Like many quarians, Loral'Zanis vas Korvus is of a slight, very lithe, but athletic build, but is tall for a quarian, standing at 5'7" and somewhat above most others of his species. There's nothing at all special about him, especially since many would never witness his face and what he really looked like, but he took special care of his suit to look at least somewhat presentable. He wore a lightly armored suit made of cheap metal and parts bartered during his time on the Station. It gave the suit an unusual mix of metallic color along his torso and extremities, but fit well with the solid bluish-purple of the cloth that was draped over it. He sported an hood like cloth over his head and helmet, hiding the various spouts and wires that jutted from the back, akin to how many of the female of his race wear hooded material. It is light, draped and layered onto his shoulders and underneath the makeshift carapace on his shoulders and torso.
Loral is a very habitual person, tending to forming habits with his hands in particular, whether it be scratching a specific area or fiddling nervously near his helmet, they have to be doing something or holding onto something. What annoys people most is the usual, incessant clicking of a pen should he find one or the scraping of a utensil on whatever surface it can find. His voice is a deepish baritone with a heavy quarian accent sounding more in like to the human arabic, distinct and precise with a moderate monotone sound to it, with a slight stammer when nervous or excited and especially when angered. Loral is very articulate, despite his accent, and speaks with precise diction, even in spite of his stammer when out of his comfort zone. Walking with an air of supreme confidence and with a purpose, Loral is very much a quarian, in that he moves to not waste time and in as much an efficient manner as possible, sometimes prone to cutting corners or taking short cuts. He is quick and sometimes jittery with energy when he moves and is almost always moving. Despite this, Loral has extremely steady hands and near perfect vision in his eyes. He is prone to clicking his tongue when idle and is noticeably swerving his head to whatever catches his attention the most.
Born 2150CE to a family with a tarnished past—an entire generation had been wiped clean from the history books due to affiliations with geth sympathizers—Loral'Zanis was like any quarian child, restricted to the confines of a ship's space and a suit tailored to protect his nearly non-existent immune system. However, the history tied to said family as the years have passed have been washed away due to the prejudice surrounding the geth and those affiliated with them. Though, the family is still riddled by an overwhelming sense of defiance that has ended in at least two exiles, though considered many in the sense that such a thing is rare, and various punishments and generally bad gifts. Some even left the fleet during a pilgrimage, though they are as rare as the exiles, all in the span of 300 years. There is often an overwhelming dread a captain gets when dealing with someone of the Zanis family, as they are known for their stubbornness and insufferable need to be right. Most have tenuous relationships with other alien species, seeing the oppression put upon the quarian people as something that needs to be stopped, mostly violently and without remorse. Justice where justice is due, is often a family thing, though revenge and grudge holding is often misconstrued as justice in their eyes.
Loral'Zanis nar Surra was raised as any Zanis child, with a kind of utilitarian need to be right and a cold, hard determination. It was the reason for many of the sticky situations he found himself in, to the point that it eventually booted him from the fleet. Loral, had always had a sense that his people were of a weaker origin, always stuck behind some piece of technology and always running from here to there. Advances in tech were toward fruitless goals of reconquering the homeworld, as if the geth didn't outnumber and outsmart them so greatly, or prolonging their stare on the fleet, acting like literal vagrants wherever they went. Loral was as stubborn a child as any, with a penchant for getting his hands into things he wasn't meant to and feeling he had the vast intellect to preform a task better than his peers. As delusional as it was, he truly felt smarter and more capable than others and it wasn't until consequences arose from other, stricter parents aboard the Surra that he finally understood the reality of lacking real, useful knowledge and experience.
Life on the civilian ship was as cramped and close-knit as any other ship in the fleet, with material objects being of no use and the need to maximize efficiency at its utmost highest. Education wasn't hard for Loral to grasp, as he always had the desire to learn, even at a young age. Technology and science hit a sweet spot during his youngest years, something Loral began pursuing relentlessly. Stubbornness was a terrible trait in some circumstances, but could be mistaken for determination in others. He pursued his goals with an equal amount of perseverance and obstinacy. Of course, technology wasn't quite at the forefront of his mind, seeing as he avoided anything in regards to geth when the topic was ever brought up. Instead, Loral had an affinity toward the medical sciences, growing fond of the idea of discovering vaccines for new diseases; retrofitting and upgrading enviro-suits to better support the quarian immune system; and even from studying bacteria to learning the anatomy of quarians and every other known, sentient species in the galaxy.
From his birth to the start of his pilgrimage, Loral's life wasn't full of excitement or mischief, but rather just him steeped material to study and learning what he could outside of the quarian education system. He was prepared for life outside of the fleet at a very young age. His parents were adamant about him getting out there as quick as possible, finding something the fleet would find useful, and come back home. Upon turning sixteen, at around 2167CE Loral was given his immuno boosters and various implants to help on his journey, and given a shuttle to dock safely in the nearest star system, that currently being the Citadel.
Adjusting to life upon the Citadel was hard, as the people there did not take kindly to his vagrancy and any misfortune befalling him was due to the oppressive nature and general disgust that came with being a quarian. He had found many things that he would deem useful to the fleet upon his journey, but they came at a cost he could not afford or at the disregard for the sole rule of the Pilgrimage. No matter the benefit of a gift, it cannot come at the harm of anyone, quarian or not. He was certain that even if he had the credits to buy something, the shop keepers would turn him down. If worse came to worst, they'd likely report him for unwanted soliciting and he'd get arrested for numerous crimes he couldn't solve, but weren't really an issue in the first place.
After years [18 yrs old; 2169CE] spent on the Citadel, Loral found a place in the lower most wards, in the seedier section of the Citadel—the seedier and slummier it got, the more blatant the racism. In a side clinic somewhere along a busy market Loral found a job as an assistant to an older asari doctor on her righteous quest to help the impoverished and downtrodden, and possibly make more money off them than she could in the upper wards. She wasn't blinded by the stigma surrounding quarians and their almost gypsy like nature, seeing him more as a tool than a pest. She noticed his expertise and desire in the medical field when he entered her clinic to be treated, telling her exactly what he thought he needed. To her surprise, especially due to the abrasive manner in which he told her, he was correct. Taking advantage of his talent, she hired him for a small wage, knowing he, like many quarians, didn't quite know the value of credits outside of the flotilla. There, he served four years [22 yrs old; 2172CE] under her charge, helping people who generally wouldn't be able to get any service in exchange for what money or what goods they brought in. He was given only part of the credits transferred, and when there was no money to be given, she offered him food. Saving up what he could for the possibility of a gift found on the Citadel, Loral made good effort roaming the 'alleys' and streets of the Citadel, finding safe enough spots to stay the night before heading off to work again.
Unfortunately, one of the alleyways he'd resided in wasn't as safe as he'd planned. A small band of unnamed mercenaries (he couldn't quite recognize or identify merc bands) from a larger group in the more crime ridden sections of the Citadel had stumbled upon him and a group of humans. Finding them suitable for shipping and selling off to a band of slavers, they took who they could captive and killed the rest. Luckily, or maybe not so much, Loral was among these captives and was smuggled onto a pirate ship disguised as a small shipping frigate days later. They was then shipped off to Omega, where the group of would be slaves was transported onto a larger slave ship, holding about 15 to 20 or so captives, and sent off into supposed 'batarian' space near the edges of the Attican Traverse.
After finding a way to get out of the bindings, a group of slaves in the small compartment they were stuffed in released all they could manage and corralled a group to help them take over the ship. Having been trained in combat before the start of his pilgrimage, Loral joined the small band of revolting captives. The group quickly dispatched what mercenaries were aboard, knocking or stunning whoever they ran into, and then binding the group securely in a sealed room—it took a very long time, but Loral had convinced the group of rebels to not harm anyone if they could help it. They agreed to an extent and, after working their way through the entirety of the ship, they commandeered it, rammed the large frigate into one of the patrol ships and made a break for the mass relay. The ship itself suffered minimal damage as it traversed through various relays until it landed in Council space, where the captives where released on the nearest, friendly planet that contained a small colony where they were given temporary food and shelter before being shipped back to their home worlds. The small, fighter that had followed their previous jumps was promptly shot down in orbit once the frigate hailed the nearest security force nearest them. Once the ship had landed, the militia took each of the mercenaries into custody, locking them in a small brig.
Loral, who'd been escorted into the colony's storage facility, the only building that could fit that many people comfortably at one time, found his way into the brig where the mercs were being held captive. After stealing a crate of fire arms, jamming them so they wouldn't work, and distracting the guard just outside, he picked the lock, slid the crate in, and made a mad dash for the ship. In the massacre that had occurred, Loral, with the minimal piloting skills he had, hastily took off, severely damaging the hangar it had been sitting in and made for the mass relay before the colony and surrounding planets in the system were alerted. It took longer than expected, after he'd stopped dead in a random system, but Loral tracked down the Migrant Fleet cutting through Argos Rho. Once there, he made contact with the fleet, giving them the appropriate phrase to safely dock.
Once he convinced the captain of his designated ship that the frigate was taken without harming anyone, promptly lying about the mercenaries who'd been slaughtered due to his sabotage, his gift was deemed worthy and useful to the fleet and was assigned to the Korvus.
Science was his life from there on. Loral spent the next few years [25; 2175CE] further studying medical sciences, biology, and medical engineering in various research projects in the special projects arm of the flotilla. His main goal, as a scientist and as a contributor to the Migrant Fleet, was to possibly help bolster the quarian immune system permanently through generations and further breeding, though he operated mainly as a doctor and engineer to better produce vaccines and medicines. Many personal projects of his, ideas, whatever popped up into his brain and on paper ultimately failed, at least the ones that were safest. However, there was one idea he'd not touched due to the danger of it: introducing extremely weakened pathogens into the quarian body to attempt to harden it, forcing his people to adapt and evolve rapidly. It wasn't until he'd hit a dead end, after so many failed experiments that he eventually gave up and gave in.
The idea of making yourself sick to bolster your immune system was considered suicide to most quarians, which was the ultimate reason why Loral had to be very picky and thorough for his test subject. In all his time on the ship, he worked rather closely with a fellow quarian by the name of Therryn'Kaine vas Korvus who apparently grew more attached to him than he'd liked. Loral requested his aid in a secret project he'd been planning once he'd determined he was the only viable candidate. There was no one he could willingly trust more than Therryn, whether he liked it or not, though using someone who trusted him unconditionally rubbed Loral the wrong way. The feeling almost made him drop the subject, but there was literally no one else who would have thought this project would have done any good.
His own blind ignorance to the repercussions drove him to further betray his friend and colleague's trust further along the road. Loral was stubborn and had a distinct utilitarian view of most situations, especially those pertaining to the survival of his people. The flotilla consumed a lot of resources to maintain their seventeen million population. Roaming around for that long, even with a small populace compared to other races would drain food, fuel, and money more than they'd gain it. Loral's plan would eventually, through rapid evolution and, hopefully, with genetic reconstructive research in tow would allow their species to be less picky when finding a new world to populate. The thought that he was benefiting his people, even at the risk of a few, kept Loral running at high speeds to further his own research.
Before finding Therryn to use him as his own personal guinea pig, Loral stole whatever he could for the experiments without getting caught. From vaccines to bacterial samples from whatever alien equipment not previously sterilized, he grabbed whatever he determined was a suitable candidate for his project. After a few weeks work and many failed attempts, Loral constructed a very weakened viral construct from what he could find, sustained it in an isolated environment away from the sterile counters of his lab, and allowed it to reproduce in its contained environment. He had at least a few days to inject the virus into a willing subject before it would eventually die from energy starvation. The virus in question acted a lot like a common cold, but to a much weaker effect. If injected into a human subject, it would likely be eradicated before it got very far into the body. To a quarian's nearly non-existent immune system, it would act like a regular flu, which could be fought off by immuno boosters and herbal remedies, though that didn't exactly help the project develop further. The idea was to create something that the quarian body could adapt to in the time it affected the body, instead of having medicines to aid in the process. Having Therryn die, however, wouldn't help the process either.
Sharing a lab with other quarians due to space restrictions made working on his research all that much harder and, of course, it wouldn't be long before he was found out. It was just a matter of convincing whoever found him out that he was doing good work. Convincing a quarian that making their populace ill would eventually help them would prove to be one of Loral's more difficult, if not impossible feats. So, Loral found time frames in which those who worked in his lab, whether they worked with him or not, were either sleeping or on break during his research. This obviously meant it would take a long time to refine everything, to study Therryn whilst he was afflicted with the disease, and redo everything to get the perfect virus that would eventually go on to strengthen his people. Overall, it took over five months until he was finally caught, in which Therryn underwent various treatments to keep him alive during this entire process, as he was injected with contagion after contagion, each one refined to work better than the other, though not all did. He was extremely caught up in perfecting the virus, making it just weak enough that it could be killed without the aid of medicine, but strong enough to warrant concern.
Many of his own colleagues had suspected he was doing rather shady work, others found various equipment that went missing and the doctors on board didn't just look over Therryn's altered state, however well he tried to hide it. The malaise showed and both the coughing and sneezing couldn't always be held down. Many times Therryn underwent procedures to boost his immune system to fight the disease, setting Loral back a few steps each time, until a delusional Therryn afflicted with a particularly nasty virus mishap outed the entire project. Not only that, but a few of the crew found the small containers in which the bacteria, viruses, and whatever test diseases Loral was altering and working with. The entire thing blew up in his face to the point where the captain, outraged, assigned Loral engine scrubbing and maintenance duty for a whole six months. Feeling slighted, especially after both confessing and going over the detail and benefit of his work a thousand times, Loral made sure to gather what he could, a small container of his recent work he'd not yet tested, but deemed good enough to produce further and finally release into the populace, or at least his crew.
Whilst everyone was sleeping in the cramped room he was reassigned to, areas separated by large quilts and storage bins, Loral worked further on his research, determined and blind to the dangers of his work. After a few months of work [26; 2176CE] and further planning, Loral took the next step in his scheme, gathered a large enough sample of his work, in which he produced an abundance, and proceeded tests on those he could. The quarians sleeping in the room they'd shared were his targets (less of a mess if they were found out and easily disposed of, should it come to that)and using gathered knowledge of enviro-suits to bypass filtration systems and the suit's sealing mechanism, he injected the virus directly into the bloodstream after a few moments of work. He continued this process for the next few days, whilst commencing further planning; things were going as planned and Loral felt, with these quarians seemingly going unnoticed by the crew and not showing any distressing symptoms, he could go deeper and larger. He was prepared and he thought—he knew his people were ready.
There was no real way to get through the quarian enviro-suit other than by direct force. The suit was designed to handle just about any kind of disease, equipped with various filtration systems and completely sealed in its own mini-environment, and handled and maintained for comfort as much as protection. Running around the entirety of a liveship injecting civilians the way he did his crew was both suicide and would end up fruitless. Getting to seventeen million people that way would take years and he didn't have years. But, there were some ways in which the suit couldn't quite catch certain viruses, the main one being through food. Under cooked and foreign foods were the bane of quarian existence, though fortunately the quarian diet is very much vegan. Paste was also a very dominant food product, being efficient, quick to produce, and small enough to be carried and produced in bulk. That would be the easiest way to get the virus to at least over half the population, if not the entire population itself. But the tricky part was getting the virus to replicate that much, reproduce within the paste, and then further spread. The hot environment of the filtration machines would make injecting the virus in that way very hard and tricky. Injecting it one by one into each container would be time consuming and he would eventually get caught in that small amount of time. The liveships, especially around the food, was guarded to the extreme.
Loral would go there on the premise that he was studying the process of making the food in order to find better, less costly, and more efficient ways of producing it. The virus seemed to have a longer incubation period than he'd expected, meaning symptoms wouldn't show up for awhile. This gave him time to further plan, forge documentations, at least well enough to get him in and out within the day, and do what he needed to do on one of the liveships. He'd made a plan, in which he'd tamper with a specific filtration system at random, near the end to keep the virus from being further detected by scans. Beforehand, however, he'd work to sabotage the automatic scanners that would find foreign contaminates, however small, in the processed food. He'd not have the resources or time to construct a virus that could go undetected by said technology—quarians took sterilization very seriously. Inside Loral's mind, this would go off without a hitch and for some time it did.
The ship's captain admitted him on board after being sent the specific documents. He'd responded so fast, Loral was sure he'd not even looked at them. The quarian people, however serious they were about protecting their race, had a deep trust for their people and for good reason. Community was everything. In a sense, Loral was acting on the same premise, even if it meant they had to suffer for their happiness. After being admitted onto the ship, he was escorted directly to the processing area, but not before going through a few scans to see if he'd had anything suspicious on his person, specifically weapons. He'd convinced the officers the vials and syringes in his carry on were harmless and would be used to test the integrity of the scanners. After further convincing, they'd let him through. Apparently, it was a rather lax day on the ship, or he was just more trustworthy than he previously thought.
Once inside the main processing area, he made his way through each piece of technology, made it really look like he was there to examine and analyze. It only took a few hours of him wandering through the area in as much a systematic way as possible for the patrol and guards to completely ignore him. They had hawk eyes and for good reason, but a quarian scientist and engineer doing what they did best didn't come off as suspicious, at all. It helped that Loral didn't act the way either. His mind was currently wired to believe that what he was doing was the right thing, leaving no room to feel like he should be at all guilty about what he did.
Going unnoticed, he hacked into a line's scanner system in which the paste would run through. Taking a sample of contaminated paste, he ran the thing through the system and further coded it in order to trick the scanner into thinking the virus wasn't harmful and rather a part of the food paste. Loral then hacked the last filtration system in line to inject the virus instead of sterilizing the paste, making sure to stop the line of paste before doing so and doing so very quickly to go unnoticed by the roaming guards. It very much acted the same as it would before, making the sabotage go fairly unnoticed. To the guards, he was simply examining the systems and machinery. Loral made sure that any odd stops in the equipment happened when absolutely no one was paying attention. Furthermore, he went through each system to make sure any trace of tampering would go unnoticed by any inspectors running through the area. Everything was going as perfect as Loral thought it would, to the point where he was walking triumphantly back to his shuttle.
However, he was abruptly stopped by the captain of the liveship and brought to a holding cell without any explanation. The captain of the Korvus had found out his shuttle was traveling directly to the liveships and, though he didn't know what he was doing, knew that his actions wouldn't amount to any good. There was nothing at all suspicious the captain of the liveship could really find happening in the food processing systems and a few hours went by in which Loral was either being interrogated or was sitting alone in a makeshift holding cell. By now, many of the shipments of paste were contaminated, as Loral had intended. It was just one line of processed food, which meant it would be rather difficult to find in all the containers that would be shipped out to the rest of the fleet. It meant not everyone would get infected, but enough people would so that the adaptation process would go at a steady pace without being detected.
Unfortunately, Loral didn't expect the entirety of the scanners would be affected by the tampering he did to one. Not having messed with them enough, he didn't realize he'd interconnected the change to all of the scanners, instead of just one. This meant the perfectly fine food that went through would come out as being contaminated with foreign objects. It didn't come as a problem until it happened persistently. That many containers of food paste couldn't possibly be contaminated, so it meant that something was wrong with the machines themselves. It took a good few hours before the tampering was tracked and furthermore traced to the filtration system down the line. Production was immediately halted for the entire day until every product was rummaged and scanned until all contaminated containers were found and destroyed.
This meant that the Krovus' captain was right about his suspicion and Loral was taken into further custody to be interrogated and processed through their system, especially when the two infected crew were prime evidence that he'd injected them with some kind of disease for some sick test. The quarians he'd used as guinea pigs were incapacitated and dying in the Korvus' medbay and the fact that they'd found the enviro-suits had been tampered with was enough evidence for the captain to point a finger at Loral. He spent at least a week's time before his ship had deemed his actions as worthy for the Conclave to look into. Previous evidence was then examined and new evidence was brought to the governing group of individuals, as well as a confession from Loral himself. After much deliberation, the Conclave deemed such actions as worthy of exile and that a trial must be held to deem whether Loral should be considered guilty or not and if the Conclave's decision should be overruled. It was a unanimous decision.
Brought in front of the entirety of the Conclave and the Admiralty board, as well as his own healthy crew, Loral's trial took place a month after the incident occurred and the evidence was piled against him. The two crew members afflicted directly by Loral's virus had ultimately died from the harsh symptoms of the disease. He'd not at all known the effects, meaning it wouldn't be a surprised if he was completely wrong about his own suspicions. The virus that afflicted the crew spread from the bloodstream to the victim's brain where the disease itself inflamed the brain so much that it pushed unceasingly against the skull, to the point where the victim would suffer from severe seizures, strokes, and hemorrhages until they died. The disease afflicted pretty much anywhere the bloodstream took it, stopping flow to the lungs and heart, eating away at the veins within the body, causing internal bleeding and a whole mess of symptoms that rendered those afflicted dead within days of the symptom's emergence. The evidence was brought to the Admiralty Board and then told to an unflinching Loral. They asked if he would like to confess to his crimes of tampering with liveship equipment, which jeopardized the quarian people itself, and committing further atrocities by directly contaminating the food supply of his own people, endangering the entire fleet in the process. Loral admitted to each and every accusation with rebuttals of self-righteous and sanctimonious testament, going to the extent of accusing the admiralty bored of dooming the quarian race by keeping their people weak and imprisoned on both the fleet and their suits. After a lengthy argument with Daro'Xen and Rael'Zorah, Shala'Raan deemed the trial over and Loral'Zanis guilty of treason and murder and sentenced to exile on the nearest inhabited planet.
Dropped off on a small colony in the outer rim of the Attican Traverse, Loral'Zanis was then left to his own devices, given what supplies he was currently carrying with him when taken into custody. The colony's people were extremely wary of the quarian, a small group of humans who were compensated for 'allowing' a criminal on their land with various supplies. It wasn't long until they scrapped up what they could and sent Loral off on the next ship to pass by. Thus, he spent the next two years stowing away on ship to ship, stealing what he could to keep himself alive as he went through the galaxy. He did this for quite some time until he finally found himself on Cartagena Station, where he found shady work after shady work so that he could sustain himself. There were a lot of close calls and times where he probably shouldn't have lived, but he remained relatively safe during the two years, even finding himself working as a ship's medical officer for a short time. The ship was a small frigate maintained by a volus captain. They transported small goods from colony to colony, sometimes gathering things the colony no longer wanted in exchange for other things, bartering and being relatively harmless. It's where he was supplied with further research beyond helping the crew, should they be injured or afflicted with disease. Loral was still ignorant of his actions upon the fleet and exile still stung him deeply, but outside he was free of the restrictions and general nosiness of his people to do as he pleased. What he wanted more was to grant his people a new home and, sadly, Loral was still stuck on finding a way beyond the suits they were restricted to. It was difficult finding worthy test subjects, however, seeing as he was the only quarian and he'd not jeopardize his mission by using himself.
However, the ship was bought off the black market and had a few blemishes from its past uses, one being a rather large symbol on the side, half scrapped off, but somewhat noticeably pirate in nature. With Siame being the spearhead for the pirate eradication, they took the ship as a threat and fired on sight. The volus captain hailed the ship's commanding officer, pleading for his crew's life and mercy. The CO responded harshly, declaring they were breaking galactic law and that Siame Industries' military force was tasked with handling said villainy with extreme prejudice, then cut off communications. Unable to reestablish comms with the ship, the crew rushed to evacuate. The ship was ripped a part by the sheer firepower of the Siame fighter, unable to retaliate, much less escape. It quickly dispatched what escape pods couldn't make it out during the assault on the main ship, and, once satiated, flew away. Loral, and at least two injured crew mates were the only survivors who landed on the habitable planet safely, a world dotted with small colonies which they had visited not hours prior. To say the least, Loral abandoned the two crew mates who'd most likely died in their sleep once they'd set up camp that night. He'd not be slowed down, especially brimming with so much pent up anger.
Exhausted and nearly starving, Loral found his way to what looked to be a turian colony where they found his unconscious body close to death right on their doorstep. They took him in, nursed him back to health, and asked for an explanation to his surprise arrival. He told them of the blatant slaughter of his crew by what he remembered as Siame Industry personnel. After giving him triple filtrated food and drink, they explained what Siame was doing to the outlaws that littered the terminus and parts of the Attican Traverse, trying to convince him that what happened must have been a tragic mistake. However, Loral was unsatisfied with that excuse, still afflicted by the anger and sorrow of witnessing his entire crew murdered unjustly. He did accept their gifts to ensure his survival and, after a few days of recuperation, sent him off in the colony's ship, which was heading to Cartegena station for cheap supplies.
That's where he'd find his purpose beyond trying to further benefit his people, even from outside the fleet.
