Reckless Abandon

Jackal is an architect and monster hunter currently living in the County of Blong. He's always been fascinated by the monsters that roam the lands, and the best ways to get rid of them. He's an avid trophy collector and enjoys building showcases for his achievements. He was previously trained as a builder and architect, but was far more interested in monster hunting and travelled to Blong in hopes of living out his dreams, but when the locals realised his talent he was once again hired to build. He built many of Blong's bases and has been commended on his architecture, even being commissioned to build houses for the other residents.

Jackal, who had not been allowed to use firearms in his hometown, was intent on becoming a ranged expert and gunsmith. To his credit he does live up to his name as a monster hunter, but his tendency to strike out alone has landed him in extremely hot water on multiple occasions. His first run-in was during a blizzard, when he knew the Deerclops would appear and he believed he could take it on. Having rested at the snow base, Jackal waited patiently for his target to appear, only for him to become the target. The rest of Blong’s residents fled but Jackal was intent on fighting until the beast vanished back into the snow, but it never did. Some quick research from Moonfreak confirmed that the Deerclops would remain for three days after all residents had left the snow, prompting Jackal to flee and escape the vicious cycle he created for himself.

The second ill-fated boss encounter was during an expedition in the jungle. Jackal, Moonfreak, Ryme and Toast were exploring the uncharted jungle when they came upon a hive. Ryme and Toast were adamantly against waking Queen Bee, but when Jackal offered Moonfreak $2 to break the larva she simply couldn’t refuse. When the last adventurer arrived back at base, they soon realised their mistake when Queen Bee arrived and continued her attack. Luckily her assault was shorter lived than Deerclops, but in some ways more terrifying.

This happened again during a group expidition, where another hive was found. Jackal immediately offered Chester $2 to summon the Queen, and when that was met with backlack from Ryme and Toast, Moonfreak offered another $2 to sweeten the deal. Brucius the Inferno was ready and believed they could take on the queen, but they were still unprepared.

Notable Events

• Summoning and being unable to kill Deerclops.
• Bribing Moonfreak into summoning and being unable to kill Queen Bee.
• Bribing Chester into summoning and being unable to kill Queen Bee.

Backstory

Jackal comes from a land that completely purged its evils when he was a child. The residents set about terraforming the Underworld, Corruption and Hallow so they could live in complete peace. Jackal’s parents were monster hunters, assigned to protect builders and terraformers on expeditions. Even after Jackal was born they weren’t around much, meaning he was raised by other townsfolk and teachers. When they were home Jackal loved hearing stories of their exploits, fighting boss monsters with a huge arsenal of weapons. They had an armory in their back yard and had built a lot of weapons, allowing Jackal to look at their schematics and teaching them how to draw his own. As a kid he created “weapon” schematics that were so outlandish his parents could only create them with cardboard and paint.

Throughout primary school Jackal was obsessed with monsters and often did his assignments on them. This frightened a lot of the other kids, pushing his teachers to ask his parents to stop telling him monster stories. They were confident he’d grow out of it and told them not to worry, but his fixation only got worse as his chances of becoming a monster hunter dwindled. On the very last mission to clear the final column of Corruption from the world Jackal begged his parents to take him, but they refused and told him it was far too dangerous. They instead gave him a flare gun and told him to shoot it into the sky if there were monsters. He took to patrolling the town, flare gun in hand, and wasn’t shy about explaining himself to any concerned adults that approached him.

In general the adults didn’t like Jackal having a gun but his parents assured them that he knew how to use it, and that he was only to fire it if he saw a monster. The townsfolk made them agree that Jackal was not to have access to their armory, and that he was never allowed a proper firearm. While they never intended on giving him access to the armory they weren’t keen on stopping their son from doing something he wanted to do, but after speaking with the Arm’s Dealer they learned he planned on leaving as soon as the lands were cleansed and decided that Jackal getting a real gun wasn’t a concern. The council decided that weapon licenses would be enforced after the cleansing, just in case.

This caused a stir amongst the older townsfolk; not only did Jackal have a gun, but he’d taken it upon himself to patrol the town. Someone suggested they try getting someone his age to talk to him, but Jackal was uninterested in speaking to anyone about anything but monsters. A young girl named Harlow heard her neighbors talking about “the scary dog boy with the gun” and assumed he was a cryptid or an urban legend. It wasn’t hard for her to find him, and as a generally quiet person Harlow was happy to sit and listen to Jackal infodump about monster hunting, weapons, lunar events, anything that came to his mind. Her parents were worried at first and thought Jackal would be a bad influence on her, but she explained that she just felt bad for him because he didn’t have friends, and because he lived alone. She liked listening to him because he was smart and knew a lot about things she wasn’t interested in, but hearing them from someone passionate made them interesting.

When Jackal’s parents returned and the world was declared completely free of evil by the Dryad, the town celebrated and began preparing to destroy all the summoning items that’d been found and kept locked up. Appalled that no one told him about this collection, Jackal planned on stealing something for his own gains. Through his research he had a vague idea of what summoned what and desperately wanted to grab a Mechanical Skull. The ceremony was slated to happen in three days, which gave him precious little time to plan his moves. His plan was to steal his mother’s Rod of Discord, warp into the safe holding all the items, grab something and warp out. On the day before the ceremony he managed to pull this off, but it was so dark in the safe and he was so panicked about being caught that he grabbed the first thing he got his hands on and got out of there. Upon leaving he found himself with a stone tablet and had no idea what it correlated to. He spent months researching it, assuming it was connected to Golem somehow but finding nothing resembling it in the Jungle Temple.

In the months following the great cleansing, many traders and dealers left the town to find more profitable locations. The first to go was the arms dealer, much to Jackal’s dismay. The last to leave was the Dryad, after staying for a few years to ensure none of the biomes were changing. Most residents repurposed their weapons and armor into more useful or vanity items, such as melting metal to create lampposts and disassembling teleporters to create decorative displays. Jackal managed to nab a few weapons before they were repurposed and knew his parents hadn’t given up any of their collection. They had reinforced the armory door and hidden the key so well Jackal had been unable to find it since their return.

Jackal and Harlow ended up in the same high school class, much to the teacher’s relief that Jackal would have at least someone to talk to. In the time they’d been hanging out Jackal had become slightly more sociable and as all the kids grew up fewer of them feared him. As he got older his weapon designs became more sophisticated and realistic, but he kept his schematics a secret and was trying to work out how to get parts for them. He knew of travelling merchants that sometimes visited different lands, but it’d been years since he’d seen one. Not keen on letting any of the townsfolk twinge to his ideas, he kept everything he’d been working on a secret. Soon he was so sure he could get away with buying a few materials without rousing suspicion that he openly bought supplies to create a launcher. The hardware store clerk assumed he was building something and asked what he was up to, so Jackal lied and said he was building a cat tower for a neighbor. Impressed, the clerk asked to see it when it was done and Jackal quickly realised he’d dug himself into a hole.

In his first year of senior high school Jackal had to double up on supplies and come up with cover stories for what he was making. He said he needed a lot of materials because he kept making mistakes and was still learning, which worked until the hardware store clerk saw the cat tower he made. It was extremely impressive and to any outsider would’ve appeared to have taken Jackal at least six months. Word got out that he had a new hobby and people were generally happy to hear that he’d gravitated to something other than monsters. Unhappy at this sudden attention, he gave the tower to an extremely appreciative Harlow, who was excited to see what Jackal made next. He said he was taking suggestions to get her off his back, and she genuinely started thinking of ideas for him.

Soon after, Jackal found himself split between studying the tablet and making various pieces of furniture for the townsfolk. He started raking in some decent money from it and his skills grew quickly. His knack for blueprints made the construction process relatively easy for him, and he didn’t hate getting paid for the work. Soon enough he was approached by a local builder and carpenter who offered to take him on as an apprentice. Backed by strong pushes from his parents and Harlow, he agreed. He soon realised how advantageous this was as the builder was responsible for building the land’s bunkers and shelters. He took Jackal on a tour, taught him about teleporters and wiring and showed him a map of the land’s mechanisms. It didn’t take long for Jackal to commandeer one of the underground bunkers for himself, rerouting the wires to a teleporter hidden in his room.

This bunker became Jackal’s primary workroom, a place where he could safely store his schematics and plans and work without being disturbed. He spent days at a time there, appearing at home for meals and little else. His parents assumed he was hard at work, which he technically was, so they never questioned him. He continued buying materials for his own work, covering it as random creations he would offload onto Harlow, and studying under his mentor. He also got in contact with travelling merchants, having them bring him materials and items he couldn’t get locally. Illegal gun parts, monster materials, Hellstone. With the money coming in from his work he was easily able to cover what he needed, and the merchants were more than happy to accept extra cash to keep quiet. During one exchange he noticed the merchant had a deep crimson cape amongst his stock, which Jackal simply couldn’t refuse.

One morning Harlow visited to ask if she could commission Jackal for something, but when his parents pointed her to his room, she found it empty. Too tempted not to look, she decided to at least glance at what he was reading. While looking at the piles of books on his desk, Harlow noticed a switch in an ajar drawer and couldn’t help but press it. She was immediately teleported to Jackal’s bunker, and thinking he’d been compromised pointed his newly assembled handgun at her. When he realised it was her, he demanded answers, as did she.

The two came to a truce: Harlow wouldn’t tell anyone about the bunker if Jackal stayed out of trouble and told her what the massive tablet on his workbench was. He admitted he didn’t know and was planning on going to the Jungle Temple but wasn’t sure how to get there unnoticed. The pylons were too public, and it was too far to walk. Harlow, not wanting him to accidentally summon something, agreed to help him under the guise of collecting materials for something she wanted him to build. He would have to build the thing, of course, but it would get him to the temple. Jackal begrudgingly agreed, and the two had an uneventful expedition to the jungle.

Jackal’s research in the temple was mostly fruitless, as the creatures that created them were long dead and their language not studied. He spent almost an entire day going through the ruins, much to Harlow’s discontent, but called it once he’d documented everything that was left. Upon returning, Jackal went straight back to his bunker and started going over his notes again in case he’d missed anything.

After being up all night and finding nothing, Jackal decided to watch the sunrise from the roof of his house. It was rare he was up that early, but even he knew that the sky was supposed to get lighter, not darker. Watching the sun as best he could, he noticed it seemed to be changing shape. Wondering if this had something to do with the tablet, he quickly ran to the bunker and crawled back to the roof just in time to see the sun half eclipsed. As the sky turned darker than night and a few early-rising townsfolk came out to see what was going on, the tablet in Jackal’s hand glowed and crumbled, followed by the sound of monsters.

The townsfolk started to panic, most not knowing what to do, and a keen-eyed few started yelling at Jackal for answers. He just ran to his bunker, armed up, and returned to the sound of warning bells he hadn’t heard for decades. His parents were in the armory and most of the town was awake and ready to fight, but they’d had enough time to gather that Jackal had done this. He didn’t have time to defend himself, running from his front door directly into an angry group of townsfolk with rag-tag weapons. As they blamed him and demanded to know what he’d done, Harlow made her way to the front to try and defend him. She affirmed that it wasn’t his fault and she was asked for proof, but when she turned to Jackal to provide it he fired his flare gun into the air. The townsfolk immediately turned on him, chasing him to the edge of town. He said nothing as his parents and Harlow begged everyone to stop, but not wanting to take up arms against anyone were powerless to stop anyone. At the edge of town Jackal paused, looking ahead at the oncoming monsters, and took one glance back before taking off into the fray. He was too fast for anyone to catch him and wasn’t seen in those lands again.

Once the eclipse ended Jackal started making his way back to town. After an entire day of fighting his weapons were destroyed and his cape was so tattered it’d fallen off his shoulders hours ago. His hair had gone completely grey and the bags under his eyes were even deeper than before. It took him days to get back with his injuries. As he approached town he made sure to stay in the shadows and out of sight, just in case. He noted it was extremely quiet and considered sneaking back home to grab the last of his belongings before taking off, but passing by the graveyard he saw his parents and Harlow laying flowers by a headstone. They took turns speaking but were too far for Jackal to hear, and after some time they all left. Once they were out of sight Jackal approached the site and read his own name on the tombstone. Shocked and enraged, he left without another word.

Stowing away on a merchant’s ship, Jackal eventually reached the County of Blong. He immediately recognised it as a fresh and untouched land, seeing monsters he hadn’t seen since he was a child. Jackal wasn’t the first to show up, but was able to make a fresh start with some new faces.

Weapons & Equipment

Jackal's favourite weapons and equipment are:

• Vortex Beater, Sniper Rifle, Flamethrower, Super Star Shooter
• Venom Bullets, Ichor Bullets, Endless Musket Pouch
• Bone Key/Baby Skeletron Head | Grim Dye
• Wisp in a Bottle/Wisp

Vanity

• Fox Ears | Blue Flame and Black Dye
• Fox Tail | Blue Flame and Black Dye
• Leinfors' Excessive Style, but the sleeves are short | Purple and Black Dye
• Leinfors' Fancy Pants | Silver and Black Dye
• Belted Knee-high Boots
• Crimson Cloak | Red and Black Dye
• D-Town's Wings | Silver and Black