I've "canonized" that exposure to the regenisis disruption effects Vortas and humans differently, doing its intended thing making "blank slate" clones that couldn't reupload most of their neurally programmed skillsets (along with often having other mutations and health issues), and in humans it interferes with blood cell regeneration (and I've admittedly got to establish more of what that does and anything else the compound might do, but you get the idea, very different effects).
I've had an idea for a Trill guy who's a former member of section 31, probably from Dominion era who will work aboard either the Omelas or another of the Charon class ships like the Wellerman (I'd like him on the Omelas, I personality wise he might be too similar to Toka and Vasilios respectively in a meta perspective with the jaded cynic & former S31 personnel type deal, but I think he could also have a good dash of well earned paranoia that might let him be different enough)
But: moreso what I'm thinking about: Would the compound effect Trills similarly to humans with it causing issues with blood cells (because I really do like the idea of the S31 personnel who worked with it in some way having subtle health tells that they can often pick up on if they know to look for it, but I'm not sure if it would be lazy for it to do the same thing to Trills
There’s a thought in my head that’s probably not a novel idea that the NuTrek Section 31 obsession is related to surveillance culture post 9/11, but I’m not able to articulate it beyond that
Ok I had forgotten this aspect of canon, but this actual lines up extremely well with my ideas for captain Vasilios' involvement with section 31 and the bioweapons
With S31's less immediately conspicuous contamination of selective Vorta's genetic reserves the Founders would actively be making the problem more difficult to address and they might not even realize it until they've done irreparable damage to their own stockpile of workers.
The compound is completely harmless and dormant in a living host or infected sample until a memory implantation procedure is attempted in a fresh regenisis subject (through a direct tissue sample or a reserve pull). Upon specific synthetic genetic code activation the compound causes targeted damage to the areas of the brain, neural upload pathways, and to facets of genetic material (sometimes in this case even complete or partial deletions), preventing (or at least severely impairing) neural reupload in the clone themself, and making it nearly impossible to viably clone from an infected clone once the compound was activated.
This would result in "blank slate" clones, still in possession of most of the Founders' neural "gifts" of subservience and anxiety, but with no means of consistently reuploading accumulated information and personality as they would have been neurally coded to mesh with the individual Vorta.
This extensive damage of course resulted in a wide array of health issues potentially presenting depending on the extent and severity of resulting damage from infection, and in many cases also in the reactivation of genetic codes intentionally rendered dormant, such as low level telekinesis and telepathy.
The majority of the potential recruits given any role in transport or distribution were not made aware of the extent of the compound's effects, only being told that infection was targeted to subjects who were of high strategic value to the Dominion, that it was a nonfatal attack, and that would interfere with memory upload, thus the primary casualty being knowledge. Unfortunate of course, but what real life was there for them to erase? Their primary wording for it was, I think, "Bloodless".
I'm not sure if I want to go the route or not, but I'm considering the Section 31 bioweapons captain Vasilios transported during the war causing some degree of medical issues for her that the creators of it (probably?) didn't know about until afterwards and maybe that's why they ended up telling her what exactly it was connected with at all.
It could kind of be a sort of silent tell regarding people who were involved in the project; You'd have to know to know, but if you have it it's recognizable in someone else. Maybe that's part of why she gets the leeway she does in regards to her attitude towards S31 and her choice of crew, idk like I said I'm not totally sure I want to do that route or not but I think it might be interesting
the Problem of wanting to write fic (esp AUs) with side characters/plot arcs that are important for that character's development but you only know them through fanfiction and you haven't actually watched the source material. like, I am on ENT's season 2. dear star trek series with your 25-episode seasons, do I look like I have infinite time on my hands?? wanna write AUs with Harris now. I wanna know who the Hayes guy is
(I've tried to be thorough, there's so much in my head that it's hard to completely pull everything out neatly, but I did my best! )
special thank yous to @sparklylovegiver and @jade-dolphi for helping with lore development!!!
I'm thinking captain Vasilios had some ties to section 31 from her younger years, maybe having gotten a bit indoctrinated into an admittedly lower branch of it when she was newer in the Academy and separated somewhat from Kirev through their respective training assignments and some of his health and marital issues.
She was someone brilliant, but young and kind of socially adrift, sheltered on Earth's utopia, kind of cold and tactical in high-stakes unfamiliar settings, and even having preexisting ties into Starfleet through one of her mothers being a professor at the academy, basically everything they could have asked for to start with.
I think they underestimated her moral compass; it's really not showy but it's very strong and deep set. She's not necessarily nice, but she's a very good person with a strong pull to do what's right (though perhaps with a more simplistic view of right at the time). They loosened their hold seeing her balk a bit. Not letting go all together, but playing a longer game to reel her back slow to avoid losing her. She got assigned aboard a ship as part of Starfleet's training and had her "Four Sights" moments so to speak, learning of the wider world beyond the databases and the handful of planets she'd ever been to (one very pivotal moment being Ceicive's birth after the ship rescues a shuttle of Cardassians with their translation system offline).
Being involved with them at all put her career on a bit of a faster track, meaning she got to the rank of captain earlier than she might have otherwise, into a mission program S31 had a lot of input into (though not complete control).
It was a class of ship blanketly called "Orpheus class", that were actually paired units of an Orpheus and a Eurydice. The Orpheuses had excellent scanners and and signal mimicry abilities that let them lead along the well-shielded and *extremely* well cloaked Eurydices that had less effective sensors and held the cargo of the trips, be that supplies, people, tech, research, etc.
The technology was salvaged from a lesser known species that had likely taken heavy inspiration from Romulans, but because the tech was so new and complex it was difficult to mesh completely onto one piece of Starfleet tech, meaning for at least a time it had to be spread between the two ships. The layout of the systems also didn't always permit for much if any coms between the two ships when either had their highest defensive systems activated, making another factor to the name. Ideally it wouldn't have been field tested in a meaningful way until the technology could be fully realigned properly, but tensions across the quadrant, and eventually the Dominion war, didn't permit for such strict adherence. These ships were practically undetectable in their defensive states, be it beguiling a scan or hunkering down unseen to wait things out, which made them perfect for gathering Intel, or sneaking supplies through war stricken areas.
Or at times more distasteful war efforts.
They made it sound so harmless, really. Smuggle some things through in some of the supplies that were going to that Starbase anyhow now and again, and sometimes get it where it needed to go once aboard. Nothing more. Organic samples, lab equipment, sometimes PAADS, though those less often.
She liked being a captain, it made her able to help her dear friend, protect her family, be a part of and defender of the Federation, and they'd made this possible and wanted to help her be and do all of those things, surely her misgivings had been childish splashes of black and white, right and wrong. Surely-
Bioweapons.
Not to the scale of the mutagenic virus; she was nowhere near at a clearance level to permit that, but something to disrupt the Vorta's cloning regenesis. They didn't tell her all at once, let the information drip-feed down over a course of months. Years. Even then they almost got her I think, with how technically bloodless it was.
An outright attack on the cloning facilities would have been flashy and drawn attention they weren't ready for. This was subtler, contamination of certain Vorta's tissue reserves. It didn't prevent them from being recloned, but caused calibrated mutations in how their brains would form in regards to the ever so carefully engineered memory upload facets. It sort of smoothed them over and made them unreceptive. It couldn't guarantee a full block, but it could void at least 70% of upload, and without a neurally compatible clone any information held by that Vorta would be effectively lost.
It was horrifying enough to later learn what the Dominion had done to these unfortunate targets in pursuit of the lost information, but it was worse for her to find out that the majority of the Vorta targeted were the scientists and doctors that would have had the best chance of intercepting and treating the mutogenic virus S31 had developed to attack the "founders", making her technically complicit in an attempted genocide.
She got to keep her ship when it was over in the end, even got to rename it. Starfleet didn't question her too much over it. The war had ended, most everyone was in arrears emotionally in celebration and mourning, and they thought her no exception. She took the ostensible reason offered; Not lying to them really, but nodding at their kind words for the lost crew of the Orpheus. They hadn't really been exactly close beyond their missions, but it was undeniably a tragedy regardless.
With the original set irrevocably broken the change made sense. The Omelas, newly christened, was retrofitted along with the other "fusions and fragments"as they came to be called (Omelas being a fragment as it was without its other half) with their deficiencies as the technology could be more stably combined. (Ships designed and manufactured with the tech already balanced being referred to as "prefabs").
She and Kirev gave the Eurydice its due funeral to christen it anew as Omelas. To promise to walk away from guiling glimmers stained with blood. From convenient glory, from the sweetness covering deeper rot. A promise not to look back despite temptation.
Kirev had rarely known her to be as distraught as when she learned of the blood on her hands. That's what broke her to tell him the moment she knew the depth. He'd held her as she cried, stood with her through the near unending ceremonies of mourning and triumph after the war. They made it the last one, hoping to lay more to rest than just the name.
The retrofit brought a new name as well for its class, trading Orpheus for Charon, still traversing "realms of death", but with a gentler, quieter role. It was spared the shared moniker as the Charon was a more physical fusion of the Hades and the Persephone paired duo.
There's little glory in the Charon class now, no longer the Federation's heroes of wartime support, sneaking their support through the enemy lines, but a dedicated support to areas in need of supplies after disaster or war fallout, shuttling researchers and academics, occasionally stopping to collect and then transport samples or scans from an outlier planet or research base. The Charon gets the flashier jobs between their continued work for S31, the rest are either covert cover or honest outreach, the Omelas being the latter. I wouldn't say she's seeking redemption or living in penance, she's largely just moving forward and seeing the world, but her past does definitely influence her.
She learned enough tricks from S31 to have enough pull with higher ups to keep them from looking too closely at her more unusual choice of crew, though in all honesty since she's volunteering for a branch of work within the Ferderation most people don't have long term interest in she doesn't have to pull those strings that often. She's no saintly sheppard to lost souls, but knows a lot of the time people with once lifeline left will fight like hell to keep it and sometimes even to pay back and extended opportunity, so a fair many of her crew are Starfleet' Academy's problem cases or are procured under less standard circumstances.
Section 31 wants her back, she's damn near a tactical genius, but she's rebuffed them each time. While she tries not to dwell on it overly, she knows eventually that if they can't make use of her there's a decent chance that they'll begin to consider her a loose end to trim, and then it will only the hope that they've got bigger threats to address that will keep them at bay. Until that day, if it comes, she chooses to live quietly, drifting from point to point on her missions and working to do good where she can.
