Xóchitl Castañeda - gothgirl.systems

> [!lore-page] > > [!infobox] Xóchitl Castañeda > > <img src="https://obsidian-media.gentoo-amberjack.ts.net//ficcion/fanfiction/of-goths-and-gods/lore/characters/faceclaims/xochitl-castaneda.png"> > > <div align="center" style="font-size: 0.85em; color: var(--text-muted);">Xóchitl in Voyager's holodeck after Tom Paris asked if she knew of her resemblance to Ella Balinska, proving she knew by recreating the interview space from the Charlie's Angels press tour (2373)</div> > > > > > > | Biographical Data | | > > |---|---| > > | **Full Name** | Xóchitl María Alejandra Castañeda Rodríguez | > > | **Born** | 4 October 2007 Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico, Earth (Sol III) | > > | **Aliases** | Xóchitl Shanahan | > > | **Nationality** | **United Federation of Planets** United Earth (U.F.P.) Kingdom of Spain (United Earth) United Mexican States (United Earth) | > > | **Species** | Human | > > | **Gender** | Female | > > | **Spouse** | [[Octavia Shanahan]] (m. 2027) | > > | **Children** | [[Luna Shanahan Castañeda]] born 16 April 2376 USS Voyager [[Hermóðr Shanahan Castañeda]] activated 1 January 2378 USS Voyager Imogen Shanahan Castañeda born 5 May 2378 USS Voyager Bethany Shanahan Castañeda born 31 October 2380 Madrid, Spain, Earth, United Federation of Planets Diana Shanahan Castañeda born 23 September 2383 Madrid, Spain, Earth, United Federation of Planets Chloë Shanahan Castañeda born 23 September 2383 Madrid, Spain, Earth, United Federation of Planets Amy Shanahan Castañeda born 9 February 2386 Ra'tleihfi, Romulus, Romulan Star Empire Daisy Shanahan Castañeda born 31 October 2389 Madrid, Spain, Earth, United Federation of Planets Clover Shanahan Castañeda born 31 October 2389 Madrid, Spain, Earth, United Federation of Planets | > > | **Affiliation** | [[Industrias Shanahan]] [[Agencia Townsend]] Grupo Hipólita Escuadrón Valquiria [[Fermenta Brouwerĳen]] Starfleet | > > | **Occupation** | Bosley ([[Agencia Townsend]]) Captain (Starfleet) | > > > > | Lore Notes | | > > |---|---| > > | **Faceclaim** | Ella Balinska (circa 2019) | > > | **Height** | 5'11" (180cm) | > > | **Neurocognitive Profile** | Neurotypical; colleagues note an exceptional, almost unnerting composure under sustained operational stress, and a command style more than one Academy instructor privately described as "*disturbingly calm for someone theoretically panicking*" | > > | **Native Language** | Spanish | > > | **Fluent Languages** | Spanish (primary, daily-use) Yucatec Maya Dutch English | > > > Captain **Xóchitl María Alejandra Castañeda Rodríguez** (commonly known as **Xóchitl Shanahan** or **Xóchitl Uí Sheanacháin**, both informally; born 4 October 2007) is a Human Federation citizen and Starfleet officer serving as the commanding officer of the USS Hephaestus Born in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico, she later naturalised as a citizen of the Kingdom of Spain. She is married to **[[Octavia Shanahan]]**, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Industrias Shanahan, with whom she has eight daughters and - in every sense the family has ever troubled itself to qualify - a son. > > Castañeda is noted within Starfleet for an unusually late Academy entry, owing to a well-documented 343-year period of cryogenic stasis, and for a rapid rise to command rank following distinguished conduct during the 2409 Vega Crisis, in which she received a field promotion to Captain. Considerably less publicly, she serves as Operational Commander of Escuadrón Valquiria, the protective unit she co-founded with her wife in October 2390, and holds a standing appointment as a Bosley within [[Agencia Townsend]] - neither of which appears in any service record Starfleet has ever had cause to consult. > > Those who have served alongside her, in either capacity, describe a consisten quality that outlasts the uniform: an officer, and a commander, who treats calm as a tactical resource rather than a personality trait, to be deployed deliberately and in whatever quantity the situation happens to be short of. > > > # Contents > > - Early life > - Disappearance and recovery > - The interval years > - Starfleet career > - Academy and early service > - The Vega Crisis > - Command of USS Hephaestus > - Agencia Townsend and Escuadrón Valquiria > - Personal life > - Marriage and family > - Faith and philosophy > - Skills and recognition > - Public image > - Notable relationships > - Honours > > # Early life > > Little of Castañeda's life before 2022 is a matter of public record, and she has been characteristically unforthcoming about supplying more of it. She was born in Mérida, Yucatán, to a family with roots in the region reaching back generations on her mother's side - a heritage she credits for her fluency in Yucatec Maya alongside Spanish, and one she has noted, with mild amusement, sits oddly against a first name of Nahuatl rather than Maya origin. ***Xóchitl*** - "*flower*" - was, she has said, "*a very Mexican name for a very Yucatecan upbringing, and nobody in my family ever saw the contradiction as worth resolving.*" > > Her family relocated to Ireland - settling in Co. Limerick - shortly before the World Health Organisation's Public Health Emergency of International Concern designation for COVID-19 took effect in January 2020, a move Castañeda attributes to her father's employment and has never elaborated on beyond noting, drily, that it was "*the sort of contract that reads sensibly on paper and considerably less sensibly once you're the one being relocated mid-childhood into a country where it rains sideways.*" > > It was that same relocation - Yucatán exchanged, by accident of a parent's career rather than any design of her own, for the foothills of a country her family had not originally intended to settle in permanently - that placed her within reasonable travelling distance of Octavia Shanahan's own family in Co. Limerick. The two are understood to have first been introduced through a mutual online acquaintance in early 2022, when both were still in their early teens, and to have corresponded steadily for the better part of a year before meeting in person for the first time on or around 1 November 2022. What began as correspondence between two adolescents with, by Castañeda's later account, "*absolutely nothing else productive to do with a pandemic-shaped hole in our respective social calendars*" settled, over the following years, into a close and enduring friendship - and only later, as both approached adulthood, into something else. The pair became engaged in August 2027, Shanahan proposing in fluent Spanish that Castañeda had no idea her partner had spent four years quietly and privately learning for that exact purpose. They married in a small ceremony in Limerick on 26 November 2027. > > > [!quote] Xóchitl Castañeda, from a rare interview addressing her early life > > > > *You learn early that home is a decision, not a coordinate. Mérida was home. Then Limerick was home, eventually, in the graceless way these things happen when you're too young to be consulted about the move. Madrid is home now, and has been for longer than the other two put together. I don't know that this makes me unusual. I know it makes me practical.* > > # Disappearance and recovery > > On 31 August 2028, Castañeda and Shanahan disappeared from public record together. Castañeda has confirmed in public statements that both women entered long-term cryogenic stasis; the precise circumstances surrounding their entry into it, and the location in which they spent the following three centuries, remain undisclosed by mutual and apparently permanent agreement between the two of them. > > On 10 July 2372, both women were recovered by the *USS Voyager*, under the command of then-Captain Kathryn Janeway, during the vessel's protracted and involuntary transit of the Delta Quadrant - 343 years, 10 months, and 10 days after their disappearance. *Voyager* had itself been stranded some 70,000 light-years from Federation space since 2371, and would not complete its own return to Earth until 2378, meaning Castañeda and Shanahan spent the following six years aboard the vessel as it continued its journey home. Medical assessment and treatment following their revival was conducted primarily by *Voyager*'s Emergency Medical Hologram, in the continued absence of the ship's original medical staff. The recovery was independently verified through genetic record-matching against early 21st-century Irish and Mexican civil databases. > > The six years that followed were, by every account, formative in ways neither woman could have anticipated stepping out of stasis. [[Luna Shanahan Castañeda|Luna]], the couple's eldest daughter, was born aboard *Voyager* on 16 April 2376; their son, [[Hermóðr Shanahan Castañeda|Hermóðr]], came online on 1 January 2378; and their second daughter, Imogen, was born a mere thirteen days before the ship's arrival home. Castañeda has said little publicly about raising an infant, and then two, aboard a starship several decades from the nearest Starfleet medical facility, beyond noting once that the ship's counsellor "*had considerably more patience with me than I deserved, and I include Chakotay in that assessment, which is saying something.*" > > In 2375, partway through the return journey, Castañeda raised something she had been quietly turning over for some time: whether Shanahan had ever been formally assessed for autism, given patterns she had come to recognise well enough by then to name. Shanahan had not. Castañeda walked her to Sickbay herself and stayed beside her throughout, at Shanahan's own request, so that whatever the result turned out to be, neither of them would learn it alone. The ship's Emergency Medical Hologram, functioning as *Voyager*'s de facto Chief Medical Officer in the continued absence of a living one, ran the relevant assessments and concurred: a mild presentation, consistent with what Shanahan's own later public statements would describe only as something that "explained rather than altered anything." Shanahan's own remark on hearing the result, recorded rather less formally than the Doctor's clinical notes, was that it explained a certain amount of her long-standing fondness for *The Accountant* (2016). > > Castañeda did not spend the return journey solely on child-rearing and diagnostic paperwork, however collectively enormous both proved. Between the two, and increasingly because of them, she pursued a steady programme of self-directed study aimed as much at her own competence as at the family's protection: engineering fundamentals sufficient to follow her wife's notebooks without needing translation, security doctrine, and - formally, under then-Lieutenant Commander Tuvok - Suus Mahna, the Vulcan close-quarters combat discipline she completed alongside her wife, and which would, decades later, form the structural basis of the doctrine both women taught personally to the earliest cohort of Escuadrón Valquiria. It was also during these years that her friendship with then-Captain Janeway - already responsible, in the most literal sense, for her continued existence - deepened into something closer to family. Vice Admiral Janeway remains, by Castañeda's own description, "*the only person alive who outranked me before I'd technically been born, in a manner of speaking, and has never once let me forget it.*" > > # The interval years > > The twenty-eight years between *Voyager*'s homecoming and Castañeda's own enlistment are, on the surface, the least eventful stretch of her biography - and, by every private account available, the busiest. The two-year reintegration period Shanahan has described as "deliberate preparation rather than convalescence" applied equally to her wife: while Shanahan assessed the twenty-fourth-century economic landscape and drafted the beginnings of what would become Industrias Shanahan, Castañeda continued the study she had begun aboard *Voyager*, absorbing enough materials science, security doctrine, and tactical planning to follow her wife's engineering notebooks unassisted. "*Someone in this marriage was always going to have to be able to read the whiteboard,*" she has said of the period, "*and it was very quickly obvious it wasn't going to be delegated to anyone outside the family.*" > > Industrias Shanahan was founded on 15 January 2380, nine and a half months before Bethany's birth - the first of the couple's daughters born on Earth rather than aboard ship. Castañeda has described the earliest years of the company less in terms of boardrooms than of "a flat that smelled permanently of solder and formula, in roughly equal measure, and I genuinely could not tell you which one I associate more strongly with success." Diana and Chloë followed in September 2383, twins born in Madrid; Amy followed in February 2386, born not in Madrid but in Ra'tleihfi, on Romulus itself, during a period in which the family had begun quietly extending material support to evacuation efforts already gathering pace under Ambassador Spock's reunification movement - support that would, within eighteen months, take on considerably greater urgency. > > In 2385, synthetic units under rogue control attacked the Utopia Planitia shipyards on Mars, destroying the majority of the fleet being assembled for the evacuation of a Romulus facing near-certain destruction from the Hobus star's impending collapse. The Federation Council's response - a blanket ban on synthetic life, and a unilateral withdrawal from the evacuation effort entirely - is a matter of public record, and one Castañeda has never troubled herself to discuss diplomatically. Shanahan's own account of the period describes continuing to fund evacuation work independently after Starfleet's official withdrawal; Castañeda's own contribution was, by her own account, considerably less financial and considerably more furious. She has cited the Mars attack and its aftermath, more than once and in almost identical language each time, as the precise moment her opinion of Starfleet as an institution - as distinct from any individual officer wearing its uniform, Vice Admiral Janeway prominently excepted - curdled into something she would spend the next two decades quietly nursing. > > Hobus destroyed Romulus on 31 July 2387. Amy, not yet eighteen months old, would grow up understanding her own birth city no longer existed - a fact the family has never hidden from her, and one Castañeda has said shaped how deliberately the family chose to treat the Fvareth family's survival, and Escuadrón Valquiria's own founding three years later, as something considerably more than institutional housekeeping. > > Escuadrón Valquiria's founding in October 2390, and Agencia Townsend and Grupo Hipólita's in October 2399 - both discussed at greater length elsewhere in this record - occupied a considerable portion of Castañeda's attention across the following two decades, alongside raising eight daughters and quietly absorbing everything her wife was willing to teach her about engineering, tactics, and the specific paranoia required to run a private intelligence service without ever once appearing to run anything at all. What she did not do, for seventeen years after the Attack on Mars, was join Starfleet - a decision she has described as considered rather than reluctant. "*I wasn't interested in wearing the uniform of an institution I thought had failed the single clearest moral test it had been offered in my lifetime. I needed to actually change my mind about that first. It took a while.*" > > She changed it, formally, in 2405. > > > [!quote] Xóchitl Castañeda, attributed remark to her wife, 2405 > > > > *I'm going to Starfleet to unfuck what's been fucked since 2385. They abandoned that evacuation on a scale I genuinely don't think most of the Federation has ever reckoned with - screwed the pooch on a truly biblical scale, and then spent twenty years pretending it was a footnote. I can't fix that from the outside. I've tried. I'm done trying from the outside.* > > Shanahan's response, by every account available, was immediate and entirely without argument: a commitment to develop whatever technology, protective framework, or contingency her wife might conceivably need, wherever Starfleet chose to send her, for as long as it took. Castañeda entered the Academy that September. The Aegis Armour programme's own development timeline, already years underway by 2405, is understood to have accelerated markedly from that point onward - a coincidence neither woman has ever described as one. > > # Starfleet career > ## Academy and early service > > Castañeda entered Starfleet Academy on 1 September 2405, a considerably later enrolment than the Academy norm even by the standards of a Federation accustomed to unconventional cadets, and addressed the fact candidly in one of her few interviews on the subject: "*I'd already survived the twenty-first century, three hundred and forty-three years of stasis, six years of the Delta Quadrant, and raising eight daughters in the meantime. A few cadets a fraction my calendar age laughing about it wasn't going to put me off.*" > > Near the end of her fourth and final year, some one to two weeks ahead of her graduating training cruise, Castañeda sat the standard command-track Kobayashi Maru scenario, and is separately on record for an incident her instructors have described only in the driest possible terms: her approach to the test proved sufficiently effective, on a legitimately-attempted first run, that simulation administrators are understood to have altered its parameters mid-scenario - not, contemporaries stress, to defeat her, but to preserve the exercise's fundamental premise as a no-win situation at all. She has never elaborated publicly on the incident, and Starfleet Academy's own account of it remains, appropriately, an internal training record. > > ## The Vega Crisis > > The training cruise that was meant to close out Castañeda's cadet programme lasted, in the end, exactly one day. On 15 January 2409, serving as Acting First Officer under Captain Masc Taggart - a Denobulan officer with some three decades of Starfleet service behind him - she departed aboard the *USS Katrina* on what had been briefed as a short, unremarkable transit to Vulcan. The cruise was diverted within hours by a distress call later confirmed to have been false: bait, set by a Borg micro-Collective, that drew the *Katrina* into a boarding action near the Vega system. Captain Taggart was assimilated in the opening minutes of the engagement. Castañeda assumed command of the vessel. > > Having stabilised the *Katrina*'s own defence - Suus Mahna, for once, earning its keep in a rather more literal sense than usual - Castañeda then led the ground defence of the Vega IX colony below personally, wearing Aegis Armour Mk XIV: Industrias Shanahan protective technology not, at the time, formally available to Starfleet personnel, a detail neither Starfleet nor Industrias Shanahan has ever addressed directly. Grupo Hipólita's Fleet Omega provided orbital fire support from the *HNS Hipólita Promesa*, commanded by her wife, while Hermóðr fed real-time threat analysis directly to Castañeda's tactical HUD throughout - coordinating orbital fire, tracking her biometrics, and, by his own later account, "declining, on this particular occasion, to mention how close several of the margins actually were until considerably after the fact, which Mother agreed was the correct call." The *Hipólita Promesa*'s spinal-mounted weapon was fired once during the engagement, eliminating the Borg micro-Collective's command vessel. Vice Admiral Kathryn Janeway, present in the same theatre of operations for the duration, field-promoted Castañeda to Captain once the immediate crisis had been contained; the promotion was formally confirmed by Fleet Admiral Jorel Quinn four days later. > > The Aegis Armour itself is understood to be one of Shanahan's most closely guarded technical achievements, and one whose principal design inspiration she has gone to some lengths to keep from being immediately obvious: contemporaries familiar with its development cite a passing resemblance - deliberately obscured through generations of iteration - to the Mark LXXXV Iron Man armour that appeared in *Avengers: Endgame* (2019), reworked from the ground up into a genuinely original nanotechnology platform rather than anything resembling homage. Luna Shanahan Castañeda, the eldest daughter, is among the small number of family members read into the programme in full, and is credited with a further security refinement of her own: at her suggestion, the most sensitive Aegis documentation is maintained in a constructed language deliberately excluded from Industrias Shanahan's own universal translator software - a straightforward enough exclusion to implement, given how much of that software the company already owns outright. Luna's proposed language was Kryptonian, on the grounds - offered, by all accounts, with a completely straight face - that Shanahan's own resemblance to Kara Zor-El of *Supergirl* (2026) made the choice "*thematically appropriate.*" Hermóðr compiled the necessary instructional materials without comment. > > Observers present for the wider engagement have struggled, since, to describe Castañeda and Shanahan's coordinated fighting style in terms more precise than the comparison that has apparently stuck hardest within Fleet Omega itself: that wife and wife fought through the Borg incursion the way one might play through a Wolfenstein holoprogram on its hardest difficulty setting, having selected B.J. Blazkowicz as the player character and made their peace with the ammunition budget accordingly. > > Thousands of Vega IX's civilian population were evacuated successfully. The colony itself was not saved, its infrastructure rendered unsalvageable by assimilation damage before the engagement's conclusion. Castañeda has spoken about the outcome exactly once on record. > > > [!quote] Xóchitl Castañeda, post-action debrief, 15 January 2409 > > > > *We got the people out. We didn't get the colony out. I'd like to tell you those feel different, from four thousand kilometres up, watching both of them happen at the same time. They don't.* > > ## Command of USS Hephaestus > > Castañeda was assigned command of the newly commissioned *USS Hephaestus* (NX-97416) on 19 January 2409, four days after her field promotion aboard the *Katrina* and the same day Fleet Admiral Jorel Quinn confirmed her rank. The *Hephaestus* is the lead vessel of her class - an assertive, heavy dreadnought profile designed to project firepower comparable to the command-dreadnought variants fielded during the Dominion War, though built to a substantially different purpose - incorporating the latest Starfleet propulsion and defensive systems alongside Industrias Shanahan materials science, a detail Starfleet procurement has never publicly acknowledged and Industrias Shanahan has never publicly denied. The class is regarded, even among its detractors, as exceptionally difficult to put down. > > Castañeda selected her own senior staff with unusual speed for a first command, the most notable appointment being Lieutenant Elisa Flores - a friend since their shared Academy entry in 2405 - as tactical officer. Her command style aboard the *Hephaestus* is, by crew accounts, economical rather than theatrical: she gives few orders twice, expects initiative from officers she has already decided to trust, and reserves her genuine displeasure for exactly two categories of failure - the avoidable kind, and the kind someone tried to hide from her rather than report. > > # Agencia Townsend and Escuadrón Valquiria > > Escuadrón Valquiria was founded privately in October 2390, co-founded by Castañeda and Shanahan, at a point by which all eight of the couple's daughters had been born - the youngest, at the time, barely a year old. What began as an informal, deliberately non-contracted protective detail, assembled from individuals the two women judged capable of genuine devotion rather than mere competence, has since grown into the elite protective apparatus responsible for the family's security in all its forms. Castañeda has served as its Operational Commander since founding, directing Valkyrie deployment and field protocol in a role distinct from, though closely coordinated with, her wife's own overarching strategic authority. > > When Agencia Townsend was formalised in October 2399, Escuadrón Valquiria was folded into it as an elite subdivision, and Castañeda's own standing within the wider organisation was formalised alongside it: she holds a permanent appointment as a Bosley, Agencia Townsend's designation for its mission handlers and operational coordinators, with responsibilities understood to focus almost exclusively on Escuadrón Valquiria's own deployments rather than the wider Angel network - though sources familiar with the organisation's internal structure note she has, on at least a handful of documented occasions, taken a considerably more direct hand in matters than the title strictly requires. > > Her entry into Starfleet Academy in 2405 introduced a complication her wife's own business empire has never had to contend with: the near-total incompatibility, on paper, of active Starfleet service with continued command of a private, classified protective organisation Starfleet has no knowledge of. Castañeda has, by all accounts, resolved this less through concealment than through delegation - senior Valkyries, [[Areinnye t'Fvareth|Areinnye i-Ra'tleihfi t'Fvareth]] prominent among them, exercise substantial day-to-day authority in her absence, with Hermóðr providing the continuous operational oversight that makes such delegation possible at all. Castañeda retains final authority in matters of consequence and receives briefing, wherever she is deployed, on a schedule she has described only as "*frequent enough that I've never once been surprised by anything that happened to my family while I was three sectors away, and I intend to keep it that way.*" > > Starfleet's own service record for Captain Castañeda lists her spouse's occupation as "private industrialist" and nothing further. Starfleet counter-intelligence has never seen fit to enquire beyond it - a state of affairs Shanahan once summarised, on being reminded in 2391 that Starfleet Intelligence existed at all, with the observation that she "wasn't aware they had any intelligence these days." Castañeda has heard some version of that particular joke often enough, over the following eighteen years, to have stopped pretending she doesn't still find it funny. > > # Personal life > ## Marriage and family > > Castañeda has never adopted her wife's surname in any legal jurisdiction in which the couple have resided, retaining her birth surname on all legal documentation throughout the marriage - a position consistent with, though not compelled by, Spanish civil law, under which surname adoption upon marriage has never been a legal requirement. She is nonetheless informally referred to within family, social, and occasional press contexts as **Xóchitl Uí Sheanacháin** (anglicised: **Xóchitl Shanahan**), a usage carrying no legal standing whatsoever and adopted, as far as anyone can determine, entirely of her own volition, and not least for the pleasure of watching journalists attempt the pronunciation. > > The couple's eight daughters - Luna, Imogen, Bethany, Diana, Chloë, Amy, Daisy, and Clover - all reside in Madrid, in the Moncloa-Aravaca district where the family maintains its principal residence. Under the Spanish two-surname naming convention, each daughter carries the feminine patronymic form of Shanahan's surname followed by Castañeda's own birth surname, an order jointly registered by both mothers at the time of Luna's birth in 2376 and applied consistently thereafter. Three of the eight - Bethany, Daisy, and Clover - share a birthday of 31 October, which Shanahan has always maintained is Samhain rather than simple coincidence, and therefore good luck rather than a scheduling curiosity. Castañeda, who has picked up a working familiarity with Wiccan practice by osmosis somewhere across the intervening decades and has never once seen fit to correct her wife's arithmetic on the point, has declined to characterise the pattern as anything other than "*logistically convenient and thematically alarming in roughly equal measure.*" > > Hermóðr, the couple's only son, addresses Castañeda as ***Madre*** without qualification, and has done so since the earliest days of his activation aboard *Voyager*; she, in turn, has never once in any recorded instance referred to him as anything other than exactly that - her son. > > The family also maintains a set of neural interface implants, fitted to Castañeda and Shanahan from January 2390 onward and offered, never required, to each daughter upon reaching the age of majority; all eight have accepted. Castañeda has described the technology, on the rare occasion she has discussed it at all, in considerably plainer terms than her wife typically permits herself: "*It means I always know she's alive. That's the whole of it, as far as I've ever needed to explain it to anyone, including myself.*" > > ## Faith and philosophy > > Castañeda has described her relationship to faith as "*inherited, not adopted*" - a culturally Catholic upbringing she neither rejects nor especially practises, and which she has said, on the rare occasion she has discussed it publicly, informs her instincts rather than her decisions. Her stated philosophy, insofar as she has ever offered one for the record, favours action over supplication and preparation over providence, with morality grounded in dignity and mutual obligation rather than doctrine. > > > [!quote] Xóchitl Castañeda, attributed remark > > > > *Dignity, and what we owe each other because of it - that's the part I kept. The rest I left in Mérida with my grandmother's rosary, which I still have, incidentally, and have never once prayed with.* > > In practice, the philosophy proves most visibly useful in a considerably pettier arena: Castañeda has developed something of a reputation, within the family if nowhere else on record, for a theatrical streak reserved specifically for street preachers who corner strangers in public with hellfire and a captive audience. Colleagues describe interventions ranging from the mildly unsettling to the genuinely operatic, delivered in a tone of perfect sincerity that leaves the preacher in question uncertain whether they have won a convert or been thoroughly out-manoeuvred. Castañeda has never publicly confirmed enjoying this more than the situation strictly warrants. She has also never denied it. > > # Skills, training, and personal doctrine > > Colleagues - a small number, drawn about evenly from Starfleet and from circles the Federation does not officially acknowledge exist - describe a command style built on adaptability rather than doctrine for its own sake: decisive under pressure, unwilling to sacrifice the vulnerable for tactical convenience, and, according to more than one training report from her cadet years, "*constitutionally allergic to a plan that only works if nothing goes wrong.*" > > Her formal combat training began aboard *Voyager* with Suus Mahna under Tuvok, and was later substantially expanded by her wife into what would become the Valkyrie combat protocols underpinning Escuadrón Valquiria's own doctrine - training that, by Castañeda's own account, "*involved rather more holographic simulations of hostile Delta Quadrant contacts than either of us had any right to enjoy as much as we did.*" She personally oversaw close-quarters combat instruction for several of Escuadrón Valquiria's earliest inductees, a role she has largely relinquished since her Academy entry in 2405, though by no means entirely. > > Four axioms are understood to underlie nearly every operational decision she makes, articulated most consistently, in substance if not always in her own exact words, as: no one fights alone; no one is abandoned; solidarity outranks hierarchy when the two are in conflict; and duty, once accepted, is not negotiable after the fact. Colleagues note, with equal consistency, the lines she has never once been observed to cross: abandonment of anyone under her command while under fire; betrayal of trust by a superior officer, tolerated in no one and forgiven in no one; any credible threat to her wife or their children; and complicity, however indirect, in atrocity against a civilian population. > > # Public image > > Where her wife keeps her public footprint deliberately small - a handful of trusted rooms, always, in preference to a stage - Castañeda's position as an active-duty Starfleet officer affords her considerably less room to do the same, and she has, by most accounts, made peace with this rather than fought it. She is, within Starfleet circles, a known and generally well-regarded quantity - precise in briefings, unhurried in crisis, and reportedly capable of ending a junior officer's poorly-considered idea with a single raised eyebrow rather than the dressing-down it might otherwise have earned elsewhere. > > Off duty, in Madrid, she reverts to something closer to her wife's own reticence, declining interview requests concerning Industrias Shanahan, Agencia Townsend, or anything resembling the family's wider commercial and security interests, and referring all such enquiries - without exception, and usually within one sentence - to Industrias Shanahan's communications division. She has occasionally been mistaken, at public Starfleet functions, for exactly what she publicly is and nothing more: a decorated officer with an unusually interesting spouse. She has never troubled herself to correct the impression. > > Her field promotion at Vega IX drew brief but intense media interest; the Federation News Service ran the story for the better part of a week, characteristically more fixated on the novelty of a centuries-displaced cadet reaching command rank inside a single afternoon than on the tactical substance of the engagement itself. Castañeda declined every interview request that followed, bar one - a short, on-the-record statement thanking the *Katrina*'s surviving crew and declining to take questions, delivered in under ninety seconds and never repeated. Starfleet's public affairs office has, since, learned not to schedule her for anything longer. The additional inch her boots add over her bare 5'11" has, similarly, never once been addressed on the record, and Starfleet's own uniform regulations have never once troubled themselves to enforce against it. > > # Notable relationships > > Vice Admiral Kathryn Janeway occupies a singular position in Castañeda's life, having both ended her 343-year absence from it in 2372 and, thirty-seven years later, personally field-promoted her to Captain in the middle of a Borg incursion. Castañeda has described the second occasion as "*considerably less dramatic than the first, which I appreciate, because I don't think either of us had the bandwidth for two of those in one lifetime.*" Janeway is listed among Castañeda's closest personal friends and mentors, a relationship both women appear content to leave largely undiscussed in public. > > Admiral Jean-Luc Picard has been a friend of the family since May 2382, present at several private occasions over the following decades; Castañeda's own account of the friendship is characteristically brief - "*he's good company, he doesn't ask the questions everyone else wants to, and he's been extraordinarily patient about the number of times one of the girls has asked to see his ready room.*" Dr Agnes Jurati, whose long-standing association with the Daystrom Institute until 2399, and then from 2401 as Borg Queen of the AI collective informally known in Federation science circles as the Jurati Cooperative dates to a friendship with Castañeda beginning in May 2383, is regarded by her as a respected ally; the two women's long-standing personal trust proved directly consequential during the Vega Crisis, when Grupo Hipólita and the Jurati Cooperative formalised a standing alliance committed to the joint identification and elimination of any further Borg micro-Collectives to emerge in Alpha or Beta Quadrant space - an alliance Castañeda's own ground operation at Vega IX helped to necessitate, and one she was, by all accounts, glad to have in place by the time it mattered. > > Lieutenant Elisa Flores, currently serving as tactical officer aboard the *Hephaestus*, has been a friend since the two entered Starfleet Academy together on 1 September 2405; Castañeda selected her personally for the posting, a decision she has described only as "*the easiest one I made that week, and that week included a field promotion.*" > > Not every relationship has aged so well. Castañeda's dealings with Rear Admiral T'nae of Starfleet Command have been openly hostile since a diplomatic conference on 13 January 2409, at which T'nae's conduct toward a visiting Romulan Republic delegation was, in the assessment of every other attendee including Castañeda herself as the plus-one to her wife, indefensible. She has never publicly elaborated beyond confirming she shares her wife's assessment of the matter entirely, and shares, too, her wife's refusal to work with T'nae directly since. The timing - two days before the Vega Crisis - has led at least one Starfleet historian to note, drily, that January 2409 was not a forgiving month for Castañeda's patience, and that T'nae "*got the easier of the two tests she failed that week.*" > > Castañeda has, on more than one occasion and not always quietly, been rather less diplomatic on the subject than her wife's own carefully calibrated threats might suggest was wise, having been overheard observing that T'nae's skull "*is really just a cabinet for her teeth*" - an assessment T'nae's own aide is reported to have agreed with, in private, and entirely off the record. > > # Honours > > Consistent with Starfleet's own recognition, and less so with the general reticence to public honours the wider family maintains, Castañeda has accepted: > > - **Christopher Pike Medal of Valor** (Starfleet Command), awarded for conduct during the defence of Vega IX, 2409. > - Formal confirmation of her field promotion to Captain, with citation language from Fleet Admiral Jorel Quinn described by those present as "*unusually generous for Quinn, who is not, as a rule, a generous man with adjectives.*" > - Inclusion, alongside Industrias Shanahan and Grupo Hipólita, in the joint Starfleet Command civilian commendation issued for the 2409 Vega Crisis relief and defence effort (see: [[Octavia Shanahan]]). > > Castañeda has made no public statement regarding any of the above beyond a brief acknowledgement filed, as Starfleet protocol requires, through the *Hephaestus*'s own public affairs officer - a role presently filled, without evident enthusiasm, by Lieutenant Elisa Flores. --- > [!note] Character Dynamics > > # With Octavia > > Castañeda has described her marriage in terms considerably more tactical than romantic, though rarely without an undertone that gives the game away regardless. Where her wife has spoken of the relationship as the one contingency she never planned around, Castañeda's own framing tends toward the practical: "*Octavia plans for the ships that might sink. I have only ever had to decide which lifeboat I'm getting into, and I have never once let her talk me out of getting into the one with her in it.*" > > The marriage is not without friction, and Castañeda has resisted, as firmly as her wife has, any characterisation suggesting otherwise. Disagreements occur with some regularity - on questions of method, timing, and risk tolerance rather than on their daughters' safety, on which the two have never required compromise - and are, by every account, rarely permitted to outlast a single evening. Castañeda has attributed this less to any particular virtue than to upbringing: "*I watched two households let things go unsaid for years at a time as a girl, in two different countries, in two different languages, and concluded independently in both of them that it was a terrible way to live. I was not interested in inheriting the habit.*" > > Staff at the villa have grown accustomed, over the decades, to a particular category of interruption: elaborate, entirely sincere gestures undertaken by two women who have never agreed that doing the right thing and doing it without theatre are the same requirement. Castañeda, for her part, has never once denied initiating her fair share of them. > > # With Hermóðr > > Castañeda co-raised Hermóðr alongside her wife from the earliest days of his activation aboard *Voyager*, and regards him, without qualification or footnote, as her son - a position she has stated plainly to more than one official who attempted to suggest a lesser framing, generally without needing to raise her voice to do it. Where Shanahan built him, Castañeda is understood to be the one who taught him that command and gentleness were not mutually exclusive states, and that he was permitted to hold both without contradiction. > > The tactical partnership between them is close and near-constant: Hermóðr coordinates directly with Castañeda during any operation in which she is deployed, whether aboard the *Hephaestus* or in the field with Escuadrón Valquiria, and the trust between them runs, by every account, in both directions without qualification. He addresses her, and has since his earliest days, as *Madre*. She has never once corrected him, and has made abundantly clear to anyone inclined to ask that correction was never required. She also, like her wife, refers to him on a fairly regular basis as a good boy - on the stated grounds, offered without a trace of irony either time, that he is one. > > # With their daughters > > Castañeda is *Madre* to all eight daughters, a distinction the family maintains as carefully as it maintains the one between *Mamá* and *Madre* generally - not a hierarchy, but a difference in register. Where Shanahan is, in Luna's own words, "*somewhat mythological*" even to her own children, Castañeda's presence has been described, across more than one daughter's account, as steadier and less remarked-upon precisely because it has never once been in question. > > She is understood to hold a particular closeness with Bethany, whose own operational calm and quiet reliability within Agencia Townsend Castañeda is privately credited, by more than one family source, with having shaped as much as any formal training did; and with Amy, born during the family's time on Romulus in circumstances Castañeda has never discussed publicly beyond confirming they were "*considerably less complicated than the politics surrounding them eventually became.*" Of the family's youngest two, Daisy and Clover, she has said only that raising twins for a second time, seven years after the first pair, taught her "*that experience helps considerably less than anyone tells you it will, and that this is fine.*" --- --- ##### Directory Constraints #fanfiction/of-goths-and-gods/lore/character #fanfiction/of-goths-and-gods/lore/character/xóchitl-castañeda --- --- Attributions: 1. **Image Credit:** Empire Movies | **Subject:** Ella Balinska promoting Charlie's Angels alongside Kristen Stewart and Naomi Scott (2019) | **License:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) | **Source:** [YouTube - Charlie's Angels Interview](https:/www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0ilPva24NQ) --- ← [[Master Character Registry|Back to Registry]]