Ensign Jara'kani
Name Jara'kani
Position Engineering Officer
Rank Ensign
Character Information
| Gender | Female | |
| Species | Jem'hadar | |
| Age | 12 |
Physical Appearance
| Height | 5'8" | |
| Weight | 175 | |
| Hair Color | Black | |
| Eye Color | Yellow | |
| Physical Description | Dr. Eden Naix had something very clearly in mind when he developed Jara’kani’s line - strength and the guile to wield it like a blade rather than a hammer. She was the only one who managed to meet both ideals (and honestly the only one of her batch to actually be viable, but let’s put that aside for now). 5’11” tall, just athletic enough to convey power while still looking graceful, just enough curves to serve as a distraction without being an encumbrance, elegant feminine facial features sculpted perfectly to convey a mild sense of danger while remaining pleasant to behold. Jara’kani wields these with quiet, unashamed confidence. Her hairstyle changes often; always neat, but she experiments with new styles often. Braids and ponytails (which might also be braided, on some occasions) seem to be her go-to, though. |
Family
| Spouse | None | |
| Children | None | |
| Father | Dr. Eden Naix (technically) | |
| Mother | None | |
| Brother(s) | As a technically, every Jem'hadar that ever lived. According to herself, none. | |
| Sister(s) | None | |
| Other Family | None |
Personality & Traits
| General Overview | In many ways, Jara’kani is definitely Jem’hadar. She seems alert at all times, constantly watching and assessing everything around her - a habit that’s more or less hard-baked into her genes. Through this she notices many things that others don’t. Whether or not she reads those things correctly is another thing, of course. When she’s at work doing something important, one can clearly see how focused she is - just like how her male counterparts in the Gamma Quadrant fight to the death in single-minded pursuit of their goal: victory. Arguably Jara does the very same, though her ‘victories’ often take a rather different form to scorched, body-strewn battlefields. Some say she’s taking all the instinct and restlessness that builds up inside her and putting it elsewhere. On many occasions this means she locks in to her work until it is finished to her satisfaction. Sometimes it means that she forgets to hydrate or take care of her basic being-alive needs and faints mid-shift. Yes, it has happened. Once. When not at work and hyperfocused on a life essential engineering task, Jara'kani is an extrovert with a hedonistic streak. Maybe that's because Risians helped her build her identity, maybe that's trauma from being cooped up in a tiny space for years talking. Either way she doesn't care one bit what people think about her; she is unapologetically what she is and she doesn't need or want the approval of people who can't or won't accept that people can come in all forms. Oh, and if you’re thinking of blithely grouping her together with her brothers in the Gamma Quadrant, don’t. She is very, very fiercely protective indeed of the identity she’s built for herself, and will defend it from anyone who deliberately mischaracterises what she is. |
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| Strengths & Weaknesses | + extroverted + fierce advocate of the diversity of life + will work at something till it's done to her satisfaction. - not very good with on-the-spot innovation - terrible cook despite being passionate about it - dependent on the ketracel-white substitute drug created by Dr. Naix, albeit in a watered-down version. - will work at something till it's done to her satisfaction or to burnout. |
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| Ambitions | * to punch Dr. Naix in the face * to finally learn how to cook without burning the food she's cooking * to meet Data * to win a gold medal in a swimming competition one day |
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| Hobbies & Interests | * swimming - she prefers to swim over going to the gymnasium. * cooking - which she's not good at at all, but she's trying. * chocolate - she can't get enough of it, She's also dabbled in a variety of hobbies over the years including sewing, yoga, dance and acting. |
| Personal History | Even in post-scarcity society, sometimes the right amount of currency (and optionally the right least amount of moral scruples) can get you whatever you want. That was what brilliant human geneticist Dr. Eden Naix did, paying an exorbitant amount in latinum for a sample of Jem’hadar tissue and ‘surplus’ maturation equipment from the black market. The purpose? Profit. His original plan had been to create his own breed of better genetically engineered soldiers and sell them on the black market as shock troops - hell, as far as he could tell, in his hubris, maybe even the Dominion itself might start purchasing them from him to fill their own ranks! What did he mean by better, you ask? Naix viewed the Changelings’ decision to make the Jem’hadar a race of all males was short-sighted. Perfect soldiers needed to think and occasionally use guile and cunning that only came with cool heads to win battles - traits he felt were best embodied by women. Thus began his task of modifying the genome he had in his possession and creating hopefully viable examples of his new soldier race, working secretly from a laboratory constructed beneath his own home by night while he taught at a local university by day. Modifying the Jem’hadar genome would prove to be a steep, steep uphill task, involving radical reengineering to yield intelligent, independent specimens. The first many prototypes, if you will, failed, expiring in their maturation chambers. At last, though, after two solid years of effort and an uneconomical pile of errors and dead bodies, Naix’s efforts yielded a single stable infant, whom he named JH-093. Save the minor inconvenience of taking a total of 96 hours to reach physical maturity, JH-093 was everything Naix wanted - intelligent, not bad to look at and, best of all, quite a bit less kill-everything than her brothers in the Gamma Quadrant. Naix knew, though, that in order to test her mental faculties, he’d need to make her blend in. Obviously, sending her to school in person would probably cause problems, Naix wasn’t that blinded by the success he’d just clinched - so he ‘homeschooled’ her, teaching her what she needed to know while getting someone to register her in the education system under the pseudonym Barakani, a young Risian woman. JH-093 sat for and passed the requisite local examinations over a period of six years, up to high school, remotely. Up till that point, as far as anyone outside of Naix’s lab was concerned, she was nothing but an ordinary Risian woman pursuing her requisite education. What happened in between, during those six years, you ask. Tests just about covers it. Naix took great care in examining JH-093’s physical and mental acuity, as clinically as an inventor might evaluate a product of his own design. Holographic combat scenarios, subterfuge, puzzle-solving, you name it. She made short work of them all after some practice. Sometimes Naix would have potential clients observing long-distance via video (or, on occasion, in person) when she performed these assessments. All told, JH-093 was well-liked by all who viewed her. Naix could practically smell the profit and power she and her forthcoming sisters would bring him. To his credit, Naix borrowed and used one of the most salient lessons the Dominion had learned about the Jem’hadar: that total, unquestioning control over them was an aspiration at best. To this end he eschewed the use of ketracel-white as a means of control (that, and getting the substance at all was nightmare even for him) for a weaker proprietary alternative, administered on a tightly kept schedule, that would keep JH-093 alive but pacified, so that she would always be easier to control should she go rogue. Not to his credit, blinded by his impending success, Naix failed to realize (or more likely didn’t care) that, ultimately, you cannot stop a Jem’hadar from Jem’hadar-ing its way to what it wants, even if it exists in a radically different form - least of all if you’ve given it a secondary level education that includes computer literacy and use of the galactic internet of things. As much as JH-093 wasn’t that sure what she was exactly, the nascent feeling that she was somehow less than she was supposed to be took root early, swiftly followed by resentment of the feeling that she couldn’t become what she was supposed to be - followed by the feeling that she needed to get out. The question was how. Nonetheless, dulled as her wits were, she was able to glean tiny insights from Naix as to his schedule, attitude and, most importantly, his oversights by observing him. She learned fairly early on that he would leave the lab at around 0730 and return around 1500. She also learned that Naix was fairly rubbish at childproofing the device she used for her schoolwork - which actually meant she had a fair amount of access to sites that he hadn’t thought would be harmful, including the Starfleet recruitment page. Like, there’s no way she’d ever have thoughts of enlisting, right? Right??? Wrong. While exploring said page while Naix was out teaching, JH-093 decided to chance an escape. She’d learned during her studies that Starfleet was an organisation that valued freedom and autonomy over all else; while she knew little of her people’s history with them, she decided that they were probably the best people to help her out of this situation. Taking a wild guess, she sent over her academic results under her Risian pseudonym through the recruitment portal and requested an interview over subspace. Two days later, said request was granted, and JH-093 shocked the living daylights out of the poor recruiting officer assigned to her when she appeared on camera and explained her situation to him. That was all she needed to do. Just four days after that quick discussion, a joint team of Starfleet personnel and Risian law enforcement raided Naix’s home and took him (and her) and all his research into custody. While Naix was taken away to a prison colony and stripped of his academic qualifications, JH-093 was placed in a Starfleet facility on Risa, with heavy monitoring and security round the clock - but at least it had windows, and her holding room was far better furnished than the meager dwelling she’d had in Naix’s basement. She spent many days by the window, staring out at the world beyond, the world she’d been deprived of for years. When it was decided that she probably wouldn’t hurt anyone by being let out with supervision, she went exploring. No one batted an eye. The Risian locals welcomed her with open arms despite the headlines on her that spread like wildfire. While she still depended on that same manufactured substance to stay alive as an ugly but necessary binding to her past, the freedom she had otherwise was intoxicating. She relished the chance to do whatever the hell she wanted with herself, helped along by the many Risian locals, who helped her to choose what she liked in her clothing, what what she liked to eat and, most importantly, a proper name - Jara’kani, adapted from the pseudonym she’d been given. Save the occasional therapist or medical officer who came by to study her and assess her health, she was free at last. Except even then she didn’t feel like she had truly become what she was supposed to be. She yearned for a purpose - something to help direct the energy she felt coiled inside her, begging to be put to use. She found herself helping out around her corner of Suraya Bay, trying all manner of odd things to find that purpose exactly, from waitressing at a bar to mowing grass. Only when she tried her hand at fixing shuttles under the supervision of a mechanic did she finally realise that she actually liked the work. It kept her mind occupied, for one, and she quite liked the idea of working on something and making it purr better - something she found oddly relatable. When she talked with the counsellor assigned to her about it, he cracked a joke about her following up with the application she submitted to get her freedom - after all, Starfleet technically did offer that exact opportunity, and more. Joke though it may have been to him, for Jara’kani, the suggestion set gears turning in her brain. The more reading she did, the more she began to like the idea of keeping her hands busy for a cause. So she applied with her results, and was granted an interview anyway. Processing her case took easily a month - understandably so, given her unprecedented case, even helped along by an ethics board decision that sending Jara’kani to the Gamma Quadrant where she was supposed to belong would probably cause her grave, unconscionable harm and that her staying within Federation space was likely the safest place for her to be (barring any especially bigoted peers, of course). At the end of it, though, she was allowed to take the Starfleet Academy entrance exam, which she passed. Jara’s time as a cadet was fairly (and refreshingly) uneventful, save a handful of incidents caused by some especially mean-spirited fellow cadets. While many were wary of her, an equal number were far more willing to simply give her a chance and see - especially when she initially struggled with some of her foundational subjects. It was thanks to one of her instructors that she discovered an interest in automated systems and equipment - purpose-built entities built to perform a single function that could also be used to do other things. Familiar, eh? It was this that inspired her to enter an engineering competition with a medical cadet on the counsellor track, creating a small spherical robot that dispensed mental health advice. Her spare time was spent hopping from ECA to ECA, finally settling on the Academy swim team, with whom she won one bronze and one silver medal. However, rather than be given her posting orders normally over subspace upon commissioning, Jara'kani was instead approached by a Starfleet Intelligence operative in her dorm, who |
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| Service Record | 2396-2400: Cadet, Starfleet Academy 2399: Wins a Commandant's Coin for 'Most Creatively Essential Entry' for her mental health bot, jointly created with Betazoid cadet Nue Jiva |