Odo

Character Information

Gender		Male
Species		Founder
Age		??

Physical Appearance

Height		1.8 meters (Humanoid Form)
Weight		??
Hair Color		Dirty Blonde (Humanoid Form)
Eye Color		Brown (Humanoid Form)

Family

Spouse		None
Children		None
Father		None
Mother		None
Brother(s)		All 'male' Founders would be considered to be his brothers
Sister(s)		All 'female' Founders would be considered to be his sisters

Personality & Traits

General Overview		Odo was a Changeling, one of a hundred infants sent out to explore the galaxy and compelled to return later in order to share their experiences. He served as chief of security aboard the space station Terok Nor, later known as Deep Space 9. After the Dominion War, Odo returned to the Great Link where he has taken on the role of Leader/Spokesman for the Dominion. Odo was one of the "Hundred Changelings", a group of one hundred newly-formed Changelings that the Founders sent out in order to gather information and explore and did not expect to return until the late-27th century.
Strengths & Weaknesses		Cares deeply for people he calls friends, no matter their species.
Languages		Federation Standard

Personal History

In 2337, Odo was found adrift in his natural gelatinous state in the Denorios belt in the Bajoran system. 19 years later, in 2356, he was brought to the Bajoran Institute for Science to be studied by Doctor Mora Pol. Not initially recognizing Odo as a sentient being, Mora subjected him to a long series of experiments, in which Odo endured time in a vacuum chamber and a protein decompiler, as well as extensive electric shocks. Odo eventually rebelled against Mora's unintentional mistreatment by forming into a tentacle and hitting him, before later forcing Mora to recognize him as sentient by copying a beaker on a laboratory table. Mora continued to study and teach Odo during the Occupation of Bajor, assisted by Dr. Weld Ram. When Odo assumed humanoid form, he copied Dr. Mora's hairstyle. During the Occupation of Bajor, Odo performed a Cardassian neck trick that greatly amused the Cardassian officers. When Odo left Dr. Mora's institute, he did not leave on good terms. He resented some of the methods Mora had used on him, and blamed him for not realizing that he was sentient. His name stems from the Cardassian word for "nothing," Odo'ital, which was mistranslation of the "Unknown sample" label on his laboratory flask. The Bajoran scientists nicknamed him "Odo Ital" as if it were a Bajoran name, and it was shortened to Odo. He used only the single name "Odo." Early in his life, when he heard others address him as "Odo", he heard it as "nothing." He felt that the name was appropriate, since he had no friends, no past, and no form; once he had gained the respect and affection of Kira and the others on the station, he ceased hearing "Odo" as "nothing" and simply considered it his name. At some point during the occupation, Odo arrived on Terok Nor. He was seen as an impartial outside observer, and often settled disputes between the Bajoran workers on the station. In 2365, due to his reputed neutral position, Odo was recruited by Gul Dukat to investigate the murder of a Bajoran collaborator. Among his chief suspects was Kira Nerys. Odo was able to discover that she was a Bajoran resistance fighter. He, at that time, lied to Dukat and did not reveal her identity. He discovered in 2370 that she was indeed the murderer. In their initial encounter, Kira sardonically called Odo "Constable", a term she later adopted as a term of affection, and which eventually fell into common use as an unofficial title. Odo continued working for the Cardassians, eventually becoming chief of security. In 2366, Odo investigated an assassination attempt (a bombing) on Dukat. Three Bajoran workers were initially linked to the attack, and Odo– too concerned with maintaining order and the rule of law– hurriedly convicted them and allowed them to be executed. If he had performed any kind of investigation instead of relying on circumstantial evidence, he would have seen that the three men were clearly innocent. However, he didn't know the difference between "order" and "justice" at that time. A bombing identical to the one that nearly killed Dukat occurred three days later, and he realized the men were innocent and that his lax investigative procedures caused a serious miscarriage of justice. This incident prompted Odo to be much more insistent on actual justice, though not necessarily the actual letter of the law. His guilt was revealed when after traveling through a plasma storm, his mind formed a link with the other passengers and caused them to relive what had happened seven years prior, the four taking on the roles of the convicted men and an unidentified Bajoran woman in a hallucination of the past. In 2366, Odo was designated an officer of the Cardassian court in order to testify in criminal cases. It was quite clear that his Cardassian employers still viewed him with suspicion; an automated counter-insurgency program designed to activate in the event of a slave revolt on the station was programmed to raise a force field around Odo's office on the assumption that he would shift sides to aid the insurgents. As an investigator in a totalitarian regime, Odo was occasionally required to operate outside official channels, and maintained a clandestine network of debts and allegiances to high-ranking members of the Cardassian government he could call on when needed. In the course of his career, he developed an extensive knowledge of espionage and assassination techniques, such as poison, explosives and scrambling signals. He retained his post as chief of security even after the withdrawal of the Cardassian forces, when the station fell under Federation administration and was renamed Deep Space 9. At first, Odo and Benjamin Sisko did not see eye-to-eye on how station security should be handled, but eventually they became close associates. Sisko stood by him when he was accused of killing a Bajoran he had arrested years earlier. When the Bajorans on the station became unruly and wanted to harm him, Sisko protected him. The situation was resolved when it was discovered that the Bajoran, Ibudan, had faked his own death in order to take revenge on Odo. Having been found in the Denorios belt, the discovery of the Bajoran wormhole provided him with further opportunity to investigate his origins. He was tricked by Croden into believing he had discovered Odo's people. The story had been fabricated by Croden to get Odo's help in rescuing Croden's daughter. Croden apologized to Odo for the deception and wished him luck in finding his people. Odo resolved the conflict between Kira, who threatened mutiny, and Sisko, who wanted to arrest her for treason. Both were affected by a matrix that contained a log of a similar battle in an ancient culture, causing the crew to do the same thing. Fortunately, Odo's non-organic nature rendered him immune to it, and with the aid of Doctor Bashir, he was able to remove the sphere's influence, and eject it out of a cargo bay door. His investigation of a Cardassian claiming to be Darhe'el, a war criminal, proved that the man was actually Aamin Marritza, a file clerk for Darhe'el who wanted the Cardassian people to realize their crimes. In 2370, an extremist group of Bajorans, known as the Circle, led by Minister Jaro Essa and supported by Vedek Winn Adami, demanded that all non-Bajorans leave DS9 and Bajor. Civil war threatened the planet, but Quark informed Odo that the Circle was being helped and financed by Cardassia in order to drive out the Federation, leaving the planet ripe for re-conquest. The weapons had been smuggled to the Circle through Kressari traders, which Odo revealed by using his shapeshifting abilities to "borrow" a manifest with a gul's thumbscan on it. When Odo was affected by a gas in the Gamma Quadrant that turned him into a destructive creature, Dr. Mora, the scientist who discovered Odo, helped cure him. Odo and Dax, while in the Gamma Quadrant, discovered a planet where the people were disappearing. The people were actually holograms created by Rurigan, the sole survivor of a planet destroyed by the Jem'Hadar. Odo and Dax fixed the holo-generator and restored the people. In the process, Odo formed an attachment to a little girl called Taya, even shifting into a top for her amusement before he and Dax departed. In the mirror universe, Odo's counterpart was an evil overseer of the ore processing plant. He was killed by Bashir. He helped represent Miles O'Brien in a Cardassian court on fake charges of aiding the Maquis. His knowledge of Cardassian law annoyed the court, and his delaying tactics provided time for Sisko to prove the evidence false, and gain O'Brien's release. During a mission to locate the Founders of the Dominion in the Gamma Quadrant, he found himself drawn to a rogue planet in the Omarion Nebula. There he discovered that the Founders were, in fact, Changelings like himself. After initially becoming annoyed with shifting into every plant and rock he could see, with the aid of the Female Changeling, he changed into a bird and took flight, finding that he enjoyed exploring his shape-shifting abilities. He soon discovered their distrust of "solids", though, and rejected them in favor of his friends. Later that year, he had another encounter with the Founders. Kira and Odo were on an away mission. They land on a planet to answer a distress call that seems to come from a Maquis Raider. While on the planet, Kira is captured and the Female Changeling assumed the appearance of Kira. The Changeling pretended that she was trapped inside a growing crystal that was suffocating her. When Odo admitted his feelings for Kira, he was subsequently able to see through the ruse when she claimed to feel the same way; he was sure that Kira didn't love him, but knew she wouldn't lie to him about something so important. It gave the Changeling an understanding of Odo's feelings for Kira, although Odo still refused to admit how he felt to the real Kira. He also served as host for Curzon Dax during Jadzia Dax's Trill zhian'tara, shifting into a form resembling Curzon. Initially, the two wanted to stay together, but Curzon was eventually convinced to return to the Dax symbiont. This gave Jadzia a greater understanding of the joy Odo found in his shape-shifting abilities and Odo learned about how much fun solids had staying up all night drinking and playing Tongo. In 2371, a newly "born" Jem'Hadar was found among the wreckage of a salvaged ship Quark had purchased. The baby matured into an adolescent within days, and as a Changeling (and therefore a Founder in the boy's eyes), Odo inherited the responsibility of looking after him. The Jem'Hadar was willing to do literally anything Odo asked of him. Odo tried to break the boy of this habit and encouraged him to think for himself and resist his natural-born tendencies toward violence. Ultimately, the boy decided that he belonged with the other Jem'Hadar and that anyone who was not Jem'Hadar was his enemy. Odo, wanting to protect the crew, escorted the boy to Dominion space. Also in 2371, Odo was forced to admit to Elim Garak that, despite his disgust at the Founders' behavior, he still wanted to return home. He accompanied Garak in an attempt to contact Enabran Tain. He became a prisoner of Tain, who was plotting, along with the Romulans, the extermination of the Founders. The plot failed, and Odo was aided in his escape by a Founder who was posing as a Romulan on Tain's ship, although he still rejected the offer to return home. This resulted in the disastrous Battle of the Omarion Nebula, in which both the Romulan Tal Shiar and Cardassian Obsidian Order were decimated. In late 2371, Odo was forced to kill a Changeling posing as Ambassador Krajensky, who had tried to provoke a war between the Federation and the Tzenkethi. He became the first Changeling ever to harm another. Odo, along with Rom, Quark and Nog, was transported back in time to 1947 (although none of the Ferengi knew about Odo's presence, he having sneaked onto the shuttle to catch Quark smuggling). This became known in history as the Roswell Incident. They eventually escaped and returned to their own time. In 2372, Odo accompanied Sisko on a trip to Earth to advise Starfleet on the Changeling threat. Odo was able to show them how easy it would be infiltrate Starfleet, and subsequently helped free Sisko from a prison after Sisko's old mentor, Admiral Leyton, was revealed to be staging a military coup. While there, he was secretly infected with a morphogenic virus by the rogue organization Section 31, in the belief that he would eventually link with others of his kind, transferring the disease and ultimately eliminating his entire species. He protected Shakaar Edon, the head of the Bajoran government, on his visit to the station, even though he was jealous of him because of his relationship with Kira. When Worf's brother, Kurn, arrived on the station after being dishonored by the Klingon High Council due to Worf's siding with the Federation in the Klingon attempt to conquer Cardassia, he gave him a job of security officer, although this ended when Kurn made constant attempts to die. Odo was also on the joint mission with the Jem'Hadar to stop a group of renegade Jem'Hadar from capturing the Iconian gateway. During the mission, Weyoun managed to infect Odo with a disease that would later force him to return to the Great Link. Later that year, Odo became desperately ill, not as a result of the virus, but because he had been poisoned by his own people in order to force him to return to them for treatment. There, he was judged by the Great Link and forced into his humanoid form permanently, unable to change shape, as punishment for harming another Changeling. While Odo was locked into a humanoid form, it hinted that he was essentially still a Changeling. Because, as Dr. Bashir would later point out, Odo's brain still contained morphogenic components. The other shapeshifters may have just used their greater collective ability while linked with Odo to force him to alter his form into that of a humanoid; guiding the specific elements of his transformation such as human physical makeup based on their expert knowledge of humans. While joined While part of the Link, he unwittingly infected his entire race with Section 31's bioweapon. Permanently locked into his solid state, Odo became extremely depressed. He found some comfort in the new sensations of eating and drinking, but this gave him little solace. Odo's frustration was exacerbated when Captain Sisko decided to bring him on an undercover mission to expose a Changeling infiltrator in the Klingon Empire. If he had been a Changeling, Odo could have simply changed into Chancellor Gowron's pet targ. Instead he, Sisko, O'Brien and Worf disguised themselves as recipients for the Order of the Bat'leth and attempted to expose Gowron as a Changeling via polaron radiation. Odo proved to be a less than intimidating Klingon, but the mission went as planned until someone recognized their true faces. The Starfleet officers were exposed and nearly executed, but General Martok helped them escape to complete their mission in the name of the Empire. Worf almost killed Gowron in honorable combat, but by this time, Odo had deduced that Martok was the true Changeling and his information about the infiltrator had been deliberately false to provoke further unrest between the Federation and the Klingons - weakening them and paving the way for a Dominion invasion of the Alpha Quadrant. The Martok Changeling was then killed by a barrage of disrupter fire. The mission was ultimately a success. Before undoing Odo's Klingon alterations, Bashir mentioned that he could surgically alter Odo's face to realistically resemble any humanoid; Odo declined the offer as he preferred his face the way it was. It was during Odo's time as a solid that the USS Defiant, through the treachery of an undercover Klingon named Arne Darvin, was sent back in time to the year 2268. The ship found itself near space station K-7 at a crucial moment when Darvin had been exposed as a spy and subsequently disowned by his people. Odo helped search for an explosive tribble to prevent Darvin from killing James T. Kirk, and even acquired one as a pet. He found Worf's recounting of the Klingons' "war" against the tribbles rather amusing, finding it hard to believe that a cute ball of fur was a "mortal enemy" of the Klingon Empire. Apparently, the Founders' attempt to force Odo to remain a solid took some time, as a plasma storm later reacted with leftover morphogenic enzymes and caused his mind to telepathically reach out to link with other Changelings. At the time, he was returning from a conference with Sisko, Garak and Dax, and the four of them were trapped in a dream-like but utterly realistic recreation of the Cardassian Occupation based on Odo's memories. The people in the dream believed them to be a group of Bajoran terrorists who had been executed during the Occupation, but instead of Odo, his predecessor Thrax was in charge. Odo did not realize (or did not want to admit to himself) that Thrax's actions in the dream were in fact a recreation of his own, and their personae there were a group of innocent Bajorans who had been executed because Odo sided with "justice" rather than his sense of right and wrong. The experience, a product of Odo's guilt, forced him to admit the truth to himself and others. In 2373, Quark found an infant Changeling among some salvage he had purchased, selling it to Odo. It was very sick, and, although Odo and Dr. Mora's attempts to teach it to change form as Dr. Mora had done with Odo did result in them making it form a face to look at Odo (along with various other shapes seemingly at a much faster rate than Odo had when in Mora's care), its morphogenic matrix began to destabilize. As it died in Odo's hands, it linked with Odo and restored his morphogenic matrix, allowing him to change form once again. This was done as a means of thanking its mentor for all that he had tried to do. As Doctor Mora departed the station, he encouraged Odo to think of his restored abilities as a gift the changeling wanted him to have, and Odo, in return, told Mora that he now had a better understanding of what Mora had done for him all those years ago. After the Dominion captured Deep Space 9, Odo was one of the few crewmembers who remained on the station, retaining his old role as constable, only with Dukat in charge. He joined the ruling council at the invitation of Weyoun. After the Female Changeling arrived on the station, his loyalties were in question. The Female Changeling realized that the reason Odo remained with the solids was his love for Kira. She linked with Odo, hoping to manipulate him. While Kira led a resistance cell, Odo did nothing to help. Rom was arrested, but Odo again did nothing, stating that he was at peace after his linking. Kira was later put into the brig and when the Female Changeling explained her plans for the solids, including the execution of Kira, Odo's eyes were opened. During the battle to retake Deep Space 9, Kira and Rom escaped with Odo's help. He and his security forces attacked the station's guards, allowing Kira and Rom to disable the station's weapons system, helping the Defiant retake the station. In 2375, he tried to help Weyoun 6 defect to the Federation, as Weyoun 6 believed that the Dominion War was a mistake, but his programming meant that he still saw the Founders as gods; contacting Odo was as close to a compromise as he could come. Unfortunately, due to the attack of Weyoun 7 and four Jem'Hadar ships, the attempt failed and ended with Weyoun 6's death, the Vorta triggering a termination implant in his brain that killed him in a matter of minutes. At this time, Weyoun also revealed that the Founders were all dying of a strange disease, and Odo was the only one who seemed unaffected by the disease. Some time after this, it was revealed that Odo was the original source of the morphogenic virus that was killing the Founders, having been infected by Section 31 during his brief visit to Earth in an attempt by Section 31 to end the threat of the Founders by committing genocide. Odo was beginning to die of the disease himself, but fortunately, after tricking Section 31 agent Luther Sloan into coming to DS9, Bashir was able to discover a cure for the virus, although it necessitated him and O'Brien each using a neural interface to enter Sloan's dying mind when the agent tried to kill himself rather than reveal the cure. Odo was instrumental in ending the war with the Dominion. He and Colonel Kira joined Damar's resistance group, providing valuable help in his fight against the Dominion. When the Female Changeling refused to order the Jem'Hadar and Breen forces to stand down, Odo linked with her, curing her of the virus and convincing her that she was wrong about solids and to stand trial after ending the war. In exchange, Odo agreed to return to the Great Link permanently to help build a new Dominion, and to cure his people. Unfortunately, this meant the end of his relationship with Kira. He was accompanied on his return to the Link by Kira. As he merged into the link, he changed into a tuxedo, which Kira liked him in. While in the Great Link, Odo was able to teach the Founders that not all 'Solids' were out to destroy them. Some, like the Federation, really did want peaceful relations with other species. In 2379, the Dominion fell into civil war. A handful of Founders wanted to break the Dominion War Peace Treaty and attack the Alpha Quadrant again. The rest of the Founders, including Odo, wanted to maintain the peace, which they though was mutually beneficial. When the Pegasus-B, commanded by Admiral Mike K'Wor Bremer arrived in the Gamma Quadrant to investigate the rumors of a Dominion civil war, and was attacked by a rogue Dominion ship, it was Odo and loyal Jem'Hadar that came to their aid. Through mutual assistance, the Federation/Dominion peace was further stabilized. After the Dominion Civil War was over in 2380, the remaining Founders that had split from the Great Link returned, Odo remained 'leader' of the Dominion. In 2388, following the discovery of a Dominion War era Dominion base still within the Beta Quadrant, Odo lead a small Jem'Hadar strike team to assist Admiral Bremer, Vice Admiral Sisko, and a Task Force from Starbase 400. It was hoped that Odo would be able to talk to the Vorta in charge, Deyos into surrendering peacefully. When that didn't happen, Odo's Jem'Hadar fought side by side with Starbase 400's Marines and Security in taking over the base on Iconia. Once the mission was over, Odo's 'body guard' and Jem'Hadar First, Ramata'tar requested to remain aboard Starbase 400 as the first Dominion exchange officer to serve aboard a Federation ship or starbase. Odo returned to the Gamma Quadrant where he's still an advocate for peace with the Federation.