Jalosk Dal'Virra: Batarian Sleepwalker of the Keelah Si'yah

Jalosk Dal'Virra was a batarian weapons dealer and a member of the Sleepwalker Team Yellow-9 maintenance crew aboard the Andromeda Initiative ark Keelah Si'yah. Like his fellow Sleepwalkers, his duties drew him out of cryosleep again and again to inspect and run diagnostics on the vessel during its six hundred year crossing to a new galaxy. His lowborn origins led many to deride him as an ignorant lout, and he stumbled over turns of phrase he had never learned, yet beneath the rough exterior lay an incisive understanding of batarian and galactic society.

A self-made batarian#

Jalosk was born on Camala into the lowest rungs of batarian society. His father had been a slave who eventually purchased the family's freedom, and his grandfather a red sand addict who did little but chase his next fix. Determined to make something of his life, Jalosk hauled himself and his family out of the laborer caste and into the merchant caste, establishing himself as a small-time weapons dealer. He married three times and fathered two children, a daughter and a son, with his third wife, who later left him for a man of the military caste and took the children with her. He bore her no grudge for it, seeing the move as a bold play that opened a path to advancement for their offspring.

Mounting debts eventually drove Jalosk to sign on with the Andromeda Initiative. On the staging station he spent his nights drinking, in time realizing that one of his companions was Borbala Ferank, once a matriarch of an elite Khar'shan family, and he fell in with a hanar preacher named Kholai whose doomsday creed he came to embrace. Shortly before the ark's departure, Camala was overrun by an invasion that turned its people into husks. His former wife refused to flee, but Jalosk understood that whatever was attacking them cared nothing for caste, and he took their unwilling children aboard the Keelah Si'yah to keep them alive.

Illness and death aboard the ark#

Three decades before the ark was projected to reach its destination, Jalosk thawed from cryostasis feeling sick, nauseous, and confused by the darkened state of the ship. He made his way to the medbay and the Sleepwalker Team Blue-7 gathered there, only to retch blood and bile against the glass as soon as he arrived. The crew was divided over him: one of his own kind moved to vouch for him while others took him for the source of the deaths spreading among the sleepers. Jalosk protested his innocence, and when the investigator Anax Therion and the doctor Yorrik judged him a danger, she threw him into an adjacent isolation chamber with her biotics.

Over the next many hours Jalosk grew steadily sicker, providing samples and baseline readings as Yorrik tried to understand what afflicted him. His rashes hardened into sores, he wept cerebrospinal fluid, and his body failed by degrees. The ship's failing systems insisted all the while that he was secure in his cryopod and in perfect health, a falsehood that helped expose how unreliable the ark's records had become. At length Yorrik confirmed that Jalosk carried the same disease that had killed his cult companion in his sleep, the affliction the doctor named the Fortinbras Plague.

A clear eyed end#

Resigned to his fate, Jalosk used his last hours to be heard. He insisted to Yorrik that he was no dullard, arguing that surviving a hardscrabble life took an intellect the batarian elite never needed. He spoke of his children with unexpected tenderness, recounting how he had nursed his son after a fall and comforted his daughter against bullies, and he held that no people could endure without love for their young. Pressed on the crimes for which batarians were infamous, he answered that his people merely sold what commanded the highest price, and that the willingness of wealthier civilizations to buy slaves at a steep markup said more about the buyers than the sellers.

In his final lucid moments Jalosk confessed that he had hoped Andromeda would be a place where everyone began again as equals, rather than the old order reasserted with the Council races on top, even as he suspected the same hierarchies would form once more. The ark's captain agreed with his complaint and swore the new galaxy would be made beautiful on their own terms, and Jalosk answered with a benediction learned from Kholai's cult, naming entropy the only peace in the universe. His last hours passed in delirium and raging madness as he battered the containment field of his chamber, dying as he shrieked. The observations Yorrik gathered from his decline were later broadcast across the ship to aid those who still fought the plague.