Childhood and The Great Assimilation
Vada’s early childhood was a relatively peaceful one. She was born to a psychiatrist, Vollin, and a bartender named Tielra. The family lived in a cliffside cottage overlooking the natural beauty of El-Auria. As soon as she saw how beautiful homeworld was, Vada knew that she wanted to explore it all. She would never get the chance.
The Borg arrived when Vada was still little and began assimilating the entire El-Aurian homeworld. Including her father, who was taken right in front of the family. Tielra took Vada and fled, managing to find passage aboard an ore freighter that fled El-Auria as it was destroyed. Thus began a period where the family was without any permanent home. They found refuge anywhere that would take them or on any ship that would transport them.
Diaspora
After years of wandering, Vada and her mother arrived on Earth in 2288. Tielra opened an inn outside of Paris, catering to visitors to the Federation capital. Vada’s childhood and teenage years were spent helping around in the inn and listening to all of the interesting visitors. While her mother saw Earth as little more than an emergency refuge and didn’t think much one way or another of the Federation, Vada was quick to fall in love with the Human homeworld and saw herself as a citizen of Federation as much as a citizen of what was once El-Auria.
Two of her closest friends growing up were the children of a Starfleet captain who lived in the same town as the family inn. She heard all about stories of adventure in Starfleet. The idea of the organization appealed to her inner explorer. And she was already comfortable with life aboard ships. Starfleet seemed like an excellent opportunity for her. But her mother vehemently disagreed. While Vada was an adult by Federation standards, Tielra took the view that Vada wouldn’t really be considered mature enough until she was in her 30s if not all the way up to 50. She was not about to let her little girl go anywhere near such a dangerous organization until she was responsible enough to make that decision for herself.
Enlisting in Starfleet
At age 18. Vada decided to enlist in Starfleet anyway. After basic training she was assigned to the USS Forberance as a torpedo bay crewman. For almost the first ten years of her career, working with weapons and explosives was the focus of her career. She learned everything there was to know about probes, photon torpedoes, and other ordnance used by Starfleet. At the start, she rose through the ranks a bit slower than usual. As a crewman she was prone to getting into mischief and ended up being disciplined more than once. Despite a rough early start, she found her footing and went on to work as an EOD and torpedo specialist.
In 2305, she underwent crossrating training as a logistics specialist. She worked on the then-ancient {{USS|Unity}, an aging Constitution class. Before the creation and full implementation of the operations department and the operations bridge officer role, logistics fell under the command division and worked with personnel from various departments to ensure proper supplies and resources were allocated according to need. After the Unity, Vada moved to Starbase 11 and continued in her role.
Starbase 11 was where she met Commander Eneaol, the base’s Intelligence Director. She was his yeoman for a little over two years. He arranged for her to become an intelligence specialist, supporting Starfleet Intelligence operations both from the starbase and sometimes in the field in the Klingon Empire. The job taught her investigative skills that would come in handy much later in her life. A potentially promising career as an intelligence asset was put on hold after a stabbing by an Orion Syndicate enforcer required her to take medical leave on Earth to recover.
Senior NCO
After a few months of medical leave on Earth, Vada transferred to security as a master-at-arms. She started on the Oberth class Benajmin Franklin and then the Ambassador class Yamaguchi. On the Yamaguchi, Vada got her first taste of command. While some previous assignments had placed her in temporary positions of command, she rarely held a supervisory role. Exceptional job performance had carried her to chief with limited experience as a proper NCO leading teams of less-experienced enlisted.
Aboard the Yamaguchi, she was the non-commissioned officer in charge in security for Alpha Shift for four and a half years. To her surprise, leadership came naturally. She was a good listener and able to keep peace within the ranks of the security department. The Alpha Shift team ran like a well-oiled machine. Vada even had the ear of the assistant chief of security, suggesting tweaks to how things were run. To her annoyance, she was transferred in 2318, moving to the USS Melroy.
Aboard both the Excelsior class USS Melroy, and the USS Kyushu, Chief Vada served as chief of the boat, the senio-rmost enlisted officer available on each ship. She monitored the crewmen and NCOs of each department, monitoring their concerns and bringing them to the captain. The task saw her back in red. After three years, Captain Scott of the Kyushu recommended her for a prestigious assignment for senior NCO’s, a post at Starfleet Academy as a drill instructor.
What she expected to be a minor but interesting assignment would dominate her Starfleet career. Vada rose through the ranks of the enlisted instructors at the Academy, teaching a few generations of Starfleet recruits what it meant to be Starfleet officers. In 2352, she moved to the Starfleet Command School, instructing cadets undergoing advanced command training and trainees in the Officer Candidate School who earned their commissions through atypical means. While a tough instructor, Vada was more understanding than most and would give advice to struggling recruits and cadets to foster their growth into new crewmen and ensigns ready to take on the galaxy.
Retirement from the Service
After a long tenure at Starfleet Academy, Vada returned to security as a senior NCO in the security department on Earth Spacedock. The posting only lasted a few months. In early 2367, a Borg cube destroyed 39 Starfleet ships and came within minutes of assimilating Earth itself. Multiple ships that Vada had served on had just been destroyed and another homeworld was about to be assimilated. And Vada froze. She failed to reach her duty station and remained in the bunks, having a serious anxiety attack.
There was a disciplinary panel, but the panel was sensitive to the reasons behind her failure to report to duty and were not considering anything too serious in terms of discipline. However, Vada requested to retire from Starfleet altogether. If the Borg were back and finally in the Federation, she was not confident in her ability to face that threat again. She was allowed to retire in good standing on Stardate 236704.18. She started writing after her retirement. She wrote a book about her own early life as a refugee of the Borg and would write multiple fictional titles too. A friend submitted one of her accounts of what seeing the assimilation of a planet was like to the FNS on her behalf, getting her a job offer as a correspondent. A position Vada accepted just in time for galactic affairs to become very newsworthy.
The Dominion War served as a trial by fire for the new journalist. She was out in the field as a war reporter, seeing the devastation of the war firsthand. Her Starfleet experience made her a logical choice for dangerous front line assignments. It was during the war that a concealed phaser became a standard part of Vada’s journalistic toolkit. She leveraged her Starfleet background to get close to Starfleet units and was one of the closest civilians to the fighting during battle. While her Dominion War coverage was exemplary, disagreements with management and a newly-developed habit of sticking her nose where it didn’t belong ensured that Vada would not be with the Federation News Service for much longer. She enjoyed her newfound freedom from decades of protocol and military life a bit too much and could sometimes rub people the wrong way with her meddling.
Leisure Travel and Independent Journalism
Postwar, Vada spent most of the 2380s traveling without much in the way of any responsibilities. She did whatever was interesting. Bartending, teaching, working on a freighter. And the whole time she got to see new things and hear new stories from interesting people. But one event would draw her back in to journalism. The destruction of Romulus.
Given popular attitudes about the attempted evacuation of Romulus and their status as a former enemy, Vada worried the struggles of the Romulan people would be ignored by major publishers. So, she spent four years living among the survivors and documenting precious Romulan history now at risk of being forgotten. She could sympathize with the loss of a homeworld and gathered various Romulan perspectives on the future of the Empire and of Romulans everywhere. She managed to get her stories published in a few smaller outlets and wrote a book titled In The Shadow of Hobus, documenting the effects on the Romulan people.
After that, Vada went to hotspots of newsworthy activity all over the Alpha Quadrant. As her reputation improved, she saw her work published by larger outlets without ever signing on with any of them as a full-time journalists. She remained independent, flying around the galaxy and finding truth wherever it was hidden. In the months leading up to Frontier Day, Vada was tracking the story developing in the Alpha Isles. On Frontier Day, had been on the way to visit Earth, where she remained for a few weeks before catching a ride to Deep Space Nine. As she was about to wrap up her short vacation and finally find transportation to the Alpha Isles, she spotted one of the very ships she had been reading about, the USS Khitomer.
