Katja Matysik

"Phasers and tactics win battles. Words prevent them." - Nyota Uhura Captains spin tales of the Kobayashi Maru, legendary final exam of the command track cadets. In engineering circles there are the Black Box tests of ingenuity and insight, spoken of in hushed terms around warp cores across the fleet. For the rest there are what's officially called Lateral Thinking Simulations, aka LatSims. Normally scenarios torn from Starfleet archives and fictionalized just enough to keep the solutions from being obvious. Working through a puzzle on the bridge under the supervision of a serving Starfleet captain. They're meant to replicate the collaborative decision making of a senior staff. And Katja Matysik is just amazing at them. She's trained in the comms track and has this knack for seeing stress indicators through the noise of the universal translator, it's brilliant and irksome at the same time. The girl from Warsaw is top of her class in xenolinguistics... a disfavored track at the academy, very few linguists graduate the academy, comms officers don't get the glory... but sometimes they stop wars. But one LatSim at a time Matysik is showing an entire academy class just how important it is to listen beyond what the Universal Translator outputs. And honestly it's kind of annoying. There's a revolution coming to Starfleet, everyone can see it. After the Dominion War, Voyager's return, and the crippling of the Borg everyone sees a chance for Starfleet to return to its roots, to science, diplomacy, and away from the martial side of things. In a single cadet that revolution is Matysik. As a tactical cadet with a minor in a scientific field you wind up arguing with Katja all the time. Not because she's wrong, she's usually right, but because she can get myopic about the comms and not see the bigger picture. Admittedly Katja's example has inspired you to see the bigger picture, to see cultural cues in tactics. She's made you a better cadet. Not that you'll admit it.