Rom

[DS9 Photo Gallery]

Although Quark's long-suffering and diminutive younger brother has long been a pitiful sight, amid recent events it appears that Rom is at last standing up for himself.

Rom was often teased by other Ferengi children, led by Quark, about his smaller lobes and about supposedly being adopted; the nickname of "Moogie" for his mother has been a lifelong habit since an early age. His father's Naming Day presents to him were swapped for old vegetables by Quark, who resold the gifts at a profit over what Keldar had paid.

After the birth of his son Nog ca. 2354, he left home on Ferenginar for good in 2361 — 10 years after Quark did — but not before witnessing firsthand his father's lack of business sense as his brother never had the chance to. Long subservient to Quark and the target of his public ridicule, Rom could have been a starship chief engineer, his son later says, if he hadn't given up a mechanical career to "be a good Ferengi" and seek profit — the reason Nog wants to avoid such a life and be in Starfleet; neither one has "the lobes" for business.

Rom was living on Deep Space Nine by 2369, where he was forced to temporarily give up his quarters across the hall from Quark's for the Nagus visit, and allowed Nog to attend Keiko's school on the station only if it helped his inter-cultural sense for profit-making.

A year later, he briefly owned a fourth of rival bar Club Martus across from Quark's; just before, his share of Quark's bar profits was dropped from one-seventh to one-eighth of the take. Accused by Odo of a murder attempt on Quark, he later helped capture the would-be assassin on his second try. Jealous of Pel's newfound friendship with Quark, he exposed "him" as a female during a visit by Grand Nagus Zek in 2370. The next year, he atoned for his involvement with the transcendent Nagus' attitude by embezzling from his short-lived Ferengi Benevolent Association.

After crossing his brother over his treatment of their feminist rebel mother, he stood up to him even more strongly to support Nog's historic admission to Starfleet Academy in late 2371; like any proud Ferengi papa, he ran the sale of Nog's personal effects in the bar as the teen raised capital to leave home for the Academy — and claimed his son's pajamas.

His newfound backbone grew even more by the next year, when he single-handedly organized a union of Quark's employees, defied his brother and the Ferengi Commerce Authority, and then resigned after they secretly won to join the station's maintenance crews — a show of independence that was perhaps the biggest shock yet to Quark. His growing renown for engineering feats grew in 2372, when he performed theoretical jury-rigging to rescue his family and Odo from a time-trip back to 1947 Earth, and later saved the DS9 senior staff by adapting an interface between the holosuites and the U.S.S. Defiant's transporter system to restore their beaming patterns. Actually, Rom had always had the ability — he just had lacked the confidence.

Rom is far from an innocent, though: he routinely breaks in to use furniture, linens, food and drink for the bar and Quark's personal stores; he denies shaving the latinum there — mostly. Rom used to live across the hall from Quark and made his son Nog do all the housecleaning in lieu of his own messiness; there's no word what it looks like since the teen left for Starfleet Academy.

1st appeared in Star Trek on Stardate 46421.0, in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Emissary.