Miko Dauntless (KIA)

Personnel File
Name:	Miko Kuni Dauntless nee Hayakawa
Rank:	Lieutenant Junior Grade
Position:	Chief of Surgery, USS Harbinger
Species:	Human, mixed Korean/Japanese/Scottish ancestry
Age:	37
Gender:	Female
Orientation:	Homosexual
Birthplace:	Hannah Starport, Almoctt III
Height:	5’7”
Weight:	139 lbs
Hair:	Raven-Black
Eye color:	Cybernetic Blue
Played by:	Vicki Zhao
Writer:	AkiraRevile
Interests
Miko actually used to be one hell of a soccer player back in the academy as well as an expert on every type of beer and lager imaginable, but nowadays virtually all her free time goes to either studying the latest medical procedures or luring her latest mark into a pointless one-night affair. She also prides herself as a history buff, particularly when it comes to Ancient Rome of all things - a fascinating civilization to say the least, as she's more than happy to tell you.
Education
2362-2364: OJT aboard the USS New Jersey. 2364-2370: Starfleet Medical/Starfleet Academy
Service Record
2370-2380 Assigned to the USS Renaissance 2380: Demoted and assigned to the USS Harbinger, KIA.
Decorations
No decorations but several demerits.

Miko Kuni Dauntless nee Hayakawa was Chief of Surgery on the USS Harbinger before she was killed in action. Before her death Dauntless aided in the opposition against the parasites that compromised Starfleet Command in the end of the 24^th century.

Biography

It’s not exactly a happy story.

To really get an idea of why it isn’t a happy story, one has to go back to her ‘birth’, if one can even call her that. Miko Kuni Hayakawa started life out as unwanted accident on the volcanic world Almoctt III, a miserable backwater colony whose mines had long ago dried up, leaving nothing but a bitter and blazing hot spaceport where the poorest inhabitants of the Federation’s border territories milled about lifelessly. Miko’s mother Yuri was a Starfleet dropout who’d made the mistake of bearing her instructor’s child and been booted from the Academy for it. To say she had some resentment and bitterness towards the child that had utterly ruined her life is to make a vast understatement. Beatings and bereavements were just a simple fact of her daily life as a child, both from her abusive prostitute of a mother and the other bitter inhabitants of the colony. Miko still refuses to discuss the details of her childhood beyond vague embittered comments, but one good look into those eyes when she starts thinking of home is enough to communicate that things occurred that’d do her nothing but harm to relive.

The angry, lonely and rage-prone young woman who grew out of all that hauled off from home the day she turned 18, hitchhiking on the first starship she could sneak on board. Given her typical rotten luck, it was hardly a surprise that Miko picked a pirate vessel to sneak onto, full of cutthroat marauders who were hardly sympathetic to the plight of this five-foot-tall girl with nothing but skin over her malnourished bones. The next two months before they docked at another port and Miko slipped out of the brig to escape were filled with all the abuse of her childhood, along with certain… violations that are best left unmentioned. At the very least she learned to better pick a vessel to smuggle herself onto. Naturally, once she managed to steal some decent food and a few beers to drown out the memories, she snuck onto another starship, and this time it wasn’t even a pirate vessel - it was a Starfleet frigate.

The crew of the USS New Jersey was decidedly less hostile to Miko than the pirates she’d hitchhiked with had been, approaching the mysterious and angry girl with friendly demeanors and a genuine desire to help her. Rather than dump her off at the nearest space station or random colony, the ship’s youngest Medical Officer, a fresh-faced Orion woman by the name of Karen Dauntless recognized that Miko needed quite a bit of help both physically and psychologically if she was going to have any hope of having an even remotely happy life. It was after Miko demonstrated that she was not simply a dump street girl but an absolute mathematical and scientific prodigy with a seemingly genuine interest in medicine that Karen was able to convince her CMO to keep Hayakawa around as an assistant and intern of a sort, if one with no formal training and a less than pleasant attitude.

What mattered was that Miko’s intelligence was as bright and fiery as her passion to learn, soaking up everything she could about medical procedures she could, particularly the surgeries that she was gradually allowed to assist with. After two years of serving as an impromptu nurse and Non-Com officer, Miko made official her desire to move beyond just assisting in surgeries and become a Starfleet doctor herself. The long road ahead, filled with an extended Academy stint just to obtain a medical license as well as an officer’s commissions hardly intimidating her given how many far worse things she’d endured; her only hesitation was in leaving the place she’d always called home, along with the people. Well, maybe just one person - what started as an innocent friendship with Karen had long evolved into a sweet and youthful romance uniting two lonely people who were absolutely positive that they were soulmates.

Yet Karen understood that Miko needed to pursue this career to be happy, and knowing that the love of her life could accept that fact was enough to lock Hayakawa into an unrelenting affection for the woman who had well and truly saved her life. It would be among the hardest things either woman would ever endure, but they swore that they’d make their relationship work over the next six years at opposite ends of the Federation, Karen off patrolling the edge of known space while Miko struggled through the Academy. Somehow, it was even more hellish than her childhood and ordeal with the pirates combined, straining the young woman as the urge to abandon an increasingly distant love and just let loose, but she just barely managed to stay true to her personal savior right through to that hard-earned day when she graduated with a medical degree and ensign’s commission. The reward she received graduation night was well worth six years of hell, as one would expect from her first night in years with Karen and an ecstatically accepted marriage proposal.

Life seemed to be pretty damn good for Miko at age 26. She had a career that she genuinely enjoyed, her past had been buried and forgotten, and the love of her life had sworn herself to the once-miserable woman now minted as a shiny new Starfleet Surgeon. And for about eight years or so, life was truly blissful for Miko, as she finally reunited with Karen aboard USS Renaissance and settled into the job she loved alongside the woman she loved. It was the best time of her entire life, a period of simply joy, tender happiness, and the merry welcoming of a child named Meridia, carried by Karen and conceived from the DNA of both women. Their pride and joy of a daughter seemed to just seal their fates to live happily together aboard the ship they loved and raise up their little girl into a woman adored as warmly as Miko and Karen adored each other.

Life naturally wouldn’t let her stay that happy forever.

Eight years into their blissful marriage and seven years after bringing Meridia into the world, Karen Dauntless became one of the fifty-eight corpses left in the wake of a Xindi Seperatist bombing on Deep Space 4. Her suddenly widowed wife escaped with the need for a pair of robotic eyes to replace the ones just about vaporized in the blast. All things considered, she came into the haze and confusion following the unexpected attack wishing that the shrapnel had gone just a few inches farther and buried itself in her brain, rather than leaving her with a widow with fake robotic eyes and a daughter who just couldn’t understand that one of her mommies wasn’t coming home. The child couldn’t understand, of course, and to be frank, Miko didn’t really understand it herself; all she knew for sure was that the woman who’d saved her life had just up and left, and there was no way in hell she’d be coming back.

Miko tried her best, of course, to raise Meridia by herself, but it was never the same, never as happy as it had been. Meridia was angry and confused to have lost her mother, and Miko didn’t exactly have the best self-control once her wife’s tender reinforcement was no longer helping to keep her on the right path. It was easier to just slip into a bottle than it was to face the loneliness and move on with life. It was simpler to be an ass to her patients than it was to keep up a pleasant demeanor when she was miserable on the inside. And it seemed to come a whole lot more naturally to yell and scream at Meridia when she expressed her fear and bitterness than it was to be the kind of rock her daughter needed right then.

Miko took the easy way out, and maybe picking up on that example, so did Meridia. Just a few days after she’d turned ten years old, the angry and resentful child took on her last idiotic dare from the other reckless kids on the ship - touching the warp core down in main engineering. The engineers on duty weren’t able to stop her from making contact with the core while the internal shields were temporarily down for maintenance; the only solace anyone could take was that the child’s death was instant and painless, vaporized through half her body may have been. It was hardly a comfort to Miko as she cradled the charred remains of the only blood-tied family she had left in the galaxy.

In that moment, as she kneeled with her baby girl's remains in her arms, something just... unclicked, one could say, inside Miko's head. She was of course distant and depressed for the first couple months after the accident, of course, but then as suddenly as Meridia's death had come, Miko swung back around personality-wise and seemed to fall right back into perfectly fine and normal, if a bit more sarcastic than usual. It took a little while for the real changes to become clear as her friends gradually realized that the doctor was no longer even remotely interested in any relationship more meaningful than a one-night stand. Over the next few months she bounced from bed to bed, abandoning every well-earned friendship to focus on brief passionate affairs that only left both parties feeling even more lonely in the long run.

The problem had gotten bad enough and generated enough formal complaints for Miko to be transferred off the USS Renaissance and onto the USS Harbinger after even smacking her down to junior lieutenant failed to alleviate her increasingly unprofessional attitude.

It’s hard not to find irony in what instead followed; just weeks after she was assigned as the Harbinger’s new Chief of Surgery Miko found herself being catapulted out with the rest of the ship’s crew to pursue the USS Theurgy after the vessel completely went rogue - as far as they knew, anyway. It didn’t take long for the ugly truth about what had happened farther up the chain of command to spread throughout the crew, nor did it take long for Miko to jump on the ‘screw Starfleet, let’s worry about our own damn selves’ bandwagon rapidly becoming popular among the crew. As far as she was concerned, the organization had done nothing of any good for her since Karen’s death, so why weren’t they better off on their own in the galaxy?

The answer to that question came in the form of three months of haphazard meatball surgery, scrounging for dwindling medical supplies and waking up each day wondering whether this was finally going to be the day that a dozen Starfleet vessels blew her out of the sky. The natural response of the crew to their hellish new reality grew darker with every passing day, and Miko was the last one to stubbornly hold onto any sort of traditions, honor, or anything else that impaired her survival. If ever one would want a case study in how rapidly a medical professional can become numb to sloppy surgery, rushed medical procedures, the occasional mercy killing, and a mixture of substance and sexual addictions to deal with the strain, one need look no further than Miko over her three-month ordeal on the lonely and struggling Harbinger.

When the Harbinger finally caught up to their supposed prey several hellish months later, Miko was slightly relieved for the first time in months. At long last, there was a chance to obtain new supplies, they could feel a tad more secure with some fellow fugitives watching their backs, and hundreds of new ways to keep herself occupied would almost certainly be available. As easily as she claimed to have moved on from her daughter and wife, Miko approached this new opportunity with a clean slate sort of attitude - after all, even if the Theurgy’s crew didn’t exactly approve of how she’d stomped over her sacred oath over the past few months, she was good enough at hiding things to keep them blissfully unaware.

Personality Profile

The surface person Miko puts off of being a calm, occasionally sharp-witted professional confident in her position in easily the biggest lie she tells every single day. Simmering beneath the relaxed exterior is a murky swamp of traumatic memories, horrified guilt, and unresolved rage directed almost entirely at herself. Deep down beyond those layers of grime, Miko's heart is best described as a thin and faded shell around the cold loneliness that losing the two people she loved most has brought, a void that she still somehow thinks she can fill with fleeting bedtime escapades and meaningless intimate affairs. That this strategy has proved wildly ineffective so far is of little consequence to Miko - she just doesn't have any better ideas in the grief that still very much grips her everyday life. Her ordeal on board the Harbinger has only worsened matters, allowing an increasingly dark and ruthless side to become more and more prominent with each hellish day.

Physical Profile

Though only of an average height and bearing rough skin along with a face which clearly shows off her difficult past, Miko is still a fairly attractive woman with a slim build and cybernetic eyes that yearn with a hunger few people could ever hope to satisfy. Her consistently firm chest is fairly well-endowed given her short stature, and her legs stand out as her most valuable asset, so to speak; the general consensus is that those heavenly long limbs are simply blissful to have wrapped around one's body. Her dark hair is long and soft to the touch, kept fairly rich simply by luck of genetics, and stands in a rather lovely contrast to the ethereally beautiful glow of her ocular implants.