Commander Senna'Nir vas Keelah Si'yah is the First Officer of the Andromeda Initiative vessel Keelah Si'yah. He also heads the Sleepwalker Team Blue-7 maintenance crew that periodically revives from cryosleep to check on the ark's systems and passengers.
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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[]
Senna undertook his Pilgrimage among the elcor. On Dekuuna he learned about batarian social cues from the few he saw there, and on Ekuna he met and befriended the doctor Yorrik. Hearing about elcor combat VI from Yorrik, Senna made an amateur system from scratch as his final test. He and Yorrik went on a pub crawl at New Elfaas City to celebrate afterward, steeling his body for weeks beforehand in order to take just a single shot of ryncol.
Upon his return to the Migrant Fleet Senna was assigned to the mid-range freighter Pallu'Kaziel. He entered into a relationship with shipmate Qetsi'Olam vas Pallu'Kaziel, which was met with the approval of his grandmother Liat'Nir vas Achaz. He followed Qetsi in joining the Nedas Movement, though eventually he became disinterested in politics while she rose up the ranks to become a leader of the movement. Ultimately Qetsi left him for the anti-geth hardliner Telem'Yered.
At some point Senna was assigned to the liveship Chayym. In 2183 Senna and his parents got to visit the Citadel because the liveship and two other vessels were there for repairs. He took advantage of the free time to look around. He explored the Lower Wards, haggled with hanar on the Presidium to swap a new Reegar Carbine for a tank of mindfish and old contra-gravitic levitation packs, loitered outside the Embassy Lounges tinkering with a volus enviro-suit he traded for the mindfish on Zakera Ward. It was there that he witnessed a gigantic geth ship looming over the Citadel and an invasion force of geth began attacking the station.
After the battle Senna became disillusioned with his passive acceptance of things and started tuning in to Qetsi's views again. When they learned about the Andromeda Initiative Senna accepted Qetsi's offer of being her first officer, then contacted Yorrik if he would be amenable to a bar crawl stretching between galaxies. He returned to Pallu'Kaziel after the Citadel, though he felt some sadness when his name was removed from its roster for the final time upon his commitment to the Initiative.
Along with Telem, Senna was one of the final two candidates for the quarians' Pathfinder. Unusually among quarians, Senna had an affinity for machines and artificial intelligence and thought his race's bad parenting were to blame for their current exile. He suspected Qetsi chose Telem for Pathfinder precisely because she knew about his pro-AI sympathies. What he never shared with her however, or with anyone outside his family, is that he possessed an intact (and highly illegal) ancestor VI of his great-grandmother many times removed, Liat'Nir.
Mass Effect Andromeda: Annihilation[]
Senna, along with his specialists Yorrik and Anax Therion, are revived by the ark's VI 30 years before projected arrival in Andromeda to respond to a possible emergency. K, the VI, apparently detected decomposition byproducts in drell cryopods despite registering nothing but normal readings. Fighting off bouts of irritation and nausea due to his premature awakening, Senna immediately suspects the occupants succumbed to Kepral's Syndrome, and wonders why previous Sleepwalker cycles failed to notice this. Nevertheless, he agrees to manually inspect the hibernation deck, hoping it's only a false alarm, only to be dejected when K calculates the likelihood of zero fatalities to be less than 1%.
One hour later, the three discover Soval Raxios dead in her pod. Yorrik's nose confirms the assessment, and Senna grows annoyed when his friend jabs him about his comparatively inferior sense of smell. Senna asks K for problems on Soval's pod, but according to the sensors she's alive and "in perfect health." On learning there are four more drell and one hanar possible fatalities, Senna authorizes the revival of the rest of Blue-7 via the command passkey alpha-iota-gamma-gamma-9.
Impatient to get his team up to speed, once they've all assembled at the Radial Senna shares the initial findings while his teammates are still acclimating to their revival cascades, along with news that the issue appears to be spreading to more pods. When Blue-7 hypothesizes about the possible causes, Senna suggests it could be a batch of defective pods. Soon they've ruled out almost every conceivable scenario, so Senna asserts his authority and divides the 6-person team into groups of two to work the problem.
Senna and Irit Non form Team How, intending to scour the ark's hardware and software for bugs and mechanical failures. However, the ship does the complete opposite of what they program it to do: instead of waking out of energy saving mode, power to the medbay is cut off, although sensors report full power restored. Hearing feedback from Yorrik, Senna advises grabbing some worklights from the supply locker then staying put while they figure out what's going on.
A few hours later, Yorrik informs Senna he has enacted quarantine protocols. Team How make haste to the medbay and discover Team What's Yorrik and Ysses experimenting with an empty quarian environmental suit along with several autopsies. When the elcor explains the situation, Senna briefly thinks his friend never noticed the suit belonged to a girl before focusing on the more relevant details. Team Who's Anax and Borbala Ferank arrive at the medbay shortly after Senna and Irit, and Borbala asks Senna to turn up the ambient heat since it is cold in the area. The commander instructs K to do so, but the VI responds temperatures are already at maximum. He mentally tallies three simultaneously failing systems now, asserting command and ordering all teams to report what they found.
Team How has confirmed that the dead bodies contained a pathogen, triggering Senna's fear and private resentment that the incident happened so close to Andromeda and right under his watch. He wonders who could possibly hate drell enough to target them on hearing Yorrik suspects an artificial virus, and at the conclusion of the doctor's report, feels exhausted by the import of bad news.
After Team Who's report and Irit's debrief about the apparent absence of anything abnormal in the datacore, Senna decides to consult his ancestor VI. He instructs Irit to make Anax a hermetically-sealed suit so she can continue her investigations without contracting the disease. Recognizing they need more manpower, he also authorizes the captain's revival from cryo. Before he could leave the others, however, a sick batarian male stumbles into Blue-7's midst.
Senna orders K to identify the batarian, but the VI insists there are no batarian males in their area. Senna queries again using the man's cryopod number, but K claims the pod's occupant Jalosk Dal'Virra is still asleep within. An exasperated Senna fields off K's artificial stupidity and Irit's rabid racism by pointing out Jalosk is also sick with the same thing that killed Yorrik's autopsies, diminishing the possibility he's a saboteur. Yorrik advises Senna to quarantine the batarian in the nearby iso-chamber while Jalosk pleads with him to let him be. Anax biotically throws Jalosk into the chamber, and when Qetsi arrives shortly afterward Senna reaches out to her in relief. Borbala then tells the group they have another problem, prompting Senna to ask what could be worse than being awake almost 24 hours without sustenance, almost 600 infectious corpses, and useless computers: the ark's outer shields intermittently flickering and the inner shields being hit by space debris.
Alone in his quarters, Senna orders K to analyze his suit for damage, altering the VI's conversational protocols to one of his own making via the command passkey alpha-vermillion-9-4-4-0-pallu. K responds to Senna in a slightly more lifelike manner afterward, even as the Commander nervously doublechecks to ensure he's infection-proof. The software breakdowns soon reach his corner of the ship as evidenced in K's behavior, but Senna pays it little heed while he tells Liat all about it and the rest of the other problems.
Qetsi knocks outside then overrides the lock on Senna's quarters, forcing the commander to quickly hide the ancestor VI. His ex-girlfriend briefly lets down her guard in his presence before reverting to professional distance and inquiring for good news. Senna has nothing yet, but then he noticed the casualty count on his HUD hasn't risen in over 2 hours. Before either of them could react to this, K informs them there seems to be a lot more people in the cargo hold other than Anax and Irit. Senna tries reaching his teammates through comms, only to realize the comms have also been disabled while K claims otherwise.
Senna and Qetsi take the trams but they end up stuck inside one, forcing Senna to hotwire a public address system in a mainframe access panel in the transport tunnel and allow Qetsi to address the growing numbers of awakened people. Liat informs Senna she temporarily patched the tram, advising him to take it so he can reach Anax and Irit. He opts to return to his quarters instead and begins working on increasing Liat's processing power.
When one child collapses in her mother's arms in the quarian zone outside Senna's quarters, he refuses to believe suits can be compromised. He forces himself to focus on the macro level and fixing the ship as he feels he would drown if he paid attention to the recent death. Noticing Anax and Borbala around, who've just finished investigating Jalosk's fellow teammate Malak'Rafa vas Keelah Si'yah, Senna tasks them to retrieve as many VIs as they can, especially those unconnected to the ship. Anax suggests waking the Pathfinders, but the commander insists their homeworld-finding mission is too important even for the present emergency, and he has ensured their pods would be the last ones affected by any malfunctions. Borbala tells him it's going to be difficult getting anything from the cargo hold now that it's full of people, but Senna assures her he can fix things if they do what he asks.
Returning to Liat, Senna learns what the ancestor VI has come up with. The software problems can be traced to a computer worm programmed to incubate the biological virus while also covering its tracks. Asking Liat how to purge the worm, she tells him she will have to be uploaded into the ark itself, at the expense of whatever personality she has left. Senna loathes the idea, but there is no other choice.
Using the VIs scavenged by Anax and Borbala, Senna constructs a technological agglomeration spanning the majority of his floor, intending to boost his grandmother's processing power before unleashing her against the worm. He decides to tell Qetsi about his plan, but when the time comes the captain's anti-synthetic stance proves too intractable. Qetsi attempts to destroy the ancestor VI, but Senna commands Liat to initiate her upload before the captain can do anything, silently muttering a prayer to his ancestor for things to go well. Soon enough comms are restored and Yorrik informs them Qetsi is part a cure he's making since she's immune to the so-called Fortinbras Plague.
In the medbay Senna is devasted to find Yorrik nearing the final stages of the plague. The elcor wants Senna to recite certain Hamlet lines to him before he dies, but the quarian refuses. He shortly departs for the drell zone along with Qetsi when Anax calls for them over the PA system, where their erstwhile teammate Ysses floats immobilized but infected and raving about spreading chaos for its cult's Day of Extinguishment beliefs. Senna thought Ysses' religion forbids doing anything to hasten the apocalypse, but Borbala points out there are exceptions. Qetsi leaves shortly after suggesting the revival of Quorum members to deal with Ysses' crimes, but Anax invites Senna to accompany her to confirm the captain's actions.
Senna and Anax witness Qetsi talking to Malak about their hand in the ongoing plague. Qetsi designed the bioweapon while Malak programmed the worm. Malak improperly coded the malware, resulting in the virus mutating to become lethal and species-jumping. Infected Sleepwalkers forced the worm to gain system access wherever they went to keep falsifying reports. The hanar have become perfect patsies for the duo's scheme, and Qetsi intends to slay Ysses to ensure it doesn't talk after ordering Malak to stay put. Once Malak leaves, Senna and Anax confront their captain and they hear all about her motivations for the plague.
Senna is furious about the revelations while Qetsi vainly tries to convince him of her righteousness. He realizes she's insane, wondering how she got past the Initiative's screening as they rejected people less bent on genocide than her. Qetsi implores him not to tell anyone about quarian involvement as that will only lead to further persecution of their race, so Senna takes a moment to decide before dragging the captain to the medbay.
There, Senna proclaims he, Yorrik, and Anax are enough to judge their captain in lieu of the Quorum. He takes Yorrik's completed retrovirus hypospray and explains what she needs to do. Manufacturing more of the cure will take time and there will be further casualties in the interim, so Senna wants her to spread the cure via physical proximity, a suicide mission for quarians without a suit. Once she consents Senna injects her with the retrovirus, vowing to remember there's still some remorse left in the woman he once loved. Meanwhile Yorrik expends the last of his strength venting virus-fueled anger at Qetsi, so when he begs Senna to recite Horatio's last lines to Hamlet the quarian finally complies.
In the aftermath of the Fortinbras incident Senna settles back into his cryopod, asking Liat for a final systems report and hearing the beginnings of her personality loss. He doesn't want to think of Qetsi as the stasis sets in out of fear of dreaming about her, as he has already decided not to let anybody else learn the quarian origins of the plague.