Dust-Off
Contents
History
Lawrence 'Larry' Nowitzki was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1948. His father Ward was an American combat veteran of World War II, and his mother Susan, a nurse. A tough, athletic youngster, Larry excelled in sports and despite not being particularly tall lettered on the football team his Senior year as a back-up linebacker and special teams player. The youth ahead of him, his good friend Jonas Orlando, went onto a scholarship at The Ohio State University while Larry Nowitzki ended his football career ignominiously not being big enough, or so he was told, to play at the next level. Larry's life changed in 1967 when the Draft Board sent him his notice indicating his lottery number had been called up, and he was required to join the Army. Although Ward Nowitzki was always proud of his own stint as a US Marine in the Pacific and saw his son as excellent material for the Service he'd had reservations about the nature of this new war Larry was being sent off to fight, in the far-off jungles of South Vietnam. "Don't worry, Pop!", said Larry as he went to the barber in his hometown of Lincoln to get a buzz-cut prior to reporting for his physical. "You know me. Always the last man standing!" Little did he know how prophetic these words would turn out to be.
Upon arriving in Vietnam Larry first saw duty as a general infantryman, but within a year a chance crash course at first-aid during a fire fight (the squad's medic's hands had been badly burned, so he instructed the young Private Nowitzki in basic field dressings while the diligent recruit worked feverishly) put him down the path of combat medicine. Soon, Sgt. Nowitzki had gotten himself an excellent reputation for courage under fire while attending to the wounded. Once, he jumped out of a floating Bell-Huey MedEvac helicopter (nicknamed 'Dust-Offs' during the war), breaking his left leg in the process, yet still managed to patch up, and then help three badly injured soldiers onto the waiting aircraft and safety. In the course of two tours of duty in Vietnam Larry Nowitzki would be twice decorated with the Bronze Star and once with a Purple Heart, the highest honor for valor in the American military. His commanding officer in a report once described him as, "bar none, the most courageous soldier I've ever had the privilege of serving under me."
By 1973 Larry Nowitzki was finishing his second tour in the 'Nam, and both the war and Larry's life were going badly. For starters, his long-time high school sweetheart Nora Honeywell had left him for a tax accountant back in Lincoln; he got the news through a dog-eared letter that had arrived three months late. Then came a greater shock: his childhood friend Jonas Orlando had been reported missing in action. After a brilliant football career at Ohio State, Orlando had gone on to turn down the professional leagues and instead signed up voluntarily to join the Army and go to Vietnam. Already an excellent athlete and tough as nails, Jonas soon found himself in the Special Forces and thereafter spent a great deal of time conducting missions across the border with neighboring Cambodia. Once, in 1972, Jonas and Larry had gotten together to share some beers on a weekend pass; now, hearing that his friend was either captured or dead, Sgt. Nowitzki was filled with anger and a burning desire to rescue him. Days later, the opportunity to do so fell into his lap, in the form of a lanky Texan officer in the Special Forces named Capt. Nelson Colbane. Informing the young sergeant that his friend was still alive, Colbane told Larry about a 'special unit' of outside operators that was assembling a rescue party near the border with Cambodia, intending to rescue Orlando and the rest of his squad from their captors. Larry Nowitzki didn't ask who these 'captors' were, and Nelson Colbane didn't tell him.
That night, on board a black Bell-Huey whose rotors were quiet like the wind, Larry was startled to find that most of the members of this 'special unit' were speaking in languages other than English and among them sat a large and powerful Native American man who'd made the papers before the war as the high-flying superhero named Thunderchief. When the team got to the drop zone, Larry Nowitzki was in for his second surprise of the evening: the target, an ancient jade-colored temple ruin, was guarded not by Viet Cong guerrillas but rather by an army of men in bright yellow-and-green body armor, their faces obscured by curious science-fiction visors. Although he didn't know it then, this would be Larry's first experience fighting the minions of the criminal cabal known as VIPER; it would certainly not be the last. The raid was successful, with the VIPER soldiers either routed or killed, and Jonas Orlando and the rest of the survivors rescued. For Larry Nowitzki it seemed like a journey's end, but really it was only the beginning.
In 1975, Nelson Colbane left the US Army and joined the United Nations Tribunal on International Law, UNTIL. He brought both Orlando and Nowitzki along with him. For the next 15 years, Larry Nowitzki served as an UNTIL officer mostly with Colbane's 'ginned-up' specialist units, along the way taking up a hobby as an amateur inventor and building the first of his 'neuro-stimulizer' combat healing rigs with the help and encouragement of the eccentric Vibora Bay-based engineering genius Juryrig as a kind of mentor. In the early 1980s a stint working on a case in Northern Ireland related to the VIPER/Eurostar War Nowitzki first fought then later became romantically involved with the quarry of his mission, a lovely but lethal Belfast sorceress and activist named Erin O'Shaughnessy, aka the super-villain Crimson Thorn. Abandoning her former life as a de facto operative for Eurostar's leader Fiacho, with whom she had also once had an affair, Erin fell in love with Larry and, after a brief stint in prison followed by a probation deal struck with UNTIL upon her full cooperation and testimony against several of her former colleagues, moved with him back to America. In 1988, they married and within two years had two children, a son Barton, and daughter Siobhan.
Carl Eckhardt personally led the unit, which consisted of himself, the two Americans, and a number of other top-flight UNTIL operatives and hired guns working 'off the books'. The team lost three operatives, Colbane among them, fighting the radioactive man-monster Grond, who'd been led to Detroit by Dr. Destroyer and was demolishing a section of the city all by himself. Ultimately, the remainder of Eckhardt's team arrived at the arch-criminal's secret lair but were too late to stop Destroyer as he fired by remote control an orbiting satellite particle cannon which managed to lay waste most of the metropolitan area. Of the 11 members of The Badger Patrol which took to the field that morning only Carl Eckhardt, Larry Nowitzki, and the French professional safe-cracker turned vigilante Voleur survived. A few weeks later, after the funeral of his old friend and mentor Nelson Colbane, Larry Nowitzki hung up the 12 gauge shotgun he'd carried into war in three decades and retired, vowing never to take to the field again...
In 2012, Nowitzki got an email from Eckhardt asking him to come out of retirement in a limited capacity to help train UNTIL's medics for it's new Special Operations team, modeled on the old ad hoc units of the 1970s. Tagging along on a raid on a VIPER Nest on Monster Island, Nowitzki realized that as an old gunfighter who'd kept himself in remarkable shape he was still capable of holding his own in a firefight, and his skills were now augmented by his own armored rig which could heal from a distance as well as generate protective force fields. Soon, he struck up a friendship with super-soldier 'GI' Joan Barrett, whose cocksure performance in the field reminded him so much of the best soldiers he'd fought with in Vietnam. After a recent period to deal with some personal business, including the death of his younger brother, Larry Nowitzki has recently donned his Dust-Off rig once more to fight with the Special Operations team. He's the last man standing, again.
Powers and Abilities
Larry Nowitzki is an ordinary human being in remarkable shape for a man in his mid-60s; he looks decades younger, a feat he attributes to his strict regimen of diet, exercise, and meditative practice of zazen, or sitting concentration. Nowitzki has in the past speculated that a brief treatment of a proto-Cyberline drug given him in the mid 1970s in his early days with UNTIL has retarded the aging process, but as he has never undergone a physical to determine whether this is so no-one can be certain if that's the case. Although he is primarily a gunfighter Nowitzki is also an experienced hand-to-hand combatant and has over time developed some fair detective- and police skills from his UNTIL days. Perhaps Nowitzki's greatest trait is his knack for keeping his cool in tough situations; this has been a big part of what's kept him alive all this time.
In the mid-1970s Nowitzki began jotting down notes for a device that could heal wounds based off the experience of fighting VIPER in Cambodia. Over time and with Juryrig's help, he built a home-made powered glove with an energy source housed in a backpack which fires a ray that stimulates the nerve endings of damaged tissue, greatly accelerating the healing process. It was also Juryrig who suggested that a force-field generator circuit be added to the unit, providing him with another way to keep his allies in the fight. After the Battle of Detroit Larry Nowitzki resolved never to go to war again, yet in his spare time could not help himself and began tinkering with various types of weapons systems he could add to the healing rig, adding fire support to the ensemble. When he returned to the field, Nowitzki brought the entire package and found that in combat he could do significant damage in reserve. Still, for old times sake he could not forget the one tool he'd carried since his earliest days as a medic in Vietnam: a trusty Remington 12 gauge shotgun which he'd named 'Ol' Son'. Re-bored for high explosive ammunition Ol' Son proved as effective as it had always been, and remains the primary weapon in Nowitzki's arsenal.
Foes and Adversaries
Larry Nowitzki has been fighting for a long time, and along the way he has made many friends, and quite a few enemies. While serving in
As if these threats weren't enough, Larry Nowtizki has since his return to the field faced a host of deadly opponents ranging from his long-time adversaries in VIPER to the corporate mercenaries of Argent to an odd assortment of super-villains, other-worldly horrors, and extra-terrestrial menaces. But perhaps his greatest enmity is reserved for an old foe he has not yet run across in the past few years, but with whom he has a score to settle. Despite some evidence to the contrary, Nowitzki still blames the arch-criminal Fiacho for having his wife Erin murdered and for the loss of his daughter to a life of crime. The Eurostar mastermind for his part is aware of Dust-Off's desire to destroy him, and for a variety of reasons reciprocates this hatred but not enough to actively pursue a vendetta against the veteran gunfighter. Only time will tell whether the two will come to blows again, but in the meantime Larry Nowitzki has gotten his old ally Voleur, still a wily crime-fighter in France, to keep tabs on Eurostar and its doings on the Continent.
Friends and Allies
on the help of Voleur (left), the French masked super-thief-turned-vigilante, and his own son Barton (right), now the freelance spy known as Red Zone. Ironically, both have crossed paths with Siobhan in Europe, although in both cases the battle was inconclusive. Although getting up in age himself the mysterious masked Frankish martial artist and master of escape is still a formidable opponent, and he does a very brisk business for UNTIL on the sly as one of their top espionage experts. For his part, Barton Nowitzki is an expert with a variety of lethal arms and has been very successful in Brussels, Belgium dealing with super-criminals in the extended Eurostar network.
Hideout
When not on duty Larry Nowitzki splits his time between the Millennium City penthouse apartment he receives as part of his service with UNTIL and an abandoned PRIMUS outpost in the American southwest. In addition to serving as a 'safe house' where he can store his gear and trophies from his various exploits the desert facility also houses a rebuilt UH-1 Bell Huey helicopter (middle) like the one Nowitzki served on in Vietnam. Nowitzki has yet to get the old chopper to fly but does tinker with it on his off-hours and, as an experienced pilot, he hopes to get it airborne again someday.
Vehicles
Nowitzki's 'Dust-Off' armored rig contains a modified version of Juryrig's patented rocket boot design, so he is capable of flight as long as the units are fueled. He has experienced some situations where extra firepower is necessary and so has on permanent loan from UNTIL an AV-55G 'Wilson' VTOL craft, armed with mini-guns, a micro-armament missile launcher and a heavy 30mm cannon lifted from an earlier 'battle-van' he used in the 1980s. The Wilson craft is light-weight and surprisingly fast, but is not as sturdy as perhaps Nowitzki would like it to be. Still, as U.N.L.E.A.S.H.D's designated fire support expert he finds it a useful addition to his arsenal.
