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application;
Character Name: Jack Townsend
Age: 26
Canon: Tales from the Gas Station
Canon point: Volume 3, Chapter 41
History: wiki link - warning, this app will contain references to gore & mental instability.
Personality:
• Impassive & Repressed
Jack's therapist once told him he has a 'hyper-logical approach to grief' and that he may have 'shut down emotionally' as a way of dealing with his own impermanence. He demonstrates a kind of monotonous apathy about his own (perceived) terminal illness, and this translates to every other area of his life as well - even to situations that should be absolutely traumatizing. From seeing an eldritch entity spewing bugs from its orifices to his friend popping the trunk of their car and to a reveal a body from an accidental murder, Jack's responses are almost always remarkably muted. He's capable of carrying on a casual, polite conversation with things that should be rending his mind completely busted.
• Loyal & Dedicated
Although he has an extremely hard time letting people in, once they are he'll go to great lengths to honor and protect them. Jack had a fifteen-year-long relationship with a girl named Sabine, who was left in a coma after a car accident quite a few years ago. Despite her being moved across the country from hospital to hospital with no chance for recovery and essentially no likelihood he'd ever see her again, he still turns down all romantic advances with I have a girlfriend. He's willing to die for his friends, quite literally - he once nearly cut off his own hand to get free of some handcuffs so he could go sacrifice himself to an entity called The Guardian in order to save his friends' lives. When eating out with Deputy O'Brien, they were confronted with a racist patron. Jack intervened immediately and assertively, without a second thought. He follows Jerry into a situation he knows to be a trap despite it being a terrible idea because he can't let Jerry go alone.
• Unstable & Unpredictable
He's really the exact definition of unstable - mainly due to a sleep disorder that impairs his mental processing abilities. He experiences hallucinations that he will frequently interact with, he'll forget entire conversations or events he's had with people, and he often just acts weird to the people around him — typically because he's actually having an episode of REM sleep behavior disorder. He believes he has insomnia and that he hasn't slept in years, when in fact he often slips into a state of extremely light REM sleep off and on periodically throughout the day, and acts out his dreams. The people around him don't even realize he's dreaming, just that he's being weird. He has a disrupted sense of the passage of time, and it has been as mild as losing track of 12 hours or as severe as thinking 6 days actually stretched out to 6 months - under peak duress, and when left alone.
• Intelligent & Creative
Despite his cognitive impairments, Jack's actually a really clever individual. He spends almost every waking hour of his free time poring through book after book like a machine. He also blogs as a way of coping with the insanity of the world around him, and writes out long well-written stories using unique metaphors and impressive delivery. He comes up with creative solutions to complex or intense problems, like creating a system of emergency boxes for a dynamic range of threatening situations, or tricking monsters into bear traps because he knows he can't fight them head-on.
• Brave & Self Sacrificing
While it might be easy for someone with Jack's condition and his tendency toward passivity to be a total coward, that really isn't the case. He has no problems looking supernatural entities dead in the eyes and being firm with them - like telling them to get out of his gas station, or that they can't use the phone without paying 25 cents a minute in advance, no exceptions. He's looked down the barrel of a gun and accepted his death with dignity, deciding his last words to be, "I forgive you." He throws himself into situations full of monsters that are stronger and faster than him in order to protect his friends. He stabbed himself in the heart with a ceremonial dagger to offer up his body as a vessel to a being that would most likely snuff out his life in the process.
Suitability: In the first book, Jack was given a prophetic vision by the Dark God that has since been referenced in the other two books, and has yet to be realized. There is an entity that has become aware of earth - and the entire universe around it. This entity feeds on pain and destruction, and is on its way to take over everything. It's been warned that this entity will make all creatures immortal, will enact hellish terror, roast the planet, and invade every single mind so that all pain and torture is unique to the individual, creating ultimate eternal suffering. At the end of the third book, Jack is advised to let his friends die, because it's a better alternative to the End that is coming, but he refuses. He insists they'll find a way to stop it. He'll believe the Apocalypse Disruption Initiative is the solution to that, and will do anything he can to help it.
Powers/Abilities:
Jack's instability manifests in a few supernatural ways.
His sleep disorder makes him immune to being knocked out by any force - be it pain, anesthesia, or a full-blown demi-god trying to render him unconscious. For better or worse, Jack's consciousness can't be blacked out by anything, the deepest he'll go is the lighest possible REM sleep that still retains some (disoriented) awareness of the world around him. This disorder also impacts the part of his brain that stores and converts memories, and he's demonstrated an immunity to having his memories wiped by several god-like beings. Stupidly and on the complete flip of this, he sometimes experiences memory loss on his own because of his condition. Pros and cons, I guess.
He has a mild resistance to supernatural compulsion effects, and can generally snap himself out of things like charms after only a few moments of effort. Example: the Fox Lady, an entity that takes on the form of whatever the beholder sees as pure and perfect beauty, then whispers come with me in a way that hypnotizes people into leaving and joining her in her hearse. She's quite perturbed when he snaps out of it after a few seconds to be like, "no thank you." The more powerful the entity the longer it takes him to break out, like the Dark God's compulsion to dig holes lasting closer to an hour. I'll use a D&D style saving throw virtual dice app if I don't have anything preplanned with the player, raising the DC according to their power level.
His hallucinations occasionally manifest in unexplainable and helpful ways - usually in clutch this-is-it situations, or when he's at peak instability. Two of the most prominent examples of this:
Physically - when handcuffed to a metal bar with all his friends unconscious and a ticking clock running out that would lead to his death (and then shortly after the conversion of the rest of the world into mind-controlled mimics), Jack tried to cut his own hand off with a box cutter. Once he started bleeding and the method proved ineffectual, he hallucinated his enemy and attempted murderer Spencer Middleton, who gave him a gun in an attempt to trick him into shooting his own wrist to break the bone. He realized how stupid that was about a second before doing it, and instead used it to shoot the links of the handcuffs, freeing himself. As soon as the cuffs were broken, both Spencer and the gun disappeared.
Another (less cool) example, Jack hallucinated a conversation with the deceased deputy that used to frequent the gas station. Tom poured himself a cup of coffee, and it was still sitting on the counter after the hallucination disappeared.
Mentally - someone sent Jack a severed head that appeared to belong to his best friend Jerry. After trying to bury it, Jack began to hallucinate the head was talking to him, and he couldn't bring himself to get rid of it. Instead, he stored it in an ice chest and began carrying it around with him. Jerry's head could tell when the people around Jack weren't human, somehow able to sense whether they were mimics, or even one time the literal devil. It could also identify hidden weapons on an attacker, strapped to the guy's ankle. He was also able to tell Jack where to find a set of car keys. Although Jack is shown to have conversations with helpful "ghosts" throughout the books (it's unknown if these are really ghosts or hallucinations), it's confirmed that the severed head is not, in fact, Jerry's ghost. Jerry's still alive and well, and when he shows up later, the head stops talking entirely. Jerry, after seeing Jack talking to the head, drop-kicks it into the forest where raccoons immediately steal it. Not related to the power, just cool and everyone should know about it.
tl;dr he's even too crazy for cryptids & his insanity defies reality a little sometimes. Unfortunately he can't control it, so it'll be used sparingly as neat thread hooks.
Entity Affinity: The Spiral
Instability and the uncertainty of whether or not the experiences unfolding around him are true is a theme all throughout the book. Jack constantly grapples with knowing whether something is a hallucination or if it's actually happening. This concern also spreads to the people around him, particularly when it's their first experience with something supernatural. They don't know whether or not Jack's crazy, whether they should believe him, whether they should listen to him because their gut says he's right, or avoid him because their logic says he's crazy. Eventually, it's easy to wonder if they themselves have gone crazy, too. Monsters existing does not fit with their perception of reality.
Inventory:
-his prosthetic leg
-a Louisville Slugger (named Ricardo)
-an ice chest containing a mummified skull buried beneath sawdust and coffee grounds; this would be considered a cursed item. Speaking with the hallucination won't do much generally, but receiving helpful information from it will exacerbate his disorientation and lost time, and can cost him hours of memory loss. This will likely also provoke fear in others, as... watching a guy have a full conversation with a box is freaky AF, let alone if they find out what's inside it. If this isn't spooky enough, maybe hearing the damn thing talk back inside their head might do it. In the event that a Jerry joins, when he is in proximity, the head will go silent and unresponsive.
Samples:
internal thought process
dialogue + another in case texting doesn't work.