Therese Siouinon

Early Life

Therese Siouinon was born on the 22nd November 2364, the seventh child (and sixth daughter) of Fabien Siouinon, a philosopher, and Jimalla Siouinon nee Rinder, a political analyst. Her birth aboard Deep Space 8 is accidental: the family was moving to the planet Veda Grimionis.

Her youth was marked by frequent travels: the family never lived for more than a couple of years in a single place, driven by Jimalla’s numerous employments. An expert in assessing the political systems of planets about to join the Federation, her job was to live on amongst a species for a couple of years and produce, in cooperation with Federation diplomats, a report on the power transition.

For the children of the Siouinon, that meant forming a group on their own: rarely mixing with other people (despite their mother’s insistence), the soon-to-be nine children of the Siouinon did everything together, resembling a horde. Their father was in charge of most of their rearing, preparing food and dispensing lessons on neo-existentialist philosophy.

Their family started separating when the oldest daughter, Sophie, decided to remain on the planet Retillinax to join their leading university and study plastic arts. After her, one after the other, the Siouinon children left, and Therese went to Earth to enroll in Starfleet when her turn came.

Starfleet Academy (2382-2386)

A neo-existentialist scientist at heart, Therese fell in love with exogeology and planetology, devouring the material at her disposal: she attended an overabundance of lectures, sharpening her inorganic chemistry, astral elemental genesis, fluidodynamics, non-Newtonian mechanics, sheer and stress tensor theory, solid-state multivariaticity, all in the service of geology. She walked for days on Earth to visit all of its most interesting geomorphological sites and, when that was done, she scouted Mars and delighted in its inactive tectonics.

After the abundance of contact that she had had as a child, crowded by eight siblings, the Academy was the place where she discovered the joys of loneliness: she grew distant and a bit cold, reserving the strength of her emotions on her subject matter. She was part of Cadet Squadron Nineteen and almost failed during her Cadet Cruise for being despondent and moody.

On Firmas 3 (2386-2390)

Fresh out of the Academy, Therese Siouinon was head-hunted by Captain Yessibhel Ojhra, herself an exogeology expert too, and assigned to the planetary outpost on Firmas 3.

Firmas 3 was first documented by a Vulcan expeditionary scout around the year 2357: however, it had been dismissed as having “interesting volcanic activity”, and nothing more. That planet presents in fact a sleuth of hitherto unseen geological formations. It is a Y2-class planet — a super-Venusian, several times the size of Earth, with a thick atmosphere, seas of aniline, an average temperature of 420 K and a gravity of 2.3 g (the outpost, obviously, had de-enhanced gravity).

Whereas on M-class planets crystals and gems can rarely grow larger than a couple of meters, Firmas 3 presents sedimentary single-crystalline strata: when brought to the surface, this manifests for instance in sedimentary mountains with layers of quartz and of amethyst; planes of obsidian; caves dug into tourmaline or spinel.

The outpost had a task: with a mixed crew of Starfleet and civilian scientists, it had to explain how these formations came to be.

This was a happy time for Therese Siouinon: each day she would spend hours in the lab, or traveling on the surface to collect samples and document geological formations. She also discovered for the first time love, although all of her relationships were quite short-lived.

Captain Ojhra’s working thesis was that the planet had evolved thusly due to its core having a Dzjaloshinskii-Ronk structure (basically having a central core separated from the mantle by a thick plasma sheet, resulting in decoupled dynamics). Therese Siouinon worked arduously to disprove this thesis and, gloriously, she managed after just a couple of months. This propelled her reputation for acumen and accuracy.

In 2390 the team presented their result at the Federation Conference for Novel Geology to rapturous acclaim: the discovery that naturally-occurring viridium could resonate the growth of sedimentary crystals went from being derided to being beheld as revolutionary.

Therese Siouinon, in the middle of the fifth bad breakup in a row, decided to be assigned to a starship.

Aboard the USS Amerigo (2390-2398)

Therese was assigned to the USS Amerigo, which had just lost a large part of its crew during a fight with ships of the Sovereignty of Kahless during the first push into the conquest of three Federation sectors in 2389. The ship refilled its crew, refurnished, and went back to battle.

For one year the ship brought war and received war, up to the last push into Sovereignty-controlled colonial star systems during Operation Gatecrusher.

This experience sobered Therese Siouinon, offering a very different life experience than what she had had on the remote, protected scientific outpost. She learned to cut corners, to manage stress, and rose in rank.

After the Sovereignty of Kahless had been defeated, the USS Amerigo was dispatched towards the Gorn border. It was destroyed by a subspace tear in 2398.

Aboard the USS Redding (2398-…)

Therese Siouinon requested to be assigned to a more calm starship, far from the duties of a Sovereign-class starship, and was assigned as Chief Science Officer on the USS Redding.

On board, she has had the chance to rekindle her love for geology, and she rejoys in not having to be in life-or-death situations on a weekly basis. Risking death merely on a monthly basis is, as far as she is concerned, much preferred.