Jazari Bezan

[NPC] Ensign Jazari Bezan is an engineering officer on the USS Odyssey.
== Background ==
Jaz never remembered where she was born. For some reason completely unknown to her, her mother could list off the precise coordinates in interstellar space where Jaz’s life had started, but personally, Jaz couldn’t care less. She’d been born on the cargo ship Izar – and the Izar never stayed in one place for long. 
Her parents were never married. Theirs was an on/off relationship between two drifters, one an academic, the other a merchant. They were happy when they were together, but they were rarely together. Mirjem was constantly moving from planet to planet for her research, and Sijiar was happy to take her there. The cracks only started to show after Jaz was born, and her parents suddenly had responsibilities besides romance. They split after a year, and Jaz spent her early childhood bouncing from the Izar to a planet and back again. 
Jaz thought her life was grand, but when it was time for her to start school, her mother had a different idea. She had remarried a Vulcan and accepted a teaching position at a university on Vulcan – then convinced Jaz’s father that Jaz needed to be educated there. At all of five years old, Jaz was quite the wild child, so Vulcan school didn’t suit her at all. 
The first school expelled her after the girl made ‘illogical’ her only academic goal and spent every day working on it. When her mother announced her pregnancy with Jaz’s stepsister, her academic escapades got even worse. Her mother threatened to send her to boarding school on Trill, and very nearly made good on her threat, until her stepfather took Jaz ‘camping.’
A week in the Vulcan desert is a form of camping only matched in misery by spending time on the surface of Andoria’s north pole. But somehow Jaz didn’t find it completely unbearable. The time alone with her stepfather allowed her to bond with him, and in that she could find an appreciation for his culture that had been lacking before. There was something past that cold vulcan exterior. The young trill just needed to find a way to see it – as her mother already had. 
Her disciplinary problems didn’t disappear overnight, but when they did, Jaz began to excel. Computers were her strong point. She learned coding languages early on, and was constantly coding new games for herself to pass the time. All of her school breaks were spent on the Izar with her father, and she was always to be found in the bowels of the ship pestering the crew with questions. When she got back to Vulcan, it was with practical engineering knowledge to add to the theory taught in the classroom. 
When it came time for graduation, her father tried his best to convince her to return to the Izar for good. But Jaz didn’t want to go. She was a mixture of both her parents. She wanted to be in space, but she also wanted to continue with science and engineering. She decided to go to Starfleet Academy instead, blowing through the entrance exams and securing her spot. 
Her father eventually came to terms with her decision, and offered Jaz a ride to the Academy with the Izar. Vulcan and Earth were quite close together, but somehow her father managed to get her on the ship a full month before she was due on Earth. Jaz quite enjoyed her time with her younger half-siblings and the Izar’s crew, so she didn’t mind the journey. Besides, it allowed her to meet the Android. 
Jaz knew there was something off about the woman from the moment she entered the marketplace on Arcturus VI. Her eyes and hair were silver, and even her skin had a faint metallic sheen beneath the bright sunlight. Jaz was quite used to aliens of all sorts, so the appearance alone wouldn’t have bothered her. It was the way the woman studied people, picking a single person the moment they entered the market and following them until they left. Her gaze never wandered. She never lost her mark. Jaz swore she didn’t even blink. It went on for a while, the woman staring at people in the market and Jaz staring at the woman, until finally those eerie silver eyes settled on Jaz herself. 
That was how she met Nyah. An android studying emotions so she could better implement them into her coding. The trill and the android talked all day, exchanging questions about emotions for coding. In a way, Nyah reminded her of the vulcans, a bright spark of life hidden behind a cold exterior. Befriending her gave the young computer whiz an idea. A direction for all her talents. 
Coding for the mind. Engineering for the body. 
Everything she was good at. 
When Jaz reached the Academy, she changed her concentration from basic engineering, focusing on computer science and cybernetics, with some extra engineering courses mixed in. She was brilliant and worked hard, so passing her courses wasn’t a problem. 
But that didn’t mean she didn’t go a bit wild at first. She’d learned to respect vulcans and thrive on their world, but attending a school full of emotional species… was just plain fun. Jazari was a party animal, going out every weekend, and barely making it back in time for class on Monday morning. Despite her high grades, she was placed on probation after her first year due to perpetual absences and tardiness. 
All four of her parents had a meeting on how to proceed. Her mother and stepfather suggested bringing her back to Vulcan for the break and sending her to a monastery for some discipline, but her stepmother, who was the chief engineer on the Izar, had another idea. Jaz was sent back to the freighter for her vacation, but instead of the captain’s daughter along for the ride, she was the lowest, greenest crewman. It was hard, but the practical work was grounding. Functioning alongside an emotional crew also helped settle her own emotions. She had never made an attempt to adhere to Vulcan logic, but she hadn’t grown up around healthy examples of non-vulcanoid emotional control either. 
The girl who returned for her second year of schooling still wasn’t the perfect student, but at least she knew where the line was. 
Despite her career aspirations, her second year was more core engineering courses with an emphasis on computer science. While it wasn’t exactly what Jaz wanted to do, it was fascinating in it’s own right. The main computer controlled everything on a starship, so to properly code one, Jaz had to get input from cadets in a wide range of Academy disciplines. Fun in theory, but less in practice, after the CS cadets spent all year struggling to create a computer system for a shuttle from scratch. There was a reason starship design took years. So. Much. Code. 
But hey, at least that made debugging an already established main computer simple in comparison. 
In her third year, she really got to start on her concentration. As a cyberneticist, her focus was more software than hardware. Which meant she worked on the coding that would be the basis of an artificial consciousness, rather than the robotics to create synthetic bodies. Technically she could work with that too, since robotics were a part of the cybernetics courses, but programming was obviously her strong point. 
Her favorite course that year was natural language programming. Jaz nearly withdrew from society that year - a complete reversal from her wildness a few years prior - to build and play with her simple little AI. Teaching her program to talk and tell jokes. It was kind of like building a friend. 
The final year was the worst, because that was when she took robotics. The cadets’ final project for that year was to improve existing cybernetic prosthesis, which had been provided by various medical device companies from across the Federation. Jaz’s team had been assigned a cybernetic arm of Bolian design. It was no wonder they wanted it improved and had gone to a bunch of cadets to do it… the thing barely worked. It took months of sleepless nights for them to have a finished product. By graduation, she was hoping that her first assignment would be a month-long nap. 
Instead, she was sent to the Starfleet Annex at the Daystrom Institute for two more years of advanced courses. This was straight cybernetics, in a cybernetics lab, which was more useful than twice the time she’d spent at the Academy.
They probably would have kept her there forever, but Jaz quickly grew frustrated. Six years and she hadn’t created anything. On its own, that wouldn’t have worried her. But the Daystrom cybernetics lab had already had lifetimes. There was no inspiration here. They were trying to create life in the most boring environment ever. What they needed was a spark, and Jaz knew she needed to leave to find it. 
She accepted a position on the USS Petrichor-D, an explorer travelling the fringes of the Alpha Quadrant. She served there for three years. Her Academy training came more in handy here, working on the ship’s computers while continuing her cybernetic research. She learned a lot, but never managed to find what she was looking for. 
So when they returned to Federation space, she put in for yet another transfer, and was sent to the USS Odyssey. 
== Appearance ==
With her hazel eyes, and slim figure, Jaz has the physical attributes of one who could be quite pretty if she ever made any attempt to be so. She doesn’t. What’s notable about her is her grin, which always gives off a slightly cheeky air, and the way her eyes light up when she’s excited. Her hair is cut short for easy maintenance, but in reality she gives it no maintenance at all, so it often looks bedraggled or windswept. If it does look nice, it’s a fluke and Jaz deserves no credit for it.
== Personality ==
Jaz was always sort of a wild child, and it still shows. She’s fearless, always 100% down for anything that she feels will further her research. And she can rationalize just about anything so that it furthers her research. 
She’s a generally happy and animated person, like a morning person who’s had a bit too much coffee, but all day long. 
Jaz loves her work, probably a bit too much. She’ll gladly talk about it at length to anyone - whether they want to know or not. She’s also known to pester people about their lives ad nauseum. Creating artificial life means understanding existing life in all its forms, thus talking to everyone.
== Psych Evaluation ==
Jaz has no psychological issues.
== Medical ==
No Medical Issues
== Facts ==
* Jaz understands the tenets of vulcan logic from growing up there, but she has never practiced them. Getting rid of her emotions has never appealed to her. Nor is it healthy for a Trill to try. However, she does meditate sometimes when she’s particularly worked up and needs something to calm her down. 
* Her parents are both trills. Her mother married a vulcan, and they have one half vulcan, half trill daughter. Her father married a human, and they have three half human, half trill children. It’s quite a multicultural family, but Jaz is the only one who travels between them.
Category:NPC