Name: Alexis Donovan

Rank: Ensign

Desired Position: Engineer

Age: 24

Gender: Female

Eye color: Green

Hair Color: Black


Physical Description: Alexis is a human woman, a bit shorter than average height, with a wiry build, a near-perpetual scowl on her face, and eternal dark circles under her eyes, giving the overall impression that she's always slowly working off the worst hangover imaginable.

She still keeps her uniform clean and presentable, her hair cut short and regulation-compliant, but only out of habit; her civilian clothes are a good deal less neat, and tend toward nondescript shirts, distressed pants, and a dark jacket that's two sizes too big which Alexis treats with almost religious care.

Personality: Alexis is a cynical, self-destructive drunk with a hair-trigger temper when she's off-duty: on duty, the only thing that really changes is she sobers up. She's also fiercely loyal to her friends and a brilliant engineer perpetually in search of a new project or problem to solve, though a lot of her more positive qualities tend to be obscured by the cynicism and self-destructive behaviors.

Before the Dominion War, she spent many of her off-duty hours painting, and by all accounts she was pretty good at it, but since the war, she's been unable to produce anything worthwhile; her paintings now are all technically very proficient, very skilled, but devoid of any soul or passion, like an all-Vulcan performance of Hamlet. Her heart's clearly not in it anymore.

Bio/History: Alexis was born to a pair of Starfleet officers in 2353. Her parents felt that a starship was no place to raise a child, and so when her mother was transferred to the USS Saratoga, her father retired with young Alexis to a brand new colony in what would later become the Demilitarized Zone between Federation and Cardassian space. There, Alexis met another girl around her own age, Kaitlyn McHenry, and the two became fast friends, essentially inseparable from then on. When Alexis lost her mother at Wolf 359, Kaitlyn was there for her like no one else could be, and when Alexis resolved to join Starfleet, Kaitlyn followed her to the Academy. They were roommates in the Academy, and remained basically a package deal: no one could befriend or date the one without approval from the other, they could be found in most of the same classes, and so on.

When they graduated from the Academy, they were assigned separate ships, but promised to keep in touch regularly; Kaitlyn would swap stories from her post as helmsman on the USS Arizona patrolling the Cardassian border for Alexis' tales of marvelous feats of engineering and gossip aboard the USS Challenger.

The next time they would meet in person would be in 2371, when the Challenger and the Arizona were assigned to apprehend a Maquis cell operating near Alexis' childhood homeworld. As it turned out, the cell was being led by Alexis' own father and, while they managed to capture him and several of the other Maquis members from the colony, Kaitlyn and several other officers from both ships had decided to defect, and they crippled the Arizona while making a break for the Badlands.

What should have been a happy reunion between Alexis and her best friend swiftly became a tearful argument culminating in Alexis flat-out refusing to run away with Kaitlyn and Kaitlyn cutting the comms channel in resignation, on the verge of tears herself. As the Challenger was closing in on the shuttlecraft Kaitlyn and the other defectors were escaping in, Alexis did one final favor for her best friend and "accidentally" disabled the Challenger's sensors long enough for the Maquis to slip away into the Badlands. Suspicion immediately fell on Alexis, but it looked enough like pure incompetence that no charges were ever filed, though she was demoted back to Ensign, a discommendation was entered into her record, and the command staff of the Challenger never fully trusted her again.

Alexis convinced herself she'd done the right thing in letting Kaitlyn get away, and she told herself they'd meet again someday and Kaitlyn would admit she'd been wrong to defect and everything would go back to normal. She held onto that hope until the Cardassians allied with the Dominion and, with Jem'hadar assistance, wiped out the Maquis colonies in the DMZ. Kaitlyn went missing and presumably died in the attacks.

Alexis never really recovered from that. She started requesting more and more dangerous assignments, put less care into her work, stopped painting entirely, and started spending more and more of her off-duty hours haunting either a bar stool or a holodeck, whichever was most convenient. Somehow, despite her best efforts, she survived the Dominion War and afterward found herself transferred to the middle of nowhere, where Starfleet rather hopes she'll waste away quietly, too competent to discharge out of hand, but no longer dependable enough to keep near the action.

Anything else we should know about your character? Alexis' father is still alive, held on some remote Federation penal colony. Alexis wants nothing to do with him, and won't even return his occasional messages. Kaitlyn's probably dead, lost with the rest of the Maquis when the Cardassians and the Dominion invaded the DMZ, but Alexis has never worked up the nerve to look for any evidence one way or the other. Alexis still hates Cardassians and the Dominion in equal measure, and while she'd never admit it, she's terrified of the Borg, even just as an abstract danger.