"Angel of death, huh? Well, maybe... but that sorta gives me this rather icky vibe of skeletons and plague boils and stuff. My work is clean and precise and exciting! Artistic, if you will. You can call me the Angel of Kinetic Energy!"

This is the first recent picture I've done of my raptor sniper character, Murk, who was created for  SteinWill's rebels setting. If you're familiar with his work, you might have seen him before since he's featured rather heavily due to my evil influence on Steinwill lol. He even made Murk a ref sheet: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/11599915/
I'll put up complete backstories for my characters in my scraps, but summarise them on their first appearance.

Murk grew up essentially a serf on a wealthy mammal family's farm, however his masters were benevolent and treated their workers well. Murk was always one of the "cool kids", swaggering, confident and popular, if a bit boastful and narcissistic. When he came of age, the first literate member of his family, the landowners even offered to buy him passage into the city to seek his fortune there. In the city however, Murk discovered real discrimination. Forced to live in ghettos, him and his reptilian friends were exploited by biased labour laws and forced to work unfair and insecure hours for little pay. Stories of arbitrary arrests and beatings were common. When protests broke out against the regime, Murk was on the front lines and as things dissolved into rioting, he began to fall in with some rather extremist reptilian-supremacist types. Cornered into a brawl with police that left several of his friends shot dead and two cops dead by his own claws, he was forced to flee the city, using his extremist contacts to smuggle him into the jungles.

Furious with a system that allowed his friends to be murdered by uniformed police, Murk was now part of what had become an armed terrorist group. From mobile strongholds in the jungle, Murk and his comrades sated their predatory urges on military and civilian targets alike. With his excellent raptor's eyesight, Murk became a deadly marksman, stalking his prey from afar before dropping them with a single bullet. However one day a raiding team brought back a grizzly series of polaroid photos of their latest victims and Murk was shocked to see the mutilated body of his former masters' youngest son, who had been working to deliver aid to impoverished reptilian villages. Realising that the hatred in himself and his comrades would sow nothing but sorrow and ruin, he gathered his belongings and escaped across the border.

Drifting aimlessly, he passed selection for a band of foreign security contractors in the neighbouring country. The whole world was evil fighting against evil it seemed and nothing would change that. Might as well let someone else do the moral philosophising and pay you to pull the trigger, he reasoned. For several years, he flew around the continent with his new brothers in arms, fighting in all manner of different conflicts. Always outnumbered but never outgunned, their squad became a tight knit family, renowned for completing the jobs that no-one else dared to consider. Drug-cartels, foreign mining/oil drilling firms, local warlords, it didn't matter who they were fighting for or why, so long as they came back with another crazy story and some money leftover after paying for their ammunition, fuel and a wild night of celebratory hookers and booze. Living in the fast lane with the accelerator permanently pressed to the floor, Murk was having the time of his life.

It was while providing security for a local arms dealer that Murk encountered Pablo, Roberto and their band of rebels back in his home country. Seeing the disparate rabble of people from all species and all walks of life united by the common belief that everyone had a role to play in the dismantling of the evil regime reminded him of the dormant but not defeated demons of his own past. Here was hope for real change and he had the power to help, so that his slain friends' deaths might not be in vain. He explained this to his commander who supported him in his decision to leave the mercenary group. After a particularly raucous leaving party, Murk brought his modern equipment, including his massive M82A1 Barrett antimateriel rifle and the deadly skills to use it over to the rebel cause.

Murk continues to fight for the rebels to this day, partially because he believes in their cause but mainly perhaps, simply because he enjoys what he does. He no longer harbours any special hatred for the mamalians and is quick to use his own past experiences as justification for shutting down others who do. Politically, he would describe himself as an anarchist, but his political views are not much more developped than a general resentment for authority figures. Murk retains the savage streak one might expect from a raptor just below the surface of his happy and extroverted personality, with a callous and very dark sense of humour as the interface between his presentation as a fun, fast-talking party boy and his inner nature as a vicious and calculating predator. He values his friends dearly and "friends" includes everyone around him, whether they want to be or not. Around the camp, Murk is generally well liked as a dependable and trustworthy person, but his bravado and overbearing extroversion can come across as arrogance to some of the more introverted members of the group.