Player: Todd
Role: Marine
Origins
A Marine, and Todd’s secondary character aboard The Second Chance — stepping in as the crew’s second pair of trigger-pulling hands alongside Benny Letcher. He came aboard with a combat shotgun and a standard-issue kit, and declined the working dog that came with it; whatever else this life is going to be, he wasn’t putting an animal through it.
Appearance
A long, narrow face built out of vertical lines, and hair that arrives in a room before he does — a tall, wild spike-mop standing straight up off a close-cropped back and sides, self-cut and unkempt, his ears sticking out past it. His eyes sit heavy and half-lidded under flat straight brows, the look of a man who has already decided this is not his problem. Long straight nose, thin mouth. Light never seems to reach the bottom half of him — a hard shadow falls across his face below the cheekbones, swallowing jaw and chin and mouth, so that the first thing anyone reads off him is the stare and the dark under it. There is usually a cigarette clamped in the corner of that mouth, its ember the brightest thing about him, smoke curling up past his cheek — lit indoors, on a station where air is the one thing everybody pays for. He is lean rather than heavy, wiry under the dirty white ribbed undersuit he lives in, its sealing ring collar riding high on his neck.
The Price of Air
Jackal joined the crew in play during the Iron Cross boarding in orbit over Siddhartha’s Peace. He and Benny sealed themselves into the armory the moment pirates came aboard and stayed hidden until Bennett II raised them on the comms, then flanked the boarding party through the locker room. He put a shotgun blast into the chest of Jax Vanko, whose veins glowed through his skin, and watched something luminous and blue spray out instead of blood — and took a magnum round through his armor for it. When Captain Vane “Rusty” Kross called for the ship’s self-destruct, Jackal wrestled him to the deck and pinned his arms until Jon gave the word.
He came out of the Iron Cross fight with an empty shotgun and never did get it loaded. He worked the top of the paracord hoist while Arnold went down into the reactor pit, hauling Weaver and Benny up out of the bad air. Then, arriving at the med bay to find three people on the floor with their ears ringing and a pirate dug in behind an overturned bed, he painted a tennis ball into a passable likeness of a thermal detonator, bounced it through the door, and rolled in behind it to put the empty muzzle against Zeid’s head while the man was still braced for a blast that never came. He took Zeid’s pulse rifle for himself and found the trap on it before it took his hand off — the second booby-trap of the night that nearly got him, after the workshop keypad. Popping that workshop door cost him: he caught a burst across the body as it opened and went down rolling, alive on the strength of being a Marine and not much else, and got thrown around the corridor a second time when Dax vented the compartment. He also, by choice, spent a portion of the evening antagonizing the prisoner in the brig.
With no shells left after the boarding fight, Jackal was restocked out of Dax’s pockets and stayed behind to hold the barricade at the airlock while the rest of the crew went into the terraforming station — the only gun left aboard The Second Chance.
Attendance Log
- Session 3: The Night of the Prophet August 29, 2026
- Session 4: The Air We Have Left September 20, 2026
- Session 5: Welcome, Traveler October 4, 2026