T'Ryssa Chen

T'Ryssa Chen
Full name:	T'Ryssa Chen
Species:	Vulcan/Human
Gender:	Female
Born:	2354
Affiliation:	Federation Starfleet
Family
Mother:	Antigone Chen
Father:	Sylix
Career
Previous Assignment:	Science officer, USS Rhea
Assignment:	Contact Specialist, USS Enterprise-E
Rank:	Lieutenant
Insignia:

Lieutenant T'Ryssa "Trys" Chen was a female born in 2354 to Human mother Antigone Chen, and Vulcan father Sylix. When she was about two years old, her parents divorced, and her mother retained custody. She never knew her father, and self-identified more as a human.

Feeling that her mother, a Starfleet officer, resented her presence, T'Ryssa ran away from home several times over her childhood, the first time at age seven, after learning of the kahs-wan ritual in Vulcan culture. At that time, she was taken aboard a Barolian freighter as ship's cook. After a week, a Starfleet security contingent tracked her down and reunited her with her mother.

In 2364, at age ten, Trys and her mother were stationed at the Starfleet research station on planet Maravel. This location was the favorite of the many where Trys lived as a child.

Sometime before 2369, Trys and Antigone were posted aboard the USS Odyssey. They were amongst the non-vital personnel off-loaded at station Deep Space Nine when the Odyssey travelled to the Gamma Quadrant to confront the Jem'Hadar.

Trys says she was aboard the Odyssey for "a few years" prior to that ship's destruction.

T'Ryssa Chen entered Starfleet Academy at age seventeen, and took five years to graduate in 2376, after the end of the Dominion War.

In 2380, Chen served aboard the USS Rhea when it was surveying NGC 6281 and avoided its fate, believed to be caused by the Borg because she was exploring a planet. She was then transported to Maravel by the entity that lived in NGC 6281.

She transferred to the USS Enterprise-E as contact specialist when it went to NGC 6281 to find and destroy the Borg to keep quantum slipstream technology out of their hands. She proved instrumental when she contacted the entity, naming it Qing Long in the process, and convinced it to allow the Enterprise to stop the Borg.

Chen began a long-term romantic relationship with Ensign Rennan Konya after both joined the Enterprise crew in mid 2380. (TNG novel: Greater Than the Sum)

Chen also served as a backup flight controller for the Enterprise. In 2381, during the Borg Collective's invasion of the Federation, Chen was on duty at an auxiliary console at the rear of the Bridge when the Enterprise destroyed a Borg cube at Korvat. She expressed relief that the battle was over, but Captain Picard insisted that the conflict was merely beginning. (ST - Destiny novel: Gods of Night)

After the USS Aventine and the Enterprise discovered the subspace tunnels in the Azure Nebula, Chen expressed an opinion against Captain Picard's decision to collapse the tunnels, earning a rebuke from first officer Worf. After the idea to collapse the tunnels turned out to be ill-advised, Chen monitored the progress on scouting the tunnels. After the two ships passed through one of the tunnels to end up in the Carina Arm, Chen recognized that Picard was hearing the voice of the Borg Collective when he was apparently distracted. The Enterprise was engaged by a fleet of Hirogen vessels, and during the assault, Chen pushed Aneta Šmrhová out of the way of an overloading console before it exploded, and needed medical attention for her burnt arm from a Kaferian medic. The Hirogen were able to board the vessel, and second officer Miranda Kadohata ordered Chen and the other junior officers off the Bridge to the observation lounge; after repelling the boarders, Chen became visibly ill at the sight of the carnage, but detected the instability of the tunnels that hastened their return to the nebula. (ST - Destiny novel: Mere Mortals)

After the USS Titan returned to Federation space and joined the Aventine and Enterprise in their fight, Chen was temporarily assigned to assist Titan Chief Science Officer Lieutenant Commander Melora Pazlar in locating a suitable Borg scout craft to capture in order to secure its vinculum. T'Ryssa was exceptionally interested in Earth Starfleet Captain Erika Hernandez's experiences amongst the Caeliar, and found time to pester the Captain with questions, having usually anticipated Pazlar's requests to calibrate the alpha-wave receiver or synchronizing the delta-wave receiver frequency with the operating frequency of the catoms.

She found it incredible that she had been with them for eight hundred years, and asked questions about the catoms and their abilities, including how the Caeliar might store memories and recall them; she wondered if each memory engram from their previous organic body was individually copied and replaced, or even if the old Caeliar brain even use engrams to record memories like most humanoid brains, or alternatively used a cranial-fluid medium like the Sogstalabians or a crystalline matrix. Chen also asked about the Caeliar's reproductive abilities or if they still had sex for pleasure, questions that Hernandez was only partly willing to answer, and only in exchange for the cessation of the questioning; after Chen agreed, Erika mentioned that Inyx had once mentioned that the Caeliar had lost the ability to reproduce, and the cataclysm that destroyed Erigol also wiped out a significant portion of their species. Captain Hernandez then asked T'Ryssa if she made a special effort to confound expectations about her heritage, and after she responded in the positive, Erika gently suggested not trying so hard. (ST - Destiny novel: Lost Souls)