Doctor Nadija Lyra

Nadija likes to read and enjoys music, especially anything performed live. She paints as a hobby. While she loves food and can cook half decently, Nadija makes it a point not to eat meat, even replicated, as a personal diet restriction.

She's estranged from most of her family and apart from a rare letter exchanged with her oldest sister and one trip home to attend their mother's funeral, Nadija hasn't talked to any of them in years.

Nadija had a stable young childhood, adored and pampered by her family, the youngest of three children born to a prominent economist father and a motivated mother who worked for Trill's department of energy. They put her through a prestigious grammar school and fought tooth and nail to get her into a high school with the credentials to put her on track to vie for the coveted symbiont pairing. It was the elitist snobbery of her competitive high school peers that ended up breaking the tether between Nadija and her parents' dream for her. She found herself completely on the outside of all of her peers-- an upper-crust of privileged brainiacs that rivaled Vulcan rigor in their intense training, only instead of stoicism, they prescribed to all manner of emotional head games. Nadija couldn't keep up with the tides of changes in social circles and the ever growing pecking order. She changed from the bright bubbly child she had been into a wallflower as she went into a cocoon of survival mode. Nadija made plans for pre-med instead of preparing for the testing for Joining.

Her parents had a few things to say about Nadija's lack of ambition, but mostly they were more distant feeling. Nadija supposed it was because her older brother had made the wait list for the joinings at that time. In a way she was glad he'd taken center-stage. Maybe they weren't happy with her for spoiling her chances at practical immortality, but Nadija preferred the cooled relationship to the more heated hounding to make the grade. It all seemed like a reasonable trade off. After all, they were happy.

But then she met her brother again for the first time, after the joining. He was alien to her. It was like someone else was in his skin, owning his memories. She couldn't explain it, except at how repulsed she was by the whole affair. Everyone was so thrilled for him. All kinds of parties were thrown, friends of friends came, extended family. It took two whole weeks for things to quiet down. She was just glad that her first term at med school would take her to the other side of the planet away from this awkward body snatching worship.

The school she had chosen was big, and while it was respected, it wasn't on any prestigious lists. The size of the student body let her melt into the woodwork and make her study a little less distracted. A significant portion of the curricula included training on symbiont maladies and care, but she'd expected as much, and decided that if it came to it, she'd treat them just the same as any other sentient being. She knew how she felt might be considered a kind of prejudice against the race of co-dependant creatures. But they lived perfectly fine in their slimy heated mud spas. Co-opting an entire society so they could travel about outside of their caves seemed somewhat subversive of them.

Med school challenged her, but Nadija rose to the task, absorbing the material through diligent study. Sometimes she was frustrated as she observed many others working much less intently seeming to get everything and skate right through. Once she reached her clinicals, however, she solidified a lot of her bookwork through seeing the practice. She found a couple of mentors in the teaching hospital-- doctors who found her peaceful nature and cool-headedness as valuable traits. One suggested she avoid specialization, since she had little interest in the minutia of research and believed she might find herself less fulfilled with a narrow practice. Instead, she elected to work in emergency medicine.

Most days were fulfilling. The old days of scary emergency medicine were mitigated somewhat by the ultra modern facilities. While many things involved the old scalpel work, surgery also relied a great deal on tiny robotics, and the stasis fields often took the mad rush out of the surgery prep of incoming patients. That patients were more often than not beamed into the ER meant they saw most cases in time to help. Only rarely did someone arrive past the point of saving. But when they did, Nadija had a hard time letting go of those losses on the table. She moved on well enough, but they still weighed on her mind. Death was becoming a part of her life. She found a way to cope, often by imagining (against her better judgment) that one of the myriad of myths of afterlives, if not many or all of them were true. When only the machines kept the still form alive, and she resigned herself, knowing that spark that must have been a soul had moved on... internally, she'd pray it was a safe journey to some place better, even if she didn't know who or what she was addressing. And then they'd shut down the machines and record a time of death. The other coping measure became all of the lives she did manage to help save. When she had a loss, she found the best recovery to be getting back to work and helping someone else to pull through.

When the Dominion War broke out, Nadija decided it was some place her skills would be most needed. She thought she was prepared to deal with the ugly. She found out how much more it would really demand of her when she got to her first assignment.

Most of her service as a volunteer civilian surgeon had her on an outpost along a fluctuating border line where war wounded were often triaged from the small rescue vessels and anyone managing to limp back from a patrol gone wrong. The outpost was regularly attacked. Nadija grew accustomed to performing surgery not only without fancy hi-tech equipment, but often with out needed supplies and many times while feeling the rumblings of weapons fire beating on the defense shielding. It seemed the more demanding the work grew, the more she could step up and withstand it. Sometimes she was assigned to a rescue mission our a small shuttle team sent as part of a search party contingent to local worlds looking for surviving lifeboat castaways. Her services were rarely needed as survivors of space wrecks were understandably rare. She was adept at filing certificates of death.

Coming out of the Dominion War Nadija wanted to continue her career somewhere her skills would do the most good. Her war experience made her desirable on the frontier, where modem equipment was rarely found but illness and injury abounded under the harsher work and environmental conditions. She continued to work under extensions of Starfleet on colony worlds. She grew accustomed to operating on even more varieties of physiology than she'd encountered during the war.

The last job she took on a colony was on Quitis Prime. Shortly after she arrived she found she'd showed up at a bad time, politically speaking. The colonists had asked the Federation for a new charter and wanted new representatives, not the appointed Governor and his cabinet installed by the Federation. The Federation was slow to respond and generally unbending. It was grumbly but fairly peaceful over all at first. However the unrest on Quitis started turning unexpectedly more serious for reasons no one understood, and Government officials begin to flee. The cowardice led to disgust from the planets top security officials some of whom switched sides, believing their home would be better off in the Romulan Empire. The entire hullabaloo left Nadija and the remaining Federation government personnel under a lockdown, unable to do more than get out a message for help before burrowing into a defensible location.

After a few days, their rescuers managed to break through and escort them out. It all happened very quickly. The return trip lasted almost two weeks however, and left Nadija with a chance to unwind and recover. It was on that trip that she got to talking with one of the security hires, a Bajoran man by the name of Zin. She didn't know what it was about him that was so disarming that it practically made her uncomfortable. For the first time in many years she felt like someone was looking right thorough her cloak-- the mask that she wore to stay professional and to maintain her outer calm. She'd gained many friends over all her time abroad, and especially during the war, having sweat and bled alongside others. But this was different. This time she was safe and secure and there was no reason for that kind of thing to take place.

When they landed on Ipsilon Taurii VI, Nadija found lodging and decided to wait there until she could sort through the options available for new work. The security contractor happened to be staying in the same hotel. Nadija swore to herself to avoid him. Once when she was sat down to dinner in the cafe and had left her bag on the second seat, he took the table behind her and held a conversation with their backs to each other. She let herself respond. What was the harm? Tomorrow she'd be gone. She had settled on another job, with a year contract as a personal physician and ship's medical officer, working under a federation ambassador. It sounded like a quiet affair. It would tide her over until she was ready to go back to working on the colonies.

It was a small complement on the crew of the little diplomatic ship. And so she had to struggle to recover her expression of surprise at discovering that the security on staff included one Mr. Zin. It was way too unlikely to be coincidence. Had he followed her? She put him off all the more, but every time she rejected him, she felt badly about it, like she wasn't just hurting him, but like she was also tearing at something of herself. Nadija started to allow herself to linger a little longer in the mess hall and didn't ask for someone else as an escort to the balls and engagements the staff attended occasionally together alongside the ambassador.

The more she let Zin near, the more Nadija realized how much she had needed him. A lot of her internalized emotions seemed to be less weighty, the burden lightened by someone who not only understood her, but went so very far out of his way to know her. She felt valued for the first time, validated by something outside of the skills she brought to the operating table. The year she spent on the contract with the ambassador seemed to slip by too fast as the friendship became a relationship and she dreaded the idea of parting ways. Ever...

So they were married by the skipper before they disembarked, after which Zin and Nadija spent a little more time searching out work together, securing positions for themselves on the FSP Spartan.

On the whole, Nadija is very internalized and guarded. Her quiet is not impersonal however. Nadija is friendly, pleasant and easy going, but rarely is she outgoing. While she prefers a personal state of quiet, at the same time, she finds fulfillment in sorting out the chaos of triage and rising to the challenge of difficult moments. It's her way of patching up the wrongs and trying to bring to others who are hurting something of the state of peace she prefers. Situationally, she draws strength the more that is demanded of her, almost transforming her from mildness into decisiveness. She is personal with and about her patients, leading to a good bedside manner, but also giving her a great burden of heart for the toughest cases. Nowadays she is content to take up work that is less stressful than the constant stream of patients an ER or a war provided.