Amanda Higgins

Name: Amanda “Mandy” Higgins (formerly 3 of 8, secondary adjunct engineering drone to unimatrix 487, grid 986)

- Species: Human - Liberated Borg

- Pronouns: She/Her

- Age: 35

- Appearance:

Amanda stands at a statuesque 6 foot 5 and has a medium build, not quite bulky but not thin either. She has blond hair and one dark brown eye, the other being lighter brown due to the borg implants. She has borg implants over the left side of her head (as pictured above), a borg enhanced left eye capable of seeing most of the electromagnetic spectrum. She also has some Borg spiderwebbed technology over her back and left leg.

- Personality: Amanda has gotte

n back most of her pre-assimilated personality of being cheerful, confident and exuding a feeling of comfort to those around her. She is skilled at her craft and doesn’t care about showing it, which can make her come off as domineering, but it’s really her trying to show her confidence to the crew. She is a good leader in the engine room, not afraid of getting her hands dirty to help out instead of ordering others around. Outside of engineering she’s a bit more reserved, still getting her feet underneath her with crowds outside of her small cadre of friends.

- Department: Engineering

- Special Position: Chief Engineer

- Academy Courses: Basic Warp Design,  Elementary Temporal Mechanics, Engineering, Temporal Mechanics, Warp Theory

- Backstory: 

Amanda Higgins was born to Jason and Miranda Higgins, both Starfleet officers from Earth. Raised in New York, Amanda enjoyed a pretty standard Starfleet childhood. Her parents were not assigned to the same ship, so she was involved in a revolving door of random parents on shore leave and relatives taking care of her during her formative years. Her father was the Chief Engineer on the USS Pyongyang and her mother was a medical officer on the USS Long Island. Her parents instilled a love of learning into her at an early age to keep her occupied while they were away and also to put her on the path to Starfleet. Amanda took to engineering like a duck to water, building model warp cores and ships as a child.

As a teen, she avoided trouble mostly due to her mother transferring to work at Starfleet Medical and keeping her in line. She applied to and was accepted to Starfleet academy with a little trouble, her parents helping her study and her marks were good enough for admission, but nothing to write home about and nothing blew away the admissions committee. She immediately set herself on the Engineering track, wanting to take after her absentee father.

During her time in the academy, she spent most of it either studying, working in the engineering labs and playing for the Starfleet Basketball team (both her parents were very tall for their species). She finished up her time in the Academy with exemplary marks, especially in Warp Mechanics, with a notation in her file commending her “think outside the box” mentality, and made her way as an ensign onto the USS Kyoto, working under her father. Here is where she got her first taste of difficulty. Her father rode her hard, harder than most due to not wanting to show favoritism to his daughter, and she racked up quite a few failures and exposed her temper that she had long kept in check. Her father was mostly absent from her early life, and she hadn’t realized how much of an anger problem he and her shared, and how much they would butt heads both personally and professionally. She retreated to the holodeck and various martial arts and sports programs to get her temper under control, but she finally realized that she just couldn’t work with her family. She needed to strike out on her own and start over.

She was granted a transfer to the USS Detroit and worked her way up to Assistant Chief Engineer. Her time there was night and day compared to what it was on the Kyoto. A caring and nurturing Chief Engineer in Lieutenant Commander Adrian Thompson helped boost her confidence but also keep her humble. During her time on the Detroit, she received commendations for the following innovations:

- Creating a system of automatic forcefields that were placed around vital engineering spaces and were triggered when the temperature of the technology would go to critical levels.

Automating the plasma injector valves to self purge, eliminating the tedious job of cleaning and purging them manually.

Stopping the primary odn relay from failing and repairing it on the fly during a battle with a Tzenkethi raider, keeping primary systems functional throughout the battle.

She learned from the chief for 6 years and was poised to either take over for him or be promoted to another ship when the Detroit had a disastrous encounter with the Borg.

The USS Detroit was on a mission near the borders of the Beta Quadrant when they came across a transwarp hub hiding in a nebula. While trying to get word back to Starfleet Command, they were ambushed by the Borg and assimilated in short order, the Detroit being a Science vessel and not suited for combat.

Amanda spent the next 3 years as a drone, participating in battles, assimilations and the like. Her work ethic unfortunately followed her to the Borg and she rose to the designation of 3 of 8, where she was secondary adjunct to their unimatrix. She stayed by the nebula and transwarp hub in a sphere and was one of the primary repair drones for both the sphere and the hub itself.

At some point near the end of her third year as a drone, Starfleet sent a squadron of ships to the beta quadrant nebula to collapse the transwarp hub. Amanda was captured, had her connection to the hive mind severed, and was sent back to Earth to have most of her implants removed. As she didn’t spend a huge amount of time with the Borg, it was easier for her to get herself acclimated to being a human again, though she has her moments of needing her solitude. 6 months after her implants were removed and she was debriefed at Starfleet, she was able to return to work as an engineer and then again as an assistant chief on the USS Bradford. The Phoenix will be her first assignment as a full Chief, but Amanda is excited (and a bit nervous) to get herself settled back “in the saddle” so to speak, and to get her life back on track.

- Roleplay Example:

“Adams! Get those magnetic constrictors locked down pronto or we’re going to have an imminent core breech!” Amanda’s voice boomed over the sounds of a plasma relay exploding. She swore as she typed furiously at her console, placing a forcefield around the plasma leak and buying her team some time. Chief G'Rel was working on keeping the core stable and it was her job, no, her duty, to work on keeping everything else running as smoothly as she could. After Adams reported that the constrictors were locked down, Amanda grabbed Granderson and T’Vela, bringing them over to the Primary ODN relay and grabbing a decoupler. She watched the readouts of the frayed relay lines and pulled up her sleeves, taking but a moment to wipe at her brow. Giving out her orders to the two crewmen, she cracked the bones in her neck as her left eye shined a bit as it reflected the EM spectrum colors. “Let’s get to work.”