Alaric Fenner
Name Alaric Fenner
Position Diplomatic Advisor
Character Information
| Gender | Male | |
| Species | Human | |
| Age | 38 |
Physical Appearance
| Height | 6'2" | |
| Weight | 170lbs | |
| Hair Color | Dark brown | |
| Eye Color | Grey-blue | |
| Physical Description | Alaric Fenner stands just over six feet tall, lean and composed. His build suggests discipline rather than strength: someone who moves with control, every gesture considered. He stands still with intent, never stiff, but never careless either. His features are sharp and clean: high cheekbones, a narrow jaw, and a straight nose that gives his profile a certain severity. His grey-blue eyes are clear and observant, the kind that linger just long enough to make you feel examined. There's little expression in his face unless he means to show it. His hair is dark brown, cut short and swept back, always neat without being fussy. He dresses the same way; crisp, immaculate, and restrained. There’s no vanity in it, just the sense of someone who knows appearances matter and prefers to control what they say. He doesn’t take up space with size or volume, but his presence is hard to ignore. There’s a stillness to him, a kind of quiet pressure that makes people think twice before speaking. From a distance, he might seem cold. Up close, it becomes clear…he’s not indifferent. Just precise. And very good at keeping things to himself. |
Family
| Father | Rhian Fenner Atmospheric Systems Architect (retired) | |
| Mother | Alys Fenner (née Rowe), Professor of Constitutional Law at the Martian Institute of Interplanetary Jurisprudence (deceased) | |
| Brother(s) | Joran Fenner (younger brother, age 32), Civil rights advocate, Federation Public Legal Aid Service | |
| Sister(s) | Dr. Lena Fenner (older sister, age 42), Xenobiologist, Research Lead at the Europa Terraforming Institute |
Personality & Traits
| General Overview | Alaric Fenner speaks with measured precision, as if every word has been carefully selected just before you needed it. His wit is dry, his voice calm, and when he disagrees, he dismantles arguments quietly… often with nothing more than a raised brow and a well-timed pause. For all his sharpness, he is not unkind. Compassion sits beneath the protocol and irony, surfacing in subtle ways: a remembered name, a glance that notices what others miss, silence filled with understanding. The Federation taught him to read treaties; experience taught him to read people. He clings to his ethics not out of pride, but because he’s seen too many traded away. He believes in peace, even when it comes at a cost. Idealism used to be his guiding light. Now, it’s a flickering compass he still follows, if more warily. He’s loyal, but not unquestioning. Orders are weighed, not obeyed blindly. He avoids command, but has often been the conscience in the room… the one who says what others won’t. Emotionally guarded, he keeps people at a distance, yet offers quiet loyalty and warmth to the few he lets in. Betray that trust, and he won’t argue. He’ll simply disappear behind civility. The loss of his mother as a teenager, and the subtle shifts he noticed after coming out, left him attuned to how people retreat behind politeness. He’s had healthy relationships, some lasting years, but trust has always been the pressure point. Sometimes it’s ideological drift. Sometimes it’s his own difficulty in letting people in without using sarcasm as a shield. Fenner isn’t the man who charges into battle: he’s on occasion been the reason it doesn’t happen. He signs the agreements that save lives, and then carries the weight of those they couldn’t save. He doesn’t expect recognition. Only that, when all is done, he might still recognise himself. |
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| Strengths & Weaknesses | Strengths: - Reads the room before he enters it - Fluent in Klingon, Vulcan, and Orion Standard - Masterful understanding of treaty law and diplomatic language - Keeps calm when others don’t in diplomatic settings or heated debates - Empathic, without needing the spotlight Weaknesses: - Slow to let people in - Doesn’t easily forgive broken trust - Puts principles before orders - Too blunt for some political rooms - Forgets to make space for joy |
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| Ambitions | To preserve moral clarity in a system built on compromise, and to shape peace without losing himself to the machinery required to build it. | |
| Hobbies & Interests | - Linguistic structure & archaic dialects, especially Vulcan - Martian poetry & Federation-era literature - Fencing - Playing Kadis-kot - Journalling – he writes them by hand, in little notebooks, most thoughts and observations using a mix of languages and Martian shorthand from colony times. Note: He drinks strong black Martian tea with dried orange peel. It’s a tea that has a bitter tang to it, but dried orange peel softens it. He doesn’t sweeten it, but drinks it the way his mother used to. He uses it as a way of grounding himself, of focusing, and even comfort. |
| Personal History | Alaric Fenner was born in the shadow of the great orbital shipyards of Utopia Planitia, Mars: a place where the stars were always present but never quite out of reach. His family had lived on Mars for generations, descendants of the original settlement engineers who helped make the red planet liveable. The Fenner name carried weight in Martian civic circles, not because of wealth or politics, but because of legacy. His grandfather had helped lay out the dome grids in Olympus Colony; his mother lectured in constitutional law at the Martian Institute. There were expectations…quiet, resolute ones …that he would carry the torch. The Fenner household was shaped by intellectual discipline and civic purpose. Dinners were debates. Books lined every wall. Contribution to society wasn’t optional: it was understood. His mother, Alys, was a principled scholar of Federation law; his father, Rhian, a systems architect who quietly helped shape the atmospheric control infrastructure of half the Tharsis region. Alaric inherited her fire and his calm. Even as a child, he was precise with words and cautious with conviction. When Alys died suddenly of a rare autoimmune condition, Alaric was thirteen. It wasn’t a dramatic fracture, but a quiet one. He didn’t lash out. He just studied more. He learned how trust in systems, even ones built with the best intentions, can still collapse. By sixteen, Alaric was fluent in Vulcan. Languages came easily to him: not just vocabulary and grammar, but the nuance of tone, implication, and intent. He came out as gay at seventeen. Mars had long since normalised difference, but still, he noticed the subtle shifts; voices that softened, eyes that lingered too long or not at all. It sharpened his sense for social nuance and coded language, making him a natural reader of subtext and power. When he did his entrance exams, Starfleet Academy took note of him already having Vulcan under his belt. He was accepted and entered into a dual-track programme in Communications and Xenocultural Negotiation, where he quickly stood out for his ability to bridge not just language, but meaning. He graduated near the top of his class, and his early assignments were communications-focused: relaying, translating, clarifying, mediating. He served aboard diplomatic missions, listening more than speaking, absorbing the shape of conversations long before he ever entered them himself. Over time, he added Klingon to his linguistic arsenal, first as an academic challenge, then as a tactical necessity. He didn’t just learn the language; he grasped its deeper structure: the logic of its formalism, the symbolism in its aggression, the importance of silence in its rhetoric. It was useful in a time where tensions slowly started to rise and he often worked on bits of analysis of Klingon ship movement. Word of his fluency in Klingon spread, and before long, he was seconded to a Starfleet Command team to assist in high-level cultural interpretation and backchannel communications. The work was sensitive, politically unstable, and rarely acknowledged in formal reports, especially when they were in areas close to the Klingon Empire. Fenner was never in a command role, and he held no formal authority in the rooms he entered, but he understood how to shape influence. He found power in precision…the right words, the right tone, the subtle inflection that shifted the course of a conversation. People listened, not because they were told to, but because they learned it was unwise not to. That secondment would define the next several years of his service. He worked closely with senior Starfleet officers on complex diplomatic entanglements, reviewing intercepted communiqués, translating intent as much as language, and drafting provisional frameworks where diplomacy had no precedent. Then came Veytan’s Reach. A politically unstable colony in a narrow corridor between Federation space and neutral systems. The official story was that he’d been assigned as a cultural advisor to a Starfleet peacekeeping team. The reality was murkier: a covert intelligence effort, half-diplomatic, half-interventionist, where too many factions had too much to lose. Fenner had helped draft the final agreement. He had delivered the last message. And when it all fell apart, when a breakdown in communications led to violence, when civilians died…he walked away. He was 31 years old when he resigned from Starfleet. In the aftermath, Fenner didn’t disappear; he redirected. As a civilian, he returned to his roots in language and law, undertaking advanced study in interstellar legal theory and treaty language analysis. It was quieter work…less volatile, more exacting…but it offered him something he hadn’t had in years: clarity of rules, clean margins, the sense that every word had weight. His linguistic background, especially his fluency in Klingon legal and honour structures, caught the attention of the Civilian Foreign Ministry, and he accepted a position at its Paris headquarters. There, he reviewed emerging treaty frameworks, restructured problematic colonial agreements, and acted as one of many legal liaisons for the Ministry’s affairs division. The work exposed him to a rotating cast of ambassadors, career diplomats, and Federation power brokers: many of whom underestimated him, at first. Fenner’s reputation grew quickly. He became known as the person you sent into the room when things were politically delicate, culturally volatile, or legally unclear. Unflappable under pressure, measured to the point of unnerving, and utterly impossible to manipulate, he developed a quiet infamy among Federation officials for "never raising his voice and never leaving without getting what he wanted." To his allies, he was the one who could thread the needle when all other avenues had collapsed. Someone who saw the whole board, not just the latest move. To his detractors, he was cold, clinical, and far too comfortable working in grey areas of intent. Fenner never corrected either impression. He simply did the work, and let the record speak for itself. By 2290, with tensions rising once more in the Organian Neutral Zone and the political landscape growing unstable, Starfleet sent the USS Ark Royal to ensure that Federation interests were being represented, and to keep an eye on the Klingons. Captain T’Kal of the USS Ark Royal heard of Fenner through former colleagues, and perhaps seeing him as useful, requested for him to join the ship. It wasn’t an order. Fenner hadn’t worn a uniform in years. But when the request came, not from Starfleet Command, but from a respected captain who understood the kind of work he did and he found he couldn’t ignore it. Whether it was duty, old instinct, or the faint hope that he still had something useful to offer, he said yes. He boarded the Ark Royal not as an officer, but as a civilian diplomatic advisor: his authority unofficial, his purpose undeniable. |
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| Service Record | Starfleet Career 2270–2274 Cadet, Starfleet Academy, Earth (Majored in Communications and Xenocultural Negotiation. Graduated with honours.) 2274–2276 Communications Officer, USS Tellurion 2276–2280 Senior Comms Specialist, USS Kelso 2280–2282 Communications Liaison, Starbase 14 2282–2283 Seconded Linguistic & Treaty Advisor, Starfleet Command 2283 Resigned — Honourable discharge following incident at Veytan’s Reach. Civilian Career 2283–2285 Graduate Scholar (Interstellar Law), University of Alpha Centauri (Remote – Mars Residency) Studied treaty mechanics, comparative interspecies law, and legal linguistics. 2285–2287 Legal Analyst, Civilian Foreign Ministry, Paris HQ (Earth) 2287–2289 Diplomatic Legal Liaison, Civilian Foreign Ministry, Paris HQ (Earth) 2289–2290 Independent Consultant, Various 2290–Present Civilian Diplomatic Advisor USS Ark Royal |