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Name: Lieutenant Rachel FalconettiPROMOTIONS &
AWARDS
Assigned to ship as Lieutenant, 4 January; 2001
FAMILY BACKGROUND
Rachel Falconetti is an officer not very well known, despite her continual performance. She is considered one of the most consistent excellers that Starfleet has ever had, but because she fails to truly shine to the level of other famous officers, and because she works in a small, odd position with little chance of advancement, she has never been given a large amount of recognition or promotion others feel she would have gotten if she worked in a mainstream field of service.
The hard work ethics, hunger for and ability to quickly employ knowledge, and the relentlessness that bred her comparable career began at home in New Haven, Connecticut. An adopted child (she does not know the identity of her parents), Rachel Leigh Falconetti was born to a middle-class family who strove to send her to good schools and taught her the value of hard work. In her studies she developed a particular fondness for the stars and set her course on Starfleet. But with the emerging popularity of the space race it was hard for someone to just pick a major and find admission. Rachel had to settle for what would get her into the Academy, even with four years at the prestigious Air Force Academy. She got in as an engineering major, but eventually graduated a security major with an engineering minor, third in her class.
Unfortunately for Rachel (often a victim of bad luck or being in the wrong place at the wrong time), security was an oversaturated field when she got there and she didn’t have much choice as to where she went. She took her first year cadet cruise learning on planet and then found herself stuck for assignments, picked up by a diplomatic escort vessel, the USS Josh Charles. While she was there, she found herself shuttled out of security and working a second shift as a damage control team manager. The nuances of engineering eventually became her focus, and she believed that she’d found a new calling. She stayed with the Josh Charles for four and a half years, continually being bounced back between assignments, earning her the title of “utility player” and the nickname of “designated hitter.” Once the heads around her noticed her solid track record, she seemed to become constantly on-call for any assignment, from working with teams trying to repair blown-out seals on deck 34 to assisting the ambassadors that would come aboard the vessel. She didn’t know what she did anymore. Rachel left the vessel when it returned to Earth and spent six months at the Falconetti family residence in San Francisco, trying to overcome the building stress of being expected to fill every need and trying to put her career back into a one-field, one-job order.
During those six months Rachel entered into therapy with a reliable psychologist, Dr. Abby Jacobs. Jacobs suggested to Rachel that she was good at what she did, and people relied on her for that – that she had found something that only she could do. Rachel was wary of the effect this would have on her personal and professional lives as well as her mental health. Her younger sister, Dana, was in the hospital with an injury from grav-skiing, and her older sister Natalie was also in a state of mid-life crisis – she feared that adding another dilemma to the pile would break the camel’s back. Over six months she and Dr. Jacobs were able to work out her fears. Dr. Jacobs made Rachel realize that she enjoyed, to some extent, being the little person whose presence was critical to putting things together – the vital element without the limelight – and the ability to try new things as a result of her diffuse position. They also realized that something too diffuse was stretching Rachel’s knowledge, time, resources and abilities too thin – if she was going to continue to fill the role of utility officer, she had to hone that utility to a highly specialized field in the fleet. Discussing Rachel’s interest in humanities, her social nature, her easily approachable demeanor, and her hands-on approach, the two of them came to the joint decision that it would be best for Rachel to focus on internal support services – the little things that assisted the running of the ship through the constant support and aid of its personnel.
After this, Rachel spoke with her family about her career choice, and they supported her all the way. She had finally calmed down, put things in order, and was ready to tackle the stars again. As soon as her two sisters had also recovered, putting her absence at about a year, she put in a request for a new assignment to the extent of the criterion that she and Dr. Jacobs had formulated in therapy. She found a ship that was needing of those same services, and much to her liking. The USS Great Provider was in spacedock at Starbase 16, not too far from Earth itself, and she accepted the offer to tour the vessel before making her decision. What she found was a community of people much like herself: dedicated, hard-working individuals who needed to be reminded that perhaps there was a life beyond the job. She accepted the post immediately and spent three and a half years helping the crew and populace get back from the brink much like she herself had done. Unfortunately, the Great Provider was finally decommissioned, and Rachel found herself searching for another place to fit her highly specialized talents. That was the problem – being highly specialized also meant that she could only find an assignment in places that were proving to be elusive. She almost considered that maybe she’d been wrong about going into a specialized field when she was contacted by Captain Sorrenta Dayspring, who had been her instructor during mandatory refresher training following her one-year absence, and told at length about the USS Malinche-B.
Following further investigation and deliberation, Falconetti felt the vessel could be helped with her services and that she could learn from it, and she requested to be transferred there hoping to regain her confidence in what she had chosen to do with her life. Rachel has also had a varied and troublesome personal life. Returning to active service, she also broke up (again) with longtime boyfriend Eric Matthews (“there’s something about him, if you can look past his ego”), who she’d seen while at the Academy and split with on their cadet cruise. Now that she is back together and he’s had some time to think about it, he’s taken time from his Earth government job to try and work things out with her. Their on-again, off-again nature makes it possible that this relationship (and its repeated breakups and makeups) are probably far from over.
She’s also dated ambitious Earth politico Doug Traeger (“a nice guy with a screwed-up image”), Federation News Service reporter Dan Whitaker (“he means well, but that’s not how it goes”), twice-graduate student Joe Roth (“something’s going on there, and it scares me”), and traffic-obsessed traffic controller Charlie Winters (“good best friend materiel, but he has no life other than that”), but she has somewhat muddled feelings for courier/painter Adam Charles, who’s scared of her … a lot. At this point, a frustrated Rachel may just have to realize that her personal life is going the way her professional life was headed, and may just have to let it happen unless her luck changes.
PHYSICAL & PSYCHOLOGICAL
BACKGROUND
Physical
Data:
Appearance:
Rachel Falconetti is an average Human female. She stands about 6’0” and 125 pounds, slender and athletic in build, with a reddish-golden-orange color to her short hair and blue eyes. Her facial features are a little more pronounced, making her look at first like someone from the disciplinary corps on ship to punish the crew, but her personality quickly overrides that appearance. She has very little distinguishments from the average Human female with the exception of the tattoo of the Falconetti family crest and motto on her upper right arm.
Physical Training:
Due to her regular assignment as a personnel instructor, Falconetti keeps up with the latest education in physical arts. She has come close to mastering most Earth forms of martial arts and is currently performing research in non-Terran fields of combat. She is a skilled fencer but is always looking for new ways to improve her knowledge of physical arts.
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Psychological Data:
Rachel Falconetti is someone that people often make a separate peace with and have no problem talking to because of her strict personal code of morals. She is an upstanding individual who usually makes friends after they see past the initial stereotype of her and her job. However, she also has a hard time keeping them, because her job so often consumes her that she is known for missing social appointments of all kinds. Her friends often need infinite patience to allow for the strenuous demands put upon Falconetti by both her job and herself.
She is usually very well spoken, very articulate, and somewhat social, though she’s not above using her sharp sense of humor to play practical jokes on other members of the crew. She tends to give others the benefit of the doubt and has a high respect for anyone who does the right thing. Command officers can turn to Falconetti at any time to give them an unbiased, straightforward view of whatever might be happening, and they can throw anything at her and know that she’ll do it as best she can with everything that she has at her disposal, because she is exceedingly reliable. Anyone else can turn to Falconetti and get the honest truth of a situation, cutting through the Starfleet buzzwords, omissions and jargon to the heart of the matter. It is through these kinds of acts that she endears herself to those around her, and she’s never let anyone down.
Rachel’s hobbies include fencing, learning about new cultures through study of their ways, diplomacies, laws and languages, reading anything she can get her hands on, building models, fencing, socializing with old friends, cooking, and watching old Terran programming, including televised broadcasts such as “Chicago Hope,” “Gideon’s Crossing,” “Sports Night,” and “Homicide: Life on the Street.” She is also a student of film, and her favorite films include “Crossworlds”(1996, with Rutger Hauer and Josh Charles), “A Slight Case of Murder”(1998, with William H. Macy, Felicity Huffman and Adam Arkin), “State and Main” (2000, with William H. Macy and Clark Gregg) and “Dead Poets Society” (1989, with Robin Williams and Josh Charles). She’ll try anything once.
STARFLEET RECORD
The Academy:
Rachel is still friends with her roommates from the Academy, who were her first real friends, and they still get together as often as possible. Mary Jo Wright is now a Lt. Commander aboard a ship of the line, the USS Archer. Veronica Shield is a Captain aboard the USS Shieldbearer, although now confined to a hoverchair as a result of an accident early in her career. Terra Mallory has left the Fleet following her release from the USS Desnos and has settled into a career on her native Trill homeworld advising on space development.
Falconetti also maintains close relationships with a number of social acquaintences at the Academy, including an ex-boyfriend, Eric Matthews, a longtime nemesis, Andrea Parker, and a handful of instructors.
Postings:
This is Falconetti’s first assignment in Intelligence and she is quickly adapting to the more protective nature of SI. She knows that the straightforward way she does things may be impeded by this, and she’s prepared for it. Having earned both of her promotions on the nature of her drive, hard selfless work and consistent record, and under consideration for a third, she feels that she will continue to survive even if she has to change.
Coming to the Malinche:
Rachel was quite interested in coming to the Malinche. She jumps at the chance to meet new people, see new places, and help out people like her, and especially with the rumors about the ship in the fleet, the stories she’s been told by Captain Dayspring, and the research she’s done, the ship appeals to her. She feels like maybe she’s had it easy the last eight years, and maybe it’s time for her to grow up and bite the bullet.
EVENT
HISTORY
To come.