| abstract
| - Jackal grew up as Liam in a suburb of Dublin, Ireland. Not the nice, stereotyped suburbs of America. In fact, a more accurate description would be dormitory town. The suburb, Ballybeg, was built specifically to contain the overflow population of workers in Dublin. Young Liam was the smallest of seven children and the middle child to boot. To say he got some stick from his larger brothers would be an understatement. Unluckily for them, Liam also suffered from a mental state he liked to call Implosive Anger Disorder. He would take and take and take until finally snapping. And when he metaphorically snapped, other people's bones tended to literally snap. He found a release in the local boxing club, often fighting in heavier weight categories to vent some anger on people he could really hit. Young Liam also showed greater academic affinities than his brothers. He excelled in school and earned 595 points in his Leaving Cert, the highest tally in the history of his small, generally drug-addicted school. He moved on to the Mechanical Engineering Course of Dublin Institute of Technology, earning distinctions and eventually a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, writing his thesis on the Fuel Control Systems of Fusion Reactors. He was immediately offered a job in a Texan nuclear power plant. Liam headed to America, bidding his home goodbye for what he did not realize would be the last time. He enjoyed his new job, holding fantastic relations with the workers, often accompanying them on trips to the local gun club and on hunting trips. He turned out to be quite a good shot but held quite a distaste for killing. Apparently, he was ok with knocking the living hell out of people in the local boxing and full-contact martial arts clubs but was adverse to shooting wild boar and deer. He also held good relations with the local community, even volunteering for the local police force, achieving the position of reserve sniper, and teaching self-defence at schools and community centers in the town. Having become a naturalized citizen of the United States of America, Liam was drafted into the Army Corps of Engineers to aid in the fighting in Alaska. Later in his training, he gave up his Irish Citizenship Rights and entered the Army Special Forces (AKA the Green Berets) as a Combat Engineer through Initial Accession. While he was not the biggest or strongest candidate, Liam pushed himself harder than he ever had before. He eventually completed training and was shipped to the Alaskan Front to fight the Chinese invaders. While he held a distaste for war, Liam was not one to let down his adoptive country, even taking part in the Anchorage Reclamation Operation. In 2076, he and his unit were rotated out of Alaska. Liam returned to his comparatively humdrum job at the Power Plant, following the war through news updates. Between tours on the Alaskan front, Jackal and his unit were also assigned to several covert operations in Chinese territory, including attacks on Taiwan and Mainland China itself. October 23rd, 2077 started the same as any other day. The Power Plant whistle called, Liam rose and went to work. Come 10:47am, however, the East Coast was struck by the bombs, and Liam, in his office in the depths of the Fusion Power Plant, was shielded from the sun-like heat and violent force of the bombs, but the high-energy radiation seeped in through the damaged shell of the brutalised Plant, as radiation seeped out through the damaged shell of the Reactor Core. Liam stayed in his shelter, becoming violently ill. His skin started to peel, and he couldn't hold down his meager, rationed food. Eventually, he took to sitting back in his office chair, waiting for death to lock him in it's cold, loving embrace. That moment never came. Liam eventually found himself feeling better, stronger even, in the horrifying radiation levels of the Power Plant. He took to exercising again. Running along the walkways every morning, pull-ups from exposed piping. Where others would have died horribly, he survived. As far as Liam was concerned, he was a God Among Men. He visited the outside world once. The sight shocked him. Wastelands, burning skeletons of towns and homes stretching from horizon to horizon. Liam took to picking at the carcass of the world, assuming the title Jackal - his call-sign. Only a few close friends in two hundred years ever knew Liam's real name. Liam set out to make what he could of a terrible situation. He found that he gave off an unearthly glow, a result of his years-long stay in the broken shell of a Nuclear Power Station. Over a period of almost ten years, he learned to consciously control his glow, and the radiation he seemed to give off. He could dim the glow down so he merely appeared discolored, or ramp up the output so much that for brief periods of time, he could glow so intensely that it became uncomfortable to look at him directly. For the radiation output, he usually kept it so low as to fade into the background, but could, in a pinch, produce a small blast so intense as to cause serious, if localized damage to living things. For a time, he took to traveling the Wastes, tinkering with anything he could find. Repairing, breaking, building, demolishing, he made a handy living repairing wells in towns and building small, useful items, usually clockwork or hand-operated tools, as well as repairing weapons and dabbling in structural repairs after storms. He retained his fitness and love of fighting, handy, given that the vast majority of humanity were none-too-nice to their fellow living things. However, despite the wanderlust, he would always return to Toloko periodically to bask in the radiation still being given off by the cracked Number Six core. Though he disabled it and the Number Four and Five cores adjacent to it after the damage was discovered, the core still leaks radiation and sometimes molten metal, as it is still burning to this day. The other three reactors still run on a minimum capacity to supply power to the plant.
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