Vanisa Taniver

Vanisa Taniver

Rank: Lieutenant JG
Position: Chief Science Officer
Player: Belinda

Appearance

Species: Trill (joined)
Gender: Female
Born: (33yo)
Hair: Brunette
Eyes: Blue
Height: 5'5"

The first thing most humans would notice about Vanisa is, naturally, her spots, marking her as a trill. Her pale blue eyes reflect a keen intelligence and immutable determination. Prominent cheekbones, carefully plucked brows, and sharp jawline give her almost Vulcanoid visage, though she is quick to smile and laugh - the later often at inappropriate moments. Her body is lean to the point of boniness - her slim fingers tipped with closely cropped natural nails. She often wears her straight, dark reddish brown hair pulled back off her face - in a French braid when she feels like spending time on it, but more often in a bun high on the back of her head. Vanisa cleans up well when she makes an effort, but day-to-day wears little makeup. Her pale skin blushes easily in pleasure or with exertion - and very rarely - with embarrassment.

Personality

((Taken from Baron and Wagele’s - Enneagram Made Easy)) Vanisa is an Asserter (Type Eight). Asserters are direct, self-reliant, self-confident, and protective.

How to Get Along with Me

• Stand up for yourself... and me.
• Be confident, strong, and direct.
• Don't gossip about me or betray my trust.
• Be vulnerable and share your feelings. See and acknowledge my tender, vulnerable side.
• Give me space to be alone.
• Acknowledge the contributions I make, but don't flatter me.
• I often speak in an assertive way. Don't automatically assume it's a personal attack.
• When I scream, curse, and stomp around, try to remember that's just the way I am.

What I Like About Being an Eight

• being independent and self-reliant
• being able to take charge and meet challenges head on
• being courageous, straightforward, and honest
• getting all the enjoyment I can out of life
• supporting, empowering, and protecting those close to me
• upholding just causes

What's Hard About Being an Eight

• overwhelming people with my bluntness; scaring them away when I don't intend to
• being restless and impatient with others' incompetence
• sticking my neck out for people and receiving no appreciation for it
• never forgetting injuries or injustices
• putting too much pressure on myself
• getting high blood pressure when people don't obey the rules or when things don't go right

Eights as Children Often

• are independent; have an inner strength and a fighting spirit
• are sometimes loners
• seize control so they won't be controlled
• figure out others' weaknesses
• attack verbally or physically when provoked
• take charge in the family because they perceive themselves as the strongest, or grow up in difficult or abusive surroundings

Eights as Parents

• are often loyal, caring, involved, and devoted
• are sometimes overprotective
• can be demanding, controlling, and rigid

Strengths: Vanisa is driven, intelligent, and extraordinarily self-possessed. She is very forgiving of other’s honest mistakes (though hyper-critical of her own). At her best she is full of life, fun, and laughter - and will seek to make work a game if the situation will allow. She forms many friendships easily, but reserves her deepest loyalty for a select few. Her sense of duty - both professionally and to those she thinks of as family - is strong enough to lead her to set aside her personal convictions for the cause. Having two and a half centuries of mistakes under her belt, she often displays a wisdom beyond her years - more so with other people’s problems than with her own.

Weaknesses: Those things that are uninteresting to Vanisa sometimes just do not get done, especially if she thinks no one will know (ie, her quarters are normally a mess, and she sees no value in making the bed). Though it should be said that she still struggles some with this attitude, as it is belong to of Taniver and not Vanisa. It is occasionally a struggle for her to plan much in advance in her personal life, as deep inside she is always hoping that some grand adventure that she has not yet even dreamed of will come along and sweep her away. This lack of planning often leaves her prowling about for something to do, which can lead her into trouble as well. Her passionate nature makes her an intense lover, but her restlessness normally kicks in before any relationship can get beyond the first flush of romance. She occasionally drinks too much and laughs too loud, and her fickleness has hurt more people than she would like to acknowledge.

Ambitions: Vanisa is the sixth host for the Taniver symbiont.. It has run an orphanage, been an author, a teacher, a great grandmother, an engineer, and a Marine. While Vanisa was a very intense, ambitious young woman, her joining with Taniver has engendered in her a sense of wanderlust that does not compel her to set firm future goals. She is, in fact, entirely devoted to the here-and-now, as she has learned that now and here is all there really is. The things we stay up nights fretting over rarely come to pass - it is the things that sideswipe us on Tuesday afternoons that change us forever.

All that being said, she jokingly muses that she might just make admiral this time around - assuming she does not run off with a good-looking freighter captain with an eye patch and a cargo hold full of Klingon Bloodwine before hand. It is not altogether an idle threat - she has actually written several short stories where she - as the heroine - has tossed away her commission to go pursue some spur-of-the-moment quest. The writing is cathartic - and telling the stories as if they really happened to someone in Taniver’s past (in essence, making fun of her own fantasies) is one of her favorite things to do while over-indulging.

Hobbies & Interests: Vanisa likes to be where the action is and adores a good mystery. She enjoys writing and has published several short stories (though all under a pseudonym, and she would deny it if anyone guessed.) She goes through cycles of passions - devoting all of her free time to whatever holds her interest that week, month, occasionally two - but inevitability something else comes along. A hot new ensign, a sport she has not yet mastered, or even new medical theory. She is happiest when that interest includes other enthusiasts, but if it is a solo activity then she relishes in the secretiveness of it - dropping vague or cryptic hints to her friends. She loves to dance (socially), sing (not on stage, mostly while dancing or in the shower), and finds games where there is a set goal to be most diverting (crime solving, for instance). While she rarely cooks, she loves to eat (especially if it is something she had never had before) and to talk about food. The more exotic something is, the more likely it is to stimulate her interest. Taniver knows how to play the violin, though Vanisa does not practice enough to be good at it. She has a fascination with caves, and enjoys spelunking.

History

Rushdie - (joined 101 years) Rushdie was an author of some minor note (mostly relationship books (how-to’s on getting along with your child/spouse/boss/mother-in-law), but the thing she put her passion in was her orphanage, which she opened later in her life after her own children had children of their own.

Ley - (joined 42 years) Ley was mild mannered and studious. Her tragic death in a traffic accident ended a dignified, though uncelebrated, career teaching biochemistry to pre-med students.

Shiman - (joined 98 years) Outgoing and wry, Shiman liked nothing more than a good, stout drink, a pretty girl, and dancing; though he spent the majority of his life in service of the Trill Honor Guard - an elite group that were in the service of Trills ambassadors, heads of state, and other dignitaries.

Gerd - (joined 110 years) Gerd took Shiman’s outgoingness and Rushdie’s people skills and turned it into a weapon. Acerbic to the point of cruelty, she spent her life in the Kalisheed (the Trill Marines) - her propensity toward disobedience getting her demoted almost as fast as her genius and stoicism got her promoted. After nearly sixty years in the Kalisheed, she had yet to break through past the rank equivalent of lieutenant colonel at her retirement, though thousands owed her their lives (and even more their deaths) to the hard-nosed, bawdy trill.

Zedon - (joined 65 years) From the time he was little, all Zedon wanted to do was fly. He built models of fighter ships, tying them to his ceiling on strings in formations, creating still recreations of battles. Later he played with remote control flying models, then as a teenager, got a job helping a mechanic that serviced the city hovercraft. Though it never interested him, he learned a lot about engines. Though his parents wanted him to pursue a diplomatic career with the newly formed Federation of Planets, what he really wanted to do was fly… unfortunately he was simply a much better engineer than he was pilot.

Zedon quit the air corps, went back home, and moped angrily for months, humiliated and lost. His mother pointed out that there was always Starfleet – the now infant exploration and defense arm of the Federation - and though he was old for a new cadet, he honestly found the Academy to be a safe haven. Instead of feeling like a nerdy outsider, he was an ‘interesting new alien’ and a representative of his species in a fleet where joined trills were relatively rare as he had at flight school on Trill, he found a niche in engineering, eventually even coming to find happiness as the chief engineer of the USS Patterson - a position he held for thirty-one years.

Vanisa: (joined 6 years) Vanisa was sixteen when she started university. In truth her parents pushed her into applying to be accepted as an initiate at the Symbiosis Commission, though later it became a personal quest. Her first love had been medicine, though not necessarily medicine that involved patients. Hygienic to a fault, organized to the point of obsession, and harder on herself than even her rigid parents could be, Vanisa wanted to do research.

After University she went to medical school, and then served the first two years of her residency on Trill before being talked into heading to Vulcan to do a two-year exobiology fellowship. Her mentor there had been a Starfleet medical officer for nearly thirty years before coming home to teach and raise a family. T’Nor’s discipline, exactness, and knowledge both enthralled and intimidated Vanisa, though the hardest part was the lack of any sort of positive feedback. While Doctor T’Nor was quick to point out her deficiencies, in the three years Vanisa studied under her, she never once praised her.

She was, however, instrumental in Vanisa receiving the Taniver symbiont. One year after beginning her training on Vulcan, she received a subspace message from the Commission stating that her preliminary application had been accepted and she should report for the next phase. It took nearly six more months -grueling, heart-wrenching, soul-searching months - before she was deemed worthy. The night before the symbiont was implanted was the second longest of her life - spent on a bunk in the back of a type nine shuttle craft, racing to meet the Patterson, where Zedon Taniver was holding on to life by a thread.

Vanisa Taniver: The transition actually went well - for about two weeks. Then the memories started coming in earnest, distracting her during the day and making it difficult to sleep. It was one of those times when Vulcan discipline - which Vanisa had been working so hard to incorporate (both due to her own naturally strict personality and a desire to please her mentor) - had made things worse, not better. While the symbiont inside of her had still been weak from the accident that killed Zedon she had been able to incorporate its consciousness and sense of self, but somehow had maintained a sense of identity. Once the connections began to gel, she found herself distracted by fragments of memory, reacting oddly to commonplace situations, and having dreams of a nature that she had never experienced before. Taniver had been a man for years and found the experience of being back in a young woman’s body utterly fascinating.

T’Nor was oddly understanding, though modifications had to be made to her training. She returned to Trill for nearly five months of her second year of training, then required two week breaks on three occasions during her last two years on Vulcan, seeking an equilibrium that she found not in mediation, but in finally letting go to the reserved, tense, young woman she had been. Once she began to accept that sometimes she was just going to feel the overwhelming urge to laugh at (often inappropriate) times, flirt with men for no other reason than that they were there, and came to peace with her new impatience for anything remotely meditative, she found that she had more fun and less guilt.

Starfleet Academy, which she entered after her residency on Vulcan concluded, was a training ground for this self-exploration, as she found herself surrounded by cadets a decade (and more) younger. While they went through the pain and angst of figuring out who they were, she did as well, getting into more trouble than one might expect from a nearly thirty-year-old Vulcan-trained physician with a 274-year-old slug in her belly. She was even dragged before the commandant after one particularly sticky situation - though ironically because she had been trying to break up the fight. It had been a narrow thing though. The part of her that had been Gerd was absolutely fascinated by hand-to-hand fighting and she found a great deal of satisfaction (and an outlet for some of her more destructive energy) in taking extra combat classes. She even toyed for a bit joining the marines after graduation and becoming a combat medic, but talked herself out of it. At the age of thirty-one, it was time to grow up and get a job.