Ezarah Ryn

Ezarah Ryn is the current captain of the USS Odyssey.
== Childhood ==
Ezarah Rennan was the middle child in a family of overachievers. She looked at her parents, both of whom were joined, and decided early on that she was inadequate in comparison. Her father, Mizarn Dos, was a Poet Laureate. Every night of her childhood he would weave words into the most beautiful pictures. All she had to do was close her eyes and listen as the universe came to life, written on the dark of her eyelids. In contrast was her mother, Nazlia Kahn, a council member in the Trill Government. Her trade was also in words, but of a different kind. Her words were movement, a call to action for those who listened.
The young Trill was intelligent, naturally inquisitive, and very much her parents’ daughter, for all she didn’t realize it at the time. She excelled at history, was fascinated with other cultures, and was the undisputed master of the debate team. When she completed her schooling, Ezarah was accepted into the Initiate Program and Starfleet Academy. She immediately entered the Initiate Program, not because she wanted too, but because she felt it was expected of her.
Her time in the program was cut short by her Field Docent, who saw her lack of enthusiasm early on and cut her from the program. Ezarah knew she should have been crushed by the rejection, but she was oddly relieved. She reapplied to Starfleet, was accepted once again, and was finally on her way to what she wanted to do in the first place.
== Starfleet ==
She entered the Academy with plans to become a First Contact Specialist. It was a more behind the scenes roll, doing the research and preparation for the diplomats. After years of learning about other cultures, she could be the one writing the book on them instead. However, her professors had other ideas. They saw her natural gifts at oration, unconsciously trained by years among her parents, and began pushing the cadet toward a more active role. It took time to build her confidence, but her teachers were the best in the business and they knew how to guide her.
By her graduation, Ezarah had found a talent she didn’t know she was capable of, and ready to take her place as a Diplomat on the USS Constellation. Since first contacts were few and far between even on ships of exploration, she thought she would have months of preparation and guidance from the department head before her first mission.
She had three weeks.
The Axori were a tall and waif-like species, so insubstantial that Ezarah feared a good breeze would blow them all away. Their language was a beautiful song, and a conversation between a group of them would form a beautiful harmony. The real Envoy had taken ill, spending the entire mission laid up in Sickbay, which meant that the newly minted Ensign had to take her place. Ezarah participated in the first contact on her own. Somehow, she made it through.
That was her defining moment. For the first time in her life, she did not feel overshadowed by where she’d come from. She was confident and content with who she was. And yet, she felt a sudden desire to be more.
A few weeks later, Ezarah Rennan took a leave of absence from Starfleet and returned home to enter the Initiate Program once more. This time she was successful, returning to the Constellation as Ezarah Ryn.
Ezarah quickly rose through the ranks in the years that followed. After all, she had 300 years of experience to draw on. After the Constellation she was promoted to lieutenant, then served a tour at the Federation Embassy on Qo’nos, before returning to starship duty as a diplomat on the USS Sally Ride. On the Sally Ride, she was eventually promoted once more to Lieutenant Commander, after which she gained the post of Diplomatic Envoy. Eventually the Sally Ride was decommissioned, and she transferred to the same post on the USS Odyssey.
== USS Odyssey ==
She had barely settled in on the Odyssey when the first officer was killed. In the wake of such a tragedy, Ezarah found herself in the middle of a conspiracy, investigating an admiral for possible violations of the prime directive. Commodore Spyre disappeared, leaving a destroyed spacedock and a starship in his wake. They followed him to the Makonian system, and Ezarah led an away team to the surface to capture him. During the mission, she initiated first contact with the Makonians, diffusing the situation without violence and returning to the Odyssey with Spyre in custody. After watching her handle the situation, Captain Walker decided to promote her to first officer. 
Even then, she wasn’t given a chance to acclimate to her new role when the Odyssey was thrown into the fire again. Walker was sick and confined to his quarters, refugees were staging a mutiny in the cargo bay, bombs were blowing holes in the ship, Spyre escaped from the brig, and Ezarah Ryn was in command. The Odyssey made it through, but crewmembers died. The chief science officer used his final breaths to tell her that his time on the Odyssey had been worth it, and his words weighted on her like chains. She tried to resign. Walker wouldn’t allow it.
Searching for answers on how to go on, Ezarah went to the root of her command experience. Zarin Ryn, a former host, had been a captain in the 23rd century. He had died in battle, sacrificing himself and his ship, but saving the entire crew. If anyone could understand, she thought, he certainly would. She performed a trill ritual to bring his memories to the surface, separating them from the other hosts. But even he couldn’t give her the answers she was looking for. Zarin was a fighter, a warrior in the truest sense. Ezarah wanted a way to leave her guilt behind, and he shattered her fragile hope with harsh words. There was no easy solution to her problem. The pain would never go away. She would have to live with it.  
She found the way through the dark place through the simplest of things. Love. Her relationship with Mevi Wyse, one of the ship’s counselors, began quickly and burned brightly. Ryn was no stranger to love. She knew it when she saw it. Mevi was alive in a way that Ezarah desperately needed, full of light and song. Zarin was right. Her guilt didn’t magically go away. But other feelings found their way back in, so while the pain was still there, it didn’t seem to hurt as badly anymore. 
The Odyssey returned to the Makonian system to process their application for Federation membership. They found some deeply disturbing practices on Makon, including slavery, which made them impossible for membership consideration. When they visited the planet to tell the Makonians, Captain Walker insisted that he accompany them. Ryn protested, but in the end she relented, and the Odyssey’s Captain, First Officer, and Second Officer beamed down. What should have been a peaceful diplomatic mission turned into a hostage situation. And none of the Odyssey’s command staff was on board to rescue them. They were in cells, and the Captain was being tortured. Ezarah attempted to escape, and the next thing she knew she was waking up in a sickbay biobed next to Walker.
Her recovery was short. The Captain’s was much longer, so Ezarah found herself back in the center seat. Thankfully, aside from a visit from a Q, this stint as acting Captain was uneventful. But what she saw only served to unsettle her more. She saw her Captain acting like a child, deliberately avoiding treatment from medical and counseling staff, and refusing to admit his mistake in authorizing the away mission. A first officer was supposed to be shaped and molded by her captain. In watching him, Ezarah realized Walker was not the kind of Captain she wanted to be.
She made her decision relatively quickly after that. The Odyssey was not the place for her. It was time to leave. Ezarah requested a transfer from Starfleet without telling Walker - or anyone else. It was accepted, and she left the ship at New Talax to board a transport back to the Alpha Quadrant. She didn’t say goodbye to anyone, not even Mevi. She knew if she dragged it out, she would never be able to leave.
== USS Altair ==
Her next post was as the first officer on the USS Altair, a starship exploring the Alpha Quadrant past the Breen Confederacy. Captain Xane, a betazoid, was a quiet man, but he managed to convey so much with a single look that it hardly mattered. Every move he took was measured and thoughtful. As a betazoid, he had a unique insight into his crew’s mental state, and would often pull them aside to help when he sensed something was wrong. Like most of his crew, it only took Ezarah a few days to decide she would follow him anywhere.
She would have served under him for years. But it barely ended up being a month. 
The Altair discovered an anomalous sensor reading near the center of a binary star system. Because of radiation and exotic particles from the stars, sensors didn’t pick up on the Chronitons until they were close. Very close. When Captain Xane ordered the Altair to reverse to avoid any temporal distortions, they found that something in the anomaly was pulling them in. They pushed the engines to the limit with no success. All they could do was watch as they were pulled through. 
If that wasn’t bad enough, they nearly rammed a ship on the other side. 
They didn’t know it at the time, but the ship belonged to the Ssutha Empire, a race who didn’t take lightly to foreign ships entering their territories. There were no hails, no warnings. They immediately attacked. Disoriented from the temporal rift, the Altair wasn’t able to get their shields up in time. Consoles exploded all across the bridge, and Captain Xane yelled at them to evacuate. It was only when they were out, free of the smoky haze, when Ezarah realized Xane hadn’t come with them. He had stayed behind, taking the helm to attempt an escape. He was successful, but at a terrible cost. When Ezarah was able to get back on the bridge, she found him slumped over the console. He wasn’t breathing. 
Not for the first time since switching to command, Ezarah found herself thinking of Zarin Ryn, and his last, horrible day. It was easy to say that he’d gone down with his ship. But he hadn’t. While his ship was exploding around him, his first officer returned to pull him to safety. She couldn’t help but note the irony of it all. Like her, Zarin’s XO had been young and recently promoted. As history was known to do, they had now come full circle. Ryn was back on the same stage, playing a different part. Zarin didn’t die on his ship. He died a few hours later in another starship’s sickbay. But his symbiont had lived on. It had come to Ezarah, only to watch helplessly as Daln Xane died in the dark of the Altair’s non-functioning sickbay. 
She wished it could have gotten easier after that. But it didn’t. There was no captain for her to look up to anymore, no superior officer to wait on for orders. They had escaped their attackers, and when sensors were repaired, they could themselves in the same sector as before. But they were 700 years too early. 
The Federation wouldn’t even exist for hundreds of years. Ezarah found herself as the highest authority left, and she took command because there was no one left to do so. 
Getting home proved to be a challenge. They needed to get back to the anomaly and return to the other side. But entering Ssutha territory always resulted in an immediate confrontation. And they had to exist here without changing the timeline. They couldn’t ask anyone for help. Nor could they hurt the Ssutha. It took time to create their plan, time to prepare, and time to carry it out. But Ezarah was patient, used to the tedium of diplomatic posturing, and she had the experience and knowledge of a master strategist and chess player from Zarin. 
They watched the Ssutha. Marked their patrols and studied their sensor grids. They made probes that the Ssutha sensors would read as ships, and programmed them to lead the Ssutha ships on a merry chase before self-destructing, erasing evidence of their presence. The probes were deployed to disrupt the Ssutha’s patrol routes enough to give the Altair a clear path to the anomaly. 
It worked, but when they arrived back at the binary system, the temporal distortion was gone. 
The Altair was forced to retreat, despairing of ever returning to their own time. What could they do if their way here was gone? Ezarah knew they needed more information. She even knew where to get it. But it was another dangerous game of temporal mechanics. If they made even the slightest mistake, Ezarah worried that they would be returning home to a timeline they didn’t recognize. However, she couldn’t sit back and do nothing. The young captain knew she would never be able to look them in the eyes and say they would never go home. 
Stealing data from the Ssutha was another time consuming, long thought out plan. But they managed that too. Altering crewmembers to look like Ssutha, infiltrating one of their worlds, and obtaining their scientific data on the anomaly. 
The good news was that it wasn’t gone. It just took a very specific - and predictable - set of circumstances for it to open. The bad news was that it wouldn’t open for over a year. 
They waited. There was no other option. The smart decision would have been to find a secluded planet and stay hidden until it was time to go. But the Altair was a Starfleet ship. They were explorers at heart, and their time in the past had already taught them how to pass unnoticed. So they explored, gathering every bit of data they could about the Alpha Quadrant in a different age. 
When it was finally time for the temporal distortion to open, Ezarah took them back to Ssutha territory, luring their ships away with the same tactics as before. Only this time, they found chronitons waiting inside the binary system. The temporal distortion was back. They didn’t fight it this time, letting the rift pull them through. 
It was a rougher ride than the first time. Maybe because of the direction. Maybe because they weren’t fighting to reverse. But somehow, the ship came out in even worse shape than their original voyage. But they’d made it to their destination, which was all that mattered. And according to Starfleet, they’d only been gone for a day. 
The Altair finally made it home. The damage was extensive, and ultimately unrepairable. She would never leave spacedock again. The crew was split up for reassignment. Ezarah resigned herself to a new ship again, mentally preparing herself to return to a first officer role. Those never seemed to last long for her. Her unofficial time in command now far outweighed her XO experience. Her preparation was for nothing, as Starfleet had a similar mindset. After nearly two years as an acting captain, they decided to make the rank official. 
And they were sending her back to the Odyssey.
== Personality ==
Myers Briggs: INFJ — Introverted Intuitive Feeling Judging — Assertive
Alignment: Neutral Good
Temperament: Phlegmatic
== Appearance: ==
Ezarah has a commanding presence, someone you cannot help but notice the moment she enters a room. Her posture is poised and elegant, fitting a diplomat, and her appearance is always impeccable. Her voice is deeper than normal for a woman, smooth as silk. But her eyes are the most striking, deep and ancient, as though one can see the hundreds of years Ryn has lived in the eyes of a much younger woman.
== Archived RPs ==
* emergence
* paris-jardin-des-tuileries
== Former Hosts of Ryn ==
Ryn was born in 1999. It then spent nearly a century maturing in underground pools on Trill before its first joining. So while Ezarah is 38, the symbiont inside her is 416. Ryn is well known as a restless symbiont. Perhaps due to the influence of it’s first host, it has never been content with being planet-bound. It’s hosts always find their way back to the stars.
=== Drezden Ryn ===
Joined 2094-2150
* Trill Science Ministry, Warp Mechanics
* One of the designers of Trill's first warp capable engine
* Piloted Trill’s first successful warp test
Drezden Ryn was considered the brightest mind of his time. However, his knowledge is archaic and useless by current standards. Ezarah has never found any use to her knowledge of Trill’s first warp ship. It’s not even a good basis for Starfleet engineering, since Starfleet tends to use old Earth designs as their base. 
Ryn was given to Drezden because the Symbiosis Commission believed that the calm, brilliant scientist would offer a solid base for the symbiont in it’s first experiences. What they didn’t know was that the driven and dedicated man secretly had the heart of a dreamer. The stars spoke to his soul, so his mind was driven to seek them out. As a youth he was quiet and slightly shy, he spoke only when talking about science. They knew that he stayed out all night mapping the stars, but they never knew of the stories his imagination spun, creating worlds and adventures around every point of light he found. His passion was given to Ryn, and every host after him has desired to explore the stars. 
=== Elza Ryn ===
Joined 2150-2212
* Singer / Musician
* World renowned on Trill, her songs are still widely played years after her death
* Trill cultural ambassador
Elza is most remembered as an artist, but the hosts that follow find her more subtle skills to be the most useful. Elza had a remarkable way of reading a crowd. She always knew exactly what they needed to hear. She was cool under pressure, and could always smile brightly for the cameras no matter how she was feeling. It’s amazing how a performer’s talents can help someone standing in the middle of the bridge as chaos unfolds. 
Elza is also responsible for the rest of the hosts' hatred of singing. They all know her songs, and they remember how they are supposed to be sung. But they have different voices now, so they will never be able to sing and sound exactly like Elza.
===Zarin Ryn===
Joined 2212-2256
* Captain, USS Victory, NCC-1794, Constitution Class
* Tactical Expert
* Perished in combat with the Klingons
Zarin was a strategist. His influence on other hosts is hard to see, but his thought process always helps them when planning. He was also an expert chess player. Like him, successive hosts find the game calming. They’re never quite as good as him, but they’ve all inherited some of his skill. None of his physical skills, like physical combat and marksmanship, are passed down. Muscle memory and experience of fighting as a 6 foot tall man hardly help the women who follow. Any combat training would have to involve unlearning Zarin’s habits first. 
Currently, his experience as a Starfleet Captain is the most useful to Ezarah. She’s young and hasn’t been in command for long, but she has the experience of a man who was Captain for over 20 years. 
=== Azria Ryn ===
Joined 2256-2350
* Starfleet Corps of Engineers
* Former Chief Engineer on various Starfleet vessels
If anyone ever needs to fix a century old Starship, Ezarah’s your girl. Besides that, Azria’s knowledge is also quite outdated. Not quite as bad as Drezden’s yet, but she’s less and less useful with each passing year. Azria was a mechanic who could fix anything on a starfleet ship, but even the basic components on 24th century starships are different than she remembers. 
=== Dezra Ryn ===
Joined 2350-2403
* Medical Doctor
* Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders)
* Served on an independent medical ship in the Federation/Cardassian demilitarized zone
* Received a battlefield commission on a Starfleet medical ship during the Dominion War, but left after the war ended
Dezra was the most recent host, so her knowledge is still somewhat useful. Dezra mostly dealt with trauma patients. Since Ezarah has the memories of medical experience, rather than the physical training and muscle memory involved, she could never be an effective doctor without remedial training. She does remember enough to stabilize a patient while an actual doctor arrives, though she would never step in if there was already a doctor present. Basically, she has the working knowledge of a combat medic.
== Random Facts ==
* Likes: Music, languages, reading, writing
* Dislikes: Yelling, fighting, physical combat
* Since Ezarah’s parents are both joined, their three children took their father’s pre-joined surname, Rennan. Her older brother Azel is a reporter for Seeker Newsmagazine on Trill and her younger sister Elyzia is a Trill Initiate.
* Ezarah doesn’t have much use for the holodeck, preferring to read books instead. Her imagination is perfectly rich in detail, and she rarely needs the holodeck to do the work for her.
== Photos/Art ==
File:Concerned Ryn.jpg|Art by Lavender
File:Ezarah Ryn.jpg|Art by SideshowKaz
File:Ezarah Artbreeder.png
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Category:Characters
Category:Odyssey Crew
Category:Command
Category:Diplomacy
Category:Captain
Category:Joined Trill
Category:Trill
Category:Female
Category:Rae
Category:Senior Staff
Category:Senior Officer
Category:Department Head
Category:First Officer