Rick Castillo

Character History

Born in 2359 to Academy classmates Brandon and Emma Castillo just after their graduation, Rick’s early years were spent on Jupiter Station. Brandon took care of Rick and his younger sibling Bailey while Emma, a stellar scientist, left on an eight month research opportunity aboard the SS Tsiolkovsky observing the collapse of a red supergiant star. All hands aboard the Tsiolkovsky were lost when the crew forced open an emergency airlock, and Rick lost his mother at the age of 11. Shortly after, Rick and Bailey were moved to Armstrong City on Earth’s Moon to live with their grandmother Eliana Taylor-Castillo.

During the state of emergency in the Sol system declared following the Battle of Wolf 359 in 2367, Rick was on a school camping trip on the Lunar surface. There was not enough time to reach a shelter area, and the students looked up to see the Borg cube appear, and eventually be destroyed, in Earth orbit “below” the Moon.

Rick was an avid, though not exceptional, member of the Parises Squares team at Günter Wendt High School. In 2369 he helped to organise a shuttle rally to Earth and back for the Apollo 11 400th Anniversary Festival.

Rick attended Starfleet Academy in 2371, unsure of his career path but certain to continue his family’s long history of fleet service. When war with the Klingons began during his second year, he had begun to imagine himself an attack fighter pilot, but his aptitude scores led instructors to guide him towards starship navigation. The Klingon war ended quickly, but immediately replaced with the Dominion War. Rick was on the Academy campus during Admiral Leyton’s attempted coup d’État and the sabotage of Earth’s planetary power grid.

At the completion of his second year, Rick was sent to the field for what was termed “accelerated training” as Federation casualties mounted. He was attached to the USS Sentinel, an Akira-class ship in the Second Fleet. His first mission was the offensive against the Torros III Shipyards. The Second Fleet took heavy losses during multiple attempts at liberating Betazed, and the Sentinel’s crew was rotated frequently to cover gaps on other ships. By the time of the final liberation of Betazed he was an acting Ensign and second most senior helmsman aboard; by the time of Operation Return, officers were treating him as a peer despite not having actually graduated the Academy.
USS Sentinel was briefly trapped behind enemy lines in Cardassian space. Engineer Gomez configured the ship to match the emissions signatures of a Galor-class ship. Rick spent most of the mission studying Cardassian fleet movements to help refine conn officer Tenmei’s course, making it appear as a legitimate patrol.

The command staff on the Sentinel were concerned that, developing in a time of war, Rick was too focused on the performance of his narrow job, and encouraged him to become a more rounded officer. This led to some training in formal etiquette in the hopes of a more peaceful and diplomatic future.
At the end of the war, Rick was transferred to the USS Forger. He assumed this was for his experience in piloting an Akira-class ship, but was surprised it carried so far as to make him ship’s most senior helmsman, and somehow, the head of a small team.

Rick’s family is multi-generational Starfleet back through the days of the United Earth Space Probe Agency, and perhaps farther; family mythology includes a member of the North American Aerospace Forces in the Sino-Western Trouble that led to WW3, though records of that period are uncertain, and stories differ as to her actual role in the service. An ancestor ran the facility building fusion reactors for Starfleet’s first Warp Delta class ships, and one of his sons would be a science officer on the last such ship decommissioned. Rick himself is named for his grandfather Richard Castillo, a helmsman aboard and presumed lost with the USS Enterprise-C during the Romulan attack on the Klingon outpost at Narendra III in 2344.

Rick has a footlocker case of physical possessions in his quarters, including a scale model of an SA-3 Talon ‘killer bee’ space fighter from the 2280s, a functional replica of a spacesuit from the 2024 Europa Mission, a grapple pistol, a jam jar sized bottle of regolith from the Moon under vacuum, a survival rucksack from a 2280s shuttle, a letterman jacket from his high school, a cup and saucer from the USS Sentinel officer mess, a digital display frame of family photos, a blue PADD storing his personal correspondence, and a straight razor shaving kit.