Mera Aeonian

Mera Aeonian is an El-Aurian serving aboard the USS Phoenix. She currently holds the rank of Lieutenant and has served in the Operations division of Starfleet for forty years.

Early Life
A rather odd coming of age story was in store for Mera Aeonian but to be perfectly honest, if you’d asked her now, she’d say she wouldn’t have it any different. Due to the well known El-Aurian displacement following the assimilation, a small community formed on a cold tempered planet not unlike Earth’s Alaska called Noorel V. It wasn’t too far from the Sol System, but wasn’t exactly next door either. Maybe that was the best, who could tell. The specific small community the Aeonians called home was Menirsuro.

Mera was born the youngest of eight children, all boys up until her, which became a rather familliarly overplayed joke in their little community. All eight of those children were reared with optimistic and curious ideals. The Aeonian family was and still is a close one. Mera’s furthest memory can be traced by her to a day when she was three and decided to dive into a tackle pile with her brothers which can’t describe their relationship any better, one of closeness, trust, a few bruises, and maybe one broken vase. The children had so much to do in the community, exploring ice caves, skating on the lakes, meandering in the forests after their schooling, and they couldn’t have wished it to be any different. The children, having very much pleased their parents with their fascination with the natural world and space at large, each turned to the stars one by one. Mera herself grew bored with the environment, and sure, she loved her family and her home but there was so much more she wanted to see in the universe and flying amongst the stars seemed to be the best bet to really explore new places and meet new people. Menirsuro was comfortable, familiar, homely, but being surrounded by the same people and the same places started to weigh Mera down.

It was bittersweet for Mera’s parents to see their boys leave one by one and then their only girl, intrigued and looking for what Starfleet had so much to offer. The exploration was in abundance, and the opportunities, provided their test scores were up to par, were plenty. Mera’s oldest brother, Rikko, took three tries to get in and thus told Mera to start studying then, about three years prior to her application, for her test. Well, alright, the young woman supposed, and got to working. It all paid off, of course, when at age 30, and looking like a fresh faced human teen, Mera passed her test and was accepted into Starfleet Academy. The test was hard for her, as was to be expected due to the so-called thinning of the herd, but Mera simply treated it as another problem to solve, another thing to learn from, which seemed to help her attitude a great deal.

Starfleet Academy
Once Mera was faced with course selection and decisions, she came to a bit of a conundrum. Would she join her brothers in Science, or veer from the family career path. Sure she was just as inquisitive as the rest of them were, but Mera wanted to be practical, hands on, really in the nitty gritty. There were a few ways she could go, Security wasn’t the best fit for Mera considering she had trouble with real hand to hand combat techniques other than casual sibling wrestling takedowns, Tactical struck her fancy, but that division didn’t really suit Mera’s passion for fixing issues and solving problems, Engineering was a thought that struck Mera’s mind but there was more she wanted to do, Mera knew there was one division that could really combine Engineering and Science at the bare minimum. As was her decision, Mera ventured into abject uniqueness and enrolled in different classes connoting her interest in Operations. While she was there, Mera decided to specialize in the different types of mechanics the Academy offered, specifically probability and temporal mechanics, the ins and outs of how time worked in space. The brunette had a rather fun time at the Academy, met with a very lovely Betazoid as her roommate whom she remained in touch with well into their years in the fleet. She did make some friends, though people were a little weirded out at the prospect of having a friend so much older yet looking so much younger. That was a little awkward admittedly.

Regardless, Mera found some extra time outside of her interesting classes with interesting professors to return to a bit of ice skating, visiting a rink or a holodeck whenever she could, often taking her friends with her as well. She found every single subject she studied endlessly fascinating, the engaged student singing her instructors’ praises to her friend on more than one occasion.

Mera’s first posing was aboard the USS Demeter.

Posting I: USS Demeter
Mera’s first ship assignment was of great pleasure to the young graduate. A science vessel with a fairly large crew. Mayhaps not the best of environments considering Mera’s accomplishments in her long time aboard got almost no recognition whatsoever, but she was one of a few Temporal Mechanics specialists so that was sort of to be expected, the division itself being large enough that there were multiple specialists per subject. Mera, too involved in her work and keeping her head far far above water, didn’t have time for friends, or so she insisted. In her later days aboard the Demeter, she would grow to regret that statement and her actions, or rather, inactions. Towards the end of her time there, the new CO took far too many liberties with the phaser systems and abused seniority while in the position of Captain. Despite his decomission and relief of duty, it didn’t sit right with Mera, blame the El-Aurian penchant for understanding the larger universe. Being on that ship made the young Aeonian very uncomfortable so she put in for a transfer, bidding goodbye to a few close coworkers and not many more.

Posting II: Deep Space Nine
Luckily, the next closest place with an opening was the station Deep Space Nine located in orbit of Bajor. DS9 was a welcome changed, more structured, stationary, a place to really get comfortable. Working as an administrator meant a lot of things, it meant testing Mera’s customer service voice a great deal but she got good at it. It was facilitating repairs, docking schedules, crew changes, shift organizing. It was the work Mera liked doing. Especially when she got to flex her Mechanics muscles, be it temporal or probability.

Deep Space Nine was maybe the first time since the academy that Mera made herself interact with people. Mainly in the civilian areas in her time off. She met all manner of interesting people living the most individually intricate lives. Many many entirely platonic dinner partners later, there was something telling Mera her time at the station was coming to an end, such was the nature of the universe, fleeting, rare, fast paced. Mera’s prolonged service at the station was noted due to her continued enthusiasm and drive over the years to fix any sort of problem, whether it was communications, repairs, resource allocations, schedules, even simple misunderstandings like “oh I thought we’d reserved this holodeck,” “no that was for two days from now, see?” So from there, she was assigned a different post and was transferred to Earth. San Fransisco to be exact.

Posting III: Starfleet Operations
Starfleet Operations was certainly a massive change for the El-Aurian. It felt just like Deep Space Nine had, just without the element of being on a space station, an element of being very solidly grounded. And Mera had to admit, California was as nice as it had been so many years ago in her early thirties. While there, Mera put her Astrogation skills to use, supplying ships and superiors alike with routes and shortcuts along with her standard Mechanics expertise. She caught up with a few former professors, saw a few retired friends. For some reason, she felt so at home and yet so alien. There was something to be said about finding people she’d lost touch with all over again, something familial rather than just friendly. Mera spent her free time reminiscing with old friends who, regrettably so, were getting older and older by the year while she just stayed the same. It couldn’t even be described as bittersweet, it was just bitter. And not even in the way you’d think.

It was the way Mera had to watch through gritted teeth and stinging eyes how her once youthful friend had to deal with joint pain, gray hairs, everything that came along with having a lifespan that was about seven times as short as Mera’s. She only wished she had so much more time with her friends, new and old. And so a promise was made, weekly dinners and holiday vacations adorned her calendar with a new sort of young ferver that Mera’s friends had instilled in her. It was their fault she looked to the stars once more.

The stars combined with her friends’ insistence inspired Mera. She worked and worked. Mera worked so that maybe one day she could be in the stars again. It was there, in her administrative job on a planet, she dreamed, ironically, of an administrative job in the stars once more. And so, to her friends applause and proud smiles, Mera Aeonian accepted a request to transfer to a new starship.

Posting IV: USS Chaser
The USS Chaser, an intrepid class ship. A long range explorer vessel. Mera loved every single minute she was there, attacking her new posting with a renewed and youthful glow more befitting her age compared to her lifespan. She was requested as an expert on probability mechanics to the brand new ship and was absolutely ecstatic to be there in the first place.

Mera’s new confident attitude, still retaining her classic traits that really made Mera truly Mera, helped her make a few long term friends and a great deal of positive acquaintances at the mess hall and the bar, she always liked listening. Hearing people out, learning, perceiving, as was her nature. Due to a family related transfer, the position of ACOO opened up. Mera deduced that with her perfect record and service, there was a small chance that for her skills and work ethic she could be considered for the position. Needless to say the woman was utterly honored to even have a shot, having been considered for her work ethic and eagerness to help other members of the department. She’d been given a chance to help the COO by providing roundabout and unique solutions to a problem, namely a jammed navigational sensor system. Due to a helmsman’s error, there was a blockage in the system that helped them detect space debris and navigate correctly which, on a spaceship, is one of the worse things to happen. Her Astronavigational skills really came into play again which helped the El-Aurian’s case a great deal. This department on this ship felt like a place where Mera really belonged. After that incident, Mera’s COO had given her a little more responsibility in terms of leading people, having Mera coordinate with a few more Operations officers in the construction of a probe meant to expedite the Astrogation process in a thickly packed asteroid field. Once it was made official, Mera could’ve practically cried from joy. She was truly invigorated, entirely pleased that her efforts to help people had reflected positively on herself.

As most good things are, after a few years, her accomplishment was short lived. On a mission to document a particularly volatile star with a few other vessels of the same class as the Chaser, the wrong type of frequency was dispensed at it by another ship, leaving the one in closest proximity, which was the Chaser quite unfortunately, heavily damaged. More than heavily damaged because as far as Mera was concerned, it was demolished. Half the ship had been lost to the vacuum of space and so had the majority of the crew in the blast. The ones that remained entered escape pods and were picked up by the ships that had accompanied the Chaser there. For everyone there, despite the fact that their research had survived, the time was somber. What good was data if the people that worked so hard for it weren’t alive to see it? The one time Mera had to transfer, she didn’t want to go.

But on the positive side, the Phoenix was always exciting so Mera just tried to summon up what she had when she first boarded the Chaser.

Appearance
Sunken and dark eyes rather befitting her age adorn an angular and sharp face that’s a little sterner than Mera herself would like. The El-Aurian stands at a firm one hundred and eighty centimeters with a not so thickened build, though she’s quite agile. Despite her rather young El-Aurian age, Mera likes to joke when she’s sore that she’s getting into her advanced stage of life, like humans of her age would be. Large and largely curled brown hair sits messily below her collarbones off duty while being pulled back inhumanely tight into a scalp braid while she’s working.

Personality
Mera is an INTJ, an Architect in nearly every single sense of the word. She often longs to find someone who can truly keep up with and not be annoyed at her constant nonstop analysis of nearly everything Mera comes across. Mera has the potential to be either the boldest of visionaries or the harshest of pessimists, of course, neither of those is mutually exclusive. Through perseverance and creative thinking Mera has enough confidence to believe that, against all odds, she can find a way to solve the problem. The young El-Aurian derives nearly all of her self-worth from her intelligence and mental acuity which may or may not be the best move, but what does Mera know? She’s only seventy. She has a rather dry sense of humor for better or for worse but in her years of service she’s learned to keep the more coded and thought heavy things for off duty so people don’t misconstrue anything. Often it was thought that Mera should be in the Science division based on her thirst for knowledge and desire to teach herself any given topic at any time, but her desire to be handy outweighed her conformity, she had to be different from her seven older brothers in some way after all. She questions everything, not in a disrespectful way of course, but she prefers to test and derive her own meaning from occurrences. Of course, that never got in the way of her duties at all, her moral and political conscience was too strong for that. Sure, she can come up with ideas galore, but as any person around her could tell you, she’ll never boast about it. No idea is worth anything until it is proven to work.