MAJOR DEEJ UNIVERSE

REAL NAME: 

IDENTITY: 

AFFILIATION: 

REGISTERED?: 

​RELATIVE AGE: 

MARITAL STATUS: 

David Jason Yorke

Known

USA/Hero

Yes

mid 30s

Single

ALIAS(ES): 

CURRENT TEAM: 

FIRST APPEARANCE: 

APPEARANCE DATE: 

CREATED BY: 

CREATION DATE: 

Sergeant Deej, Captain Deej​

The Challengers

MDU: ORIGINS Issue # 2

8 Aug 2016

Don "Major Deej" Finger

28 Dec 2006

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, David Jason "Deej" Yorke loved basketball, learning and his family.  His father, Phillip, a respected veteran Brooklyn Firefighter Chief, and his mother, Joanne, a head nurse at the local hospital. taught him self-reliance, discipline and most importantly, humanity.  Although Deej and his fellow siblings, Sarah and William (Billy), were a handful to manage as kids, Phillip and Joanne worked hard to make sure that they understood the importance of making the right choices and challenging one's self to do better and work hard to get where they want to be in life. It was a loving family, but one of hard knocks, arguments and a constant checks-and-balances system amongst themselves to keep on the straight and narrow - much like most of the families in Brooklyn did anyway.

 

After graduating high school with honors and several scholarships, Deej went to Brooklyn College and earned a bachelors degree in History, his favorite subject. There, he signed up for the US Army ROTC program and upon graduating college, became a commissioned 2nd Lieutenant officer.

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While in the Army, Deej went on three deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq, where he earned several medals most notably the Silver Star. The citation stated that he earned the medal for his actions in gallantly leading his troops under heavy fire to take out three heavily fortified enemy positions, saving several civilian and military hostages and redirecting the enemy's communications to have the enemy take out their own forces, all the while wounded and not losing a single man or woman under his command. All in all, due to his actions, a 250 square mile stretch of battlefront was won in a single tactical dynamic field-generated combat plan.  At the end of his active duty service, he was awarded the rank of Major and sent back home to join the Army Reserves.

 

Back home, Deej continued his education taking night courses, but this time, in Constitutional Law and Criminology.  At the time, jobs were scarce, his father was laid off after he was hurt in a fire incident, his mother's hours cut back due to a recession, and as such Deej needed a job...any job.  Since he was interested in Law Enforcement, he applied to the Brooklyn Police Department's only open position in the 13th Precinct - in the dangerous side of town.  With only one lowly 'officer' position available, Deej agreed and signed up, being highly overqualified for the job as it were.  It didn't take but a month on the job before Deej discovered the 13th precinct was a house of 'dirty' cops and highly illegal hidden operations including human trafficking, drugs, money laundering, weapons sales and execution squads.  As such, Deej was hounded day and night to 'fit in or get taken out in a box', but as each bad situation arose, he tactfully was able to get out of each situation without pulling off a single dirty or illegal action...thanks to his clandestine reporting to the Police Commissioner about the 13th's dirty operations.

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The Police Commissioner and Officer Deej set up a year-long Internal Affairs (IA) covert operation with undercover agents brought in to be part of the the precinct's operations, gathering evidence along the way and undoing as much as they could after any dirty dealings were done via the 13th precinct.  One such dealing, however, slipped through the IA's eagle-eyed trackers (which they were too embarrassed to report at that time) - the loss of a large shipment of military-grade thermobaric explosives; explosives that use oxygen from the surrounding air to generate a powerful high-temperature blast strong enough to sinking ships - or obliterate a city block.

 

To keep himself from being folded into the illegal operations going on, Deej had a tracker/recorder installed on him, allowing all his activities to be monitored and later used in potential prosecutions against the 13th's dirty cops.  It was a rough year for him, being constantly berated and help back by his boss Captain Joseph Iron, the 13th Precinct's captain - and the dirtiest cop there.  Deej took the Detectives test twice that year, even against the orders of Captain Irons (but authorized by the Police Commissioner through one of the official police rules), and passed with a perfect score (as did another fellow officer), that should have led to earning a Detective 3rd Class promotion.  Sadly, Captain Irons 'declined' Deej's promotion each time stating in Deej's records that he was 'incompetent' and 'too arrogant' as a police officer to be promoted.  It was a miracle that Deej simply didn't 'disappear' much like many other good cops did when Captain Irons got tired of dealing with them.

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Finally, after a year's worth of evidence, investigations and documented illegal activities, IA and the State Police raided the 13th Precinct, arresting nearly 70% of the precinct's police there. Deej, as his last action in that precinct that day, knew the news was going to put a black eye on the police and the district's law enforcement and immediately went on patrol with a few others to make a show and maintain law and order.  It didn't take but 1/2 hour after the raid before it all started falling apart.

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First, two of the IA's agents 'disappeared' with nearly all of the evidence against Captain Irons and several other dirty cops. Second, the illicit locations where much of the illegal materials and actions were done at (rat-hole apartments, several non-descriptive metal truck containers on private property, etc.) all suddenly went up in flames or were no longer there. Third...Captain Irons escaped custody.

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As all this was happening, the Police Commissioner was going crazy trying to perform damage control on what was to be a banner day for the NYPD in uncovering police corruption in their own ranks. The fires alone set Brooklyn into a frenzy of activity, and now, with a depleted 13th Precinct police force, everything quickly became chaos.

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When the call went out about Captain Irons escaping custody, a handful of officers from the neighboring precincts, Deej and another fellow officer, arrived on the scene to see a bloodied police car and two downed officers out in the open in a small plaza in front of the old Reston Building tenement; a low-income tenement that had failed several safety and sanitation checks and was to be condemned later that month. Deej arrived on the scene, quickly discovering that Captain Irons was holed up inside the Reston Building with hostages, one being a wounded police officer.

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While negotiating with Captain Irons to trade himself with any/all of the hostages, Deej was informed by fellow officers flanking the building that they found crates labeled as 'thermobaric' stacked inside the building.  Calling for forces to pull out of the area, one group of officers attempted to instead save the downed (later determined to have already been dead) police officers in the plaza area, therein setting into motion what was believed to be Captain Irons' lighting off the thermobaric explosives in the building.

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The entire city block went up in a massive explosion.

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Later, it was reported that It took seven fire crews tens of thousands of gallons of water and four hours of intensive firefighting to finally contain the Restson Building explosion which also destroyed five additional adjacent buildings. All that remained of the buildings were smoldering debris and slagged steel building frames. All in all, 45 people were reportedly killed in the blast. Nearly all were vaporized due to the extreme heat of the thermobaric weapons. The report cited that of the 45, the city lost 5 firemen, 8 police officers, 30 civilians, Captain Irons...and Officer David "Deej" Yorke.

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Deej's broken, burnt and mutilated body was pronounced dead on arrival (DOA) at Crowne Memorial Hospital when he arrived by ambulance twenty minutes after the Reston Building explosion occurred. His body was taken to the morgue, where it was placed in a cooler for the next 3 hours until his family arrived to identify if it was Deej's body. Phillip and Joanne confirmed it was. 

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An hour after his grieving family left the hospital’s morgue, Deej awoke in the morgue’s cooler, minutes before his official autopsy. Deej's body wasn’t ready to die…at least, not that day.

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Hours later, after the medical staff saw the miracle of Deej's body automatically healing itself at amazing levels before their eyes, Deej awoke again, whole, healthy and in more than perfect health.  Not only was he alive, but he didn't have a single scratch on him. The doctors gave him the once-over five times, checking and rechecking with blood samples, x-rays, MRIs, EKGs, EEGs - every test possible. He was in PERFECT health.

 

When Deej's family arrived, much to their relief, they were happy to see him alive, but of course, however, Deej was severely distraught over what had happened at the Reston Building, as well as the fact that he just came back from the dead with super-powers.  As with all family, they helped him quickly put things in perspective and get him out of the 'mental funk' he was in after the traumatic event that had just occurred to him. Thanks to them and his combat experiences overseas, Deej was able to shake off the shock of his funk just in time to have to deal with other critical situations, namely being 'assigned' some unknown, creepy doctor from Zenith Labs and an agitated Police Commissioner who was trying to protect Deej as his only viable (and living) witness left in the whole sting operation on the 13th precinct.

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In a pitched battle of words in the hospital's emergency room, the Police Commissioner and the Zenith Labs doctor (who was later discovered not to be who he said he was) fought over custody of Deej. Deej intervened and sent the doctor away and informing the Commissioner that he'd still do his duty, but instead, would like to use his new 'ability' as a tool towards a greater purpose - a Special Tactical Unit used to stop the ever-increasing threats of super-powered and tactically-necessitated situational operations in support of the local precincts, only to be used in the event that SWAT teams couldn't handle the situation. The Commissioner agreed, and with a promotion to Sergeant, Deej was put in charge of the unit and its training, eventually making it the 2nd most heavily weaponized and armored unit in the NYPD.

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Over the next couple years, Sergeant Deej earned several police medals and citations for his and his team's bravery and skill in several dozen daring and dangerous calls, all resulting in expedient conclusions with minimal to no loss of life.  As such, the media was making Deej out to be the hero, even though Deej himself touted the valor of his teammates over all the accolades the media tossed upon him, but of course, this didn't go without derision.  A local Brooklyn Newscast Service that did talk shows, interviews, podcasts and live reporting had one of their more ornery reporters, Rita "Railroad" Ryan, put on a negative smear campaign against not only the NYPD (all of whom Rita believed to be corrupt beyond imagination), but mostly against then-newly promoted Lieutenant Deej Yorke.  She made it her mission to find fault in everything he or his team did, assaulting him on the airwaves and podcasts, spreading seeds of doubt regarding what she deemed were Deej's 'jack-booted' responses to poor, misguided criminal victims of his violent 'nazi-like' actions.  As such, her endless retorts seemed to help lead criminals and gangs to go 'all out' in their dealings with the police, bringing in energy weapons, lasers and even thermobaric weapons into standard crimes, turning Brooklyn into a warzone.

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Amidst all of this, Deej received news from One Police Plaza: the dead body thought to be Captain Irons in the Reston Building incident was NOT Irons; Irons DNA from his blood got mixed with a civilian's dead body. A blood trail of Irons' was found leading down into the sewers, where, most likely, Captain Irons escaped through as the Reston Building burned. The conclusion: Captain Irons was still alive.

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Also during this time, it was deduced that Deej's powers were the result of him having a latent mutation in his DNA. After some investigation, it was determined that Samuel Yorke, Deej's great grandfather and a World War I soldier, had been exposed to a mutagenic mustard gas called X-65, all of which, left a small, latent mutation in each child in the Yorke family's line.  Deej's mutation activated upon receiving the massive amount of wounds he received from the Reston Building explosion, thus allowing the mutation to provide an amazing regeneration ability and a thickening of Deej's epidermis, muscles and bones making him remarkably strong and incredibly resilient to many forms of damage.  Deej's father and siblings were found to have an active 'minuscule' (less than 1%) DNA mutation that aided at a feeble level to ward of sickness and age degeneration, but nothing more, leaving Deej the only member of his family's lineage to ever truly have 'super powers'. After further investigation, Deej's old military DNA was tested again and found to have had the same 'active' (less than 1%) properties as his father and siblings had; a result that testing prior to 2010 would never have caught and identified them as 'special' (since 99% of the body's DNA was actually 'normal').

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Meanwhile, as things got worse in Brooklyn, "Captain" Deej Yorke was forced to expand the unit to become a "Precinct Police Department" (PPD) level organization (which Railroad Ryan called "Painfully Policed Destruction"). After taking massive damage from the ever-increasing weaponry now used by the city's criminal elements, Deej had to resort to several upgrades of armor, Mark I through V, protecting himself more each time.  Eventually, it got to the point where super-villains started showing up as well as mercenary squads from organizations such as "Death Legion" with $5 million marks against 'Captain Deej' (as Railroad Ryan called him). Finally, crime got out of control when One Police Plaza was attacked in a massive battle, all while Brooklyn's police forces were strategically attacked. Even Deej's dad was shot in the shoulder while attempting to put out the fires at One Police Plaza.  Phillip Yorke survived, however, this 'war' was now affecting those he loved.

 

With Deej's forces hospitalized, dead and depleted, Deej made a grand decision that day: He quit the police force...to became something more.

 

Deej instead chose to de-escalate the war that the police were hog-tied to stop by severing his ties with the police, stopping the assaults on the police, and instead go full-out on Deej. Deej was now a man with super-powers that was willing to sacrifice himself rather than his fellow officers or the city's citizens, neighbors and family, yet he was still a man with a very important link - a military link, He was still a Major in the US Army Reserves; a Major who had access to an armory of weapons and equipment that was about to be used to put an end to the Brooklyn War.

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In less than 24 hours, Deej has the man who helped him in gearing up armor, upgrade the the new Mark VI armor, complete with new military-grade armor, weapons, communications, tracking and even flight with his guy's newly created experimental jet/rocket boots.  Using all the intel he was able to glean from the military and the World Council-led G.U.A.R.D., Deej initiated a lock-down of city of Brooklyn, without anyone else's authority, telling all residents through his souped-up new communications array, to hunker down and stay indoors until he was able to stop the war.

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For the next 35 hours, Deej relentlessly went from battle zone to battle zone, fighting and defeating every single criminal, villain, mercenary and gang member threatening him and the city.  The $5 million dollar mark that went out on "Major Deej" (Railroad Ryan renaming him again, but more to the use as "Major Crazy Deej") was rescinded after Death Legion lost all of their mercenaries and contracted thugs in less than 12 hours to Major Deej (as well as two Death Legion safe houses and HQs). In the end, Major Deej exited the last super-villain held stronghold in Brooklyn, leaving over 90 battered (but living) villains, criminals and mercenaries. With him, Major Deej dragged the beaten and broken body or an armored (broken by that point) Captain Irons, who, as was later learned, was the actual mastermind behind the escalation of hostilities against the Brooklyn Police, Major Deej, and the person responsible for the Brooklyn War itself.  Battered and barely able to stand, the dazed and bleeding Major Deej stumbled to a nearby Dunkin Donuts shop to get a cup of coffee, drank one sip, and then collapsed from his injuries and exhaustion, unintentionally in front of the media's cameras.

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David "Major Deej" Yorke was deemed the hero of Brooklyn.

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Over the next few weeks, the local and regional police, military and even super-heroes community came together to help clean-up the results of the aftermath of the Brooklyn War.  When all was said and done, not a single innocent life was lost in those 35 hours, however, in all, Major Deej took out a total of 268 criminals and villains in over 20 separate locations, bunkers and sewer locations. Military Intelligence found all of Captain Irons' files (including the IA files that 'disappeared' the day of Irons' initial arrest) and computer info, all of which was used to indict Captain Irons and all of the 268 (and more, since over 150 others fled the city and/or country once Major Deej started fighting the 'war') on multiple convictions.  Even though the death penalty was allowed for the jury to award, Irons instead got five life sentences and was placed into the newly upgraded Rykers Island Super-Maximum Security Prison Facility. As far as everyone was concerned, justice was done.

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As for Major Deej, he had to go before a military tribunal for his actions and was awarded a letter of reprimand, thus preventing any chances of him every being promoted again.  Deej also realized he could not return to the police force or the war would escalate all over again.  Instead, with the advice of an 'old superhero war veteran', Major Deej, as everyone was calling him now, decided to go on to become a new superhero for the world.

 

It didn't take long, however, before a crazed lunatic was threatening to set-off a nuclear bomb in New York City.  No longer a man of resources (since Deej had his military security clearances revoked for his Brooklyn Wars actions), he called for help from other heroes to stop the threat. Several superheroes showed up and did just that.  Not long after, they joined forces, making Major Deej the team leader, and  created a new super-group called "The Challengers".

 

For several years now, Major Deej has become an even greater icon that ever before.  His humility, kindness, bravery and dedication to helping and saving others, as well as 'challenging' himself and others to be more, has made him legendary throughout the world.  As such, villains and criminals still seek to make a name for themselves battling Major Deej, but with his team, The Challengers, as well as nearly every policeman, soldier and citizen of humanity by his side, these same villains and criminals usually get what's coming to them.

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Today, Major Deej is still the leader of the Challengers and is considered the greatest superhero celebrity ever (even though Major Deej dislikes the attention or the accolades).  Rita "Railroad" Ryan is now a commentator for World Wide News (WWN) and is still laser-focused on Major Deej and his purported 'cult of personality' who uses his 'innocent, apple pie mentality' showing of his 'true colors' of his manipulation to create an autocratic world under his rules and his laws, much like Adolph Hitler.  Strangely enough, Rita still has quite a following at WWN.  As for Deej, he and his family are still together and as strong a family as ever...even when the argue and fight every other hour or so.

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As a side note, a time-travelling sect from the 27th century called the "Order of Chronos" is under the presumption that this timeline, the one the this whole (website) universe is based in, is perceived to be a critical timeline wherein they believed Major Deej is a vital link in the prevention of 'The End of Time'.  As such they have called 'this' universe the "Major Deej Universe" - a unique title with a unique person who, supposedly on a cosmic level, is going to save time and potentially multiple timelines and universes as a result...that is, unless the Order of Chronos is completely wrong and is misinterpreting Major Deej's role in all of this...

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