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Vrazhan's mother Airokal served the Romulan Star Empire as an aide to Vice-Proconsul M'ret. Her family was so proud that she served someone only two steps below Praetor Narviat, but that pride quickly evaporated as it became clear that she supported M'ret's efforts to end repression in the Empire. Increasingly ostracized and pressured by her parents, aunts, grandparents, and siblings to officially disavow M'ret, Airokal chose instead to defect with him and a fellow aide. In fact, it was Airokal whom M'ret tasked with contacting the underground reunification movement. She often told Vrazhan when e was a child about having met Ambassador Spock in the process; her beaming face telling this story is one of Vrazhan's most prized memories.
Entering stasis and trusting their fate into the movement's operative aboard the IRW Khazara, one Sub-Commander N'Vek, the three left their home forever. Thanks to N'Vek's abduction of Starfleet Lieutenant Commander Deanna Troi of the USS Enterprise-D (and said Betazoid's quick thinking,) the defection succeeded despite being betrayed by the Corvallens who were meant to facilitate it. Settling into the Starfleet base Draken IV after being interrogated by Starfleet Intelligence, Airokal found companionship and love with a Tellarite engineer on the base, one Petty Officer, First Class Dvoriv bim Sgolv. M'ret went on to become deeply involved in Starfleet-Romulan operations, and her fellow aide also ended up finding love with an alien. He flew to Betazed out of a desire to personally thank the Troi clan for Deanna's efforts, only to end up married to one of her cousins.
Vrazhan has long called his half-Betazoid daughter Lwabir eir cousin. Lwabir is now an agent with the Department of Temporal Investigations.
As a child, Vrazhan's parents stressed that the Romulans could send agents in any number of disguises and elaborate schemes. Vigilance was the cost of their freedom, which drove Vrazhan to hours spent behind the wheel of small shuttlecraft acquired by any number of means (begging, borrowing, stealing, various school assignments and field trips, etc.) and getting away from others. Though e just wanted to get away from everything, e still needed a destination, and so ended up exploring any number of ancient Romulan ruins across Draken IV's surface.
Vrazhan grew up uneasy about the role of the military and scornful of the idea that e might serve in Starfleet. Dvoriv was, of course, saddened by the idea; the sprawling, deafeningly loud arguments about Vrazhan's future bonded the two together in a fashion only possible for Tellarites. In the end, faced with his wife's history and the Dominion War breaking out when Vrazhan was all of 3 years old, Dvoriv had to concede that his child's future did not lie with Starfleet. Airokal urged Vrazhan to still find a way to serve the Federation, as a way of honoring the risk she took in defecting and its reasoning.
Romulus was consumed by the supernova of its sun when Vrazhan was 17 years old; e left Draken IV the very next year to attend university. The University of Bajor gave Vrazhan a degree cum laude in interstellar activism, with a minor in security diplomacy in 2392 at the age of 22, and e joined the Federation Diplomatic Corps immediately upon graduating. Both parents attended eir induction ceremony, beaming with pride. Vrazhan's graduating thesis had been about the need for involvement by outside polities in sapient rights movements, arguing that it was impossible for change to occur from within a system defined by and defining its elements.
Vrazhan requested that eir first placement be far from eir mother's people. Eir feelings about the remnants and successors of the Romulan Star Empire were simply much too complicated; it is hard to get onto one's feet in a tumultuous storm like that. Accordingly, the attache was sent on a civilian mission following the Starfleet Operation Full Circle. They were tasked with establishing and normalizing relationships with the various civilizations and species being re-contacted by the Full Circle Fleet and originally contacted by the USS Voyager. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was there that the USS Quauitlicac made first contact with a species called the Yusocch whose language was marked by an interlocking grammar, wherein one person's utterance was inflected and marked by their communication partner's. A sentence was meaningless unless considered in relationship with what else was being said at the same time.
For eir work in discovering this phenomenon, translating the Yus(ird)occh language, and modifying diplomatic protocols in order to enable productive interaction, Vrazhan was called back to the Beta Quadrant. Relations between the United Federation of Planets, the Klingon Empire, and the Romulan Star Empire had begun to deteriorate after the USS Kelso's destruction in 2395 revealed Starfleet's experiments with cloaking technology, and so Starfleet Intelligence reached out to Vrazhan in hopes that the half-Romulan could be of some use in preserving the peace. Despite SI being all too similar to the Tal Shiar in Vrazhan's eyes ~ all military intelligence being suspect ~ e felt secure enough now in eir diplomatic capabilities to engage once more with eir mother's people.
And so e did, making numerous trips into the Romulan Star Empire and various successor states, begrudgingly pursuing Starfleet Intelligence's goals while assiduously working through normal diplomatic channels to ensure that whatever rebuilt itself from the destruction of Romulus proved less repressive than its forebears had. For the most part, this exhausting double life involved supporting and empowering the faction known as the Romulan Republic. As stated, ambassadorial work by day followed by infiltrating any number of underground movements by night leaves not a lot of time for rest. Recently, however, reports have come across eir desk about infiltration of the Gorn Hegemony by Species 8472.
It's a good thing Romulan ale is so strong, as Vrazhan fears that eir workload will soon be increasing yet again.
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