Anax Therion: Drell Analyst of the Keelah Si'yah

Anax Therion was a drell analyst and former data dealer who travelled to the Heleus Cluster aboard the Andromeda Initiative ark Keelah Si'yah. She served in the Sleepwalker Team Blue-7 maintenance crew, viewing the world around her in a clinical and detached manner and carefully calibrating her responses to every moment. She kept faith with the old drell pantheon, particularly Amonkira, and presented a deliberately nonthreatening face to others while remaining more than capable of dealing with physical threats through guile, strength, and biotics.

A life of secrets#

Anax was born on Kahje, the ocean world that the drell shared with the hanar. She had a hard childhood and entered the world of data dealing and espionage young. By her own varying accounts she came to the attention of a powerful hanar patron, served for years as a multilingual agent moving through upper-class society, and made her benefactor wealthy through her work. After her patron was lost she became a freelancer once more, eventually finding long-term employ under the Shadow Broker, the one client whose face and voice she never knew.

A defining trait of Anax was that she tailored her past to whoever she was speaking to, giving different listeners wholly different histories. Some shared common elements that may have held a grain of truth, but the names were never real, and she conceded that she had been close to only one person in her life and that the experience had left her unable to fully trust anyone after. By the time of the journey to Andromeda she was thirty-one years old, left-handed, and fitted with biotic implants along her arms.

Joining the Initiative#

When Anax joined the Andromeda Initiative, she spent her time reading personnel files rather than mingling with her fellow travellers, though her aloofness did not prevent the occasional fling. During the pre-launch festivities she observed the crew at their revels and wandered the staging station, and she witnessed a murder there that she chose to put out of her mind as an insignificant matter centuries removed from wherever she was bound. She was assigned to the Sleepwalker Team Blue-7 maintenance crew of the ark Keelah Si'yah, the vessel carrying the Initiative's drell, hanar, batarian, volus, quarian, and elcor contingents.

The plague aboard the Keelah Si'yah#

Anax was roused from cryostasis when the ark's systems reported a possible emergency. She and her fellow Blue-7 crew soon confirmed that large numbers of drell had died in their cryopods despite readings of excellent life signs, and as the most capable investigator among them she took the lead in working out why. Examining the bodies, she recognized one of the dead as a woman she had admired and noted the dark sores that marked the corpses, warning her teammates against ruling out any explanation too soon, whether equipment failure, poison, pathogen, or sabotage.

Paired with the former batarian crimelord Borbala Ferank, Anax searched the ship for evidence, retrieving makeshift laboratory supplies for the doctor Yorrik and studying the security feeds. She came to suspect a cross-species pathogen after recalling the same sores on a victim of another race, and she traced a shadowy figure moving through the cameras' blind spots, the mark of a deliberate plan rather than an accident. As order aboard the ark broke down and passengers were forcibly woken from stasis, she pressed on through chaos, questioning the sick and the suspect alike.

Uncovering the truth#

Working with Yorrik, who identified the disease and named it the Fortinbras Plague, Anax narrowed the field of suspects. She used her biotics throughout the crisis, raising a Barrier to shield her teammates and hurling a sick man into an isolation chamber with a Throw, and binding an infected, drug-maddened crewmember with a Stasis field. Sifting her own memories and the evidence around her, she discounted a doomsday cultist as a mere scapegoat and concluded that the ark's captain bore the real guilt, the one figure who turned up again and again at the heart of the matter.

With the captain exposed and a single dose of the cure prepared, Anax supported the plan to have the immune captain spread it through the ship at the cost of her own life. In the aftermath she helped Borbala back into her cryopod, the two having grown fond of one another over their shared ordeal, and bade the old matriarch to sleep well and to find her again in Andromeda.