Lieutenant JG Sam Matthews
Name Sam Matthews
Position Security Officer
Rank Lieutenant JG
Character Information
| Gender | Male | |
| Species | Human | |
| Age | 25 |
Physical Appearance
| Height | 6' 2" | |
| Weight | 188 lbs | |
| Hair Color | Black | |
| Eye Color | Dark Brown | |
| Physical Description | Tall and athletic at 6’2” (188 cm), Sam carries a lean-muscular build made for reach and quick footwork rather than brute force. He moves quietly, heels down and balanced, with an easy “at ease” posture even when still. His dark brown eyes habitually scan a space before settling into eye contact, giving an attentive, steady look that reassures rather than challenges. Hair is kept regulation-short—tight at the sides—and he’s usually clean-shaven, though end-of-shift stubble isn’t unheard of. Up close, a faint hairline scar at his left temple (Brighton shrapnel) and a couple of pale heat specks on his right forearm are visible. On duty, his uniform is crisp and ordered—boots polished, duty jacket sitting flat, phaser holster worn high and secure, tricorder pouch aligned exactly where it should be. Off duty he keeps things simple: fitted tees and duty joggers, nothing flashy. His resting focus tends to soften into a small, reassuring half-smile when he engages someone. |
Family
| Father | Colin Matthews An orbital logistics foreman with the Federation Transport Authority based out of Earth Spacedock. Formerly a cargo specialist on a Starfleet auxiliary tender, he’s practical, unflappable, and big on checklists—Sam’s love of tidy kit and clean incident logs comes straight from him. Off duty, Colin is a patient tinkerer who can lose an evening to fixing an old grav-bike. |
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| Mother | Dr Priya Shah-Matthews An emergency physician with London Central Medical who rotates into Federation Disaster Response during major incidents. Warm but formidable, she taught Sam that composure is a kindness and that de-escalation saves more lives than bravado. She’s notorious in the family for brewing tea strong enough to strip paint. |
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| Brother(s) | Theo Matthews An apprentice composites technician at the Antares Fleet Yards, specialising in structural panels and micro-layer repairs. Bright, cheeky, and easily distracted by half-finished projects, he messages Sam at odd hours with holos of whatever he’s building—and occasionally to ask how to talk his way out of trouble with a supervisor. |
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| Sister(s) | Asha Matthews A planetary ranger with the Federation Parks & Heritage Service, posted to a temperate preserve on a mid-rim colony world. Outdoorsy, wry, and fiercely protective of her patch, she ribs Sam about choosing an “indoor job”, yet checks on him after every rough mission. When home, she drags him hiking and times his sprint splits. Imogen (“Imo”) Matthews A final-year student focusing on xenolinguistics and music therapy. Sensitive and sharp, she’s the family’s best listener and Sam’s favourite person to decompress with after a long shift. She’s considering a civilian placement aboard a hospital ship, which Sam both encourages and worries about in equal measure. |
Personality & Traits
| General Overview | Sam is a calm, quietly ambitious security officer whose first instinct is to de-escalate and protect. He favours clear procedure, tidy evidence trails and humane authority over theatrics, and he’s the sort who reads a room before he speaks. His manner is measured and respectful—“good-cop” by instinct—but not soft; when a line needs holding, he holds it cleanly and without fuss. Brighton matured him quickly: seeing real harm up close left him with a visceral commitment to shielding bystanders and a belief that composure is a kindness. In the field he communicates in short, steady bursts, keeps people anchored with his presence and dry humour, and prefers prevention to confrontation—visible, dependable, never provocative. He’s reflective and coachable, folds feedback into his practice, and takes pride in being the teammate others naturally steady themselves on. Beneath the restraint is a firm moral centre: Sam is empathetic without being naïve, decisive without being heavy-handed, and always trying to leave a scene safer than he found it. | |
| Strengths & Weaknesses | Strengths Composed under pressure, Sam communicates clearly and keeps others calm, favouring prevention and de-escalation over theatrics. He’s meticulous with procedure—evidence, chain-of-custody and reports are consistently clean—and his situational awareness is strong, translating into disciplined room entries and tidy sector coverage. He builds rapport quickly without losing professional distance, integrates smoothly with Marines or other departments, and adapts to new briefs fast. A steady moral centre underpins his judgement, so his authority reads as humane rather than heavy-handed. Weaknesses Brighton left him with a few sensory tripwires—smoke, sudden concussive noise, sustained heat—that he manages well but still feels. He can defer to senior voices longer than he should, which occasionally slows initiative, and in highly ambiguous situations he may cling to protocol when a bolder read is warranted. He’s prone to shouldering burdens quietly instead of asking for help, has limited exposure to high-stakes political/diplomatic theatre or deep-cover work, and dislikes public-facing scrutiny, which can blunt his voice in briefings if unchecked. |
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| Quirks | Sweet tooth for caffeine: Takes coffee (and tea) far too sweet; claims it “takes the edge off” after shifts. Scent memory: Can identify several wing sauces by smell alone—annoyingly accurate about honey-garlic. Grounding ritual: Rolls his right shoulder twice and checks kit placement with a quick four-point tap before stepping into a lift or a new space. Breath mirroring: Unconsciously matches a distressed person’s breathing to calm them—often without noticing he’s doing it. Paper-and-pen loyalist: Keeps a small pocket notebook for names, pronunciations and quick sketches of layouts, even with a perfectly good tricorder. Entrance awareness: Rarely sits with his back to an unsecured doorway; if he has to, he’ll clock sightlines first. Tidy by reflex: Straightens misaligned items on tables and consoles without thinking—holsters, mugs, PADDs in neat rows. Fidget token: Carries a small, dented grav-bike washer from his dad’s toolbox; turns it with his thumb when thinking. |
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| Ambitions | Short term (next 6 months): Qualify as Alpha shift lead; complete the shipboard counter-sabotage/anti-tamper certification; run point on a live boarding/hostage drill; start mentoring a new Security ensign; tighten his command voice in briefings. Medium term (1–2 years): Promote to Full Lieutenant; specialise in shipboard investigations with a Counter-Intelligence liaison remit; cross-train with Marines on VBSS; earn Field Evidence Tech II and Diplomatic Security modules; lead a multi-department security case from first response to charge sheet. Long term (career): Serve as Assistant Chief of Security and build a reputation for humane, high-standards policing; develop a de-escalation & room-entry syllabus for fleet use; eventually teach at Starfleet Academy Security or run training detachments afloat. Personal growth: Build resilience around Brighton triggers; add a second language for field work; join Federation Disaster Response as a reservist to marry Security skills with crisis medicine ethos learned at home. |
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| Hobbies & Interests | Off duty, Sam keeps things simple and steady. He trains on the holodeck a few times a week—short circuit sessions, light sparring, and the occasional bouldering route or zero-g climb to keep his head quiet and his footwork sharp. He’s a low-key social creature: happy at a shipboard quiz night, a friendly cards table he rarely wins, or a quiet corner of the mess with a good brew. Food is a small joy—he experiments with marinades and wing sauces (to frankly nerdy levels), and he’s slowly becoming a passable batch-cook of stews and tray bakes for friends coming off late shifts. Coffee is his other vice; he’ll happily talk pour-overs and grind size if you let him. When he wants to think, he tinkers—usually with a small toolkit and whatever needs mending—an echo of evenings spent helping his dad with grav-bike parts. He keeps a pocket notebook for sketching room layouts, jotting names and pronunciations, or working through a tricky incident in pen and ink. To keep his judgement sharp he reads after-action reports and dips into de-escalation research, and he’s trying to add a second language in short, stubborn daily bursts. For pure calm he’ll set up a quiet holodeck beach or try to solve a few hands of three-dimensional chess, more for the focus than the victory. Occasionally he runs a short, informal self-defence and breathing session for junior crew—nothing flashy, just practical skills that help people feel steadier on their feet. |
| Personal History | Sam grew up between two worlds that ran on alarms, checklists and cups of tea at odd hours: his mother’s shifts at London Central Medical and his father’s cargo decks on Earth Spacedock. Weekdays might begin with school in the city and end with a shuttle ride to the habitat rings; he learnt early that composure is contagious and that safety lives in small habits. Family was the fixed point. Sunday roasts when everyone’s rota allowed, shared breakfasts grabbed in hospital canteens, and long walks along the Thames when his mum needed daylight after nights on call. On Spacedock, his dad showed him how a bay breathes when people respect procedure—lockout tags, clear lanes, hands where they should be—lessons that later became second nature in Security. He is unabashedly family-orientated. Asha dragged him up hills on leave and taught him the quiet discipline of keeping pace with someone else; Theo inherited their dad’s love of tools and roped Sam into fixing whatever was half-finished; Imogen practised listening until people felt steadier—something Sam copied without quite realising. Group calls were (and remain) sacrosanct, and when he left for the Academy he promised to keep the thread alive. He has. Starfleet Academy — Security Track Security felt like an extension of how he’d been raised: look after people, keep the flow, leave every space safer than you found it. He gravitated to small-unit tactics, room-entry discipline and evidence handling, with a particular interest in de-escalation and humane authority. His mother’s triage stories shaped his belief that a calm voice can change an outcome; his father’s logistics gospel made him meticulous about chain-of-custody and clean reports. He volunteered with the peer-support programme, the closest thing on campus to the listening he’d watched Imogen practise at home. Cadet cruises and placements kept him close to the worlds he knew: a term with Earth Spacedock Security conducting embarkation checks and controlled detentions; a Disaster Response observation block that left him with a healthy respect for scene safety; and a short attachment with a station armoury where he developed a tidy kit habit that never quite left him. He didn’t chase medals or headlines; he chased consistency—clear comms, steady hands, and teams that trusted each other. Pre-Moore Assignments Commissioned out of the Academy, Sam asked for work that would keep his skills honest rather than glamorous. He started with Earth Spacedock Security, spending just under a year on Gate Team Three. The rota mixed embarkation screening, embark/disembark crowd management, and custody transfers from civilian dockmasters. He learnt the art of a clean stop: clear introductions, open palms, and questions that de-pressurise rather than inflame. A short stint supervising the detention block and auditing the armoury ingrained chain-of-custody habits he still follows—every seal logged, every handoff witnessed. A quiet highlight was catching a set of forged cargo seals on a bonded container; his tidy evidence trail later underpinned a successful prosecution, earning him a letter of appreciation from Station Legal. He then took a six-month secondment to a Sol patrol cutter, rotating through boarding teams alongside Customs. The work was repetitive on purpose—dockside disputes, randomised hull searches, and the odd hot run when a freighter tried to outrun a summons. Boarding drills sharpened his room-entry discipline and comms brevity; he also picked up the knack of talking a nervous skipper down from defensiveness to compliance. The cutter’s most testing shift came responding to a pressure-loss event on a small passenger hauler: Sam helped with the sweep and assisted first-in triage, falling back on lessons he’d absorbed from his mother. He later noted a mistake in his own report—he’d clung to the checklist when a distressed passenger needed immediate human contact—and built a personal rule from it: protocol first, people firster. A short relief posting to a regional starbase rounded out the pre-Moore tour. Security there felt like city policing in space: permit checks, union-hall disagreements, and high-stakes diplomacy happening two doors down. He set up de-escalation zones outside a contentious trade hearing, liaised with station counsellors, and observed just enough diplomatic theatre to know when Security should be seen and not heard. Across these postings he earned Field Evidence Technician I, Small Craft Boarding & Search, Crowd Management, and Hazardous Materials Handling certifications, with an Intermediate Phaser Rifle qual. Mentors mattered: a no-nonsense training petty officer drilled kit discipline into him; a patient detention supervisor modelled lawful empathy. Sam wrote home often, kept family calls sacred despite odd hours, and arrived on the Moore with a reputation for steadiness—reports that stand up, entries that are clean, and authority that reads as humane. USS Moore Sam joined the Moore straight off his patrol-cutter secondment and settled into Security with quiet efficiency: tidy kit, clear comms, and a bias for de-escalation. The early months were about earning trust—shadowing watch officers on custody transfers, learning Lieutenant Commander Davaris’ preferences at thresholds, and drilling room-entry language until it lived in muscle memory. He integrated cleanly with the Marines for VBSS practice runs and became the dependable pair of hands you wanted on a door: corners clean, voice steady, reports that stood up when read by someone who hadn’t been there. His first real test came during a soft lockdown on Deck 7 when a hydroponics sensor flagged a possible biohazard. While Medical traced the alert to a benign fungal bloom, Sam organised a calm corridor and a “quiet room” near Sickbay, working the door like a metronome—slow breaths, simple instructions, clear sightlines. It was a small incident, but it introduced him to the ship’s pulse: the way crew anxiety spreads and how a composed presence can contain it without force. A week later, at Hargrave Station, a plasma conduit ruptured along the cargo promenade while the Moore was docked. Security’s job was crowd control and evidence preservation. Sam set a clean cordon, de-pressurised tempers with courteous stops, and helped catalogue scorch patterns and broken housings for the station investigators. No fatalities crossed his path, but the smell of hot metal and the hush that follows an alarm stayed with him; he wrote a thorough handover that Ops later cited in their own report. He then spent a short, intense spell on prisoner-transfer duty during a shuttle hop from Starbase to the Moore. The detainee, a freight clerk caught in a customs fraud, panicked in transit and tried to self-harm. Sam went to ground in front of him—hands visible, voice low, instructions specific—then secured restraints with careful wording and even more careful pressure. It was the first time he saw how lawful empathy could tilt an outcome. Davaris’ debrief afterwards shaped a rule he still follows: hold the line, and hold the person. A derelict-tug boarding off the normal shipping lane gave him his first live entry on the Moore. Working under Marine supervision, he helped clear the tug’s narrow spine, called “stun-only” posture, and located a data core for Engineering. The scene was more dust than danger, but it taught him to keep chatter sparse and angles clean, and to leave a compartment exactly as Investigations would want to find it. Back aboard, he filed a precise evidence log that drew a nod from the armoury chief. Not everything was crisis management. He took a quiet pride in the ship’s morale, helping oversee boxing night in Cargo Bay Two, checking rope tension, exits, and med cover before taking a light spar that ended with a grin and a handshake. He also pulled a week of VIP corridor duty during a trade liaison visit, where his uniform stayed immaculate and his presence unobtrusive as diplomats drifted past. Chloe de la Vega learnt to save him a portion when he came off the late watch; in return, he made sure her staff always had a clear lane during surprise inspections. Brighton Colony marked the first hard edge. Caught near the initial blast while on shore leave, he fought through heat and smoke to clear a lane for evac, talking panicked civilians down and keeping his own voice level even when his ears rang. The memory of a man who wouldn’t wake stayed with him; in the weeks after, he doubled his breath work and volunteered for the late watches others avoided. It didn’t make him harder, exactly—just more certain that composure is a kindness. At the memorial he stood quietly beside Ensign Bishop, the sort of presence that anchors without speeches. Not long after, the Moore’s “Terrorist Moon” operation gave him his first taste of coordinated assault under Marine command. Working alongside 1st Lieutenant Th’relnal and Gunnery Sergeant Matewa, Sam slotted into a breaching element and executed textbook entries through a chain of service corridors—stun first, restraint clean, evidence tagged and bagged with practised hands. He kept sectors covered while Davaris negotiated a surrender three rooms over, and he learnt when to speak up and when to be the calm in the stack that keeps everyone honest. The auxiliary warp-core incursion was quieter but just as instructive. Responding to an unauthorised presence in a sealed compartment, he helped unseal the space, conducted a methodical sweep, and escorted the detainee with firm courtesy. He logged every seal, hand-off and time stamp, and made a point of leaving the scene undisturbed for Investigations. The lesson he took from Davaris that day—lawful empathy is still lawful—became part of the way he polices. A few weeks later he joined a search-and-rescue shuttle during a sensor-shadow incident in a dust-heavy nebula, where he put his Brighton lessons to work—mask on, voice steady, slow count-in for a frightened crewman until they were clear of the hatch. Over time, Davaris trusted him with more voice on the net and more influence at the threshold. He began mentoring a new Security ensign on room-entry language and the choreography of a clean arrest. He picked up certifications—Field Evidence Tech II, Small Craft Boarding & Search renewal, and a Crowd Management refresher—and an informal reputation as the one who will both back you in the room and write the report that protects you afterwards. Off duty he remained a regular, steady face in the mess; Chloe de la Vega learnt to save him a portion when he came off a late watch, and he, in turn, made sure her staff got a clear lane during surprise inspections. By twenty-five, he’d become part of the Moore’s rhythm: visible, dependable, humane. He still calls home after the bad watches, still straightens misaligned items on the det-block desk, and still believes a calm voice can change an outcome. The ship has sharpened him, but it hasn’t blunted what he came aboard with—an instinct to protect, a respect for process, and the quiet certainty that leaving a space safer than you found it is its own kind of victory.. |
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| Service Record | 2380.08–2384.05 — Cadet — Security Track — Starfleet Academy (San Francisco) — Small-unit tactics, room-entry, evidence handling, de-escalation; Peer Support. (Incl. 2383.02–2383.08 attachments: Earth Spacedock / DSR obs. / Station Armoury.) 2384.06–2385.10 — Ensign — Security Officer / Boarding Team — Earth Spacedock → Sol Patrol Cutter — Gates, detention & armoury audits; VBSS with Customs; pressure-loss lifesaving assist. 2385.11–2386.02 — Ensign — Relief Security Officer — Regional Starbase — Permit checks; de-escalation zones; Counselling liaison. 2386.03–2386.11 — Ensign — Security Officer — USS Moore — VBSS drills; Deck 7 soft lockdown; Hargrave Station rupture; prisoner transfer; derelict tug; VIP/boxing night. 2387.02–2387.05 — Ensign — Security Operations — USS Moore & Away Teams — Brighton evacuation; Marine-led breach/clear; aux warp-core escort; SAR shuttle (dust nebula); unit & individual commendations. 2387.06–Present — Lieutenant (JG) — Security Officer / Acting Alpha Shift — USS Moore — Mentors junior; Evidence Tech II; humane, high-standards policing. |
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| Awards & Decorations | Starfleet Lifesaving Commendation — Brighton Colony Evacuation For establishing a safe egress and calming civilians under immediate threat following the initial blast; recognised for composure, clear instructions, and effective crowd control under hazardous conditions. Unit Citation (USS Moore Security/Tactical) — “Terrorist Moon” Operation Awarded to the Security/Tactical element for coordinated entries under Marine command leading to mission success with no friendly casualties; cited for discipline and evidence integrity. Search & Rescue Service Ribbon — Dust-Nebula Sensor-Shadow Incident For service aboard the SAR shuttle, assisting Medical in stabilising and evacuating affected crew; credited with preventing secondary injuries through calm scene management. Joint Operations Ribbon — Marine Integration (VBSS/Boardings) In recognition of seamless integration into Marine-led boarding stacks during live derelict clearances and routine intercepts; maintained concise comms and non-lethal posture. Crisis Response Service Ribbon — Hargrave Station Conduit Rupture For orderly cordon establishment, evidence preservation, and interdepartmental liaison during the promenade incident while docked. Captain’s Commendation — Prisoner Transfer Intervention For humane restraint and de-escalation of a distressed detainee in transit, preserving life and ensuring a clean, lawful handover. Security Excellence Citation — Auxiliary Warp-Core Incursion For meticulous chain-of-custody, scene integrity, and professional conduct during the investigation and escort of an unauthorised individual from a sealed compartment. Good Conduct Medal — Year One, USS Moore For exemplary conduct, reliability on watch, and consistent adherence to procedure. Operations Letter of Appreciation — Evidence Handover (Hargrave) Letter entered into service jacket for thorough incident documentation that supported Operations’ technical review. Starfleet Service Ribbon — Active Shipboard Service For satisfactory completion of initial qualified service period aboard a line vessel. |