Drauc T'Laus (MIA)

Personnel File
Name:	Drauc T’Laus
Rank:	Former Mercenary
Position:	Former Position in Starfleet: Security Officer Former Rank in Starfleet: Lieutenant JG
Species:	Romulan
Age:	33
Gender:	Male
Orientation:	Asexual
Birthplace:	Romulus
Height:	6ft 2in / 1.88m
Weight:	201lbs / 91kg
Hair:	Burgundy
Eye color:	Brown
Played by:	Mads Mikkelsen
Writer:	Auctor Lucan
Interests
Redemption Quietude Renewed Purpose Battle Justice
Education
2353-2366 Mind War Division, the Tal Shiar 2368-2372, Starfleet Academy
Service Record
2373-2374 Ensign, Security, USS Vanguard 2375 Lieutenant JG, Security, USS Vanguard
Decorations
N/A

Drauc T’Laus was a former mercenary imprisoned at Starbase 84 when the USS Resolve returned to Federation space. After the Battle of Starbase 84, he ended up on the USS Theurgy. Drauc aided in the opposition against the parasites that compromised Starfleet Command in the end of the 24^th century.

Biography

Romulan children born with physical deformities or attributes that impeded their ability to serve the Romulan Star Empire were not allowed to live. The development of the child was monitored closely until the age of five. If the child was fit, then they entered a rigorous training program of schooling, cultural indoctrination and physical training for fifteen years.

Yet since the twins Drauc and Kraun had just turned five years of age, their father had seen it convenient to dispose of them, unable to raise them himself. Their lives would have ended that day, unless a tall Romulan had pulled them out of the termination program, offering them osol twists and asking them if they wanted to play. The man was a collector of the Tal Shiar, hand-picking subjects that no one would miss.

Image: Kraun T'Laus, Drauc's twin brother.

Romulans were not typically telepathic, but the two brothers were taken into the Tal Shiar's secret training program that sought to hone them instruments of mind warfare. The experiments were conducted by the Mind War Division of the Tal Shiar, and they had full latitude in their research. The first thing that happened was that Drauc and Kraun underwent extensive brain surgery, opening their cranial ridges and their brains being experimented upon. The idea was to awaken dormant psionic abilities. Since Romulans had a shared ancestry with Vulcans, the Tal Shiar believed they could restore these abilities artificially. The collector had picked the two brothers because he knew that they would depend on each other, and would survive for far longer when their conditioning began.

Their father didn't even know that they were still alive, and Drauc recalled his mother only by a fading face and a false name. Later in life, Drauc sometimes wondered where their mother had gone, and if she had known what befell him and his brother since she had been an operative of the Tal Shiar. After all the things done to him, only her false name remained in his memory. Merely a codename through which they had been able to contact her before she vanished; T'Mei.

Under the guidance of their chief training facilitator, the brothers quickly learned the mantra that “emotions will cloud your judgement and pain will keep it sharp”. What little emotion they had were for each other, and that they kept their emotional bond carefully hidden from their teachers. To say the two brothers were content would be a lie, yet they were indoctrinated to the abuse. When their minds were not honed, they underwent physical conditioning as well, meant to some day become field operatives. On a regular basis, new surgeries were preformed upon them, making them suffer different side effects each time. Still, they would have complacently carried on with their training with nary a word of disobedience had Kraun not developed a rare blood disease. Worse, it was one that was potentially easy to spread in a training program where blood was commonly spilled. Kraun would have been killed, but luckily for the two, the brothers managed to escape the program by using their psionic abilities and stealing a shuttle. While they had been taught of the world outside the training facility, it was the first time they stepped outside it. By that time, in the year 2366, they were eighteen years old, and had been test subjects of the Tal Shiar for thirteen years.

Federation Space

Image: Drauc T'Laus as a Starfleet Officer between 2368 and 2376.

Knowing they would not be safe in Romulan space, they made their way to the Federation border. There, they encountered the USS Apollo, to which they surrendered tbefore their pursuers could stop them. Aboard, the ship's doctor was able to use a new form of treatment that gave Kraun a new chance to live. He was not fully cured, but he was able to take medicine that would sustain him for decades. Due to their personal code, the two brothers vowed to repay the help they were given. They decided the best way to do that would be to enter Starfleet, and help protect the people who saved them.

Though their Romulan heritage made them subjects of suspicion for some time, they were eventually, in the year 2368, allowed to enter Starfleet Academy. As Romulans, it was difficult for them to earn the trust of others, but by working diligently, and proving themselves to be absolutely loyal, they were eventually given the respect they deserved. They entered Starfleet Security, because their set of abilities were best suited there.

One year after they graduated from the Academy, after having served on the USS Vanguard, the Dominion War began in 2373. For three years, the brothers fought in defence of the Federation. It was three years of hellish war, composed of seemingly never ending strings of battle. Even though the brothers thrived under such conditions, it quickly began to wear on their brittle mental state.

Then, Kraun fell in battle.

They had been fighting back to back when a Jem’Hadar kar'takin pierced Drauc's left side and went into his brother, severing his spine. So chaotic was the fight that Drauc did not notice for a few moments that his brother had fallen. By the time he reached him, his brother was dead. The next few hours were a blur of red that Drauc never could remember. At some point, he had cauterised his wound with his phaser. He must have been screaming with such madness and loss that he permanently damaged his vocal cords, leaving him a harsh whisper of a voice.

He woke up in sickbay on one of the Federation starships, disoriented and confused, asking for his brother. When the memory of his death came, his mind shut down and he was left catatonic for a over a month. His mental trauma was to the point that he could not even use his mental abilities, as whenever he reached out, when he did not feel his brothers mind, he would shut down completely. He ended up back on Earth, treated at Starfleet Medical, but showed no improvement.

It was not until one day, when the plight of a Cadet named Jovela stirred him, that Drauc mentally returned to the living. She suffered the attention of a Klingon in the same ward as his own, and he preserved the Risan woman's modesty from the cruel and dishonourable intents of the Klingon patient. Drauc took out his grief upon the Klingon, killing him by striking his head until it broke against the sterile floor. In compassion and gratitude, and despite her fight, Jovela helped Drauc escape justice for this crime. She helped him with clothing, lied to protect him, and Drauc was able to steal a transport from the facility's shuttle bay.

Lonesome Mercenary

After that, Drauc vanished from all records. Much of the following time remained a mystery for both the Federation and the Tal Shiar, who still had not forgotten the time and resources vested in the experiments on the T'Laus brothers. Rumours had it that Drauc acted as a mercenary for years, as well as a raider for six months near the Atavan Straight. In all, he was gone for almost six years.

Then, in 2381, a raiding party emerged from the Romulan Neutral Zone. It was made up of former members of the Orion Syndicate and Romulans who had deserted Romulus because of the Romulan Civil War. Drauc was in that raiding party, and he was captured by Federation authorities after a raid against an abandoned storage facility. He was sent to Starbase 84 to await transport and his pending trial. By the time the USS Resolve came to Starbase 84, he was the last member of the raiding party that had yet to be shipped away from the starbase.

Meanwhile, after being lost in Romulan space for three years, the Luna class vessel – USS Resolve returned to Federation space and received a hero’s welcome at Starbase 84. A short time later, a Tal Shiar operative was murdered on the starbase, and one of the crew was wrongly arrested as the prime suspect. While ascertaining as to why his officer was imprisoned, Captain Kendrick – Commanding Officer of the Resolve - enacted a jail break when the situation turned sour. Alongside his operations officer, Kendrick also liberated Drauc T'Laus, who revealed that the murder of the Tal Shiar operative had something to do with a traitor on the starbase. By reading the thoughts of the accused crewmember, Drauc had learned that the dead operative had a contact on the starbase, and this contact was a Starfleet officer.

This was the onset of events that would lead to the Battle of Starbase 84, where the USS Theurgy arrived. After the many twists and turns of the development, Drauc ended up aboard one of the shuttles of the Resolve, who docked with the Theurgy just just before she went to warp.

Personality Profile

Drauc was even-tempered to a fault. The mental trauma he endured at the loss of his brother created a defence mechanism that kept him from experiencing strong emotion. It was his resort to dealing with loosing Kraun, regressing to the mind-set he had when in the Tal Shiar's care. Should something actually manage to pierce this defensive shell around his mind, he reacted violently, removing the ‘threat’ at all costs, using any means at hand.

While Drauc's grey heart was a cold and scarred thing, he was no longer without empathy as of 2381, when he came aboard the USS Theurgy. For how could he stay the way he had been made by the Tal Shiar, when he had learned to feel through others? Never having let anyone closer than Kraun, and because of what the Tal Shiar did to him, he viewed love and intimacy with a some detachment. Procreation was merely a means to an end, and he experienced it too often when reading the minds of people around him. He found the same resemblance in animals, and while on one level he could understand the appeal, his lack of passion precluded him from truly enjoying the act.

The experiments preformed on the T'Laus brothers had given them the ability to read the thoughts and emotions of the eligible minds in their immediate vicinity. Like Betazoid, they could not read the minds of Ferengi or Câroon, but they also had little control over their mental abilities. They could not project their own thoughts into the minds of others, yet the minds of others tended to invade upon them instead. Therefore, both the T'Laus brothers had a strong aversion to crowded areas, and over the years, Drauc especially developed misophonia, literally "hatred of sound". Since misophonia could adversely affect his ability to achieve life goals and to enjoy social situations, Starfleet counsellors tried to treat him during his time in service. His treatments consisted of developing coping strategies through cognitive behavioural therapy and a lot of exposure therapy during his duties.

His sense of loyalty was still strong, but had shifted since he deserted Starfleet. Organisations - like the Federation he once served - could no longer earn his loyalty, only people, and very few at that. One of them was Captain Kendrick, yet he died in the Battle of Starbase 84. Those who he felt had earned it would find him a staunch ally, willing to help in any way possible.

Physical Profile

A tall Romulan male, Drauc T'Laus was quite an imposing sight, and since he always wore either a threadbare, brown robe or a cloak of similar design, he looked very much the raider or mercenary that he had been when he was imprisoned on Starbase 84. The only difference between that life and the one led on the Theurgy was that his personal hygiene had improved with the access to sonic showers.

As typical for a Romulan, his ears were sharply pointed, though the experiments preformed upon him and his brother had left his forehead a mess of overlapping surgical scarring. There was virtually none of the Romulan brow ridges left on his forehead, instead webbing of hundreds of cuts that the Tal Shiar researchers didn't bother to erase. There were also a number of minute scars all over Drauc's body that resulted from the surgeries that worked to enhance his psionic abiliies.

He had a wound from the centre of his abdomen to his side, with an exit-wound in his lower back. Though the wound could have been healed, he chose to keep it in respect for his fallen brother. Because of this, he walks with a slight limp. On cold nights, he still felt the pain of that Jem'Hadar blade that claimed his brother's life.

His voice remained damaged since the battle where his brother Kraun died, and his whole appearance was rife with signs of a life led on battlefields. His knuckles were scarred from fighting, fingers calloused from hard use, and his body roped with muscle and sinew. He has a rather gaunt countenance, and he rarely - if ever - smiled. His brown eyes stare through tresses of burgundy red hair, yet even if his gaze was piercing and knowing, he was never hostile towards those he spoke with. At least not until provoked too far, or when under orders to achieve some kind of mission parameter, in which case he could be both efficient and cold-blooded.