Grayson Paul

Authored by Abijah Sanders

Character Biography

Grayson Paul grew up in the mountains of Colorado, a rugged throwback to a different age on Earth. The youngest of 12 children, Grayson was born to Michael and Danielle Paul on November 12, 2374. His parents were arboreal agriculturalists, helping to safeguard the continued regrowth of mountain forests in the region, and as such Grayson spent a significant portion of his youth out of doors. At the tender age of 5, his father presented to Grayson some chickens and rabbits, and for the next two years Grayson learned how to coop and keep the animals in his care, collecting and selling eggs to the neighbors. He even learned to skin the rabbits and cook them over an open fire. His first real loss in life was when a fox managed to get inside the enclosure and feasted upon Grayson’s animals.

As a young teenager, Grayson’s interests shifted to sports (being a tall lad he was decent at basketball; being a tall, thick lad he was real good at football) and building Mother-Freaker-Outers (two-wheeled contraptions with a small engine that tended to burst into flame if they were driven too long.) As an older teenager, sports and building small engines still held his interest, but girls really held his attention; and being fairly easy to look at he found considerable success in this area, at least success as defined by a teenaged boy.

Shortly before graduating from high school, a shuttle craft carrying a captain from Starfleet HQ in San Francisco to a ship in orbit crashed into Grayson’s school. Fortunately, Grayson was not injured, however that could not be said for the majority of students and faculty at the school. Aboard the shuttle, three were dead while the captain had suffered grievous injuries. But she was impressed as a tall young man removed her from the shuttle, organized a triage area and set some of his fellow uninjured friends to the task of caring to the wounded, while he continuously ran back into the burning school, retrieving more injured. Impressed as she was, she recognized in him a leader, a man who kept his composure and took care of the situation as necessary. After Starfleet personnel responded and took over, she sought him and his family out and recommended him for Starfleet Academy.

He wrestled with the decision. He’d never really left the mountains his entire life, and his family expected he’d join the family business. There was also the matter of Emma, that cute brunette girl who seemed to be expecting him to make a different sort of decision with her at any time. It surprised them all when he announced his decision to join Starfleet, and while Emma decided to move on, his family supported his decision. He found his first year at the Academy trying. He battled homesickness. He battled a lack of purpose, especially as he bounced from specialty to specialty. The captain had recognized him as a leader, but he didn’t feel like he’d earned the command track. The sciences were intriguing, especially the thought of visiting the wild on foreign worlds. But it meant a lot of waiting, and he was impatient. He was good at security and tactical, but it didn’t satisfy his inner yearning. He was a builder. He put things together. He couldn’t do that as a tactical officer. It was a chance encounter with a certain aged non-commissioned officer, an instructor at the Academy that turned him on to engineering. This instructor, the Chief, had been a veteran of the Cardassian and Dominion Wars, was involved in the Battle of Wolf 359 and had told Grayson what it meant to be an engineer.

And so, Grayson began his second year in the Academy in the Engineering department, and from that department is where he graduated. His performance as a student in the Academy was similar to his high school performance: average. His high marks had to do more with personnel management, improvisation, thinking on his feet and working with his hands, and it was fun. As he graduated, he thought of his place amongst the stars, wondered what wonders he would see and was excited to see what the future would bring his way.