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Lieutenant JG Mara Tomason

Name Mara Tomason

Position Assistant Chief Security/Tactical Officer

Rank Lieutenant JG

Basic Info
Personality
History

Character Information

Gender		Female
Species		Human
Age		26

Physical Appearance

Height		5'9" / 1.52m
Weight		154lbs / 70 kg
Hair Color		Dark brown, kept short
Eye Color		Brown
Physical Description		Lean and quick rather than heavily built. A childhood of freighter labour, hauling containers and lifting cargo, left her strong and fit, and the habit of staying that way never left her. Tomason carries a faded scar along her cheek, earned in the pirate raid that ended her freighter years. When she is stressed or angry, it seems to flush and darken with her mood. Her dark hair falls in loose curls, kept short and trimmed at the back and sides with a little length left on top, easy to manage and never a distraction at the wrong moment. Her eyes are rarely still, and she has a habit of standing where she can watch both the door and the room.

Family

Spouse		None
Children		None
Father		Henrik Tomason Sr, retired freighter captain
Mother		Della Tomason, retired freighter engineer
Brother(s)		Henrik Tomason Jr.
Sister(s)		None
Other Family

Personality & Traits

General Overview		Loyal, headstrong, and quick to anger. She is fiercely protective of the people she has decided are hers, and will tell a superior officer to their face that they are wrong, often before she has thought better of it. The same intensity that makes her difficult in a briefing room makes her dependable when it counts, and once she has committed to something she does not let go. She trusts competence over rank, and earns loyalty rather than demanding it.
Strengths & Weaknesses		She is decisive and clear-headed when there is a real threat in front of her. The trouble comes in between, with paperwork, protocol, and orders she thinks are wrong, none of which she has much patience for, and a temper that tends to get out before her judgement can catch it. Mara has more than one reprimand on her record because of it. Underneath it she is intensely loyal, takes every loss personally, and carries responsibility that was never hers, sitting with her failures longer than is healthy.
Ambitions		To run a security department of her own, and to do it without losing anyone on her watch. Further out, she would like to move into security investigations. She fancies herself a detective in the mould of the old crime novels she grew up reading.
Hobbies & Interests		She collects and repairs antique weapons, drawn more to the engineering of them than the firepower. She also plays a passable jazz trumpet, usually late at night when she cannot sleep, much to the annoyance of anyone trying to sleep near her.

Service History

Personal History		Early Years - 2359 - 2377 Tomason grew up aboard her family's cargo freighter, the SS Henrik's Folly, moving between border worlds and rarely staying anywhere long enough to make lasting friends. Her family were the closest thing she had to company, for better and for worse. Life was tough at times, the Tomason family didn't always make the best deals, and money was always tight. They had very little in the way of luxuries, as every spare credit was spent on keeping the old freighter running. Mara was drafted into the work of the ship from a young age, more so as she got older. Her chores changed with whatever needed fixing, cleaning or moving that day, which gave her a working knowledge of every part of the ship. Her father, Henrik Sr, was fond of the line "If you weren't helping, you weren't eating", and aboard the Folly it was not entirely a joke. He ran the ship on a short fuse. When a deal fell through, or a system failed, which was often, the whole family heard about it, and the arguments aboard were loud and frequent. Mara learned early that going quiet only drew his temper out longer, so she learned to give it back. By the time she was twelve, she could hold her ground in a shouting match with a grown man twice her size. When she was not working some shipboard duty or sitting through the education programs her mother insisted on, Mara read. She favoured the old noir detective novels, the harder-boiled the better. Somewhere on every freighter, there is a dead spot where the gravity plating has failed and was never worth repairing, and on the Folly, that forgotten corner of the hold was hers. She would wedge herself in among the cargo and read, out of earshot of whatever argument was running that day. Dominion War 2373-2375 When the Dominion War broke out, the Tomason family struggled even more than they ever had. Work dried up, fuel and parts grew scarce, and the family spent the war keeping as far from the front as a cargo run would allow. It was not always far enough. More than once, the Folly ran from an over-eager Dominion patrol and got clear on luck as much as skill. The strain told on all of them. Money was tighter than ever, every setback cut deeper, and her father's temper, never gentle, turned worse under the pressure. The fights aboard grew sharper and more frequent, and Mara stopped backing away from them at all. Post-Dominion War 2375-2377 The end of the war did not make the frontier safe. Starfleet was still spread thin, and in the trading sectors, the gap was filled by pirate bands and opportunists who had learned that no one was coming to stop them. When Mara was seventeen, raiders boarded the Folly. Her father ordered her to stay hidden. She did not. She took up a fallen crewman's weapon and fought, and a disruptor bolt opened her left cheek before the raiders were driven off. Two of the crew were killed, one of them the old engineer who had taught her to splice a power conduit when she was small. She has never claimed she was brave that day, only that she would not cower. The raid did not scare her out of her temper; it hardened her around it. She came away certain that the ones who survived were the ones willing to stand and fight, and that someone had to stand between raiders and the people who could not. She applied to Starfleet Academy the following year and chose security and tactical without hesitation. Academy Years - 2377 - 2381 Starfleet Academy was a shock. After a life on the frontier's edge, it was strange to live somewhere that had everything and room to spare: the replicators always worked, the beds were comfortable, and there were green spaces everywhere. Harder to take were the instructors. Their rigid authority and the relentless workload were nothing like the loose, do-what-needs-doing life of the Folly, and Mara did not adjust to either gracefully. The real trouble was the written work. In the field she was near the top of her year, since years aboard the freighter had taught her ship systems, repairs, and how to handle herself, and the practical assessments came easily. On paper she sank. Her schooling had been the education programs her mother put in front of her between chores, self-directed and unmarked, and she had never learned to write to a rubric or argue a case in an exam hall. She could solve a problem with her hands long before she could set it down in the expected form, and her written marks sat near the bottom of the cohort for it. Some of her classmates made sport of it. To the cadets who had grown up with everything, the freighter girl who could break an arm but not pass a written exam was an easy target. Mara wore it longer than anyone expected her to, until one remark landed wrong and she put a cadet on the floor. The fight was hers, she threw the first punch, and it earned her first Starfleet reprimand and a place in front of a disciplinary board, one ruling short of expulsion. What kept her fighting to stay was the rule she had been raised on: you did not quit, and you did not go home a failure. What actually saved her was Lieutenant Sahil Renn, a tactical instructor who had come up the hard way and had no patience for desk officers or for self-pity. Renn spoke for her at the board, not because she had been wronged, but because they had seen what she could do in the field and judged it worth saving. The reprieve came with terms: take the punishment without argument, and turn up to the extra sessions. Renn's help was not what she expected. Rather than drill her in essays, they taught her to take a written problem apart the way she would a failed power coupling, working it in the order that made sense to her and setting down what she had already reasoned out aloud. It was the first time anyone had taught her in a way that fit how her mind worked. Her marks climbed, not to anything brilliant, but to good enough. She graduated in the middle of her class. It was no one's idea of a stellar record, but it was enough to earn her commission, and she left with two things she had not arrived with: the memory of the first adult who had backed her without raising their voice, and a quiet intention to be that person for someone under her one day. USS Tecumseh - Ensign - 2381 - 2383 Borg Invasion - 2381 Mara was commissioned in 2381, the year the Borg came for the last time. Starfleet needed crew more than it needed clean records, and a junior officer with a temper and a reprimand was still a junior officer who could hold a deck. Tomason was posted straight to the USS Tecumseh, an Akira-class heavy escort, as a security officer with the rank of Ensign, and the Tecumseh went where the fighting was worst. The invasion was the strangest discovery of her life: she was good at it. Everything that had gone against her at the Academy, the chafing at order, the short fuse, the trouble sitting still, went quiet once the shooting started. Where steadier officers froze, she moved. The speed and noise of it left no room for argument or second-guessing, only the next thing that needed doing, and she did the next thing again and again. She was not fearless. She simply worked when it counted, and people noticed. It was aboard the Tecumseh that she earned her Starfleet Citation for Conspicuous Gallantry. During one engagement a hull breach tore open her section and a wounded crewman was caught in the path of a venting plasma line. Mara put herself between him and it, dragged him clear, and took burns down one side for the trouble. She never made much of it afterward, then or since. The end, when it came, was not a victory. The Borg were not beaten back so much as they were suddenly gone, and after weeks braced for the worst, the quiet was hard to trust. The Tecumseh had lost people Mara had served beside, and she carried their names out of the war the way she carried everything, quietly and for a long time. She did not say much about it. She had learned young what it cost to be the one who lived. By the end of it she was no longer the troubled cadet, but the Ensign who had held her section together when it mattered. That, more than any mark on a transcript, is what shaped the career that followed. Aftermath and Recovery - 2381 - 2383 The Borg were gone, but the damage they left was not, and the Tecumseh spent the next two years working in the wreckage of the invasion. There were shattered border systems to secure, relief convoys to escort through ruined space, and no shortage of pirates and opportunists who had learned that a disaster is good hunting. The new Typhon Pact was hardening along the same border, so the work was rarely quiet and never pointless. It suited her. The freighter girl who had once watched raiders board her family's ship now spent her days standing between raiders and the convoys carrying everything a ruined colony needed. It was the exact thing that had sent her to the Academy, and she was good at it. For two years she had real work that never stopped asking something of her, and it was the steadiest she had ever been. Her temper had somewhere to go, and the reprimand from the Academy began to look like something she had grown out of. By 2383 the worst of the crisis had eased, the Tecumseh was rotated back for refit, and Ensign Tomason was reassigned. She did not get a say in where. USS Calloway - Ensign and Lieutenant Junior Grade - 2383 - 2385 Mara's next posting was everything the Tecumseh had not been. She drew a berth aboard the USS Calloway, an ageing Miranda-class running supply and escort rotations through pacified space, ferrying cargo and the occasional dignitary along routes that had not seen trouble in years. After two years in the ruins of the invasion, it was meant to be a rest. To Mara it was a sentence. The irony was not lost on her. She had joined Starfleet to get off a freight run, and here she was back on one in a better uniform. With nothing that needed doing the way the war had needed it, the old edges came back: the impatience, the short fuse, the open contempt for procedure that existed only to be filed. She was not difficult because she had nothing to do. She was difficult because she could see the work being done badly and was made to watch. It came to a head early in 2384, when she called out a senior officer for signing off on a safety inspection he had not actually run. She was right. It did not matter. The manner of it earned her a formal reprimand for insubordination, her second, and a hold on the promotion to Lieutenant Junior Grade she was already overdue for. It would have been easy to let that be the end of her, and she did not. Whatever else the freighter had made of her, it had not made her a quitter, so she set out to make herself too useful to ignore. She stopped giving the ship reasons to write her up, took the dull work seriously enough to do it better than anyone, and when the quiet sector finally threw up a real emergency, a crippled transport and a boarding attempt on the convoy she was escorting, she ran the response cleanly and without being told twice. None of it undid the reprimand. All of it built a record alongside the reprimand that told the truer story. By late 2385 the hold had been lifted, the promotion to Lieutenant Junior Grade had come through, and her commanding officer thought enough of her to put her forward for an assistant department head's billet. The resentment had not gone anywhere. She had simply learned to outwork it. USS Ithaca - Lieutenant Junior Grade - 2385 In late 2385, newly promoted to Lieutenant Junior Grade, Tomason transferred to the USS Ithaca as Assistant Chief Security and Tactical Officer. She came aboard with a good reputation in a fight, two reprimands on her record, and little patience left for being managed. What she makes of the posting, and what it makes of her, remains to be seen.
Service Record		2359 Born aboard the civilian freighter SS Henrik's Folly to Henrik Tomason Sr and Della Tomason. 2377 Entered Starfleet Academy, Security and Tactical Division. 2381 Graduated from Starfleet Academy. Commissioned as Ensign. 2381 to 2383 USS Tecumseh, NCC-62890 Rank: Ensign Position: Security Officer Class: Akira-class heavy escort 2381 Borg Invasion, USS Tecumseh, NCC-62890 Rank: Ensign Awarded the Starfleet Citation for Conspicuous Gallantry 2383 to 2385 USS Calloway, NCC-31604 Rank: Ensign, later Lieutenant Junior Grade Position: Security Officer Class: Miranda-class light cruiser December 2385 USS Ithaca, NCC-75227 Rank: Lieutenant Junior Grade Position: Assistant Chief Security and Tactical Officer Class: Nova-class science and survey vessel
Awards & Medals		2381 USS Tecumseh, NCC-62890 Awarded a Starfleet Citation for Conspicuous Gallantry after being wounded shielding a crewman during the Borg invasion.
Reprimands & Disciplinary Actions		2379 Starfleet Academy Formal reprimand for striking a fellow cadet. Referred to a disciplinary board and permitted to continue training. Early 2384 USS Calloway, NCC-31604 Formal reprimand for insubordination toward a senior officer. Promotion to Lieutenant Junior Grade placed on hold.