Name:T'Leram

Rank/Assignment:Commander, Chief Engineer-U.S.S. Kitty Hawk

Race:Caitian

Age:34

Gender:Male

Eye Color:Navy Blue

Hair Color:White, with metallic silver streaks

Physical Description:

Like most other Caitians, T'Leram is a bipedal felinoid, standing 6 feet 4 inches tall, and covered in a thick coat of white fur with a long prehensile tail, most resembling a Terran lion or puma. Due to many years of hard physical work as an engineer, T'Leram's phyisque is nicely toned, though still retains his species' characteristic feline grace and ease of movement.

Personality:Usually good-natured and friendly, with a soft-spoken purr of a voice with a bit of mid-western drawl thanks to his upbringing on Earth. Can be a bit standoffish when it comes to dealing with superiors or others in authority over him, and has little patience for what he calls "bureaucracy and other business-minded tomfoolery", which naturally has led to him getting into trouble over the course of his Starfleet career.

Can be very direct to the point of bluntness, and is often brutally honest when it comes to matters of opinion. Although not naturally inclined to violence or brutality, T'Leram can lose his temper quite easily and be very grouchy and irritable when he gets over-stressed, and his laser-sharp focus can sometimes lead to him neglecting his personal care when he's got something he's working out.

Partly out of tradition drummed into him at the Academy, partly out of personal stubbornness, T'Leram refuses to call any female officer anything other than "Sir", even if requested to use more feminine pronouns.



Bio:

Although born on Cait and spending his earliest years there, T'Leram was raised on Earth by his human relatives for most of his life, the matter being one of the things those who know him best don't tend to press him about, the only thing he tends to say on the matter being, "Me and the folks on Cait, well, we didn't see eye to eye on things, and they didn't take too well to it."

T'Leram applied to Starfleet straight out of high-school at the urging of his human grandfather, John O'Rourke, who had had been with Starfleet as a security officer and was keen for his furry grandson to follow his footsteps. Taking a shine to the Academy lifestyle, T'Leram graduated in the top 20 of his class, earning degrees in Engineering, Transwarp & Temporal Theory, as well as earning high marks in the Command course.

Of note here is that the young Caitian spent his last year at the Academy on assignment to the U.S.S. Yorktown, a preserved Constitution class starship on display at Starbase 178 as an annex of the Fleet Museum, working as one of her maintenance personnel and the occasional tour-guide, a duty he still remembers fondly.

After graduation, the newly minted Ensign T'Leram was assigned to Starbase K-10 in the Gamma Quadrant, where he remained for most of his career up until the opening of hostilities in the Dominion War, steadily rising through the ranks as he went. Of note, it was while he was on K-10 that T'Leram was involved in a serious engineering accident. Although he did eventually recover, radiation exposure resulted in his tawny-brown fur turning permanently white, as well as his headfur developing its unusual metallic silver streaks. "I'm lucky it didn't make me glow in the dark too," he often will quip when asked about the incident.

At the outset of the Dominion War, T'Leram was reassigned away from K-10, serving about several ships and planetary outposts before ending up in one of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers' mobile repair outfits, traveling with a mobile shipyard facility repairing and in some cases building starships for the war effort, eventually attaining the rank of Commander for his war service, as well as a unit commendation and other awards.

However, his tendency to be insubordinate and standoffish with his superiors was not forgotten, and at the conclusion of the hostilities, he found an official reprimand courtesy of a miffed admiral and a reassignment to the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk waiting for him now that he was no longer needed, and although he's done his best to keep his nose clean since, T'Leram has been passed over for promotion to captain and a command of his own several times now.

Although hopeful that the rebuilding of the fleet post-war might open up a chance to skipper something even as lowly as a dilithium freighter, it's still a sore point for the Caitian engineer, and it would be best not to bring it up..