Jack Darling is a loving father of three and also. A bastard. Just a complete bastard.

On a meta level he's my exploration into the way that magic and mental illness would realistically intersect— he suffers from psychosis that developed after an extremely traumatic magical event that gave him some degree of psychic abilities, but the psychosis very firmly isn't him ""seeing reality"", he's paranoid and being able to see and sense more than the average person actually makes things much worse because it's hard for him to differentiate real things other people aren't seeing from hallucinations. He has a pipe fox named kit that acts as a seeing eye dog for delusions and helps, along with his meds, to manage his symptoms.

That's not really what he's about, though, his Deal is that he's an old grouchy bastard who had a horrible divorce with a kitsune so he has three half-human children, a large handful of grandchildren, and following his unceremonious firing from the university he used to work at he's decided to give up archaeology and dabble in Just Straight Up Robbery because some private collections are sitting on some very cursed objects, and anyway, it was all stolen in the first place, really he's doing them a favor by taking it off their hands. And since he's doing them this favor, he's entitled to other compensation. Like the contents of their lockboxes.