Sofia Falt (Mother): A highly-regarded Norwegian botanist and senior lecturer at Oslo University. She still insists on calling Tomas by his childhood nickname, Lille Villkatt. He doesn't mind.
Erik Falt (Father):
A Finnish project manager who has made a career specializing in the construction and refit of space stations. Uncommonly for someone in his profession he is a civilian, and has never been in Starfleet. This has given him the freedom to take on both federation and non-federation contracts. He has worked for many species across the Alpha and Beta quadrants and has a huge list of contacts.
Erik's work kept him away from home for large parts of Tomas' youth, but whenever he was at home he would take his young son into the woods for weeks at a time. To escape the pressures of his career they took no technology with them on these camping trips, and lived as primitively as possible. On these early trips he taught his son bushcraft, survival skills and how to live off the land. His fatherly teaching inspired Tomas' lifelong passion for practicing these techniques and studying how historic cultures lived, survived and thrived without 24th century technology. On later trips they often experimented together with different primitive methods of survival and bushcraft that Tomas had researched. His mother was a botanist and frequently joined them, helping the young Tomas understand which plants had nutritional or medicinal value.
Tomas followed his childhood passion and enrolled at Oslo University to study the anthropology and archaeology of pre-warp cultures. For his final dissertation he undertook a "living archaeology" experiment for a year, where he recreated living as a 17th century explorer of Earth's North American continent. His documented experiences earned his thesis top marks and after graduating his professors encouraged him to continue his academic studies.
After a couple of month of thought Tomas decided to take a break from University. He wanted to complete more living archaeology experiments, this time based on how other pre-warp races had survived on their own planets. He initially asked his father if any of his contacts had opportunities for him to get the off-world experience needed to join one of the many civilian science missions studying alien cultures. His father had suggest Starfleet, with it's mission of exploration, would likely be a better fit than his commerce focused contacts. Heeding his advice Tomas had originally intended to enlist in Starfleet and serve a single tour to get the required experience. It was his mother, in her gentle way, that persuaded Tomas to go to the academy. She pointed out that Tomas would get more opportunities to follow his passion in Starfleet that way, plus she didn’t think he'd be very happy scrubbing conduits and fixing replicators for four years.
At the academy, Tomas took a major in science. He wasn’t natural science officer material and struggled with some aspects, such as astrophysics, which he barely passed. Unsurprisingly he was the among the best in his class for his specialism’s in anthropology, archaeology and botany. Tomas also took elective survival classes from the security program and surprised his instructors when he topped the class in land based survival, a testament to his childhood passion. At their encouragement, he took the additional modules needed to minor in security and round out his skill set.
Whilst not a classic science graduate, Tomas is a resourceful problem solver and fairs well when he needs to think outside the box, especially when 24th century technology is unsuitable or unavailable.
