Lieutenant Commander Ryan Keel
Name Ryan Felix Keel
Position Chief of Diplomatic Intelligence
Rank Lieutenant Commander
Character Information
| Gender | Male | |
| Species | Human (Rigellian Colonies) | |
| Age | 36 |
Physical Appearance
| Height | 1.91m / 6'2 | |
| Weight | 105kg / 231lbs | |
| Hair Color | Brown | |
| Eye Color | Hazel | |
| Physical Description | Tall and broad-shouldered, Keel as the All-American look down pat. Keel is always turned out neat, clean shaven and uniform freshly pressed. A set to his shoulders suggests he isn’t one to let his hair down at all. |
Family
| Spouse | Meg Keel (divorced) | |
| Children | None | |
| Father | Felix | |
| Mother | Sarra | |
| Brother(s) | Kaden | |
| Sister(s) | Lily, Sunflower |
Personality & Traits
| General Overview | : Keel is a stickler for the rules and doesn’t give even an inch for them to be broken or stretched, the end result of a chaotic childhood and upbringing. He does relax slightly when off-duty, enjoying the occasional beer, and game of chess. The man finds he only truly relaxes when he has a banjo or harmonica in hand and can play his favourite music as part of a band. |
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| Strengths & Weaknesses | + - Studious – Keel believes in studying each and every problem that comes to him in order to understand it fully and apply the knowledge gained. + - Patient – for the most part, Keel is a patient man, a necessary prerequisite for a diplomat to see the end results of their work. + - Charming- Keel does have a charm that has proven useful in the past. - Inflexible – With his Starfleet duties, he is inflexible, and is unwilling to bend the rules for others - Arrogant – Keel is supremely confident in his own abilities. After all, he’s gotten this far on his own. |
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| Ambitions | To run for political office one day, whether to the Rigelian legislature or perhaps even to the Federation Council. He’s torn between deciding to do so after captaining his own vessel or not. | |
| Hobbies & Interests | Keel has a great love of reading, particularly fantasy and history. He is also a keen musician, enjoying the harmonica and banjo. Frequently he’ll try and form a band to play with wherever he finds himself. He’s also a keen runner and weightlifter in order to keep himself fit. |
| Personal History | John Keel was born in 2353 to Felix and Sarra Keel, itinerant labourers who had travelled the Federation and the Neutral Zone before settling down on the planet Rigel III in the Beta Rigel system. He would soon be followed by more siblings. The Keels were inspired by the hippies of 1960s Earth and had travelled across space in order to find peace, contentment and distance between them and what they regarded as an overbearing government. They found in Rigel II the perfect world. Temperate and comfortable, they were able to begin living out their peasant idyll in peace. Purchasing a smallholding, they turned to creating a self-sufficient life for themselves, as detached from wider society as was possible. In this they were aided by a network of similarly-minded people who had settled on Rigel II for that very purpose. The Keel parents quickly turned the smallholding into their chief source of food, and even invested in a small plot of Rigellian coffee beans in order to fund their future life on the planet. As he grew up, Keel began finding the disorder of the family to be overwhelmingly distasteful. Forever out in the fields making sure their crops were growing and flourishing in order to feed their children, their home was forever needing repairs and lacked routine. Keel found that often he would fend for himself, left to his own devices for hours at a time once he could walk and talk. Schooling was a welcome reprieve from the family’s lack of routine, a convenient babysitting club with the unfortunate side-effect of an education the Keel parents disparaged at every opportunity so as to discourage their children from being drawn into the wider, corrupted world of the Federation. He developed a love for books and holos, staying after class to watch what was normal for the other children his age, and enjoying baseball. As the 2350s wore on into the 2360s, the Federation and Starfleet made a concerted push to recruit the next generation of Starfleet personnel. With the Cardassian Wars winding down, Starfleet was once again turning to the wide frontiers of the galaxy and pushing them back. With the introduction of the Galaxy-class of cruisers, educational materials were provided to every Federation member world to show exactly what Starfleet was intending its new flagship class of vessel to achieve. Watching the holos at school, Keel fell in love with the class, admiring its sleek lines and almost organic shapes. His parents dismissed Starfleet as ‘fascist thugs’ and discouraged talk of them in the home. A teen Keel began yearning for an escape from the drudgery of his home, and idealised a life where he was a fully integrated Federation citizen, free of his parent’s influence. Knowing he had athletic ability, he secretly began casting about for a way off Rigel II. It was a chance encounter with a Marine recruiter who had set up shop in the local town for the day that had inspired him. Desperate to leave, and with little idea what he was really signing up for, Keel signed up on the spot. After being instructed to ensure his parents counter-signed due to his age, Keel agreed, taking the form away and forging their signature. He stole away in the dead of night shortly after the end of the school year and his seventeenth birthday. Marine basic training was a stark contrast to what had come before in his life. Days were hard, filled with training, drilling and classes. Keel threw himself into it, vowing to become the best he could be, determined not to go back to Rigel II and the family he barely missed. He soon got into the swing of his new life, making fast friends amongst his squadmates. Basic training was over all too quickly, and Keel was shipped out to the Seventh Fleet to join the Fourteenth Marine Brigade on detached service aboard the USS New Brunswick. Patrolling the border between Tholia, the Federation and the Gorn did not make for exciting assignments. Keel appreciated the all-too-rare planet-side assignments. In the late 2360s these mostly involved humanitarian missions, assisting in building work and flying the flag as the Federation revelled in being the leading power in known space. Following the first encounters with the Dominion, though, the atmosphere changed. Training became more intense and focused. Orders disseminated through the fleets to begin analysis and deconstruction of the data that came in from repeated encounters with hostile elements. The New Brunswick was pulled from border patrols along the Tholian front, and reassigned to patrols along the Romulan Neutral Zone as tensions briefly spiked following the discovery of the USS Pegasus. Toward the end of 2370, Keel’s detachment were pulled from the Brunswick as the Fourteenth Marine Brigade were reassigned to Starbase 327. There they were subjected to a gruelling training regimen designed around combating the Jem’Hadar threat. Keel was left battered and exhausted by the experience, but was grateful to acquire new skills. By mid-2371 he was well on his way to being an accomplished sniper marksman. Though it seemed that tensions across the Alpha and Beta Quadrant would slacken with the signing of the Bajoran-Cardassian treaty that year, the disappearance of several Starfleet vessels in the vicinity of the Cardassian border, the increasing threat of the Maquis, and the revelation that the Dominion’s Founders were in fact shapeshifters led to Starfleet Security being pulled in several directions at once. The Marines were increasingly used to plug the gap, with elements of the Fourteenth Brigade beginning to work closely with Starfleet Intelligence to make up for traditional Security personnel shortfalls. Thus began John Keel’s long, fruitful and shameful association with Starfleet Intelligence. With Starfleet so stretched, sub-optimal solutions were the order of the day. The Marines were deployed to mop smuggler and pirate bases along the Cardassian frontier in an attempt to flush out Maquis cells and their sympathisers. At least one independent colony planet was mis-identified, the after-combat records sealed and buried as deep as a bureaucracy could. The aftermath of the raid on Trartya III lay heavy on Keel’s mind for a long time, a cold hard knot of shame that settled in his stomach. He was kept too busy, however, to truly process it. As the Fourteenth Brigade ranged across the frontier of the Alpha Quadrant, news of open war with the Klingon Empire, plunging the Brigade into further action. As the Klingons invaded the Archanis sector, and looked to secure their position on the south of Cardassian space, the Klingon Defence Forces fanned out across the southern portion of the Federation. Detached to the Centaur-class USS Ithaca, Keel spent months in hit-and-run attacks on Klingon supply convoys and depots in an effort to cripple their advance against the civilian Cardassian government. Fighting was brutal, reminiscent of the Four Year War. During a raid on an asteroid supply depot in system Zeta-Zeta One One Eight Keel was involved in a fierce deck-by-deck struggle with Klingon soldiers that lasted a week. The aftermath left Keel reeling, losing many good comrades to the fight. The gains were minimal, the Klingons switching their supply depot within the week, bypassing an already fluid front line. The Fourteenth was shortly rotated out of the front line to rest them, allowing them to sit out most of the rest of the war with the Klingons before the Cardassians signed the treaty with the Dominion and held the Klingons at bay. With the fall of Deep Space Nine and the a full declaration of war against the Federation, the Fourteenth were thrown into the front line, struggling to contain the surging Jem’Hadar as they pressed into Federation territory. Driven back all the way to Betazed, the Marines could only watch in impotence as the planet was taken, and a final retreat ordered. Grimly holding on, the Fourteenth were sent to the front, all notions of specialised training thrown out the window in the desperate struggle to contain the Dominion. Keel embodied the struggle, an already quiet man becoming grim and taciturn in the prosecution of total war. As the war dragged on into 2374 and the Argolis array was destroyed, the war turned in the Alliance’s favour. The Fourteenth went on the offensive, finally returning to the small teams tactics they had trained in before the war had broken out. Keel was once again reunited with Adoran Trass as they ranged behind enemy lines aboard the USS Kolensky, darting in and out of Cardassian space to disrupt their war efforts as much as possible. With the Romulans and Breen joining the fray, the war unwound towards its inevitable end, with the defeat of the Dominion Alliance and the assertion of the Federation Alliance’s victory across the Alpha Quadrant. With the winding down of the War, the Federation, and Starfleet offered their military veterans the opportunity to retrain in order to fill the drained manpower of Starfleet. After the brutal activities that Keel and his Marines had taken part in, he was ready to take stock and change his career. He was tired of shooting to solve his issues, and opted to use the funding given through the Veterans Bill to re-train at the Academy. Being accepted in 2375, Keel relocated to Earth for the first time in his life, and settled in, heading through an accelerated Academy program, majoring in Interstellar Politics with an applied emphasis in diplomatic theory. Graduating in 2377, Keel was made a Lieutenant (JG) in recognition of his past service during the war. Posted aboard the USS Jefferson as a Diplomatic Officer, he embarked on his new career in the service of rebuilding two Quadrants following a devastating war. A Nebula-class vessel, the Jefferson was pressed into service along the Alpha Quadrant borderlands, tasked with dousing the many fires of peacetime. More than once Keel found himself part of a Federation delegation in some nondescript building in high-pressure negotiations. He found it exhilarating, a far cry from combat, but no less an adrenaline rush for that. The man became adept at preparing his brief, always on top of the detail. This earned him several mentions in dispatches his tour with the ship. Opting to stay with the Jefferson for a second tour, Keel was quickly promoted to Deputy Chief Diplomatic Officer, often being required to operate independently of his home craft with a small team as the later 2370s proved to be increasingly unstable. The Jefferson’s Diplomatic Team Beta went on to mediate several disputes, particularly between the Ferengi and their neighbours who were at the mercy of their predatory price increases at the time. As the decade rolled over into the 2380s, Keel earned a sabbatical, being rotated out of active duty to do a teaching course at Starfleet Academy’s Tellar adjunct. The two years spent teaching recharged Keel’s batteries, and allowed him some travel due to the teaching year’s generous leave time. Once his two years were up, now-Lieutenant Keel was assigned to the Jörmungandr, a Sovereign-class vessel assigned to the Beta Quadrant frontiers of the Federation. The Jormungandr spent the two years from 2383 to 2385 building up relations on the Federation’s western frontiers, often times intervening when overly-aggressive Klingons tried to intervene in the affairs of several independent colonies, driven by the frustration of younger Klingon warriors who had not partaken in the glories of the Dominion War and had grown impatient with the ageing leadership of the Empire. Keel’s work felt all the more urgent when Mars was burned. The now-Chief Diplomatic Officer threw himself into his work, assisting his captain in shoring up the Federation’s position in whatever way it could. To his dismay, he saw the evacuation of the Romulan’s home system abandoned by Starfleet, a betrayal strange to one who had witnessed the Romulans fighting alongside their allies against the Dominion. Though he was a realist, the lesson stung hard that yesterday’s friends could be discarded when they proved an inconvenience. Chastened by the destruction of Romulus in 2387, Keel felt unmoored for a time, and took a leave of absence from his duties, travelling across a Federation he did not recognise. The experience was sobering, a population that quaked at their own shadows, and a political class that had been battered by decades of hard decisions and crises and had turned inwards. Bringing his leave to an end in 2389, he requested a new assignment and was given Astrea. |
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| Service Record | TBC |