Red Jackal

As to the Red Jackal – it’s just a dreal I had and felt compelled to share, I guess. Perhaps it will provide some scenario fodder for someone, though by the end the dream was closer to Call of Cthulhu than DC Heroes. Which, BTW, means it may not be for the squeamish.

Background

Advertisement

Powers and Abilities

Before his transformation, the Red Jackal was an accomplished intelligence-gathering agent.

After his transformation to his current form, the Red Jackal is at the peak of human physical ability and can leap prodigious distances. He has a wicked set of 8-inch retractable talons in his fingers. He also can cling to surfaces through unknown means (it is known that he does not use his talons to do so).

Though he lacks any notable combat training, his present natural physical abilities make him a formidable combatant.

History

It is obvious that he was involved in intelligence work in his previous life. The Red Jackal also seems that he acquired his nom de guerre before he was transformed into his present state.

He first appeared at the City Bus Plaza, accosting a man there and demanding answers about a number of children that had disappeared. The children were all apparently related to various intelligence operatives and the Jackal implied that his current physical state had something to do with his quest.

The man hesitantly gave up the location of a secret location known only as “the Abattoir.” The Red Jackal was then assaulted by his captive’s colleagues and played a cat-and-mouse game with them throughout the downtown area. He captured them one by one, interrogated them, and then beat them unconscious.

The Red Jackal made his way to the outskirts of town and found the Abattoir. It was a large abandoned cathedral. It was remarkable both in that such an impressive edifice had been allowed to decay and that no one, not even the local homeless population, had intruded upon it.

Advertisement

The Abattoir

The Jackal waited until the fall of night and stole onto the grounds. He noticed that despite the cool temperature of the evening, the grass was warm.

He knelt down and discovered that the grass was not grass at all, but some form of sessile slug, thousands of which had rooted in the ground and assumed a flattened green shape. He plucked one and could see the thick green line of its spinal cord running through the center of its lighter-green translucent mass.

Undaunted and more curious than ever, the Jackal continued into the Abattoir, gaining access through a broken window on the darkened side of the cathedral.

There, he discovered how the edifice had gotten its name. Hanging within on meat hooks suspended from the ceiling were several dozen bodies. All of them had been mutilated, missing various limbs. Where each amputation had occurred there was a bile-green slime capping the wound. Despite the obvious decay of some of the bodies, there was no stench of rotting flesh, only a must like that decaying wood.

The quick and the dead

The Jackal made another discovery: the “corpses” were still alive, moaning softly as they slowly twisted and gyrated in the night breeze. He heard a gibbering as if from a madman and slipped through the bodies like a wraith.

He came across two men in dark blue robes standing before a living man dangling from one of the ubiquitous meat hooks. He was missing his legs, the wounds capped with that odd bile-green hardened gel. As he watched, one of the robed men rubbed a bile-green jelly around the hanging man’s right shoulder.

He whispered a word and made a gesture, and the slime suddenly tightened, eating through the shoulder. The hanging man’s arm dropped off as the slime hardened over the gaping wound, staunching the flow of blood. The Jackal was outraged at this horrific violation and swept toward his opponents, the tortured man’s ravings covering the noise of his charge…

…And then I woke up. Damn alarm clock.

Description

The Red Jackal looks a lot like the Marvel Universe hero Sasquatch, a humanoid covered with long hair (especially on the forearms and lower legs). The differences are that the Jackal’s fur is rust-red instead of orange, his eyes are human (albeit with amber irises), and he is only of normal height.

His cranial hair is also slicked back (as opposed to Sasquatch’s bushy brows), making him look a little like a seal.

His talons are a dark crimson, the color of dried blood. He speaks with a rich, cultured voice, always maintaining an even tone.

Personality

The Red Jackal is relentless, but not a raving fanatic. While he has great depth of feeling he rarely displays any emotion. His only goal at the moment is to find out what happened to the children that he is seeking.

He will avoid violence if possible, and will subdue enemies with a minimum of harm if he has the opportunity, but has no compunction whatsoever about killing if necessary.

The quotes in this profile were bluffs for purposes of intimidation; the Jackal actually abhors torture and in fact responded with unusual violence when he witnessed others using such techniques.

While the Red Jackal is very quiet most of the time, when he does talk he actually tends toward the loquacious. When he’s interrogating subjects, he tends to slip into an affected cultured British accent much like Wile E. Coyote’s when he was explaining one of his nefarious schemes to an audience.

This may be part of the Jackal’s perverse sense of humor, which is demonstrating in odd behaviors such as using his clinging power to run up stairs while “standing” at a horizontal orientation, looking like a refugee from an Escher painting seen through a mescaline lens.

Quotes

“I do hope you’re reaching for a tube of lubricant, because whatever you pull out of that shoulder holster is going straight up your ass.”

“Shall I show you a little trick I learned with my talons ? I could slide them under your face and snip the muscles, one by one, until you were incapable of any expression ever again. Or…you could answer my questions.”

“When I was questioning your last friend, I found out that you can’t actually strangle someone with their own intestines: the damn things tear too easily. Well, the point is that one way or the other I find out something new every time I talk to someone. Do you want to tell me something I don’t already know, or must I resort to further experimentation to satisfy my yearning for new data ?”

Other Universes History

Since he is not rooted in any particular fictional universe, the Red Jackal can be imported without any alteration.

The dream had definite Lovecraftian overtones, and I got the impression that the Red Jackal’s transformation was the result of an inhuman parentage coming to the fore rather than a completely foreign change, akin to the change of a Deep One hybrid or the atavism of the eponymous subject of Lovecraft’s short story Arthur Jermyn.

Interestingly, the What If? mini-series Paradise X, set in one potential future of the Marvel Universe speculated that Sasquatch and similarly bestial heroes were “throwbacks” to what humanity might have evolved into if the Celestials hadn’t implanted the mutant seed in homo sapiens’ DNA.

The Red Jackal’s quest could take him through any number of locales in the DCU. If the conspiracy that the Jackal was at odds with makes a habit of replacing plants with animal analogues (such as the grass-slugs), the Red Jackal might find an odd ally in Poison Ivy.

Perhaps the Jackal’s change was an atypical result of exposure to one of Rah’s al Ghul’s Lazarus Pits, which would raise some interesting possibilities. In particular that the Jackal’s enemies were a mystical offshoot of the League of Assassins.

By Roy Cowan.

Source of Character: A meat combo pizza-induced dream.

Helper(s): Ethan Roe.