Jackson Polly

Jackson Polly is the result of Noah's desire to have a parrot in "proper" pirate style, but not wanting to clean up bird shit. His mother, Diziara, decided to see what she could program up after a number of the Torchwood Photonic Officers expressed a desire to add feathers to their appearances, so she wanted practice modeling holographic feathers. While he does not have the same level of complexity and intelligence as the photonic officers, he is self aware with an intelligence on par with an African Grey parrot.

Jackson Polly was named as an homage to the 20th century abstract expressionist painter, Jackson Pollock. When originally created, he was provided with a selection of Macaw species for his appearance. Macaws were selected due to their popularity and frequent use in pop culture related to pirates, and he was initially booted with the appearance of a Chestnut-fronted Macaw as a nod to the origin of the belief that pirates frequently kept parrots — Long John Silver's parrot in Treasure Island, and that the parrot was green in the first color adaption of the novel into a film done by Disney. Noah was satisfied with this, and did not elect to change his appearance.

It wasn't even a month later that Noah returned to his quarters and found a strange parrot on Jackson's perch, a Blue-throated Macaw nearly twice the size of the Chestnut-fronted Macaw. It was quickly made apparent that this new bird was just Jackson Polly with a different appearance when he shifted to yet bigger bird, the Hyacinth Macaw, and squawked his trademark phrase that causes Noah to both chuckle and cringe, "Jackson Polly wants a cracker!" He rewarded the bird with a holographic cracker as he verified the logs to ensure no one else had been fiddling with Jackson, only to have the logs confirm the bird himself had made the change.

He largely favors his original appearance, though he has been known to change to match whatever Noah's wearing when he comes along for a trip away from the ship. He shows some difficulty navigating spaces when he changes to a species that's either significantly larger or smaller than his original, and this is Noah's chief theory for why Jackson favors the one version of himself over the others. As he's had plenty of practice on The Pelican with a number of the species available to him, he tends to more freely switch between them at will when he's on the ship.