Character Information

Gender		Male
Species		Human
Age		39

Physical Appearance

Height		5'11"
Weight		180lbs
Hair Color		Brown
Eye Color		Brown
Physical Description		Ilian Ashford is a man who is easy to overlook in a crowd, not the handsome stranger standing out or the quirky one worthy of remembering. His face is long and lean, mostly clean shaven, with a squared jaw and high cheekbones. His skin shows the marks of long hours and accumulated stress rather than outright age, with faint lines at the eyes and mouth that speak to someone having to swallow down a lot. He has dark hair that he keeps short and practical. His brown eyes are mostly unremarkable, just calm and steady, the kind that rarely drew attention or stuck in memory. They are observant but, paired with a small smile, can seem mischievous or sarcastic. He has good control over his face and can be controlled, but also a hint of warmth. He is athletic rather than buff, trained for speed and reflexes rather than to look imposing.

Family

Father		Mykael Ashford (deceased)
Mother		Captain Elyse Keene (deceased)

Personality & Traits

General Overview		Ilian Ashford is sharp in a way that doesn’t try to impress, the humour dry and sarcastic and his observations often filled with some sense of ‘oh, that is how life is’. It’s partly a shield, partly an invitation. He is good at judging a situation, or a person, weighing up the chances for them to either be useful to his mission, or stab him in the back. It doesn’t make him outright manipulative, it’s just the training he has been given and the experience of his career. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t form meaningful bonds with people, or that he doesn’t trust them. There’s just limits to his trust. He would never use the word spy to explain his work, but he is fully aware of the muddy waters of Intelligence work. As a Starfleet officer, he believes in what the Federation stands for, the charters of the Federation and Starfleet…but he knows people like him are needed to make sure the rest keep their hands clean. He is loyal, but he has no illusions about what and who he is. He’d never call himself noble. He jokes that he has ice water in his veins, keeping himself calm under pressure. It’s not necessarily true, but he knows how to manage himself enough to push through his fear and focus on the task at hand. He is used to making the least-worst decision in the field, even when everything else looks too bleak. The thing with Ilian isn’t that he is extremely charming or can dazzle people with his brilliance: but rather that he appears ordinary, able to drift into the background, yet be steady for those that need it. Off duty, Ilian is sociable, who enjoys a good conversation. He might not be the warmest person in the room, and his smile might have a bit of a bite to it, but he likes people…he just doesn’t necessarily trust them.
Strengths & Weaknesses		Strengths • Good at seeing through lies • Keeps a level head when things go wrong • Picks up languages and tone-shift cues with ease • Knows when to push and when to hold back Weaknesses • Struggles with technical and complex systems • Keeps guilt tucked deep until it curdles into regret • Has a stubborn streak that can clash with authority • Trusts his instincts more than orders, and not always in that order
Ambitions		To do the job right, so someone else doesn’t have to pay the price, even when the orders fall short.
Hobbies & Interests		Free climbing (with a preference for natural rock and old ruins rather than holodeck routes), wood carving with a field knife (not artistic, just meditative), food and drink exploration (especially regional heat, spice, or unusual pairings), and a quiet fondness for live performance: music, spoken word, or small theatre, so long as it’s real and flawed and someone’s heart is in it.

Personal History

Ilian Ashford was born in 2351 on Starbase Daeron, the only child of Commander, later Captain Elyse Keene, a Starfleet officer, and Mykael Ashford, a Federation civilian working in logistics and transport coordination. His early childhood was shaped by the rhythms of station life: ships in and out, maintenance corridors and playing around in mess halls and occasionally sneaking to play in the maintenance tubes….and the low hum of the station itself, never sleeping. His mother was often away and when she was there, she was focused, efficient, and unmistakably Starfleet. She loved him, but her faith lay firmly in duty and structure and she was not shy in telling him that when he asked. She also was firm she didn’t want to worry about them on a ship with her…so she had to be away and he had to be here with his father. His father filled in the gaps without making a point of it. Mykael was practical, patient, and quietly attentive, the sort of person who fixed things before they became problems and never drew attention to the fact that he had done so. He would make sure his son was safe, entertained, and got his education. When Ilian was ten, the USS Gylland was declared lost with all hands. There was no distress call, no survivors, and no clear answers beyond a formal ruling of systems failure under hostile conditions. Starfleet held a memorial. A flag was folded. Elyse Keene’s name joined others on a plaque that people passed without stopping. After her death, Ilian chose to use his father’s surname rather than the double ones. It wasn’t out of resentment, and not out of rejection, but because he did not want to grow up as “the son of Captain Keene” and the mystery surrounding the loss of the ship. He saw too many times the look adults got when they realised who his mother had been. He did not want sympathy, expectation, or legacy attached to him before he had done anything of his own. They left Starbase Daeron soon after. Mykael accepted a new job on New Madrid, a developing colony world that was quieter and slower than anything Ilian had known. There, people cared less about who your parents were and more about whether you pulled your weight. Ilian adapted easily with this frontier spirit. As a teenager, he was unassuming. He did well enough in school without excelling, helped his father at home with chores, and his teenage years were mostly without incident. A fight here and there, some black eyes and detention, but these were normal wobbles of a boy who was learning who he was and what his own limits were. He applied to Starfleet Academy at seventeen. His scores were solid, unremarkable, but there was something in his psych interview that pushed him over the edge into being accepted. He would never be sure what. Ilian left New Madrid with a single bag and an antique wrist watch his father had repaired by hand. Unlike many of his year, Ilian arrived at Starfleet Academy without illusions. He did not expect to shine, and he did not. He was not the cadet instructors singled out as exceptional, nor the one classmates quietly resented for making things look easy. But he worked consistently, pushing himself and picking up concepts. He did well in linguistics, and had a knack for understanding what someone was trying to say even when the words were imperfect. He was learning to see beyond the words and into the small tells of people…finding a baseline and seeing if they were going beyond it. He was learning to see the lie. But where something made sense, other things were a struggle. Engineering did not come easily to him, even when it was just small modules that formed a well-rounded Starfleet Officer. Systems theory frustrated him from the start. He struggled to visualise complex mechanical interactions and never developed the intuitive grasp some cadets seemed to have. He compensated the only way he knew how: by following instructions exactly, repeating procedures until they stuck, and writing things down until muscle memory took over. He was not elegant with tools, but he was reliable. Given a checklist and enough repetition, he would not make the same mistake twice. His road to Intelligence at the Academy was more a stumble. It was meant to be Security and Tactical. But a couple of months in he was asked to consider doing Intelligence instead. The reasoning had been how he would use the computer for patterns, asking questions of it until he found something that felt out of place. He was asked what he would do for the Federation. The answer was whatever it took. It wasn’t truly bravado, even if it had sounded like it. The tensions in the universe, especially with Cardassia, had ramped up. War was on the horizon, even if the Federation were trying to avoid it. He must have said something right, because he was moved into Intelligence. It was a different atmosphere, the studies were different. But he did well enough, following the pattern of not being the best, the most brilliant or the charming one. He just was there, pushing through when others had gone to their bunks. He graduated in 2373 with solid marks and no distinction. He was initially posted as a junior analysis officer in the early months of the Dominion War, stationed at Starbase 214. His work was quiet: border monitoring, convoy manifest reviews, and comm intercepts. He was told to find things that didn’t fit. So he watched for inconsistencies, flagged things others missed…it reminded him of his father’s work…and maybe that was how he could help. He had a low clearance, just another Ensign working behind a desk while others went out and bled and fought. But eventually, something changed. He found something and submitted a report…compromised supply lines. By the end of 2373, he was in the field. In the beginning it was just liaising with logistics teams or as the intelligence brief to sit in a meeting room as orders were handed out. But that changed as the pressure of the war changed. He got sent to the edges, to bases and planets that were not Starfleet, some not even Federation. Under assumed names, and sometimes even with a different appearance. Rank lost its meaning, although on paper he was Ensign. He was just Ilian. The war itself taught Ilian that there was no such thing as a noble war. And no matter how much you tried, some parts of you were dipped in blood. No one was truly innocent, and not all innocent people were protected. So he applied his craft, did what he had to as a member of Starfleet Intelligence. And yes, he didn’t have the charm for honeytraps and great speeches…but he kept his head down, meant it when he said he'd keep an asset safe, and knew what to write in a report and what not to. When the war ended, Ilian Ashford did not transfer out, demobilise, or seek reassignment. He returned from his last operation and took the next one. For most of the next decade, he served with shipboard Starfleet Intelligence detachments assigned to multi-role vessels: cruisers, deep-range patrols, and later diplomatic convoys. Every few missions, he disappeared, always under orders. Not long, just enough to handle something off-record. Sometimes he was sent ahead to scout potential contacts or map out third-party movement on developing colonies. Sometimes he operated as a liaison with unaffiliated intelligence partners who would not deal with anyone wearing gold pips. And sometimes, he was a handler. It was not glamorous work. It involved long waits, careful listening, and understanding exactly how much a frightened person might risk before they snapped. Ilian did not play puppet-master. He knew what was needed…sometimes who was needed. The truth about how to handle an asset was simple to him: it was letting a person be the hero in their own story. But nothing, even a career that felt like he was going to be doing it forever, lasts that long. In 2385, after a decade of quiet fieldwork, handler assignments, and shipboard rotations that blurred into each other, Ilian Ashford stepped away. The decision was not sudden. It came after a long, slow compromise that ended with a name. She had been one of his assets, a civilian who was born on a colony that had been handed over to the Cardassians. While her parents had joined the Maquis she had been sent to Federation territory. When her parents died and the war was over and she was just another 18 year old trying to find a future, he had found her. Guided her. She became a freight tech, worked for planets and colonies that weren’t affiliated with the Federation. And Ilian protected her when he could, took information from her…and did what he could to make her feel strong. But when it started to look like the ship she was on was getting into more trouble, that she was at risk, he filed the request: extraction, silent, clean, no Federation fingerprints. But the request was declined, the mission was too volatile. And it would risk the overarching operation. An asset’s life wasn’t that much weighed up against the intelligence that could be gained. Ilian listened to the rejection, nodded and then simply left, taking leave officially but unofficially? He made the attempt on his own time, under his own cover. He got close. Close enough to see what had happened but not close enough to stop it. Her death was clean, quiet, and final. He was reprimanded in private and reassigned in silence, the truth was simple: he had gotten too close to the asset and his mistake of going after her to extract her most likely got her killed, and it almost blew the operation. Ilian did not protest. He did not try to explain. He submitted formal request for sabbatical and left the quadrant within a month. Another coincidence was that the asset’s child, a daughter, went missing as well. There were no record of where Ilian went or what he did. Now and then, his real name, Ilian Ashford, showed up. Nothing bad, just the standard things…enough for Intelligence to know he was alive and not causing any issue. In 2388, three years later, he showed up on Earth and reported to Starfleet HQ. He was not turned away. He was not restored to his old rank. His service was acknowledged, not celebrated and he was offered a deal...going back in as a junior officer, or dismissal. He took the rank. Lieutenant Junior Grade. He took it with a small smile, a raised eyebrow…and nothing more.