Repairman Jack
Born Janko Stepanovic in Zagreb, the capitol of today’s Croatia, Jack ‘the Repairman’ Stepanovic grew up fascinated with the tales of local legend, Nikolai Tesla, who had died the same day Janko was born, January 7th, 1943. The Second World War had just ended, and the world was taking a breath, alternately filled with a desperate hope for a world at peace, and yet shaken to its core by the display of technological supremacy with the detonation of the atomic bomb.
As a teen, Janko found himself
working in the newly-built
From the workshop of ‘Jack the Repairman’ came the combat-armor of the Crimson Kestrel, with it’s rocket-pack and retractable steel talons, the sonically-resonant humanoid robot named Tintinabullum, and he was among the researchers called in to design the the first ‘containment’ suit designed to constrain the raging nuclear forces of the man today known as Positron (his modern suit, much less bulky and no longer confined to the laboratory, is a far cry from those early days, and was designed later by others). Other brainstorms from his workshop were refined into diverse technologies, such as the sophisticated ‘trick’ arrows of the hero Manticore (and his legion of imitators), as he disliked the very concept of the gun, which he thought ‘inelegant,’ and would go out of his way to outfit heroes with weapons that used ensnaring glue, fast-deploying nets, blinding flashes of light or obscuring clouds of smoke, rather than simpler, more lethal designs.
His technology was known for a certain retro look, which
some called ‘steampunk’ (and closely resembles the
look of the inventions of both Nemesis and the Clockwork King) and his fascination
with the pulps of earlier eras, an era he had just missed, was well-known. Sailing over
But all of his heroic contacts proved insufficient during the Rikti invasion. While his friends and allies fought and died against the alien menace, a group today known as the Sky Raiders seized the initiative and raided his laboratory. In the initial explosion, he lost an eye and the use of one of his arms. The broken legs were quite deliberate, as the aging inventor refused to cooperate with the leaders of the fledgling organization. After taking his plans for flight harnesses and robotic assault automata, the data that represented his life’s work was wiped out, his workshop set afire and he was left to burn with it.
Jack only survived through the intervention of a prototype robot that he had invented, which the raiders had dismissed as a non-combatant (he hadn’t programmed it to fight, since it was never meant for that role) and left also broken and leaking hydraulic fluids. The robot didn’t register pain, or weakness, simply analyzing its condition, strapping duct-tape over the leaking areas and crawling to its creator, pulling him from the burning remains of his former life.
In absence of any programming regarding the hospital, the robot’s primitive AI chose to ‘repair’ the Repairman. When Jack awoke next, many months later, he was strapped into a gurney in an abandoned laboratory that he had outgrown years before, and his world was one of pain and panicked confusion. His robotic ally had kept him in a form of suspended animation while it repaired itself and learned all it could about the human form and human / cyborg interfacing.
Contradictory signals poured into his brain from a camera-eye that the well-meaning robot had tried to mesh to his optic nerve. A crude mechanical arm, of the sort one might find on one of the primitive Freakshow, flailed about uncontrollably in response to his anguish. Only extreme doses of pain medication kept him from passing out again entirely, and he slowly began to refine the work his robotic protégé had begun. He was still confined to a wheelchair, and his legs were crushed so as to be nearly inoperable, and his functioning arm was in constant pain from its own injury, but he persevered and soon had designed a process by which stainless steel grafts to the remains of the bones of his legs would allow him to walk. He crafted a much smaller and more smoothly integrated bionic eye, also replacing some of the cracked skull plates around that injury. He replaced his crude mechanical limb with one capable of fine manipulation, and when the pain and medications too distracting, chose willingly to sever his remaining arm and replace it similarly. During this time, he also repaired and upgraded his robotic ‘friend,’ including combat programming and armaments this time…
During this time, he slowly came to realize that the outside world still existed, and that his robotic ally had been stealing forth and capturing items of technology he needed for his work, including some items of Rikti technology (whose flight systems were indeed more elegant and powerful than his own initial rocket-assisted designs, and ended up being incorporated into his robotic companion as a ‘jump’ system, and into his own body, to help support his frame on unsteady legs, still recovering from their trauma). Tuning into laughably-called ‘secure’ channels, he learned that ‘the Repairman’ was discovered to be in league with the Rikti invaders, and that many of his technological advances were inspired from alien allies. The Sky Raiders had covered their bases well, and no hero had come to save him, or track him down after the destruction of his laboratory, because they thought him a traitor to his own race. Even his mechanical ally had been identified as his work, and its nocturnal raids in the Rikti Crash Site, and on certain warehouses, had been captured on film, adding further evidence to his ‘crimes.’
All had abandoned him, his friends, his family, all thought him to be an alien collaborator, which bothered him only slightly more than the thought that they believed the fruits of his genius to be stolen from aliens! Only one being had not abandoned him, crawling from its own wreckage to restore him to this semblance of life, the robot he had named Imprimus (meaning ‘first’). That name took on a new meaning, as he now vowed that First would not indeed be Last, that he would forsake humanity the way it had forsaken him, that he would create new friends, new family, a new race of beings who would know only the truth of his genius and his loyalties.
He had previously worked with the Crey corporation (ostensibly on ‘pressure suits’ for deep-sea exploration, but he knew bullet-proof and combat-capable armor when he made it, even if they added the weaponry later outside of his sight), and suspected that all was not kosher with this organization, but never given it much thought, concerned with weightier matters. Now he would conceal his own plans in an environment bespoiled by their excesses, and hope to go unnoticed in the midst of the wreckage. During this time, he found himself lending his services to dubious allies indeed, particularly the loathsome Freakshow.
He knew that he would need resources and to spare, not the sort of cobbled-together cast-off technologies that he’d been using, and he orchestrated what he thought to be a cunning plan. First he implanted a micro-computer within his own brain, replacing the damaged tissue around his ruined eye, and downloaded all of his schematics into it. A filtration system added to his lungs would allow him to breathe in the toxic slew of the new workshop he planned to construct. He hacked his way into an automated automobile production company on the outskirts of town, and set the robotic assemblers to create an entirely different vehicle, for his own use, a flying car using Rikti antigravity technology that would be able to transport his entire base to his new workshop, hidden deep in the no-mans-land of Crey’s Folly.
Unfortunately, human workers at the plant managed to get a call out before he locked down communications, and a team of heroes managed to defeat the reprogrammed mechanical assemblers, with their array of crushing claws and arc-welders. He himself was captured and thrown in the Zig, the plans for his Rikti-inspired antigrav flying car serving as ‘proof’ of his collaboration with the aliens, and his own bodily modifications serving as similar ‘proof’ of his psychological distance from the human race, as if he was some sort of Freakshow fetishist, chopping off his own limbs out of some pathetic self-loathing.
Jack Stepanovic spent 4 years in the Zig, working patiently and diligently in any technical positions he could secure, starting with repairing the facility laundries, and later the power generators and even, under guard, the security systems. He was distrusted even by his fellow villains, with even radioactive mutants, death-cultists and hit-men thinking that a man who would betray his species to otherworldly invaders was not to be trusted, and so spent time alone, reviewing and refining the schematics in his data-files.
Operation Destiny came as something of a surprise to Jack, he had just finished designing a prototype replacement for Imprimus (which had been dismantled upon his capture, but not before he managed to download its basic programming into his own cybernetics). When the assault began, he called up Imprimus from where it was hidden as components in the prison power plant, and battled his way free to join the escape to the Rogue Isles, where he plans to begin construction of his new family, his new race.
He has since refined the Rikti technologies he has seized. His legs include antigravity stabilizers, allowing him to fall great distances as if a man of advanced athletic skill and even flip to his feet like some young karateka. Force field generators in his outsized mechanical arms are capable of projecting pulses of unstable gravitic force to hurl opponents away from his person, and stable ‘shields’ of force that repel and soften kinetic impacts. The arms themselves also make use of gravitic manipulation to strike harder than even their formidable steel shells would imply, often disrupting propulsion systems with gravitic pulses to knock foes from the air. He has even managed to create a larger model of robotic ally incorporating this protective Rikti shielding technology. That, and an energy rifle, also inspired by Rikti design (he himself was never much of a weapons-man, being more into armor and propulsion systems), completes his gear, with the adoption of a gun troubling him more than even the loss of his tinkerers hands.
He has finally mastered the gravitic technology sufficiently to soar through the skies like some majestic zeppelin, and perhaps soon even to warp the fabric of space itself, as he has seen the Rikti Communicators do with the formation of their portals. It is something of a frustration to him that the thrice-damned Sky Raiders managed to figure out this technology during his time in prison, and he alternates between wanting to steal it from them in turn, or simply prove his genius by figuring it out himself…