From Station
John Eugene Reynolds
Rank: Lieutenant
Position: Chief Security / Tactical Officer
Player: Brian
Appearance
Species: Human
Gender: Male
Born: 30 May 2355
Place of Birth: Harmony Cove Colony - DMZ Federation / Cardassian Border
Hair: Black
Eyes: Green
Height: 6'1"
Having spent most of his career in Security and Tactical, as well as his undercover work beforehand, John has kept up a regular exercise and training routine to maintain a good level of physical fitness without becoming too obsessive about it. When out of uniform John has a habit of wearing his favourite leather jacket despite the fact it's rather beaten and worn from years of bar brawls and the likes. The prosthetic eye that John was fitted with is an almost perfect visual replica of his original eye although there are times when someone paying close enough attention might notice a faint delay in responses. This usually only happens when he's tired though as the device itself is of high quality. John also chooses to ignore shaving at times because he thinks the 5 o'clock shadow makes him look edgier and impresses the ladies.
History
John's parents were members of a small group that had their fingers in every pie among the colonies. Because of this John grew up unaware of what it was like to struggle for recourses, like some of the others living in the DMZ, however life was far from easy for John and his younger sister Samantha.
Where the other colonists could do nothing about his parents, he and Samantha were a different matter; they were picked on by adult and child alike. But as John soon came to expect, his parent's saw him as the catalyst to these problems. Samantha was fortunate enough to avoid this type of atmosphere until about the age of five or six, when she started interacting with the local children. Then of course, John made it clear he would take on anyone who even thought of turning their anger towards her. It wasn’t long before Samantha was the only one to see her brother for the good person he was.
Despite their distant nature, Anthony and Catherine Reynolds tried to provide their children with every luxury their wheeling and dealing could produce. In their own way the pair did love John and Samantha, however they never really understood what life was like for them. Thankfully though, they always had each other. John may have been ten years older but Samantha was highly intelligent and understood far more than she let on, even to her brother.
Shortly after turning eighteen, war broke out against the Dominion. Given the things John had to face on a daily basis in the colonies, it might be surprising to know he was conflicted about leaving to join Starfleet; doing so would mean leaving Samantha alone with two distant parents and people who hated the name Reynolds.
However Samantha wanted more for her brother; she knew he didn’t stand a chance of amounting to anything in the DMZ. So semi-reluctantly he left for Earth; his desire to leave the miseries of the colony behind and to help the Federation in any small way winning out. While nowhere near as bad as home, even Academy life turned bad soon enough. His teachers considered him to have problems with authority that stopped him from reaching his potential. This led to mediocre test scores and a danger of failing all together. With nowhere to go John was desperate to find a way of making things work.
That's when he met a man from Starfleet Intelligence who changed everything; Commander William Hart hoped to use John to infiltrate the Maquis, who were known to have connections to the demilitarized zone. Like an untold number of other Starfleet operatives, John would be placed inside the Maquis to both report on their movements and perhaps even sabotage their efforts to disrupt the agreement between the Cardassian government and the Federation. This meant that as far as the public were concerned, John had failed and had been released from the Academy. However, he was placed in an accelerated training program for a few months before being introduced to known Maquis agents and left relatively to his own devices until needed.
John during his time undercover in the Maquis
This inevitably led John to some Maquis agents operating on and around Bajor, commanded by Jespen Torel; a former Bajoran resistance member. The group were dividing their attention between the Bajoran people and the Maquis’ main objectives. Here, among supposed criminals and vigilantes, John found the sense of home he had only known with his sister. Unfortunately after about a year undercover, John was captured by Cardassian forces when they raided the Maquis vessel he was working on. Unbeknown to John, it was his information that had led the Cardassian patrols to them; part of an agreement with the Federation. To avoid blowing his cover, John was also tortured for information and then taken to a labour camp. After a few months he and some of the others were rescued by ‘fellow’ members of the Marquis.
Upon returning to Starfleet John was offered a position in Tactical and what he considered to be nothing more than a bribe to keep quiet. He declined, deciding he had lost whatever admiration he once had for Starfleet and the Federation as a whole. Instead he returned to the colony, only to find everything had changed; his father had been killed, by whom was unknown, and his mother and sister were living in relative squalor. The whole balance of power among the colonies had shifted in the year or so he had been away and the so called committee his parents had belonged to were now just regular colonists.
His time back in the colony was short lived however when he came clean to his mother and Samantha about what he had been doing for Starfleet. Branding him a traitor, Catherine threw him out and forbade him from seeing his sister. John took losing both his sister (contact with her) and the friends he had made among the Marquis pretty hard and spent the next few months drifting around; spending almost all his time in bars or on dodgy transport vessels. Despite this low point in his life, he always made sure he contacted Samantha as often as possible, and that she had enough latinum to take care of herself.
In mid 2374 John was beginning to run out of steam; he was no longer content to just drift around having meaningless relationships, romantic or otherwise, with people he came across between bars. He contacted Starfleet and after some wrangling and negotiation took their previous offer of a position in Tactical. Although John knew it would be a tough job proving himself, and that the terms of the agreement kept him from ever progressing, he put himself whole-heartedly into his new role. After joining the USS Archimedes he even surprised himself by managing to find the home he had always been looking for. Despite being a science vessel the Nova-class ship seemed to attract a lot of trouble which constantly kept John and his colleagues on their toes. Recently though they came across an issue that pushed them to their limits and resulted in both a death of fine Officers and the destruction of Archimedes. Devastated by the loss of friends and his home John contemplated finally returning to life at Harmony Cove Colony until a surprise manoeuvre by his CO allowed him to break free from the agreement he had made with Starfleet, and move forward with his career.
That selfless act from a man John had barely been able to tolerate made him reevaluate his life; now that he actually had a future could he finally escape his past? Perhaps not all of his past as he was soon to find out. Kepler Station was in drastic need of personnel when the USS Hippocrates, a ship John had been assigned to a few months prior, was in the area. Along with a significant portion of the medical vessel's crew the Assistant Chief of Security soon found himself face to face with on old acquaintance; Doctor Sarah Martin.
Sarah had been assigned to the USS Archimedes as Assistant Chief Medical Officer, until the vessel was destroyed, but they hadn't really had much to do with each other until John had been assigned to an away mission with Sarah's boyfriend Hadion Fare. The Operations officer got separated from John on the way back to the rendezvous point and was captured before he was able to return to Archimedes. Blaming himself for Hadion's capture John felt even worse when the man sacrificed himself to allow them to escape with four dozen children who had been experimented on by weapons dealers. Through some outdated, and misguided, sense of chivalry John felt a compelling need to make up for his failure to Sarah which lead to a number of conflicts and misunderstandings between them. When they then found themselves serving together on Kepler, having been unaware of the other's presence on Hippocrates due to it's size, it was safe to say it made for a tense working environment. For her part Sarah did well not to eject John out the nearest airlock after such instances as accidentally implying she was sleeping with the CO.
But it soon began to dawn on John that he wasn't looking out for the doctor because of his misguided sense of duty. He had started to develop feelings for the kind, caring, beautiful woman he had gotten to know. Things took a somewhat giant leap forward for the pair when exposure to Polywater lead to a romantic interlude that made John's feelings on the matter clear. After a somewhat rocky period, not helped by the sudden return of Apres Lana, both John and Sarah have expressed a desire to move their relationship forward although that will hardly see an end to their troubles.
After serving on Kepler for a few months John once again found himself dealing with a whole new situation when Kepler Station was transported all the way to the Alpha Quadrant, to an area known as The Expanse. This relatively unexplored region of space placed them right between at least four powerful territories and left them as the only real Federation presence within thirty light years. Barely a week into this new situation John was given command of a training mission aboard the USS Harbinger that proved to be rather disastrous for him personally. The ship found itself caught inside a cloaked satellite network and while they were attempting to deal with the issue a distress call lured John and one of Kepler's medical staff, Cassiopeia Yale, down to a Planetoid at the centre of the satellite network. On the Planetoid the pair were attacked by a Romulan madman, and his deranged girlfriend, and the savage beating left John struggling for survival. Although he was kept alive by Cassiopeia and remained stable during the trip back to Kepler, they were unable to save his right eye. This loss, as well as the guilt over what he saw as a series of mistakes, took their toll on John and he decided to take some much needed time off to recover and go through the lengthy process of rehabilitation. He has since come to terms with his new prosthetic eye and is determined to return to duty as quickly as possible.
Family
Father: Anthony Eugene Reynolds (Deceased)
Mother: Catherine Ann Turner (Deceased)
Sister: Samantha Marie Reynolds
Awards
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|  NPC AwardMission: Freud's Hostage (for Violet Matthews) |
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|  Personal LogChallenge 1: 8th - 15th April, 2011 (as Harrison Matthews) |
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|  ArgumentChallenge 1: 5th - 12th May, 2011 (as Violet Matthews) | NPC AwardMission:The Donkey's Brahe (for Cadet Zachary Eastman) |
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|  Grrr RibbonMission: The Donkey's Brahe (for Cadet Zachary Eastman) |
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| Personal LogChallenge 2: 13th - 20th January, 2012 (as Nikolas G. Bakyr) |
