Maria Alvarez: Difference between revisions

{{Heading|Missions|Gold}}

====[[A Scouring of Stars (Arrow)|A Scouring of Stars]]====

Maria arrives aboard the USS Arrow after an incredibly long, sleepless shuttle flight made unbearable by a faulty inertial damper she was unable to repair.  Out of the loop, and terribly loopy, she makes her first introduction to the captain and crew during a conference between the major powers orbiting Theta 122.  She's immediately pressed into service - with the help of Crewman Patrick, Chloe Waters, and Hayley Caden in Shuttlecraft 1, she targeted and destroyed a dampening field cutting off communications with an orbital strike.  The success is only temporary, and soon the life of the captain and other senior officers are under threat, trapped in the conference room with the bloodthirsty orion pirate queen, Ghant.  Maria discovers that in the crew's haste to return to the conference, she wasn't granted command codes for the ship, and ends up locked out from the computer and unable to assist.  She hatches an insane plan to use the security module from the shuttle she arrived on to hijack the Arrow and deploy anesthizine before boarding pirates can take control.  With the help of Chief Brom, Eerie, Regan Wilde, and the engineering staff, the crew holds out against an all-out assault on main engineering long enough for her to complete the plan and deploy security screens (and become accidentally registered as Fleet Admiral in the process).  Still the anesthizine is inoperative, and she discovers she must engage a manual bypass in the cargo bay.  Once there, she is confronted with the escaped Ghant, who nearly roundly defeats Maria after calling her ability and motivation into question.  Given a moment's reprieve by the heroic sacrifice of Lt. Wilde and intervention of Lt. Serinus, she pulls herself together and just in time before she's cut off from help yet again.  She finally gains the upper hand and kills Ghant, and manages a hasty re-activation of the anesthizine before falling unconscious from her wounds and sleep deprivation.

Maria finds herself struggling to adapt to everyday life aboard the Arrow, especially after such a wild first day.  She fails to connect with her new roommate, and has a spat with both the CO and XO in an attempt to minimize and hide her actions, already set on edge by the ship buzzing about her actions in Engineering.  She finds herself reliving killing Ghant over and over again.  She reaches out to Regan Wilde, one of the few people she felt like she connected to after cake, but the first two tries at their friendship go terribly awry.  She speaks at the funeral for [[Sofia Davenport]].  Regan and Maria finally manage to bond over a game of paintball assassin, and Maria is overwhelmed when Regan reveals he gave up his holodeck time on the Syrtan to be with her, and they become fast friends.  Maria receives the Legion of Merit and the Innovation Ribbon in the awards ceremony.

====[[The Ultimatum (Arrow)|The Ultimatum]]====

Maria leads a new charge to decipher the Sheliak language, under pressure with the new Sheliak threat to Theta 122.  The effort doesn't get very far with too little time to make serious progress.  She aids in a maneuver to disable the Razor's Edge, and mostly facilitates the crew's actions.  When the crew discovers they can't get communications with the away team and that the shuttle had been shot down, she works with the engineering teams to jury-rig a probe that can bypass the interference in the atmosphere.  This plan helps regain contact, and also draw the attention of a Sheliak captain.  With contact re-established with the away team, the ''Arrow'' discovers there's not just an Iconian portal, but a live Iconian on the surface.  With the Sheliak captain now heading to the surface, Maria assists with a plan to dive the ''Arrow'' into the atmosphere and shut down the portal so the Sheliak can't benefit from the technology.  The plan works, and the crew rescue a number of wounded from the surface, the Sheliak beaming away and repatriating the rest.

Maria started out the leave with little to do other than paperwork, leaving her in a bit of a bored bind.  She spent a fair bit of her early leave with her friend, Regan - emceeing "FSB" and consoling him about long lost love, Nicholas Rehme.  During the same discussion, Maria discovers her roommate, Chloe, might be harboring a growing crush on R'Ariel, and she meets the ship's new doctor, Cassie Mason.  She eventually returns to her doldrums though, worse than ever.  She ends up improvising a rap during the bridge night watch with Collins that cuts some of the tension, and the two end up reconciling and sharing music and drinks while the watch finishes.  It's still not enough, and in an attempt to escape dwelling on her past, she invents a project to build a holodeck aboard the ''Arrow''.  Her first step is to justify the need of such a construction, and prove its viability.  In the course of doing so, she winds up taking likeable R'Ariel out for drinks and having a surprisingly in-depth conversation about identity, siblings, myths, and legends.  Soon after, she's compiling data, and discovers Regan is being transferred off of ''Arrow'' by his father.  Upset, she confronts him, and is frustrated when he refuses to fight the transfer even though he doesn't want to go.  The next day, she goes to sickbay to gather more data for pitching the holodeck, but winds up making a new friend when she confides in Cassie about Regan, and shares a conversation about joining Starfleet and Maria's past.  Maria is delighted later when Regan asks her to help him stop the transfer once and for all - she takes internal sensors offline long enough for Regan to have a private conversation with his father.  That complete, she finally pitches her idea of a holodeck to the Captain and the Engineering team.  Afterwards, she has an antagonistic confrontation with Shayne over what to do with the Sheliak linguistic data ''Arrow'' gathered, but more importantly the events of Regan's transfer.  She eventually reaches a truce with the Captain, only backing down from her position when the alternative is a transfer.  She's awarded a second '''Innovation Ribbon''' for her efforts assisting in closing the Iconian Portal on Theta 122.

====[[Miracle of Venthis (Arrow)|Miracle of Venthis]]====

The ''Arrow'' is assigned to Second Contact with the people of the planet Venthis. Venthis had been in a global catastrophic civil war for nearly two hundred years before the fighting suddenly stopped eighteen months ago. After First Contact with the ''Arkhipov'', the Venthis have petitioned for membership in the United Federation of Planets. ''Arrow'' is tasked with evaluating the planet for membership and discovering the reason for their new technological advancement in such a short time.  Maria is tasked with running a survey of a large debris field surrounding the planet, hunting for clues as to the technological advancement.  She doesn't get very far before the ship suddenly locks down, every console aboard displaying a Greek Omega symbol.  After releasing the lockout, the captain abruptly re-tasks her to building a quantum resonance chamber with Hayley Caden.  Upon completion, she finds herself thrown into escorting the enigmatic Venthian, Hawisa Alios, then taking her daughter, Azzo, on a brief tour of the ''Arrow'' that ends in Sickbay.  Before long, Maria is ordered to the surface with Serinus, Ander, and Caden to find the Omega Particle and neutralize it.  They nearly locate the particle in a southern city called Lowka when they're pinned down by enemy forces.  ''Arrow'' barely manages to beam them and the particle out just in time, leaving Maria somewhat dazed as the particle is deposited in the closest black hole.

====[[What Happens on Risa... (Arrow)|What Happens on Risa...]] (Shore Leave)====

Maria is dragged into a book club by Quentin and Cassie, but manages to convince them to go on an adventure with her at the next available opportunity in return.  While cleaning out a storage closet, Maria discovers an old Fleeter Still, and takes it to Shayne.  She tries to convince him to keep the still, and they end up drunk and discussing a mysterious letter of the Captain's in the process, somehow bringing the two slightly closer to an understanding.  Later, she throws a birthday bash on Risa, and convinces some fellow officers to dance at the club with her.  At the awards ceremony, she's decorated with an '''Innovation Ribbon''' and a '''Captain's Commendation'''.  She barely manages to catch up with Regan, who's decided it's time to take leave of Starfleet for a while, and says her goodbyes to her friend.

====[[Freaky Friday (Arrow)|Freaky Friday]]====

Arrow is put on a mission to strike a deal with the exacting Gentii.  Angling for a spot on the away team, Maria dives head-first into researching the Gentii and their elaborate customs, finding a traditional called a "Bairiri" that blends festival and art exhibition.  She proposes holding a Bairiri, and receives approval from Captain Shayne and Commander Collins.  Upon arriving at Gentii II, however, her plans are thrown into chaos after a probe swaps around the crew's minds!  Suddenly, she finds herself inhabiting the body of Quentin Collins, unsure of how to proceed when its clear the Gentii demand a live performance in the Bairiri.  Initially, she tries to get Collins (in her body) to perform a dance, but instinct and muscle memory alone aren't enough to accomplish anything worthwhile.  Time quickly runs out, and the Gentii delegation shows up demanding to see the show immediately.  Fortunately, Collins manages to come up with the idea of singing a song he knows well, which goes okay and stalls the Bairiri for a little bit.  Still, it's a far cry from what the delegation expected.  Maria pulls Collins out of the performance, and begins to melt down emotionally, strongly experiencing the symptoms and confusion from the body swap and finding herself in a crisis of confidence.  Just in time, Doctor Mason appears with neural collars, designed for assisting quad- and parapalegics, which will allow Maria to "pilot" her own body without waiting to be swapped back.  The collar works spectacularly, at first, with an unexpected side-effect of entangling the pair's feelings and minds even more than they already were with the body swap.  However, things quickly go awry as the body-swap begins deteriorating, and Collins is pulled into a liminal mind-space haunted by a man he knows as "Faraday."  Maria is pulled along with him, and experiences a number of disturbing visions, involving her mind's interpretation of Faraday - a man calling himself "Fernandez."  She ends up discovering a way out of the visions after realizing she's "stuck" on her failures from the past, and fear of future failures, which have most notably manifested themselves in visions of Maria's mother, Emilia.  She asserts her control over her own mind, and destroys Fernandez, then finds Collins in their shared mind-space.  Having seen a version of some of his memories, she realizes he's been running from his fears - much the same as hers.  Together, they admit they have a lot of work to do, and finally become unstuck from their visions, allowing them to wake back up in sickbay in their own bodies - the rest of the crew figured out how to get everyone swapped back.

* Maria accidentally catches Shayne in his quarters with his new fiance, MacKenna.  Surprised to see him so obviously romantically involved, she goes a little off the deep end...

* Maria and Quentin finally confront the nature of what they experienced together, and decide to embrace their unlikely bond...

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