet Early Officer-enrollment Program. When she, somewhat inevitably, failed to out-compete her peers, sixteen-year-old Vreen tried to jump off a building.
It took three years of therapy to get her life back on track. With the help of a good and caring psychologist named Jane Hayward, Vreen got herself back on track, but in a significantly more healthy manner. She applied to the Academy just before her twentieth birthday and was accepted into that year’s class without any further ado. After her initial four years, she opted for an additional two years in the academy to complete a specialty program in Starship Command and Leadership, which allowed her to live full time on Earth. Finding that she was up to the competitive application process for that program, after having failed so miserably almost a decade before, was one of the proudest experiences in Vreen’s life.
During her six years in the Academy, Vreen made a number of friends, and maintained a few short-lived relationships. However, the only people she ever really got close to were a couple of instructors who took her under their wing and helped her navigate the complexities of Academy life.
First years in Starfleet
Vreen spent the next decade serving on various ships in the Fleet, serving twice aboard ships conducting long-haul exploration missions. She rose easily through the ranks, always willing to take risks while simultaneously building a name for herself as a die-hard adherent to Starfleet protocol. Though she remained a loaner in her personal life, her shipmates and commanding officers found her to be a witty, friendly presence. It seemed likely that she would soon find her way to her own command, and the fulfillment of a dream she’d carried for almost two decades.
Declining health
On a particularly dangerous away mission, Vreen caught an excessive dose of radiation from a damaged power conduit. While this may have been easily treatable in many cases, the radiation exposure awoke something dormant in her genes: the same recessive cancer that had killed her father. Luckily, medical science had advanced considerably during the last the thirty-five years, including some semi-experimental cures for her condition. The prognosis for her survival looked reasonably good, so long as she took an extended leave of absence from her duties in Starfleet. It nearly broke her spirit to do it, but in the end she returned to Earth for treatment and set aside her hopes for a command of her own.
First command
Treatment for her illness took over a year, but Vreen refused to stay idle during that time. While she couldn’t serve aboard a starship, she could still apply herself to learning. She opted for an engineering extension course from the Academy, which she completed mainly from her hospital bed via a holographic interface. If she, reasoned, she was going to have her dreams of a command held back, she would do everything in her power to keep herself sharp for when she could get back to work. As it happened, luck was with her. Starfleet’s post-Dominion war rebuilding effort had seen a reasonable surge in new ships being constructed, and with further destabilizing events taking place throughout the quadrant, the demand for experienced officers was high. Impressed by her commitment to Starfleet, several people up the chain of command moved her name forward for consideration for a run at a command position… should her health become clear. Which it did.
Her first command therefore came as a complete surprise: a light escort designated to patrol one of the quadrant’s hottest sectors. It wasn’t one of the new top-of-the-line vessels, but that didn’t matter: Ezra Vreen was finally in command.
Court-martial
For five years, Vreen commanded the USS Maripol, and earned herself the sheer respect of her crew. For those who had placed her in command, things were not always so smooth. In the center chair, Vreen demonstrated an intensity that shocked those who had only paid attention to her professionalism. Not that she became slack in her duties, by any means. Rather, she seemed to consider many of those sitting back at a starbase and issuing orders as the slackers. For some, her fiery attitude was enjoyable, and she found herself with an odd mixture of highly-placed friends in amongst those who disliked her. And of course, nobody other than her own ship’s counselor knew how much Vreer’s brush with cancer had affected her. The touch of her mortality had inflamed an old anger in her, an old intensity that forced her dangerously close to a manic edge.
During a particularly intense mission involving two non-Federation parties, with Federation citizens caught in the middle, Vreen deliberately disobeyed her orders from one Admiral J’set Morale. In what some would later describe as a personal vendetta, the Admiral filed a lengthy list of charges against Vreen, barely stopping short of declaring her a traitor. Though the whole affair ended with all those charges dropped, and with the Admiral’s own career hanging from a ledge, Vreen still came out the worst for wear. Unofficially marked as “troublesome” by some of the more conservative hardliners in the Fleet, Vreen found herself without a ship, and without the likelihood of getting anything apart from a desk job again for quite some time.
Return to Starfleet
For just over a year, Vreen trained new recruits at one of Starfleet Academy’s colony branches, before one of her friends up the chain of command was able to catch her a little break. Commodore Alicia Harper, who had been friends with Vreen during their time at the Academy, pushed something through. Starfleet needed a new platform from which to test experimental technologies, years, perhaps even decades, before they would see active service in the Fleet. It would be, for all purposes, a bit of a milk-run for someone with a decade of experience, babysitting engineers and scientists out in the middle of nowhere while they tinkered away. But it would also be a way back to the center seat, and that was something that Vreen could not pass up. She made her way to Starbase Bravo to await further orders, feeling for the first time in a long time that her star was once more on the rise.