USS Galileo :: Biography - Miraj Derani

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20 Sep 2018 @ 12:46pm

Ensign Miraj Derani

Name Miraj Derani

Position Flight Control Officer

Rank Ensign


Character Information

Gender Female
Species Human/Boslic
Age 21
Date of Birth 19th September 2369
Place of Birth The Pirate Ship Serpent's Tooth

Character Type


Starfleet ID

Serial Number VO-571-1173
Security Clearance Level 4
Duty Watch Alpha

Physical Appearance

Height 5'6"
Weight 120lbs
Hair Color Candy Pink
Eye Color Blue
Physical Description Anyone looking at Miraj tends to think the word "bouncy". She's usually smiling and happy, and being on the small to average size is quite childlike.

Her Boslic heritage gives her candy pink hair that she wears in bunches; her orbital arches are much less pronounced, and the trident crease in the forehead of a full Boslic is much shallower.

Off duty, she has what can only be described as an appalling dress sense. She tends to favour clothes that make her look a lot longer than her already young 21 years, and she favours bright, frequently clashing, colours. When not in uniform she also prefers to have bare feet, to better "feel" the ship.
Body Art She has a tattoo of a skull and cross bones on her left shoulder

Family

Spouse n/a
Children n/a
Father William Garrison
Mother Lianej Derani
Brother(s) Malcom Garrison (half brother)
Other Family No blood relatives that she knows about, though she hopes she has some on her Mother's side.

Her father's colleagues and crew from his salvage business became a surrogate family, giving her many 'aunts' and 'uncles' of various species.
Pets n/a

Personality & Traits

General Overview Miraj is pretty much a puppy in human/boslic form, she's enthusiastic and positive and perky. She doesn't just love to fly, it comes to her more naturally than breathing. She didn't just have the highest flying scores of her intake at the Academy but some of the highest scores in its history. Anything to do with flying came easily, instinctively, as if it was baked into her DNA.

But she's got some funny ideas about flying, believing a ship and its pilot should be one. She likes to commune with her ships, getting into the crawl spaces and places where she should not go, such as nacelles and jeffries tubes, to feel the 'vibes' of the ship. If she's not at the helm, then she can be found in the ship's 'personal space' rather than the cabins and other spaces meant for people. And she believes that ships talk to her, that they tell her if they are sick or uncomfortable. It makes her come across as a little eccentric. Describing her as a 'space cadet' isn't too far from the truth.

On the other hand, she's still very young and inexperienced with anything that isn't flying and tends to defer to anyone on anything else, regardless of whether they're right or not.
Strengths Miraj was born to fly. She first piloted a starship at the age of 3, sitting on her father's lap. She can get into any ship, from the smallest fighter to the biggest Ship of The Line and get more out of it than the original engineers ever dreamed. Its an ability that is almost supernatural. She is one of the best pilots alive, and can fly anything, anywhere, under any conditions. She says she does this by becoming one with the ship, letting it feel her, and she feels it; she can tell if the engine is under-performing by half a percent, just from the feel of the deck plate under her bare feet, and claims she can fly just from the sensations of the ship alone, without needing sensors.
Weaknesses If its not flying, or flying related, she's pretty terrible at it. She got through the academy on sheer persistence, scraping passing grades in everything that wasn't flying, navigation, and basic engineering. She isn't stupid - her grades in anything to do with the physics of flying show that - but she has almost no interest in it beyond how it can get her to fly.

And where she has a confidence that would be arrogance in someone only slightly less talented when it comes to flying, about everything else, she has very little faith in her own meager abilities, and believes that everyone knows more than she does. Whilst this is generally true, it can make her overly trusting and gullible.
Ambitions To fly everything there is to fly, to fly through every 'dangerous' and 'challenging' space hazard and to do at least one time jump using a slingshot technique.

To find her mother, a pirate during the Dominion War, who hasn't been seen in seven years.
Hobbies & Interests Her spare time is divided into two major activities. First is her search for her mother. She is desperate to meet her, and scours every publicly available source for any clue.

The second is also related to her mother. Due to her Mother's career, Miraj is absolutely obsessed with pirates and knows more than anyone person needs to know about the history of piracy on earth, as well as in space. She has researched Piracy among the Orions, and within the Badlands. She knows about the maquis actions and the privateering around Ferengi space.

Her quarters are filled with pirate themed ephemera, complete with a jolly roger and a ship in a bottle, and one of her most precious possessions is a genuine 17th century sextant that was supposed to have belonged to Calico Jack Rackham.

She enjoys holodeck simulations of the pirate life. She knows how to splice a main brace and how to tie a monkey's fist and how to careen the futtocks. She knows all the stories of the golden age of sail, of Henry Morgan, Anne Bonney and Stede Bennet. However her view on the subject is highly romanticized by her longing to know her mother, and her love of trashy novels set in the golden Age of Sail.
Vernacular Miraj's obsession with pirates tends to spill over into her conversation - its peppered with sailing terms and colloquialisms that's more than typical for being on board a sailing ship than a star ship.
Orientation Heterosexual
Language(s) Spoken Ferderation Standard

Personal History At the height of the Dominion War, William Garrison was a young officer piloting a federation ambassador towards DS9 when the ship was waylaid by a group of pirates operating out of the Badlands. The Serpent's Tooth was a horribly overgunned old frigate, captained by a boslic woman, Lianej Derani. It knocked out the runabouts engines, and brought it on board, taking the passenger and pilot prisoner.

Whilst the pirates held the Ambassador for ransom, William and Lianej engaged in a brief but torrid affair. But when the time came to return the ambassador, William decided to leave Lianej Derani and return home to his wife Lucy, and eight year old son Malcolm.

A year later, a baby girl, about 8 weeks old, was left at DS9, along with a note that made it clear who her father was. When Lucy Garrison heard about the half boslic, half human, baby, it was the last straw for an already rocky marriage. She left him, leaving William to raise Malcolm and the baby Miraj by himself.

William's parents, both career Starfleet, had been killed several years earlier at Wolf-359. With no one to help him, William left Starfleet to raise his children, creating his own salvage business so he could keep his children close.

Miraj had an almost idyllic childhood. They lived on ships and spent very little time on the ground. Her elder brother seemed delighted to have a little sister, and encouraged her mischief at every turn, and she loved him to bits, worshiping the ground he walked on,and often acting as look out and alibi in his own mad schemes. Their playgrounds were old derelicts and abandoned ships that his father and his small crew would bring in for breaking, and from them she learnt all about getting a ship to fly in the direst circumstance

It became clear that Miraj was born to fly. She took to it like a duck to water, flying the ships her father salvaged whilst sitting on his lap. She flew on her own for the first time at the age of seven, a small shuttle craft that her father had had since she was born. From that, it was like she had come alive, tackling bigger and bigger ships.

By the time she was fifteen she was frequently working in her spare time to fly broken and wounded ships back to port from wherever they were salvaged from. Even before attending the academy she had flown most classes of Federation vessel barring the most modern, and had also flown Ferengi freighters, abandoned, Galor class Cardassian warships, and even a Klingon Bird-of-Prey.

It was Malcolm who kindled the two other great tides of her life. Despite the nine year age gap, they were very close, and he gave of pirates, after reading her a highly romanticized story of pirates for a bedtime story, and letting slip about what her mother had really been.

From that, Miraj felt an urge to know her mother that she hadn't felt before. Her father had never really talked about Lianej, just telling Miraj that her mother had been someone he'd loved briefly and fiercely, and her mother had left her behind when she had to take a very dangerous voyage, and had never come back.

Now she knew there was far more to it, she started trying to find out anything she could about her mother, but there was precious little intelligence about the Serpent's Tooth and its crew that she could find, and the last time anyone had even seen it was when Miraj was fourteen, in 2383, heading into the Typhon Expanse.

She hasn't given up on finding her mother, but she knows that with seven years without anyone hearing anything that her chances of ever meeting her are slim.

And she also really, really, wanted to fly the new generation of ships, and they were unlikely to come up as salvage, so at 17 she applied for Starfleet Academy,
Starfleet History Her extraordinary aptitude for piloting got her into the Academy, but she had to pass the rest on her own merits. Apart from piloting, it was a struggle and for nearly everything she had to trade coaching on piloting and navigation for coaching on whichever course she was on at the time, from Interstellar Ethics to to Tactical Analysis.

Even her Kobiyshai Maru was 'solved' with flying. She took the helm and managed to fly her ship into to pick up the Kobyashi Maru in a piggyback and then used tactics more akin to fighter piloting to get out of the neutral zone. She got the Kobyashi Maru out intact, but the attempt left the ship without a nacelle, the warp core ejected, and half the crew lost to vacuum when the nacelle exploded. However the drop out of warp still left the ship in motion, and she skated it back across the border of the neutral zone, completing the rescue of the civilians, at the cost of more than twice their number in her own crew.

She had cadet postings as helmsman on the USS Arvin, a Intrepid class and the Sovreign Class USS Thelian.

Freshly graduated in October 2390, with a special commendation for her superlative flying ability, her first posting was as Chief flight control officer on the USS Galileo. Her first flight was out to a colony world, where a side trip to survey a nearby planet resulted in an almost deadly encounter with smugglers. Her life was saved by the dashing Lieutenant Commander Luke Wyatt, a man for whom she developed feelings on increasing intensity.

On returning from the colony the Galileo was attacked in the Paulson Nebula and destroyed. She like the mjority of the crew were captured and taken to a rogue planet within the nebula. There she suffered several trials, including being tortured and molested by the Klingons who had kidnapped them, but also an encounter with a former crewman of her mother's who thought to take his revenge on Lianej out on her daughter.

When the crew was sent with the Kreanans to the Klingon homeworld she was drawn against her will into the planned mutiny set up by General Ko'raH to make sure they didn't get to Qu'onos. In the following battle she sustained a serious head injury that lead to significant loss of cognitive function that cast a shadow over her future in Starfleet
Medical History Miraj's mixed heritage has meant she's had some minor complications with her health, mostly that medication can react unpredictably, but so far the worst that its caused has been to need customised formulas for common vaccinations and pain killers.

In early 2391 she underwent brain surgery to resolve damage to her temporal lobe that had resulted in a condition called acquired prosapagnosia (inability to recognise faces) and impaired spatial relationship processing.
Service Record 2386-87 - Enters Starfleet Academy,
2387-88 - Second year, Cadet posting to USS Arvin
2388-89 - Midshipman year, Cadet posting to USS Thelian
2389-90 - final year, graduates Starfleet Academy
2390-present Posted to USS Galileo

Character Progression System

CPS Option DISABLED

Skills and Perks


Skill Training