Christine Chapel

IN-CHARACTER INFORMATION

Name: Christine Chapel
Fandom: Star Trek (AOS)
Age: 29
Canon Point: a few months before the Enterprise leaves for its five-year deep-space mission
Original Universe or Alternate Universe? Alternate Universe: differs from her TOS counterpart in being of mixed-race background; diverges from AOS canon by existing as more than an offscreen voice in the first movie and an entirely offscreen character in the second.

Personality:

Outwardly, Christine seems like exactly the kind of person who should be a nurse. She is as compassionate and patient as the day is long, never failing to be anything but warm and supportive to patients and colleagues alike, never losing her temper or raising her voice. If circumstances get trying, she just takes a deep breath, summons another smile, and carries on. She is highly organized, very skilled and knowledgeable about her job and entirely devoted to it.

She's driven to the point of being an overachiever. Growing up she was a Girl Scout who earned nearly every merit badge, in high school she was captain of the cheerleading team and in many clubs, in college she was president of her sorority and eventually earned a PhD in endocrinology. She was top of her class in nursing school and her performance at Starfleet Academy led to a posting on the Enterprise. As the ship's head nurse, she was a tireless presence, always focused on her patients, tenaciously assisting Dr. McCoy with the benefit of her background in medical research and helping him to keep the ship's medbay running smoothly.

She's a private person who keeps both her personal life and her feelings to herself most of the time. She feels that helps her keep her professionalism and her even keel at work, though if she gets to know a person and they grow close she shares more of her private self. She especially keeps any inward conflict or self-doubt to herself, though she struggles with both on a number of fronts at times: she wonders if she's thrown herself too much into her career, she wonders if her family is disappointed that with all her achievements and her background, she decided to enlist in Starfleet and become a ship's nurse rather than have a more lucrative career closer to home; she wonders if she made the right choices in her relationship with Dr. Korby.

But doubt and conflict don't tend to overwhelm her; all in all she's a very confident person, compassionate and caring, always striving to learn more and do more. And for all that she wears professonalism and polite distance as part of her uniform, she's not above gentle trolling or using humor, especially to get someone to do something they ought to, or to defuse a situation. And she's a very frank person--she may deliver it with warmth and support and the best manners, but she doesn't hold back from telling you what she thinks. While she may keep personal feelings to herself she isn't shy about making friends or showing respect on professional and personal levels.

Background: Christine Chapel at Memory Aloha: AOS and TOS.

Background for this AU:

Christine Chapel was born in New Orleans in 2230 to Patterson Chapel and Lauren Thanh Chapel. She and her brother grew up in an old, lovingly restored home in an affluent area of the city. She studied ballet when she was a child, but by the time she'd reached high school she'd abandoned it in favor of studying science. She dreamed of getting into a career where she could use her passion for and knowledge of science to help people.

In college, she studied medical research and medical archaeology, though she eventually earned a PhD in endocrinology. While a graduate student, she met Dr. Roger Korby, a respected medical archaeologist. She joined him as an intern, and a romance blossomed between the two of them, leading to an engagement in 2253. The following year, while Christine remained on Earth to continue work toward her doctorate, Korby joined an expedition to a remote outpost to investigate remnants of an older civilization found there by Starfleet. The expedition was eventually reported lost and presumed dead.

Consumed by grief, Christine threw herself into studying and work to give herself something else to focus on. She decided to abandon her plans to remain in medical research, as that would only serve to remind her of what she'd lost; she enrolled in nursing school and eventually enlisted in Starfleet, which would give her both the chance to help people hands-on with her knowledge and training, and to be part of an exploratory expedition herself.

Following Nero's defeat at the hands of the Enterprise, Starfleet got word that Korby was alive on his remote outpost. Christine was conflicted, and sought the Captain's counsel on what to do, and then his assistance in getting a transfer to join Korby. She had never told her colleagues about her engagement, and kept the news of her fiance's apparent return to herself, so to many people, it may have looked like there was a personal relationship and then Christine fled.

Things weren't much better at the outpost. She discovered the expedition was in fact dead, but before his death, Korby had uploaded his consciousness into an android built with the recovered alien technology the expedition found. But he'd gone mad, and had plans to infiltrate Starfleet with more androids. She'd had to kill him in self-defense. She was brought back to Earth for hearings and explanations, and had gotten back in touch with Admiral Pike to be reinstated to the Enterprise pending the results of the hearings, but that was all put on hold when he was killed and the ship was destroyed.

Other Notables:

Inventory: Her complete uniform, including undergarments and boots; a fully-stocked basic Starfleet first-aid kit; a Starfleet communicator; anything else the powers that be would like her to have (troll away).

SAMPLES

NETWORK SAMPLE: TFLN; and again.

LOG SAMPLE: Actionspam log; prose log.