Summary
The Valkyrie will be Ensign Mizuki’s 2nd ship assignment since graduating from Star Fleet Academy. She’s fresh-faced, full of enthusiasm, and, quite frankly if you scrub that smile off her face and dig past that “ready Sir/Ma’am!” – Scared. To. Death. Yes, most ensigns also are, but not like Aika.
Ensign Mizuki’s official degree is in archeology, specifically ancient alien cultures. She’s also a highly skilled navigator. Her coursework as an astro-navigator came about somewhat by accident. She qualified her first year at Academy as a shuttle pilot of her own volition. At the end of her Second year, she got pulled into a Kobayashi Maru exercise as navigator. The precise term might be “Yonked out of the hall” because someone else got sick just before the drill. The KM exercise is set to disable the Navigation panel, such that the cadets can only go forward, not plot a course of retreat. Doing so only throws the ship into a even more disastrous, tactically disadvantageous, position.
During this particular exercise, however the cadet Captain called for a retreat as many often do, and Mizuki realized that her instincts were giving her very different directions than what the Nav Panel was reading. She had just had a session with an instructor the day before, urging her to trust herself more. She decided to do so, and acting on instinct, gave the Helmsman a course to take them out of the Neutral zone, per their Captains orders.
To the surprise of everyone, especially the overseeing staff, if worked. The simulated “USS Enterprise” survived for the first time in many runs, the Sr Cadet Captain delighted at “his accomplishment” and leaving the instructors very puzzled as to how the this had happened.
A great deal of effort would be spent figuring out that the Kobayashi Maru hadn’t been breached or hacked, but rather they had a Navigator with the ability to replot a course based solely on visual star references. Further, she had a passive telepathy, that tapped into other crew that had visual reference to the stars, further enhancing her starfield. The techs running the test in the background, looking at the 3 dimensional, full starfield, had unwittingly provided her with the whole map of how to escape!
Appearance
- Mizuki is petite and slender, only standing 157cm, and weighing 42 kilos. Her hair is naturally a soft brown, and she generally keeps it medium long.
Her face is the long triangle, common to Vulcans.
Personality
Quiet, observant, Aika won’t usually jump to lead something, unless it happens to be her specialty. A dedicated student during Academy, she only made a few friends while attending. Unlike her Vulcan “cousins”, she is quite emotional, a fact that has most definitely not endeared her to most Vulcans. They have no idea what to do with her. She avoids them as rude, and they avoid her as “flighty and annoying”. The fact that she has beat many of their own on tests only adds to their annoyance; not that they’d admit it. That’s a human emotion.
History
Mizuki was found in an underground alien lab, on an otherwise uninhabited planet in the Delta quadrant by a survey party. She was only a child.
There were signs of an ancient civilization, but Starfleet felt that the lab was newer and of different origin. Mizuki and two other, non-intelligent “specimens” were found in suspended animation. The shattered remains of a storage facility that once held thousands of similar capsules was found nearby. Scientists are still cataloging what remains were intact enough for study.
The main lab had been maintained by automated systems. Starfleet scientists could only guess how long it had been there. Years, or centuries?
She was adopted by Dr Kawamoto Mizuki and his wife Dr Janet Mizuki, two of the scientists on the discovery team. Information on her storage unit labeled her as a “Tinari” in the alien language, but scans showed she was physically nearly identical to vulcans, despite being thousands of light years from Vulcan.
Her new parents gave her the names T’les Aika, hoping that the Vulcan first name might help her fit in easier. Aika was a family name on her father’s side.