Irit Non: Volus Design Engineer of the Keelah Si'yah

Irit Non was a volus design engineer who travelled to the Heleus Cluster aboard the Andromeda Initiative ark Keelah Si'yah. She served on the Sleepwalker Team Blue-7 skeleton crew, rising frequently from cryostasis across the six hundred year voyage to inspect and maintain the vessel. She bristled at the smallest slight, real or imagined, and at any insult to her people, yet she became a consummate professional the moment her own expertise was called upon.

A designer of suits#

In the Milky Way, Irit had been a sought after designer of custom environmental suits, her work so prized that the richest volus were said to wither and die on her waiting list before their commission could be filled. Her suits were far more than mass produced wear: they carried a patented pain dampening matrix, and could be fitted on demand with medical shields, contaminant safeguards, and sophisticated pathogen detection systems. She priced them accordingly, reckoning that the worth of a drell firstborn would not even cover the down payment on a custom job. Her own suit, patterned in brown, black, gray, and white mesh, was as elegant as the feathers of a raloi and sleek where others were bulky, lending her an unmistakable air of superiority. For all her pride in the craft, she despised being called an artist, a term her father held in high esteem.

Irit walked away from that success to look after her father, the political dissident Gaffno Yap, whose beliefs she hated even as she could not bring herself to abandon him. She did not want him left alone with his conviction that the volus would one day shed their mercantile obsessions, a hope she thought he would never see fulfilled in any galaxy. When he resolved to join the Andromeda Initiative, she went with him aboard the ark Keelah Si'yah, the vessel carrying the Initiative's drell, hanar, batarian, volus, quarian, and elcor contingents. Before its departure she designed a topiary within the ship's Radial from the plants of several races, arranged as a deliberate symbol of unity, and she defended the divisive project with such passion that she struck a dissenting batarian to make her point.

The plague aboard the Keelah Si'yah#

Three decades before the ark was due to arrive, Irit was woken by her Blue-7 teammates to confront a wave of deaths among the sleeping passengers. She was indignant that no funeral rites or quarantine had been observed, and she clashed at once with the former crimelord Borbala Ferank. As the team weighed possible causes, Irit insisted that no pathogen could pass between cryopods given their sealed construction and scrubbers, and that no one could truly die within a pod at all. Commander Senna'Nir split the crew into pairs to work the medical, security, and computer angles of the crisis, assigning Irit to help him examine the ark's failing hardware and software.

When the elcor doctor Yorrik identified the disease as resembling the volus illness Yoqtan, Irit refused the conclusion, listing the properties that should have made such a plague impossible to spread or to kill. She was as quick to suspect others as she was to defend her own kind, briefly fixing blame on a sick batarian newcomer she took for a saboteur. Set to the task of protecting the investigator Anax Therion, Irit built her a sealed, hermetic suit from her own creations, adjusting pieces shaped for volus physiology to fit a drell frame and testing its filters against her own breath.

Uncovering the breach#

Working through the disaster, Irit gradually confronted the truth she had resisted. She came to understand how the pathogen could pierce even a sealed suit: patchwork repairs and the strain of wearing the garment even in cryostasis had left it with uneven breaking points where microfractures could form. Acting on this insight, she ran an ultraviolet scan over the captain's suit and found it riddled with hairline tears. When Yorrik needed eezo to begin work on a cure for what he named the Fortinbras Plague, Irit suggested drawing it from the ark's engines, and later mused that red sand might serve in its place. A hidden stash of red sand ultimately allowed the doctor to prepare and spread the cure, bringing the long ordeal aboard the Keelah Si'yah to its end.