The design engineer Irit Non is a member of the Sleepwalker Team Blue-7 skeleton crew, frequently reviving during the 600-year voyage of the ark Keelah Si'yah to inspect and perform maintenance procedures on the starship. Irit easily takes offense at every slight whether perceived or real or directed at her or her race, but performs as a consummate professional whenever her specialty is involved.
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“By the homeworld I hope to find one day.” — Spoilers for Mass Effect Andromeda: Annihilation follow. |
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Background[]
Back in the Milky Way Irit was a highly in-demand fashion designer. The richest volus willingly withered and died on her waiting list just for a chance to have one of her custom environmental suits. However, she left it all behind in order to take care of her father, the political dissident Gaffno Yap.
Despite hating the old man's beliefs and personally achieving financial success, Irit could not bring herself to abandon him. She didn't want him to be alone when he finally came to his senses that the volus would never form a society free of their mercantile obsessions regardless of which galaxy they were on. Given her profession, she detested being called an "artist", a term Gaffno held in high esteem.
Unlike mass-produced ensembles, Irit suits come with a patented pain-response dampening matrix and has flourishes of style here and there courtesy of their creator. Medical shields, prophylactic reservoirs, contaminant stopgaps and a highly sophisticated pathogen detection system are some of the optional features that may be installed on demand. The suits are appropriately expensive; Irit estimates the worth of a drell firstborn child isn't even enough to cover the downpayment for a custom job.
Her personal suit has patterns of brown, black, gray, and white mesh that are as elegant as a raloi's feathers. Unlike the usual suits, Irit's is sleek, stylish, and gives off an air of superiority.
Mass Effect Andromeda: Annihilation[]
Prior to Keelah Si'yah's departure Irit designed a topiary within the vessel's Radial, composed of plants from five initial races artfully arranged into a pleasing whole. This proved to be a divisive issue among the other passengers waiting in Hephaestus Station, so Irit passionately made her point by punching a dissenting batarian in the groin while declaring her project to be a symbol of unity and peace. In the end, Commander Senna'Nir vas Keelah Si'yah presented her with keleven stalks to complete the set and add the quarian contribution to the bouquet.
When the ark reached the midpoint of its intergalactic journey, Irit tried and failed to discourage her father from doing anything crazy during the drinking binge that followed the mission and status reports.
3 decades prior to the ark's scheduled arrival, Irit is woken up by her Blue-7 teammates. The entire team has been tasked to deal with deaths sweeping among passengers in cryosleep. She's indignant that funeral rites haven't been performed yet, nor quarantine, and expresses her irritation at her teammate Borbala Ferank's boorishness.
While attempting to sort out possible explanations, Irit posits that it's impossible for pathogens to spread across cryopods owing to the devices' self-contained construction and sophisticated scrubber systems. She also points out it's impossible to "die" inside a pod since a person enters and leaves cryostasis in the same state they were in. If it were a problem on the hardware end, Irit supposes the rest of the ship should have been affected as well and not just drell or hanar. Since her own suit has advanced filters, she doesn't think the issue should be her problem, but she quickly apologizes after seeing her teammates' reactions.
Senna splits the team into groups of two to tackle the problem along medical, security, and computer aspects. Irit complains on Borbala and detective Anax Therion's behalf on hearing they're to scour the kilometer-long ship on foot for possible saboteurs. She tries to delegate the work to the ship VI K, but Senna demonstrates the VI is apparently malfunctioning as well. Senna tasks her to work with him to check the ship's hardware and software and hopefully resolve the problem.
Later, Senna and Irit attempt to shut down the Keelah Si'yah's power-saving program. The medical team Yorrik and Ysses claim the medbay went completely dark even as screens on Senna and Irit's end report all power restored. The volus follows Senna back to the medbay to meet up with the rest of Blue-7, where they discover the medical team messily experimenting with a quarian child's suit. Irit sees a mutilated volus doll next to the suit, and grows indignant because such toys are "bigoted representations" of her people. Ysses explains they only needed its eyes for their project, but Irit still demands they get rid of the doll immediately.
Yorrik then reveals his findings to Blue-7: the cause of the deaths is a pathogen resembling the volus disease Yoqtan. Irit splutters her objection at the accusation, listing off Yoqtan's properties that make it impossible to kill or jump species. The elcor doctor wants her to look at the findings herself, but Irit is in steadfast denial. Senna and Irit also relay their discoveries on the hardware/software side: they found no issues on both ends, except things keep breaking and the ship insists that they're not. With little else to do, Irit is tasked by the Commander to make Anax a hermetic suit in order to protect her from the pathogen while she continues her investigation.
Before Irit's new orders are carried out, Blue-7 is interrupted by the arrival of someone who isn't supposed to be awake and roaming. Irit demands Borbala hand her a pistol, only to be ignored. On seeing the newcomer is a sick batarian, the volus immediately pins the disease to some nefarious batarian conspiracy. Still disbelieving Yoqtan had anything to do with the problem, Irit thinks the newcomer Jalosk Dal'Virra is the stowaway Anax had been looking for and encourages the drell to dispose of the alleged criminal for justice. Merely by seeing two batarians with passing familiarity to each other in the room, Irit also concludes that Jalosk and Borbala are in cahoots in some plot to frame the volus for the ship's problems.
Jalosk protests his innocence, but Irit insists on poking holes in his story. She doesn't want to leave unless her teammates admit that her people had nothing to do with the present predicament. However, several new developments such as the arrival of Captain Qetsi'Olam vas Keelah Si'yah force her to set off after Anax to the cargo hold anyway.
Irit's massive personal crate in the cargo bay has an assortment of working suits and spare parts as well as her other tools of trade. The fashion designer proceeds to make Anax a suit out of Irit's other creations, adjusting pieces meant for volus physiology to fit with her drell one. Testing the suit's systems, Irit flings a bit of her spit into Anax's covered face and registers positive feedback in return. The volus wonders if it's still possible the pathogen was accidentally spawned. Anax tells her the system malfunctions on top of the pathogen still leaves the issue up in the air, so they both agree it is then likely another problem will come up that will conclusively point to deliberate sabotage.
While adding flourishes of style to Anax's suit, Irit reiterates the volus are not to blame for their problems. They have no serious quarrel with Rakhana-clan nor Kahje-clan. The volus would simply try to buy drell allegiance from the hanar or manipulate the Fleet-clan or Khar'shan-clan against them should it come to blows. There's no profit to be had in simple death, only the expense related to labor shortages, corpse disposal, and coverups.
Gaffno Yap used to tell Irit their people's risk aversion is a weakness, causing Anax to realize the infamous political agitator is her father. Irit whines about her father's contrasting views and connections, telling Anax about the hanar Day of Extinguishment cultists led by Yap's friend Kholai. After finishing the drell detective's fitting, Irit explains her custom suit's features and the expense of one should she decide to market it.
Irit then hears Anax's intention to interrogate Sleepwalker Team Yellow-9 member Malak'Rafa vas Keelah Si'yah since two members from that team are dead and Jalosk seems afflicted by the same thing that killed them. She doesn't believe the quarian will be able to help since she thinks the race with weak immune systems aren't willing to deal with weaponized infections, still insisting Jalosk (or "Jolly Doll" as she misremembers) is a suspect.
After Anax clears up Irit's misconceptions, the volus then asks her why she came to Andromeda since the drell already knows about Gaffno. Irit hears a story similar to hers, with a hanar father figure using the drell to do his dirty work. Famished after all the work earlier, Irit wants to make a detour to the mess hall for a quick bite, but soon she and Anax are surrounded by laser sights from a multitude of awakened passengers who appeared in the cargo hold.
Irit and Anax become stuck in the hold for at least over a day, taking weapons and refuge to defend themselves against some colonists who have become unreasonable in the wake of quarantine procedures instituted shipwide. Irit is bogged down on her own hiding place, so when Borbala sneaks in she allows Anax to escape with the old batarian.
The volus somehow gets out on her own. She discovers Gaffno has also succumbed to the plague, interring him in Mess Hall 4. Later, Irit presents the corpse of a quarian child to medbay, wanting to show Yorrik that even suited people aren't safe. She finds the doctor asleep with the medbay quarantine broken, and screams at his face to wake up until he does.
On Yorrik's advice Irit temporarily adopts the elcor speech technique to help blunt emotions in times of great stress. She used the time hauling the Clanless corpse to think how the pathogen could have breached her suit: patchwork engineering combined with wearing it even in cryostasis resulted in uneven breaking points in the suit, allowing for microfractures to form. Qetsi joins the conversation, and upon learning she has been attacked Irit runs an ultraviolet scan on the captain's suit and discovers multiple hairline micro-tears.
Later when Yorrik explains to the rest of the team he needs eezo to start on a possible cure for the Fortinbras Plague, Irit suggests taking from the ark's engines. The compromise isn't acceptable, so she muses if they had red sand they can use that instead. Without an immediate response from the others, Irit sardonically congratulates the team for a job well done, highlighting the fact they were supposed to start over with a clean slate.
As it turns out, Borbala has a red sand stash and Yorrik is able to use it and Qetsi's newly-discovered immunity to spread the cure. It is not apparent what Irit experiences in the aftermath.