Senior Chief Petty Officer Oisín Ocasta

Character Information

Gender		Male
Species		Human (Mars)
Birth Date		April 12, 2351

Physical Appearance

Height		5'10"
Weight		165 lbs
Physical Description		Oisín has black hair and brown eyes. Average height, and an athletic build. He possesses some cybernetic augmentations as a result of injuries sustained during the Dominion War: while these are largely invisible, the ocular implants in his eyes and some faint scarring around his ears and some limbs may be visible on closer inspection. Always seems to be tired.

Family

Spouse		Nia Rezart (2373-2376)
Children		Echo Ocasta (b. 2374)
Father		Cmdr. Ayal Ocasta † (d. 2367)
Mother		Dr. Elaine Ocasta, MD † (d. 2385)

Background

Childhood/Background		Oisín was born on April 12th in 2351, on the two-hundredth anniversary of the launch of the Enterprise NX-01 — a holiday not viewed with quite the same excitement on his native Mars as it would have been on Earth. He grew up in Valles Marineris, a city built into the walls of the eponymous canyon, the largest in the Solar System. His father Ayel was an engineer at Utopia Planetia, and so Oisín grew up surrounded by space and starships, giddy to follow in his father's footsteps when the time came — much to the chagrin of his mother Elaine, a doctor, who would much rather her son had shown more of an interest in biology or medicine. A particular point of pride for Ayel was the opportunity to work on the construction of the USS Enterprise-D, which Oisín had the opportunity to visit on his twelfth birthday, six months before the ship's launch. Life changed for Oisín in 2367. He was fourteen years old when the Battle of Wolf 359 took place, a battle that his father volunteered to participate in as part of the crew of one of the starships rushed out of the Utopia Planetia repair yards to fight. Oisín and his mother recieved news of Ayal's death less than an hour before the Borg Cube breached the Mars Defense Perimeter; Oisín's prevailing memory was an overwhelming sense of powerlessness and helplessness. Soon after, Oisín's mother accepted a new position at a medical center in Ares City, and the two moved. Oisín grew disaffected with his studies, and while Elaine made every effort to encourage her son towards the academic qualifications he would need to attend the University of Mars, Oisín ultimately chose to leave home at seventeen and enlist in Starfleet, beginning a period of estrangement from which the two never managed to recover.
Academy History		Oisín enlisted in the Starfleet Technical Services Academy on Mars in 2369, completing his basic training before moving on to advanced courses in Engineering and Operations. Oisín developed a reputation for working hard — perhaps too hard — during basic, as if desperate to find some way to reconnect with his father through his work. As a Crewman Apprentice during Oisín's advanced training, he was transferred to the Academy Flight Range at Saturn. He started out on maintenance duty, but later progressed to a Communications apprenticeship, working under the Academy Range Officer as part of tracking and coordinating flight operations. During the final months of his training, Oisín served an Operations apprenticeship aboard the USS Avalon. Upon completion, he was invited to remain with the crew as a Crewman.
Career History		Oisín graduated as a Crewman in 2371, joining the crew of the USS Avalon, an Akira-class starship. He began in Operations, working as a loadmaster in the ship's cargo bays, before moving across to shuttlecraft maintenance. While the newer role provided him with the opportunity to be more hands on, Oisín never quite felt close enough to his father, constantly requesting additional assignments and maintenance details wherever the Chief Engineer would allow, often at the expense of his downtime. Following the fall of the Cardassian Central Command and its replacement with the Detapa Council in 2372, tensions along the Cardassian and Klingon borders began to increase. Starfleet Tactical chose to assign a squadron of Federation Attack Fighters aboard the Avalon: due to his experience at the Academy Flight Range, Oisín was invited to assist the Communications Officer in coordinating flight operations from the bridge. Crewman Ocasta remained in the role throughout the Federation-Klingon War that followed. Late in 2373, the USS Avalon was diverted to Earth to participate in the Battle of Sector 001. While the Avalon's fighters were no match for a Borg Cube and thus were not deployed, Oisín was allowed to be present on the bridge during the battle, providing him with the opportunity to participate in avenging his father. Shortly after, he was promoted to Petty Officer. One of Oisín's crewmates during this time was Nia Rezart, a nurse with whom he struck up a romance, and who had also lost a parent at Wolf 359. The two eloped shortly after Starfleet's withdrawal from Deep Space Nine and the outbreak of the Dominion War, believing that if death might be just around the corner, they had no time to waste. Unbeknownst to Oisín, Nia became pregnant during that time, something he would not learn until years later. As the war progressed, the Avalon and her fighters became increasingly critical to the war effort. With advancements and new tactics desperately needed, the Avalon's fighters were modified to include an electronic countermeasures (ECM) station behind the pilot and navigator, to help counteract the jamming and interference being used against small craft by the Dominion. Oisín was one of the Avalon crew who volunteered to become an ECM specialist; through a mixture of his surname and some misremembered air force terminology from Earth history, Oisín earned the nickname "Warlock" from his new pilot peers. Ocasta participated in a number of successful sorties against the Cardassians and the Dominion throughout the early part of 2374. During the Battle of Tyra, however, an overconfident Allied assault suffered a devastating loss, with 98 of the 112 Alliance starships involved not surviving the encounter. While the Avalon did make it back to Federation space, Oisín's ship suffered a direct hit from a Cardassian torpedo, with Oisín himself suffering extreme injuries before the emergency transporters could engage and beam him clear of the wreckage. Oisín was recovered by the Avalon before they withdrew, but was in critical condition, requiring extensive surgery and biosynthetic reconstruction. When Oisín awoke — on Mars, at the hospital in Ares City where his mother worked — weeks later, everything was different. Damage to his optic and cochlear nerves had required ocular and auditory implants to restore his sight and hearing as well as other neural implants to manage them and repair the neurological damage he had sustained; damage to his heart had necessitated a cardiac implant; and both legs above the knee and his right arm below the elbow had needed biosynthetic replacements. While his mother and her associates had gone to great lengths to hide and disguise the efforts of their surgical reconstruction, it took Oisín a considerable amount of time to accept and adapt to his new physiology, a problem hardly helped by the fact that, in his mind at least, he was more like a Borg than like a person. Oisín spent the remainder of the Dominion War in rehab, separated from his wife. When they finally reunited, he met — and learned of — their child for the first time, something Oisín had difficulty processing, particularly with the new filter that his implants placed over his sight and vision, robbing him of the opportunity to see and hear his daughter with his own innate senses. Nia had elected to resign from Starfleet, wanting nothing to do with the organisation that had not only taken one of her parents at Wolf 359 but now almost done the same to her daughter, Echo, as well. Oisín meanwhile still craved a career in Starfleet, feeling as if he couldn't bear to lose yet another aspect of his sense of self. Unable to find a way forward, Nia filed for divorce, and Oisín agreed to let her retain sole custody of their daughter. Returning to Starfleet in 2376, Oisín accepted a posting as an Engineer's Mate aboard the USS Warspite, a recently-launched Sovereign-class ship. He served aboard dutifully for several years, but despite having achieved an Engineering assignment that felt closer to his father's footsteps than ever, Oisín struggled to find the enjoyment and passion that he'd always imagined he would have. Matters were hardly helped by the repercussions of Oisín's surgical reconstruction: while his ocular implants could perceive beyond the scope of normal human vision, he could no longer appreciate the aesthetics of Starfleet design in the same way; and while his auditory implants were rated for a Vulcan range of hearing, he struggled to filter and process the new frequencies that he could now perceive. Sensory processing and overwhelm became a frequent problem, and Oisín found himself feeling increasingly removed from not only the world around him that he no longer felt he could sense directly, but also from his peers and colleagues as well. In 2380 he requested a transfer, and after spending a few months away from the Warspite undergoing additional training, he returned in to serve as a Transporter Chief. Oisín found the transporter room a much more comfortable environment: it still allowed him contact with his crewmates, and still presented technical and maintenance challenges to occupy his time, but provided much less intensity and frequency to those encounters and interactions, allowing him to learn to adapt to his new status quo at a much more controlled pace. Slowly he began to come out of his shell once more, interacting with his crewmates voluntarily and socially, and even took steps to try and reconcile with his ex-wife and daughter, although service aboard the Warspite still kept him largely absent from their lives. Oisín struggled to reconcile with his mother, however, whose decisions as his medical proxy had undoubtedly changed his life, but also irrevocably changed him in a way that he might not have chosen to be changed if the decision had been his. That struggle turned into deep regret in 2385, when rogue synths from the Daystrom Institute launched a devastating attack on the Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards and the planet below. Oisín's mother Elaine was among the devastating casualties that Mars suffered, and while Starfleet would eventually make efforts to rebuild the shipyards in which his father had proudly served, the image of his whole world in flames would haunt Oisín for years to come. Worse still, with his own Dominion War survival based so heavily in biosynthetics, Oisín's survivor's guilt was compounded by a sense of being a cybernetic Trojan horse. After returning to Earth for Advanced Tactical Training, Oisín transferred to the USS Vanguard as an Armory Officer. He had hoped that his new role would provide him with something to fight, but as the Romulan Supernova inverted the political landscape of the Beta Quadrant, Oisín found himself spending more time cataloguing torpedoes than playing any part in actively using them. Oisín briefly considered joining the exodus of Starfleet officers to frontier organisations like the Fenris Rangers, but instead was convinced to transfer to Security instead, joining the USS Callisto as Master-at-Arms. After three years assisting with Security aboard a frontier explorer, Oisín's fire and frustration had largely abated, and he found himself craving something more akin to the tranquility he'd felt back in his days as a Transporter Chief aboard the Warspite. Putting in for a transfer once more, he joined the crew of the USS Malinche as the ship's Boatswain.
Service Record		2369 — Starfleet Technical Services Academy - Basic Training (Crewman Recruit) 2370 — Starfleet Technical Services Academy - Engineering & Ops Training (Crewman Apprentice) 2370-2371 — Starfleet Academy Flight Range (Saturn) - Apprentice Technician (Crewman Apprentice) 2371 — USS Avalon - Apprentice Technician (Crewman Apprentice) 2371-2372 — USS Avalon - Boatswain's Mate (Crewman) 2372-2373 — USS Avalon - Communications Specialist (Crewman) 2373 — USS Avalon - Communications Specialist (Petty Officer, 3rd Class) 2374 — USS Avalon - ECM Specialist (Petty Officer, 3rd Class) 2374-2376 — Extended Leave of Absense (Medical Rehab) 2376-2378 — USS Warspite - Engineer's Mate (Petty Officer, 2nd Class) 2378-2380 — USS Warspite - Engineer's Mate (Petty Officer, 1st Class) 2380 — Starfleet Technical Services Academy - Transporter Training (Petty Officer, 1st Class) 2380-2385 — USS Warspite - Transporter Chief (Chief Petty Officer) 2385 — Starfleet Academy - Advanced Tactical Training (Chief Petty Officer) 2385-2387 — USS Vanguard - Armory Officer (Chief Petty Officer) 2387-2391 — USS Vanguard - Armory Officer (Senior Chief Petty Officer) 2391-2394 — USS Callisto - Master-at-Arms (Senior Chief Petty Officer) 2394-Present — USS Malinche - Boatswain (Senior Chief Petty Officer)

Personality & Traits

Personality		Oisín is an enabler and a facilitator: his life's mission is to help and encourage others, more interested in being the helping hand at the bottom of the pyramid providing a boost to others than in being at the top in the limelight himself. While this was a keen and enthusiastic impulse in his youth, over the years it has turned somewhat bittersweet, as Oisín watches those he mentored and encouraged exceed and outgrow him. He has always had a dry and weary sense of humour; shipmates have often joked that Oisín has spent his life waiting for his hair to turn grey and catch up with his personality. Over the years this attitude has taken deeper root, however, with a string of losses and ordeals burdening Oisín with an increasing weariness, with his more positive side having an ever harder time peeking through the clouds.
Hobbies & Interests		Oisín has seemingly fallen out of interest with many of his hobbies. Once an avid cyclist, swimmer, reader, writer, and amateur astronomer and anthropologist, Oisín has struggled to find passion for those pursuits in recent years, although the interest and knowledge associated with them still lingers. Much of his disenchantment stems from the injuries he has suffered and the adaptations needed to recover from them — things no longer look or feel the same as they once did. Currently, Oisín's main source of distraction is history, particularly surrounding events that intersect with his life and personal experiences. In particular he has an obsession with the history of Mars, feeling a sense of obligation to learn and preserve the memory of his world and culture.

OOC Info