Name/Nicknames: Kanaye Zimraan (Kana)
Gender: male
Rank/Position: senior scientist, Dragon Project
Age: 57
Birthplace: First Centauri

Physical Description: Kanaye is 5'9" with a thickset build that does little to hide his paunch. His short, straight black hair is now liberally silvered and somewhat thinner than he would like, and he will often threaten to shave himself bald rather than see it all drop out gradually. He is dark-skinned with dark green-brown eyes and features that show a mixture of races in his ancestry. He has long, nimble fingers that seem a little out of place given the stockiness of his build. His voice is extremely deep and tends to carry very well.

Personality: Kanaye is an avuncular man, genial and easy-going with almost all those he interacts with. His sense of humour is generally gentle and his temper rarely roused unless on a subject he cares passionately about -- many a student will testify that his disappointment is far more damning than his anger. Extremely intelligent and with a mind that retains minor details forever, he is utterly dedicated to his research and to the colony he has become a part of. He wasn't expecting to find himself part of a project to engineer bioweapons from the native fauna, but he has thrown himself into the task -- the sleds won't last forever and something must be done to contain Threadfall if the colony is to survive.

A lifelong academic, Kanaye has little interest in politics beyond those that directly affect his work... but will fight tooth and nail to protect that work. Funding battles on First Centauri hardened him to the need to defend every last credit and after almost a decade of peaceful taxonomy on Pern he isn't overly-pleased to be back to fighting for his work's survival, not when the stakes are so high.

His relationships with the three children he took to Pern with him have not always been easy -- Bhavin and Talos both got over their youthful resentment, but Ayami, the youngest, is at an age where she is trying to assert her independence and Kanaye sees little of her. He has a tendency to 'adopt' younger members of his work team and sees Zyena Ahvaya-Sanchez as almost another daughter, having been a friend to her father before his death in the Nathi Wars. With the successful hatching of many of the second batch of engineered dragon eggs, he has started to feel vaguely paternal about his new charges but would be the first to admit to many of them being 'problem children'.

Background: Kanaye was born on First Centauri to academic parents, the second of two children. He was always encouraged to ask questions and developed an interest in the natural world at an early age. He trained as a xenobiologist and travelled to several nearby systems on research expeditions. It was on one of these trips that he met Inayati and, after a brief, intense romance, married her. On returning to First Centauri, Kanaye took up a university research position and settled into family life. Five children were born to the couple over the next decade, but their happiness was not to last.

Inayati had been born on a trading ship and, on going planetside, had served as liaison between First's commercial authorities and her family's trading company. However, most of their ships were lost in the Nathi Wars after being commandeered as military supply vessels, and Inayati found herself working to try to keep the shattered company afloat. She eventually took her two eldest children to help crew their new flagship, leaving her husband and their three youngest behind.

Although their parting had been amicable, Kanaye found his life rather empty following his wife's departure. He started looking for projects that would allow him to start over and give his children a chance to make something of themselves outside of First's great cities and the post-War political climate. The Pern colony looked ideal and was eager to recruit someone of his expertise, so he signed up his family and set out to make a new life for them all. On arriving on the new world, he set to work cataloguing the native fauna and flora, discovering what might be most useful to the colony and what might be most actively dangerous. He developed an interest in the firelizards, attaching one from an early clutch and then getting involved in the mentasynth engineering experiments that some of the geneticists started out of curiosity. He attached a queen from the first clutch that survived to hatching and has since used the gold as a source of genetic material for the Dragon Project.

Threadfall was a shock, an unwelcome intrusion into Kanaye's pleasantly busy life. While none of his direct family were lost, one of Bhavin's partners, the pregnant Jaelyn, was killed, and the entire colony thrown into turmoil. Talos was one of the group that decided to go North, as was Keon, Bhavin's surviving partner; their choice saddened Kanaye but he accepted it as a valid one -- the colony couldn't afford to put all its eggs in one basket. He threw himself into working on the Dragon Project, refusing to be disheartened by the loss of the first batch of eggs. Now, with the first dragons successfully hatched and both Bhavin and Zyena Impressed to members of the engineered species, he is concentrating his efforts on monitoring the development of the young aliens, heading the team studying them and watching for potential problems. It's an often thankless task, but with so much at stake it's not one that he can or will abandon.

Family/Friends:
Son: Bhavin Zimraan / 23 / dragon partner, junior scientist / New Landing
Son: Talos Zimraan / 20 / cartographer / Northern Continent
Daughter: Ayami Zimraan / 16 / hydroponics student / New Landing

Hobbies & Skills: Kanaye is not a genetic engineer by his original training, being more inclined towards studying genomes for evidence of evolutionary relationships; however, he has picked up a lot of the techniques through sheer necessity over the past few years. He's a good administrator, able to turn his keen eye for detail to the practical concerns of running a project as well as to the precise needs of its science, although it tends to bore him if it takes too much time away from his research.

In his spare time, Kanaye likes to sketch, or sometimes paint, a talent that he honed for the purpose of recording biological details but enjoys as a hobby too. His subject matter tends to be observational, but not always biological in nature -- he enjoys painting landscapes and has several before-and-after scenes where he revisited the sites of previous efforts to record the devastation of Threadfall.

Pets: two firelizards, blue Tesh and gold Raeka. Tesh is a small, dark blue from a wild clutch, and takes great delight in hunting down crawlers to eat loudly and messily in whatever public situation he can find. Raeka was one of the first experimental mentasynth enhancements. She's a large, elegantly proportioned queen with a calm and rather imperious personality. Her hide would be a solid yellow-gold but for the numerous small white scars that mark and dot her belly, showing where she has been repeatedly used as an egg donor for genetics work. Raeka is technically the "mother" of a couple of the dragons, as well as several of the original whers.