Yorrik: Elcor Doctor of the Keelah Si'yah

Yorrik was an elcor doctor, specializing in ear, nose, and throat infections, who travelled to the Heleus Cluster aboard the Andromeda Initiative ark Keelah Si'yah. He served in the Sleepwalker Team Blue-7 maintenance crew alongside his quarian friend Senna'Nir. A reluctant physician with a deep and abiding love of Shakespeare, he was thrust into the medical fight of his life when a plague began killing the ark's sleepers, and he ultimately gave his own life to engineer its cure.

Naumm of Ekuna#

Yorrik was born Naumm in the city of New Elfaas on the elcor world of Ekuna, into a line of doctors that included his father and his grandfather Varlaam. As a young calf he fell gravely ill and nearly died, surviving only through Varlaam's resourcefulness during a power outage, and his grandfather sought to pass on the same values to him. Naumm only half listened, for he had never wished to be a doctor at all.

He nonetheless became a medic early in his career, serving in the military and taking part in the battle of Viluuna before returning to civilian life as a pediatric allergist. Tired of treating frightened young elcor and yearning to do more with his life, he eventually left that work behind.

A devotee of Shakespeare#

Considering his birth name respectable but plain, Naumm legally changed it to Yorrik after becoming a fervent admirer of Shakespeare's Hamlet, taking the name of the play's dead court jester. He held some unusual convictions about the works, theorizing that Shakespeare had secretly been an elcor writing about elcor characters, and citing lines he believed described elcor physiology and outlook as evidence. He once auditioned for an all-elcor adaptation of Hamlet, and before departing for Andromeda he spent his time composing an elcor rendition of Macbeth that he projected would run sixteen hours.

It was during the Pilgrimage of the quarian Senna'Nir that Yorrik set aside earlier ill feeling toward quarians and formed a lasting friendship. When Senna later offered him a place in the Andromeda Initiative, he readily accepted, and the two travelled together aboard the ark Keelah Si'yah.

The plague aboard the Keelah Si'yah#

Yorrik was brought out of cryostasis by the ark's automated systems to deal with a possible medical emergency, dosed so heavily with stimulants that he was practically bouncing by the time he reached his teammates, though even then his keen sense of smell caught the stench of death. He was reluctant to perform examinations on the dead, having not touched a corpse since the battle of Viluuna, but as the only doctor among the Sleepwalker Team Blue-7 crew the task fell to him.

Working in a barely functional medbay, Yorrik improvised. With a toy microscope and fluorescent dyes scavenged from the cargo hold, and with an empty quarian environment suit he pressed into service as a makeshift analyzer, he ruled out bacterial infection and blood toxicity and confirmed that a virus was killing the sleepers. Testing a sample, he diagnosed the disease as closely matching Yoqtan, and as it proved capable of crossing between species and possessed of unparalleled destructive power, he named it the Fortinbras Plague.

The cure and the cost#

As the crisis deepened, Yorrik himself contracted the plague while studying it, yet he refused to stop. He charted the progress of the disease in the batarian Jalosk Dal'Virra, who had stumbled into the medbay already sick, and he laboured to understand the virus well enough to defeat it. He reasoned that a retrovirus might be engineered using element zero, an immune patient's blood, and a functional gene-viral lab, and the batarian Borbala Ferank undertook to procure the needed element zero.

By the time he completed his work, sores had blossomed across his body and he was bleeding and leaking fluid, the madness of the disease beginning to take hold. He had managed to produce only a single retroviral dose, meant to be carried to one immune person who could then spread the cure to others. When that immune individual proved to be the ark's captain, Yorrik passed her the dose and, his strength spent, asked his friend Senna'Nir to send him off with a line of Shakespeare. Senna at last complied, and Yorrik died with words of friendship over him as the cure went out to save the ship.