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All through her life, Casira Meu has attracted quite a lot of attention wherever she goes. It is not intentional on her part to stand out in such a way - indeed, in recent times she would perhaps wish for far less attention than she tends to receive - but rather an unavoidable side effect of her appearance, her nature, and her rather remarkable life story.

Certainly her height is not an element which makes her stand out. At a mere 4’10” from toe to the tip of her pointed ears, her stature is really quite unremarkable. Unusually for her race, however, the soft, silky fur that covers her body is not sandy brown or midnight black, but a dazzling shock white in color, an extremely rare feature almost unheard of in Caitian society. Her form is very attractively proportioned, with smooth, graceful curves and a lithe, agile quality even in excess of others of her kin. Her tail is longer in proportion to her size than most, just long enough to brush the floor behind her when she walks. And her perfectly straight hair, the same gleaming white as her fur, is worn in a carefully manicured bob cut style, cut off in a line just above her shoulders and kept in check by a broad white fabric hairband sitting behind her feline ears.

Her face complements her attractive style, her features thin and delicate like porcelain, her whiskers long and soft - altogether, many Caitians would consider her appearance quite stunning, and even members of other races have been known to comment on occasion. Most remarkable of all about her visual features, however, are her large, beaming eyes, seemingly disproportionately large for her small face. Even before her accident her eyes had been a shimmering, intense shade of glittering sky blue, sharp and intelligent like the burning hue of a warp core. And now that intensity has been increased many times over - both her pupils and the whites of her eyes are a solid inky black, no color or reflection showing in their empty voids. Her irises, meanwhile, are an incandescent neon blue, visibly glowing with energy from within and turning her already intense gaze into a penetrating, overwhelming stare that could melt through tritanium.

Casira’s parents were both Caitians themselves, and both had high flying careers in Starfleet. Her mother was a Lieutenant Commander on Jupiter Station, a well respected scientist and head of the station’s science wing, and she met Casira’s father when he was a Vice-Admiral assigned to the station as second in command. Despite their devotion to their jobs, they also took special care to make plenty of time for their family, and Casira’s young life was a happy and fulfilling one under their loving care. The young girl quickly developed a kindly, empathetic personality who would befriend anyone and go to extreme lengths to look out for them and help them, and her mild and gracious nature swiftly became well known and highly valued throughout the station’s community. And in addition to this, surrounded by science, learning and lots of technology, Casira very soon betrayed a great thirst for knowledge and an innate, natural skill for all things scientific.

A gifted child, she excelled greatly in all her studies, seeming to revel in discovery and experimentation just like her mother, and by the age of fifteen she expressed a desire to join her parents within Starfleet’s ranks. Of course, at the time she was far too young to enrol at the Academy under normal circumstances, but her father used his influence as a well respected officer to let her sit the entrance examination early. She passed the test with flying colors, and it was decided to allow her entry even despite her young age. The next three years of her life were spent in hard work learning the ropes and proving herself to her tutors. Her speciality was science studies, where she quickly gained a lot of respect from both the Academy authorities and her fellow Cadets, but she also proved herself a natural in another area - that of piloting. It seemed her naturally swift reactions and intelligent, tactical mind lent itself well to flying fighters and shuttles, and her skill made her somewhat of a living legend in the Academy’s hangar bays.

Just like the entrance exam, she excelled at Starfleet’s graduation tests at the end of her course, and was immediately assigned back to Jupiter Station as an Ensign on the science wing, working under her mother. It was wonderful to return and renew all the old friendships she had cultivated from her childhood, and the station was happy to welcome back one of it’s best and most valued friends, now with the additional responsibility and honor of being a fellow officer in Starfleet’s employ. And in addition to this, her piloting skill was put to use on supply runs between the station and the various other outposts and planets of the Sol system, and she loved to cruise around the sector at will, revelling in the freedom of having ‘her own’ shuttle. It was on one of these runs, however, that the disaster happened...

Just over a year from her initial assignment, and mere weeks after her promotion to the rank of Lieutenant, her shuttle was caught in the wake of a massive solar flare during an equipment supply run from Spacedock. The shuttle’s shields were not nearly enough to withstand the massive bombardment of radiation, and it swiftly began to disintegrate in the raw blast of energy, breaking into pieces as it’s systems overloaded one by one. The transporter techs on Jupiter Station quickly leapt to Casira’s aid, locking on to her signature and beaming her out before the craft finally exploded, but to their horror when she materialised they realised they had not been quick enough to save her from the carnage going on inside the shuttle’s devastated cockpit. Fully half her body - her left arm and leg and a good section of her head and torso - had been blown clean away by the internal explosions and overloading consoles, and she was at the very verge of death. She was quickly rushed to medical where the doctors on duty performed miracles to keep her alive for a time, but it was clear that if she were to survive any longer than a few hours, something drastic would need to be done.

And so began one of the most thorough reconstruction surgeries in Starfleet history. Over a series of painstaking operations taking many weeks, the damaged portions of her body were slowly replaced piece by piece with cybernetic circuitry and systems, overlaid with synthetic skin and fur designed to mimic her original appearance. Her father pulled in all the favours he could muster from different areas of the Federation, even dipping into military research and development on Borg implants to find the skills and parts required to assist his daughter. There was very little hope that their work would be successful, and even if she did somehow survive physically, the doctors were worried that the damage to her brain, which had been scarred by shrapnel and had to be partially repaired too, would be too great for her to ever regain consciousness. But to everyone’s amazement Casira actually survived the tortuous ordeal, and several months after the accident walked out of the station’s medical unit apparently almost completely unaffected by the disaster, Only the color of her eyes, which had both been replaced with cybernetic ocular implants, gave any visual indication of her changed nature.

For a while, everything seemed to go back to normal. The station was overjoyed that their friend had been saved, her parents were besides themselves that their daughter had not been taken from them, and Casira herself was extremely grateful to all who had contributed to her recovery. However it soon became apparent that all was not quite as well as everyone had hoped. Many noted that the Caitian no longer seemed the exuberant, empathetic character they had grown to know and love - instead, she now seemed very distant and reclusive, rather cold and dispassionate, and on occasion downright hostile even to former close friends. Her sense of humour had all but disappeared, and she never smiled any more, rarely showing any kind of emotion besides irritation and anger. Even with her parents her relationship had soured, her mother being thrust away and rarely spoken to, while meetings with her father usually ended up in blazing rows. Many were at a loss as to the problem, and the doctors who had worked on rebuilding Casira’s body could only theorise that the damage to her brain had somehow affected her personality in some way to cause the drastic change.

Casira herself had another explanation. Even though she was grateful for the work that had been done to save her life, she was deeply conscious of her cybernetic half, and felt distinctly uncomfortable about others seeing it. In her eyes, however, the entire station had changed in it’s attitude towards her, now viewing her as some kind of abomination or curiosity, to be either avoided or ogled at in every available opportunity. Everywhere she went, she claimed, people compared her to what she had been before, and looked down upon her or treated her with disrespect at what she had become. And most of all, they were frightened, judging her as some kind of freakish monster that could threaten their lives at any moment.

Which viewpoint was more correct, Casira’s paranoia or her colligue’s claim that she had changed, was uncertain. But whatever the case, it was clear that her situation on Jupiter Station was rapidly degenerating. She felt increasingly hounded and judged with every passing day, and longed to just leave the place and find somewhere far, far away, somewhere where her former self would not be known and her cybernetic nature could perhaps be accepted simply for what it was, with no preconditions or suspicion. And so one evening after a particularly heated argument with the Vice-Admiral, she stormed back to her quarters and sent a private message to Starfleet Personnel, requesting a transfer to a ship in one of the Federation’s outer fleets far away from the Sol system and Jupiter Station. Unknowing of the circumstances surrounding the request, the personnel board accepted it with little fuss, and Casira was formally transferred to the USS Athena in Starfleet’s Third Fleet, on the border of known space towards the galactic core...

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Casira’s cybernetic implants give her a number of special abilities and skills, but also cause her some problems too.

Her optical implants allow her to see a much larger range of the spectrum than most races, and give her the ability to zoom in on distant objects much like a certain blind Chief Engineer on the Federation’s flagship. They can also scan and analyse things in much the same way as a tricorder, feeding the information directly into her brain through neural processors. Her cybernetic limbs and body structure give her massively increased strength and reactions on her left side, and the military background of some of the technology allows her to link her mind directly into a computer system and operate it via thoughts, the neural processors acting as firewalls to prevent the computer’s power overwhelming her mainly organic brain.

She feel extremely conscious of her cybernetic half, however, and so will only draw attention to her visual aids if the situation at hand requires it, preferring not to parade her abilities for all to see if possible. Her added strength and linking to computers she will use even less - only in the most dire of circumstances when absolutely necessary, or in secrecy when nobody else is aware - and she will go out of her way to avoid talking about them with others, even to the point of getting aggressive.

They also have physical drawbacks: some of the technology that has gone into constructing them is so complex that a medical doctor would be at a loss to repair anything but minor faults, major malfunctions would have to be looked at by an engineer instead. Her implants run on an internal battery that can only be charged from a special terminal in her quarters - this battery usually lasts for around a week, but strenuous or intense use can reduce this to a matter of days. If the charge dies, her cybernetic half will shut down and become inert and unusable, and thanks to it’s added weight this makes it almost impossible for her to move around unassisted using only her biological half. And what is more, the mechanical systems sustain her organic side, so if they shut down for longer than 24 hours there is a very real risk that she could die.

Important Note: Due to Casira's brain damage, and the subsequent reconstruction of such with cybernetic parts, her mind and emotions are largely unintelligable to any telepaths or empaths who try to scan her. There is a large, unreadable gap in the core of her emotions, a complete absense or void as if she wasn't even there. Around the outside of this gap there is a 'border' of very powerful, intense emotional feeling, but these emotions are shattered and jumbled like a jigsaw puzzle, and make no sense to anybody who can detect them. And her thoughts come across as disconnected, confused phonetic sounds overlapping and interfering with each other, occasionally interspersed with a mechanical buzz or synthetic whine like a computer booting up.