PS Jackal

Base Stats

• Brawn: 2
• Agility: 2
• Intellect: 3
• Cunning: 3
• Willpower: 2
• Presence: 1

• Wound Threshold: 10 + Brawn
• Strain Threshold: 10 + Willpower
• Wildkin Instincts: Cool, Perception, Stealth, Skulduggery, Vigilance
• Starting XP: 85

• Death Jackal (Optional 15 xp): When a Death Jackal is the only being within short range of an enemy, it gains a boost dice to all attacks against that isolated enemy and adds 10 to the value of all critical attack rolls.

Unit History

Yama and Kali. They are the reason you don't see jackals out on the front lines or bottled up in development labs. Wolves were known for their combat prowess, domestic canines for their loyalty and acceptance of training, and foxes and their kind filled in the lightweight roles of sneak thieves and more. Jackals, like dingos, had a very different reputation, and jackals more so than dingos. In terms of evolution, they occupied their own branch on the tree, and unlike all others, they were more often associated with death than any other of their relatives. That should have been a warning to us all.

The first jackals were based on the black-backed jackal, the most distant relative to the canines given it is the one that cannot be interbred with other species. The test batches were perfect. Highly intelligent and clever by nature, they were groomed for deep cover work, espionage, and some good back alley murder, but then they showed up. Two jackals came out melanistic with nearly perfect jet-black fur. We were going to name them, but they did that on their own. The female called herself Kali, and the male, Yama. They chose these names at their equivalent of four year old children, and they learned faster than any other jackals we had. That in itself would not have been a problem if not for the liberation.

Yama and Kali somehow possessed knowledge far beyond our training, and as soon as their bodies could keep up with the demands, they started acting out. Breaking security systems wasn't anything new, but the systematic murder of the staff be it research or security was new as was how efficient they seemed to be at breaking out and making a run for it. At one point, Yama let security forces on a two hour chase with a heavily mangled super security droid tailing him most of the way. Like all failed projects, they were terminated. That should have been the end of it.

Two days later, two other jackals suddenly changed fur color. Black just like Yama and Kali except it wasn't like Yama and Kali, it was Yama and Kali. They were even more dangerous the second time they showed up, and we realized that so long as any jackals still lived, whatever Yama and Kali were might keep jumping into new bodies. They were eventually, after heavy losses, captured and sealed in carbonite. Both of them were locked in the high security wing of the facility, and all the other jackals were scrapped just to be sure they didn't have any new bodies to escape into.

Yama remains in containment to this day, but a recent raid by what may have been a group called Nightsisters, of which we know little, resulted in Kali being stolen. With no other jackals to leap into, we should be safe, but woe into anyone who uses Kali to create more of her kind.