Ensign William Kaplan
 
Name: William Kaplan
Race: Human
Gender: Male

Appearance
:
William's appaerance is rather average, having a face that blends easily into the crowd, despite the light blue tattoo of a serpent on his left cheek.. Standing 6' and of average weight, he can appear lanky at times. His hair is black and kept fairly short, his eyes a soft grey, while his skin is dusky, but fair. When not on duty, he dresses casually, preferring the baggy style of dress of his homeworld.

Personality
:
Easygoing, but softspoken, William has a habit of looking at things from every perspective. Almost always calm and with a dry sense of humour. He is loyal to his friends, while maintaining a polite distance from people he's not familiar with. A spiritual man as well, coming from the beliefs of his homeworld. While he will not talk about it much, he is certainly not ashamed of his spiritual side.

While he loves to watch movies, especially the classics, he's an outdoor person at heart. The days spend playing in the vast forests of his homeworld have given him a healthy understanding of nature.

William is always respectful to his superiors, in person or behind their back, but he does have the tendency to be awed very quickly in the company of one the more well known Starfleet officers, the men and women he idolised as a kid.

Background:
Hailing from Dunlanding, a Human colony world, William grew up in what is commonly known as frontier space. He had a happy childhood, growing up with two older brothers, Tuomas and Eduard, on his parents' gossamer farm. His parents would collect the cobwebs of the giant spiders, known locally as springers, kept at the farm, which would then be made into products like clothes and sails, strong but soft. William and his brothers would attempt to ride the giant spiders if their parents weren't around.

When he was six years old he, like everyone on Dunlanding, received his spirit tattoo, in his case a serpent. A tradition spanning back to the time when the first colonist crashed on the planet and had to survive without the aid of most technology for over a hundredandfifty years before being re-discovered. The colonists reverted back to a more primitive way of living, even courting the nature spirits of their new home. Their spiritual leaders, more shaman than anything else, would communicate with the spirits and bestow on each a mark that best connected them to the spirits and the planet. Even after re-establishing contact with the Federation and the influx of modern technology, belief in the spirits remained.

Despite most of life on Dunlanding is spent outside, like many kids, he became engrossed with space opera's he saw on the broadcasts. It showed the adventures of such Starfleet heroes as captain Kirk. William believed Starfeet to be a mighty force of explorators and peacekeepers, it's officers modern heroes. Many afternoons were spent in the forests, re-enacting the fights from the shows with his friends.

As he grew older he grew out of it for the most part, school and work at his parents' farm taking up most of his time, but the fascination for Starfleet remained. It would probably remained just that if not for the Starfleet officer present at his school graduation ceremony. The captain, an instructor at the Starfleet Academy, was there to give a speech and hopefuly encourage some of the graduates to the Academy. It was something William had dreamed about and with his parents' permission he applied to Starfleet Academy. He was accepted not long after.

Starfleet Academy proved to be interesting. It was less about heroics and more about study and hard work than he had imagined before coming there. Earth and it's crowded cities overwhelmed him at first, as did the many aliens he encountered. Dunlanding was in a backwater system, not much visited by anyone, let alone aliens. He quickly adopted however and wrote his family daily about all the new things he encountered.

It became obvious in the second year of the Academy that William's skills were in the sciences, despite his excellent physique and woodland skills. He was a natural scientist, especially biology and botany were taken in eagerly. Despite his only mediocre skills in engineering and computer science, he graduated with honours from Starfleet Academy, receiving a special commendation from the Academy instructor who had set him on this path four years earlier, captain Ibn Jeriko.

Following graduation, William applied for the assistant chief science position on the USS Camelot.