Mona’qé, Aquatic Anthropologist

Welcome back to another edition of Tuesday’s at Quarks! We’re continuing our look at the Sargon Region today with another NPC that you can use in your own adventures or with our living campaign adventures to customize things to your gaming group. Today I’ve got an interesting one for you: a whale in Starfleet!

The NPC of the moment, Lt. Mona’qé, is a Takaya’s whale, something of a weird corner of the Star Trek universe. Whales have been a part of Star Trek since the crew of the Enterprise scooped some up in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. It’s a little unclear, to be frank, what a cetacean officer in Starfleet would entail from the on-screen canon, but there are references in the episodes and technical manuals to Cetacean Operations which is supposed to be connected to navigation but Mona’qé is a scientist who specializes in observing civilizations unseen.

The most obvious use for Mona’qé is with the aquatic world in the Poseidonis Adventure where he can be leading the team observing the locals. Given the greater context of the region, however, Mona’qé could be pulled off his assignment to act as an “expert” in the cultural hegemony efforts in the Sargon Region. There are connections across light years that point towards some advanced civilization that insinuates itself into local customs, and Mona’qé has seen those local customs up close and personal. As your group’s starship travels the region looking for clues, Mona’qé could be a correspondent or even a Support Crew member who can provide some insight into the clues they find.

There are lots of ways to use this character, but here are a few plot hooks to get you started.

• On an assignment setting up an aquatic outpost on a frontier world, Mona’qé encounters a strangely warped subspace signal. It seems like a natural phenomenon at first, but Lt. Mona’qé determines that it looks like an encrypted signal, and one from the Tal Shiar at that!
• Following the events of the Poseidonis Adventure, Mona’qé needs to move a significant amount of equipment to Quobor II to sustain further study. This requires a starship to carry the equipment there and get it to the surface without alerting the Quoborites. As an extra concern, there is a dark matter energy source approaching the system that seems a lot like the one observed in the Planet of the Ebon Pearl.
• As an expert in the meta-cultural trends in the Sargon Region, Mona’qé is brought onboard the ship during one of the other living campaign scenarios. As a side plot, Mona’qé is immediately distracted as soon as he enters the ship, saying that he hears strange vibrations in the hull. Are there microfractures from some recent battle? An energy fluctuation building unnoticed in the warp core? Or has the lieutenant’s time among the Quoborites started to affect his mind?

Click on the image below for the PDF.