Keely Iyuska

Keely Iyuska is a human xenoarchaeologist and a junior professor at the University of Edinburgh on Earth.

Early life and academic career
Keely Iyuska was born circa 2530. By 2550, Iyuska was attending Sydney University on Earth where she met the fourteen-year-old prodigy Olympia Vale, who also attended the university. The two quickly became friends, perhaps partially due to Vale's self-admitted desperation to be accepted by her older classmates. It was during their time together at the university when Iyuska gave Vale the nickname of "Pia," a name which Vale liked at the time, though the appeal of it would wear off. Vale would first tell Iyuska that she did not like the nickname at their commencement ceremony. Iyuska graduated from Sydney Univeristy with a degree in xenoarchaeology. After graduation, the two friends would next see each other shortly after the end of the Human-Covenant War and Vale's walkabout on the Sangheili world of Khael'mothka. Iyuska was so excited to ask her questions about Sangheili culture that Vale began to feel that she was nothing but a research opportunity to her old friend.

By the late spring of 2555, Iyuska held a job at the University of Calippus, working on the side for the Office of Naval Intelligence as a civilian xenoarchaeology consultant and as a guest lecturer at the Luna OCS Academy. While still working at the University of Calippus, Iyuska applied for a tenured postion. Ultimately the application was denied, something which did not surprise Iyuska given her young age. Following Vale's return from a joint UNSC-Swords of Sanghelios operation to Installation 00 earlier that year, she was given permission to brief Iyuska on the technology and architecture she observed while on the mission. This meeting was strictly professional and left little time to grow their friendship. Vale was also not permitted to reveal that she had been recruited into the SPARTAN-IV program, instead simply telling Iyuska that she was being sent on a "special assignment." Iyuska later stated that she was worried sick about Vale following their meeting.

As part of ONI's Project BOOKWORM, Keely Iyuska travelled to Heian to lead some excavations of its ruins. Following this, Iyuska became involved with the University of Oxford and got caught up in a scandal involving an affair. This scandal got so overblown that ONI had to designate it as "need to know" in order to avoid embarrassing Iyuska, an important ONI consultant. Due to her talent and security clearance, ONI helped Iyuska land a post at the University of Edinburgh, despite her troublesome record. Iyuska was happy that she still had a place to work, though she believed that the department chair, Cadence, was a "jealous cow" and only accepted her hiring because she wanted ONI funding. Cadence gave Iyuska a full load of introductory archaeology courses to teach, with none of them in the field of xenoarchaeology. However, as part of her post, Iyuska also had to filter through UNSC after-action reports in search of evidence of protogenic civilizations, effectively wanting her to canvass the entire Orion Arm. For this task, she was given funds for an artificial intelligence and research assistant, who helped Iyuska generate a list of three hundred and fifty-two candidates on two hundred and eleven celestial bodies.

Hunting ghosts
As she dug deeper into her assignment, Iyuska began to see evidence of a civlization older than the Forerunners, be it a device that required an unattainable amount of energy, a impossible to build structure, or a settlement that appeared to exist separate from space and time. Yet, each time that she though she found evidence, the observations just vanished from her mind, or were explained away by the next report she examined, or her assistant would track down a record that established the technology firmly as Forerunner in origin. Iyuska sent a grant request to Cadence for funding to survey the sites from her research, but the department chair suggested that she would have more luck getting the funding if the surveys were framed as a search for the missing San'Shyuum. Since she wouldn't get any support from Cadence, Iyuska sent the grant request directly to Admiral Serin Osman, the Commander-in-Chief of the Office of Naval Intelligence. In response, she was sent the UNSC's Military Survey of Unihabited Planets and a translated copy of the Covenant World Registry.

Researching Netherop
By cross-referencing these documents with her research, Iyuska found evidence of this mystery civilization on Netherop, a planet that was the site of a small battle in 2526. On top of this, details from the Covenant World Registry led Iyuska to believe that the Forerunners called the world "Planet of Ghost Makers," implying that they had suffered heavy losses in a battle there. This was enough to convince Admiral Osman to authorize a survey of Netherop. However, the rise of the Created prevented the funding from arriving.

Sometime later, Iyuska was approached by Eto 'Saljhoo, a Sangheili antiquities collector, who—unbeknownst to Iyuska—was aligned with the Banished and had already discovered record of a weapon on Netherop that interested Atriox. 'Saljhoo provided Iyuska with the funding for the mission, with the stipulation that he would have first pick of the artifacts recovered from Netherop, an agreement that the two sealed with the Sangheili custom of sucking the marrow from the roasted femur of a colo. However, Iyuska soon began to suspect that there was something that 'Saljhoo was not telling her, and further research on the planet produced a record that indicated a Guardian Custode had long ago been sent to subdue Netherop, and that the planet's civilization had managed to defeat the construct.

Recruiting consultants
In late 2559, when Keely Iyuska was supposed to rendezvous with her benefactor, she instead travelled to the state of Vadam, Sanghelios to meet with Olympia Vale and see if ONI would still support a mission to Netherop, given her concerns about Eto 'Saljhoo. When she failed to make the rendezvous, Eto 'Saljhoo hired the Sangheili Oath Warden Crei 'Ayomuu to hunt Iyuska down and hold her to her promise. Using a flight of Eyes, Crei tracked Iyuska to a tenement island in Vadam Valley where she attempted to hide among the kreche warrens. When a band of angry Sangheili males fired on the Eyes, Created armigers arrived at the tenement island to investigate, also discovering Iyuska's presence. Already aware of her research, the armigers razed the tenement island to the ground. Iyuska escaped unharmed and sent a message via trysting pod to Vale's residence, the Villa of Long Views. In the message, she informed Vale to look for her at the villa's sally port. Once brought inside out of the dark Sangheili night, Iyuska was shocked by Vale's appearance, not realizing that she was a Spartan-IV. The two caught up on their lost time and Iyuska informed Vale of her situation, asking her if she could talk to her ONI contacts to get them to mobilize a mission to Netherop, stating that they can't let Eto 'Saljhoo get his hands on the Guardian-killing weapon first.

With this settled, Iyuska stated that they needed to go to the Outer Colony of Gao to hire a consultant who knew Netherop better than either of them. Vale managed to convince her superiors of the importance of the mission and the two women arrived at Gao a few days later. Here, they hired a pipistrelle piloted by Arturo Ramus to take them to the village of Paraiso deep in the jungle. Under the guise of medical researchers studying a newly-encountered prion disease, Iyuska and Vale wished to speak with and recruit Rosa Fuertes, a member of the Castoffs that Blue Team had rescued from Netherop decades earlier. One of the armed men protecting the village suspected that the two women were agents of the Office of Naval Intelligence, but with some monetary incentive and a show of force from Vale, they got to speak with Rosa Fuertes, who agreed to come with them to Netherop, despite being afflicted by the prion disease. Iyuska, Vale, and Fuertes left Gao and rendezvoused with the, a that would transport them and an entire battalion of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers—who would assist in the excavation of the artifact—to Netherop.

Mission on Netherop
After several slipspace jumps, the Hidden Point arrived at Netherop to discover that a flotilla of Arbiter Thel 'Vadam's ships had already entered orbit and deployed several Phantoms to peculiar crater on the surface. Iyuska, Vale, and Fuertes boarded a D102 Owl stealth insertion craft with the fifteen ODSTs of Tango Team and deployed onto the planet separately from the rest of the battalion. The Owl reached the crater as the forty Pelicans carrying the ODST battalion entered the upper atmosphere. At this moment, a rift filled with blinding light opened on tel at the center of the crater, destroying all forty of the Pelicans and briefly disabling the Owl. Despite the horrific loss of life and the pilots' wanting to call off the mission, Vale had them land the Owl on the tel, saying that they just found what they were looking for. Upon reaching the tel, the group disembarked to set up a perimeter and attempt to find a way below the surface. Iyuska busied herself by three-dimensional rendering of the tel's summit using terrain reader and a mapping tablet.

As the group searched for an entrance, the Sangheili survivors who had taken over the structure beneath the tel launched an ambush, dissolving the dusty ground beneath Iyuska, Fuertes, and several equipment crates. Falling into a tunnel beneath them, the Sangheili went after the two women. Iyuska hid under the pile of equipment crates, but the Sangheili grabbed Fuertes, pulling her down the tunnel. Vale jumped into the breach and told Iyuska to stay put as she looked around for Fuertes. However, several Sangheili lunged at her and she attempted in vain to calm them by explaining the situation in their native tongue. The ODSTs breached their way into the tunnel using C-12 explosives and managed to push back the attackers. Shortly after this, Arbiter Thel 'Vadam and his entourage arrived at the tel in mountain runners operated by Captain Amalea Petrov and her soldiers. The Arbiter had encountered the human castaways just before the weapon had fired, and a tense discussion led to Petrov agreeing to a cease-fire. It was agreed that the Arbiter and his forces would enter the tel first and attempt to reason with the Sangheili defenders. In the meantime, Vale and Iyuska continued to look for another way into the structure.

Personality and traits
Keely Iyuska is known to have a habit of getting herself into trouble, with ONI once having to bail her out of a scandal involving an affair. Although her academic curiosity sometimes gets in the way, Iyuska is good friends with Olympia Vale.

Iyuska is noted to have a sturdy build and a slender face with deep green eyes that could either make her look guileful or fiercely observant. She has meter-long red hair which she often has in a braid draped over one shoulder.

Equipment
While visiting Olympia Vale on Sanghelios, Iyuska wore a dark field jacket and dark pants with large square pockets, as well as a wide-brimmed hat. She is often seen carrying a data pad with which she records her findings, usually via the data pad's speech-to-text function.

List of appearances

 * Halo: Outcasts