Donny Vermillion

Donald "Donny" Vermillion was a newscaster of the Universal News Network and a devoted loyalist of Arcturus Mengsk and the Terran Dominion. For years the chief anchor of the program Vermillion Live, he broadcast Dominion propaganda during the Second Great War and worked to undercut the reputation of Jim Raynor and his Raiders before personal crisis and hard experience slowly tempered his fervor.

The voice of the Dominion#

Donny Vermillion had a brother who was killed in the Fall of Tarsonis. By 2504 he hosted Vermillion Live on the Universal News Network, with Kate Lockwell as his co-anchor, and he would later boast that without him she would still be covering bowling tournaments on Bukari V. At the outbreak of the Second Great War he reported on the massive zerg invasion of the sector, and his war coverage dispensed Terran Dominion propaganda, portraying Jim Raynor's Raiders in the worst possible light and deliberately twisting facts to obscure the heroism of many of their missions, often cutting off Lockwell before she could say anything in their favor. On at least one live broadcast he was forced to witness a colleague run down by the zerg, a sight that visibly filled him with horror.

When Raynor and his men broadcast the news that Arcturus Mengsk had used psi emitters to lure the zerg to Tarsonis, Vermillion was shaken, muttering on the air that his brother had lived on Tarsonis. He soon began to miss his work, and Lockwell hoped on air that he would get well soon. After he reported the zerg retreating to Char, he took sick leave for unknown reasons and committed himself to the Dominion Mental Health Center, clad only in his socks and rumored to be carrying Mengsk's manifesto and a pound of peanut butter. Lockwell replaced him as chief anchor.

Return and independence#

Vermillion was eventually released from rehabilitation. During the End War he reported on allied commanders fighting to halt the destruction of Veridia Prime at the hands of Amon's forces, sparring with his seismologist Terry over whether hard science was boring the audience and openly disappointed when the commanders saved the planet. Some years after the End War he returned to the Universal News Network following what was described as an astounding recovery, hosting a segment on the Dominion relief effort to Antiga Prime and later questioning what the Dominion was concealing from its people after it declared the zerg threat there ended, and investigating the Defenders of Man militia.

By some point after the Battle of Adena, Vermillion had left the network and started his own program, "The Donny Vermillion Show," which reported the news with a pro-Arcturus Mengsk slant and was critical of the regime of Valerian Mengsk. He was often dismissed as a shill of the old government, a charge he was determined to disprove. Through the show's run he kept up a running one-sided conversation with his tawny cat, Augustus.

The Tartarus affair#

The day before the anniversary of Arcturus Mengsk's death, Vermillion received a tip from a xenophobic freighter pilot and fan who claimed to have found a story. The pilot flew him to Tartarus, a world on the fringe of Dominion space that Vermillion had never been allowed to report on while at the network. When the pilot revealed that one of Vermillion's broadcasts had convinced him to murder a superior officer, Vermillion grew uneasy. The ship ran into Tartarus's satellite defense network, and when the pilot noticed an unexpected zerg presence on the planet he refused to turn back, ejecting Vermillion in an escape pod to the surface below as his ship was torn apart.

Stranded on the infested world, Vermillion met two survivors, a doctor named Evelyn Yoo and her son Jun-Ho, who at first took him for a means of escape. A hydralisk attack cornered him until the renegade ghost Nova Terra, who had been tracking him, killed the creature. Joining Nova's group, Vermillion accompanied them into a jorium refinery, where they discovered a chamber of cryo-pods holding dormant spectres. As a zerg queen rallied her brood and broke through the doors, the group debated whether to free or kill the spectres, and Vermillion broadcast his footage to the wider sector. The spectres were eventually released against Nova's orders, and they seized Vermillion and stole the dropship Griffin, keeping him alive only as a source of intelligence on the state of the Dominion.

A humbling#

Over the following days aboard the Griffin, Vermillion repaired his camera drones and stewed over the success of Kate Lockwell's reporting on the spectres, insisting that this was his story. Manipulated psionically by Nova and the Nerazim Matriarch Vorazun into broadcasting, he unwittingly betrayed the spectres' location. Taken to a mining outpost where the spectres tried to extort vespene gas, he was nearly killed when their leader realized he had led pursuers to them, only to be saved by a fully infested Jun-Ho, who sacrificed himself to protect him. Vermillion comforted the dying child with a coping habit from his media days, counting down from five but never reaching one, and left with Nova as she talked the spectres into standing down.

Vermillion buried Jun-Ho and Evelyn on Tartarus and returned to Korhal, where he resumed his pro-Arcturus show. Intending to decry the hypocrites of the Dominion, he found his anger cooling as he spoke, and on impulse created a new segment, Heroes of the Dominion, devoted to acts of heroism by those working for a brighter future. Among the assorted submissions he received, he found footage of one of the spectres' former handlers rescuing civilians, and smiled.

Character#

Vermillion was loyal to Arcturus Mengsk, and even after the emperor's death and the revelations about his role in the zerg invasion of Tarsonis he remained devoted to his memory, though shaken by what he learned. His experiences with the spectres humbled him, softening his pro-Mengsk line and bringing him to acknowledge that one had to learn from the mistakes of the past. He held a high opinion of himself that those around him rarely shared, and by one reckoning he was not strong-willed and had little ability to resist mind control. When frightened he counted down from five toward two but never said "one," a habit that reached back to his days in the media.