Editing Vladimir Goldmark (section)

==Ancestry== 
Vlad’s grandfather on his father’s side was a Reman shock trooper who escaped from his Romulan commanders and hid on Turkaran IV around 2345. His grandmother, Shanda Myre, was the daughter of Federation citizens on Turkaran just before it’s separation from the Federation. She became a victim of a rape gang in which the Reman participated when she was 14… the night before her family was scheduled to escape. 

The family did escape, but all did not go as planned. They made their rendezvous with the private shuttle Shanda’s father, a doctor, had arranged to transport them to a safer Federation colony, but on route out of the system, the shuttle was attacked and badly damaged. Off-course and without adequate control systems, the craft crashed on a habitable but relatively low-tech world, peopled by an isolationist humanoid race of unknown origin. Shanda was the only survivor. 

One of the families on the planet took Shanda in. They were kind enough in their way, but provincial and suspicious of that which they did not understand. When it became clear that the girl was pregnant, their people began to study the equipment left behind in the crashed shuttle diligently… they were sufficiently technologically advanced to understand what it was, but they did not know how to activate the signaling systems that might bring Shanda’s people to pick her up. However, as her pregnancy became increasingly difficult, they redoubled their efforts.

After almost a year of diligent study, the isolated community’s top minds succeeded in activating the signal beacons. But it was too late for Shanda. She had died giving birth to a child that to her adoptive family appeared to be a monster. It was humanoid and obviously male, but the pale, yellow-eyed creature screamed every time the sun shown on it. Feeding time was a nightmare, especially when they discovered by accident that it had a taste for fresh blood. The couple that had cared for Shanda found themselves being shunned by their neighbors… some even encouraged them to kill the child. Had not a nearby Federation ship received the signaling beacon when they did, the well-meaning but increasingly frightened couple might not have been able to preserve Shanda’s strange child’s life much longer. 

The commander of the away team sent to the surface to collect the child and the shuttle’s logs spoke only briefly with the planet’s representatives before being requested to leave and never come back. She obliged, forwarding the planet’s passionate lack of interest in maintain further interstellar contact to Starfleet, and turned the child over to her ship’s doctor.

When the boy’s story was pieced together and his half-Remun heritage was determined, Federation officials sought a suitable home for their ward. A couple was found in one of the mining colonies on Janus VI who were willing to adopt him… and the conditions there suited his physiological needs. So, the nameless orphan soon became Pavel Goldmark, son of human extraction engineer Sam Goldmark and Doctor Danika Goldmark. 

The Goldmarks did not care what their child looked like, or what the neighbors thought… in fact, they found Pavel’s pale, ridged skin, sharp teeth, and yellow eyes exotically attractive; and his pointed ears rather cute. They encouraged Pavel to see his differences not as disabilities, but as opportunities to develop talents that few others had at his level. When Pavel grew up, he followed his natural tendencies into the colony’s police force, where he became a detective in record time. He married the lovely human biologist Myri Linderman and settled down to raise his own family, safe from the sun in the mines.