Ev Ki'Vek
| Ev Ki'Vek | |
| File:Ki'Vek.jpg | |
| Full Name: | Ev Ki'Vek |
|---|---|
| Nickname: | "" |
| Species: | Selay |
| Gender: | female |
| Birthplace: | Membai Hatchery caverns, Selay |
| Birthdate: | Jan 1, 2406 |
| Empire: | United Federation of Planets |
| Organization: | Starfleet |
| Assignment: | Antares Ship Yards |
| Billet: | Commanding Officer |
| Rank: | Commander |
Ev Ki'Vek is a Commander in Starfleet, serving aboard the Antares Ship Yards as the Commanding Officer.
Description
The height of this serpentine woman, as is common in Selay, regularly varies depending on her mood and the necessities of any given situation. Her entire body is nearly 15 feet long from head to tail, but she tends to maintain an average height at around six feet or slightly more, but can rise to around ten feet or lower to under five feet when resting. Although completely hairless, she is covered from head to tail in deep, dark brown skin patterned in thin black lines that form angular, interlocking geometric shapes. This tough, scaly skin is also very smooth to the touch, but is hard instead of soft, usually glistening like wet leather even when dry. A thick hood covers the top and back of her head, fanning out on the sides of her neck like that of a Terran King Cobra. Narrow glittering eyes peer out from under this hood like two dark yellow glass marbles, the horizontal pupils little more than thin black slits peering out over a somewhat elongated snout. Two very sharp pairs of teeth, top and bottom, are clearly visible near the front of her mouth. The scales lining the inside of her hood are a lighter shade of brown, almost tan, and devoid of the geometric lines that cover other parts of her body. These lighter scales also cover her chest, as well as her belly and the underside of her tail nearly to the tip. Her arms are long and proportionally very narrow, and her body flows seamlessly into a long tail rather than a pair of humanoid legs. Her movements are fluid, body and arms sometimes bending in unusual places, and her entire body sways side-to-side in an almost boneless, rippling wave when she moves from place to place. Her throaty voice is low and airy, and her breath often comes in soft hisses that rise and fall in direct relation to her levels of stress or agitation.
Biography
When once she at last extracted herself from the shell of her egg in the Membai Hatchery Caverns on the Selay homeworld, Ev Ki'Vek was born into a well-known, accomplished, and respected Selay family. Her parents were legal scholars of high standing, both of them holding positions as law professors at the planet's most prestigious university. She had two older brothers who seemed to be following along their parents' path of academia, as is common in Selay families. These brothers were from different clutches, of course. The first Selay baby to break free of their egg is instinctively driven to destroy the other eggs in the clutch and to kill their still struggling clutchmates. This is what each of her older brothers had done, and what Ev Ki'Vek did as well. But there, the similarities between her and her brothers ended.
From a very young age, it was clear that Ki'Vek's interests were different from those which she was expected to follow given her emergence in such a prominent family. Where the rest of her line were excelling at law, history, philosophy, and other academic pursuits, she was interested instead in science and engineering. She built model space probes and starships, sometimes flying them around outside in the gardens and in public parks. She built a miniature forcefield generator that she used to keep her brothers out of her room when she wasn't home or wanted privacy to study her technical journals. They, even more than her parents, were always pestering her and trying to convince her to put away her dreams of being a 'common mechanic' and live up to her family responsibilities by studying art, history, and law, as was proper for a young Selay in her position. When she wasn't studying forbidden topics, she enjoyed being out in the wilderness with her father. Hunting was popular among most Selay regardless of class or position, and she was no different in that respect.
She continued her studies despite the pressures from her family, all the way through her primary and secondary education. She did well, too. The problem was that the better she did in those subjects which her family believed unbecoming for her, the more embarrassed they became about her open and public rejection of the Selay family traditions. Her brothers began responding in kind, publicly turning their tails on her as they felt she had turned hers on them. Her mother seemed to approve of her sons' treatment of her daughter, allowing their behavior to occur in her presence without protest. Only her father ever scolded the boys for the way they treated their sister. Although he was also a traditionalist who would have preferred that Ki'Vek live up to the expectations of family and society, he was less staunch than his mate and their offspring. The time spent with his daughter in the wilderness also gave him a different insight into her activities and created a certain closeness between them that didn't exist between the others.
At the end of Ki'Vek's secondary education, she applied to and was granted a place in Selay's top naval engineering institute. This enraged her brothers and greatly upset her mother as well. When the boys declared that they refused to live in the same shelter with a common mechanic, their father decided to act. A few weeks earlier, he had been offered a position in the diplomatic corps on Earth. He had been considering the offer for some time, but now decided to accept it. He took Ki'Vek with him to Earth where she could study engineering without the pressures of Selay society and tradition to impede her natural advancement.
Finally free to study what and where she wished, Ki'Vek began researching the various educational institutes available to her. At first she focused simply on ship building and the design of propulsion systems. She had dreams of working on multiple ships, learning different designs and figuring out ways in which they might be improved. But the more exploring she did, the more interest she gained in actually traveling the stars aboard a starship, learning everything about its function inside and out, and for the first time ever in her life, being included in a group of people who all had the same goals and who each used their own skills and interests to help achieve that goal. Of course, the natural choice for her education then was apparent. She applied to Starfleet Academy and was accepted, thanks to her test scores from her education back on Selay.
Ki'Vek's Academy career was mostly uneventful, differing very little from that of any other engineering Cadet. Her sharp mind and obvious enthusiasm made her stand out somewhat, as did her tendency to use her physical abilities to climb around on and between various pieces of equipment while she worked. She liked to get right into the guts of a machine, quite literally, whenever possible. Being a Selay, she was able to use her snake-like body and tail to wrap around support beams and fuel lines, gripping them tightly to hold her in place while she studied and fixed problems of all kinds. It wasn't uncommon for her classmates to find her coiled around plasma conduits, slithering slowly along them to trace down any possible problems with only a hand held tricorder instead of relying on the main computer. She was mildly injured during a training exercise in her third year when she tried to follow a deuterium transfer conduit between the bulkheads of two adjacent bays. Her cold-blooded body was unable to regulate her temperature while being pressed for so long against the drastic cold of the conduit. Her metabolism quickly slowed to a point at which she lost consciousness and fell to the grated walkway below. She spent a day being treated by the medical staff, and learned a very valuable lesson about her own limitations.
On the day she graduated from Starfleet Academy, Ki'Vek was not surprised to see that her father had come to attend the ceremony. She was nearly shocked, however, to see her mother and brothers accompanying him in the auditorium. How he had convinced them to come, and also why he had done so, she could not imagine. When the ceremony was over, she was able to visit with her family. As expected, her mother and brothers were less enthusiastic than was her father, but they had apparently reached some level of acceptance regarding her career choice. The public service element of her new job, it seemed, had negated at least some of their disapproval to her rejection of an academic lifestyle. Full acceptance was clearly still a long way off, but perhaps they had taken a step in the right direction. But as the Terrans were fond of saying, only time would tell.
Having gone out into space on her Midshipman's cruise during her final year, she knew that she had made the right career choice. She had worked on a ship, seen how everything was coordinated between engineering, science, and all of the other departments. She found exactly what she had hoped to find... an environment where she could thrive, learn, contribute, and achieve. With these things in mind, she volunteered upon graduation to join the USS Phoenix, instinctively sensing that that ship's mission was to be one of great challenges and accomplishments, and something she certainly wanted to be part of.
After serving for a short time aboard USS Phoenix, Ki'Vek received some troubling news from home. A rival clan had begun a movement against Ki'Vek's family to ruin her family name and remove them from the prestigious rung on the Selay social ladder which they occupied. This was a common thing in Selay society, and not something normally worth worrying too much about. But still, it was always the type of challenge that needed to be answered. In this case, matters for Ki'Vek personally were made worse when she discovered that her own actions, (untraditional as they were), were being cited as evidence against her family. With irritation she put in for a leave of absence, then headed home to help defend her clan's place in society.