Jonn Welland: Psychiatrist of the Aegis VII Colony

Jonn Welland was a clinical psychiatrist stationed on the Aegis VII Colony, the Concordance Extraction Corporation mining settlement whose survey teams uncovered Marker 3A in the planet's soil. As the colony slid into an epidemic of insomnia, depression, paranoia, and violence, Welland worked alongside Doctor Tom Sciarello, the settlement's Chief Medical Officer, in a losing effort to treat afflictions that answered to no known medicine. His name reached as far as the orbiting USG Ishimura, where the Marker specialist Doctor Terrence Kyne sought him out as one of the two physicians worth consulting about the artifact's effects on the human mind. Welland's practice ended where his duty took him, in the colony's medical lab after the planet crack, where he and Sciarello discovered the dormant Necromorphs waiting in the morgue.

Practice in a colony losing its mind#

Welland held the psychiatric post on Aegis VII during the settlement's final planetcrack operation, and the discovery of Marker 3A turned that post into the busiest and most hopeless office in the colony. Colonists came to the medical staff in growing numbers with depression and sleeplessness that no treatment could touch, and the complaints hardened over time into paranoia, dementia, and open violence. Welland and Sciarello attempted to treat the numerous psychological problems together, a psychiatrist and a physician working the same impossible caseload, and neither man's methods made any lasting difference. Sciarello, a confirmed atheist, came to suspect the Marker itself as the cause of the wave of madness, going so far as to secretly test the artifact for radiation, while his appeals alongside P-Sec Sergeant Abraham Neumann to abandon the mining project were ignored by the colony's manager, Hanford Carthusia. Welland's own discipline fared no better against the sickness than Sciarello's medicine did.

The clearest record of that failure was the miner Brant Harris, whose exposure to the Marker had left him unable to sleep and prey to vivid hallucinations. When Welland's prognostic analysis of the man proved fruitless, he arranged Harris's transfer to the USG Ishimura in orbit, where the colonist was to be studied at the request of Doctor Terrence Kyne. The transfer removed Harris from the colony before the Necromorph outbreak overran it, and delivered him instead into the hands of the Ishimura's doctors, among them the Unitologist Doctor Challus Mercer, whose later experiments on a patient from the colony were held to have produced the creature known as the Hunter.

Welland's reputation extended beyond the surface. Aboard the Ishimura, Doctor Terrence Kyne sent a message to Captain Benjamin Mathius expressing his interest in going planetside to discuss the Marker's effects with Sciarello and the psychiatrist Jonn Welland. To the one man aboard the flotilla most qualified to study the artifact, the colony's two doctors were the essential witnesses to what it was doing to the people living beside it.

The funeral of Katie Evans#

The violence the medical staff could not cure eventually reached into their own ranks. Harris, before his transfer, had taken Sciarello hostage at the clinic, and in the struggle with the P-Sec officers who answered the call he fired a line cutter that missed its targets and cut the nurse Katie Evans in half. Evans had served as Sciarello's personal assistant for five years, and her killing was among the early deaths that showed how far the Marker's influence had already spread.

Welland was present at her funeral. Sciarello rose to deliver the eulogy, but it was cut short when he was seized by a hallucination of Katie herself, the first of several visitations of the dead nurse that would pursue him to the end of his life. It fell to Welland to step in and apologize to the gathered crowd. The moment placed the psychiatrist in the position he occupied throughout the colony's collapse, standing beside a colleague who was himself beginning to break, smoothing over in public what neither man could repair in private.

The medical lab and the morgue#

When the planet crack came and the colony fell into pandemonium, Welland did not run. He and Sciarello made for the colony's medical lab to prepare it to receive the wounded, reasoning that the injured would come to the one place they knew to seek help. Welland put the logic plainly to his colleague: "Because that's where people will expect us to be, where people will come when they're injured!" On the way the two doctors fell into a heated argument over medical ethics, over what their roles as physicians demanded of them in a crisis that had passed beyond medicine.

The argument ended in the morgue. The bodies of the Unitologists who had committed suicide in Union Square were missing from their trays, and the two doctors stumbled across the dormant Necromorphs waiting in the room. The creatures, Slashers clinging to the ceiling, ambushed the group that had come to the lab, and one of them killed Sciarello with a blade through the forehead. Welland was presumably killed shortly thereafter, in 2508, though no account recorded the manner of his death. He died as he had worked, at the post where the injured would have expected to find him, one of the many colonists of Aegis VII whose devotion to their duties carried them into the outbreak rather than away from it.