abraxas info

[stations]

Jack Townsend

Tales from the Gas Station

— BASICS —

Jack Miller Townsend

FULL NAME

28

AGE

Tales from the Gas Station

CANON

Post Book 4

CANON POINT

Em

PLAYED BY

The Moon

ARCANUM

Thorne

FACTION

★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

INFLUENCE

N/A

TITLES

Castle Thorne

RESIDENCE

— FIRST IMPRESSIONS —

APPEARANCE Jack looks chronically a little unhealthy. He is average height, a little too skinny, and has bruises under his eyes indicating a long-term lack of sleep. He has dark hair, green eyes, and a sort of neutral borderline resting bitch face. He is missing the smallest finger on his left hand, and his right knee below the leg. He typically wears a prosthetic limb.

CLOTHING Jack favors long sleeves and hoodies, generally in dark shades like black or purple. He wears jeans when possible. He isn't particular about what he wears, and looks like your basic nerdy gas station attendant in terms of wardrobe.

DEMEANOR Comically deadpan and often unflappable. He wears a polite-neutral customer service demeanor, has a pleasant but apathetic monotone, and usually doesn't react in the face of some of the most bizarre or horrific shit you've ever seen. He tends to stare, isn't good at answering hypothetical questions, and can accidentally come across as kind of a dick because his brain conditions leave him a little vacant at times. Between his sleep issue and his medication, Jack frequently has "blonde moments" or comes across as awkward, and it would be easy to think he's really dumb — but he's actually a sharp guy, he just has a lot going on. He's incredibly good at minding his own business most of the time, though there are rare occasions where his curiosity gets the best of him.

AURAL Sample; Jack can be well-spoken when he has time to think about what he wants to say, or when he's reading from something. He is excellent at accents, and comes up with the most hilariously absurd metaphors. He curses pretty frequently, and 90% of the time speaks in a pleasant, polite monotone. When shit hits the fan, though, his voice tends to rise in pitch and speed. When stressed or caught off guard, he fucks up his words and says the dumbest imaginable shit.

OLFACTORY Good hygiene, but not overly invested. He will use basic, cheap soaps and deodorants. He washes his clothes regularly. Pretty unremarkable.

— SKILLS —

Jack has some pretty strange, abstract supernatural abilities.

MENTAL DEFENSE immunity to being knocked out or put to sleep by any means, immune to having his memories erased, strong resistance to charms or mental compulsions, insanity resistance

SUPERNATURAL BRAIN mild reality bending in the form of object creation, slight psychic / precognitive tendencies

POWER BATTERY is a sponge full of magic cosmic voidrift energy fit to be the host vessel for a demigod for thousands of years

MUNDANE THINGS weirdly good aim, decent pickpocket, good with baseball bats, exceptional blogger

— RUMORS —

• Tends to stare into space vacantly for minutes or hours at a time
• Occasionally talks to himself

— HAUNTS —

• Anywhere with books — he is perpetually reading
• Anywhere that serves coffee

— ITEMS —

• Prosthetic leg

— MAGIC —

• reality bending - object manifestation
• postcognition - the ability to see the memories of people around him first-person perspective as though he lived them, happens at random, no control
• find familiar — a glowing raccoon moth thing

— OUT OF CHARACTER —

Em · She/Her · AZT · Em#8430 · paingravy

CODE

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HORIZON/DOMAIN INFO

[stations]

At the edge of town on the downhill side, beyond the abandoned railroad tracks to nowhere, past the point where the streetlights end but before the world disappears beneath a twisted canopy of oak and black willow trees, there’s a shitty little gas station open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. There’s nothing really special about the place.

If you were to go inside, you would probably see the same boring components of any other perfectly normal gas station across the forgotten backroads of God’s country: Shelves packed with off-brand chips, cookies, potted meats, and pickled curiosities. Walls decorated with beer advertisements and windows filled with broken neon signs. A notice board covered in dozens of missing persons posters. A pot of coffee brewing in the corner where that bloodstain keeps reappearing no matter how many times we clean it up. The steady mechanical hum of a frozen drink machine that hasn’t been serviced since the Reagan administration. Random pockets of icy cold air that seem to move about of their own accord.

And of course, that family of mutated raccoons living in the crawlspace behind the grease trap. Well, we think they’re mutated anyway. At the very least, they’re inbred to the point of genetic deformity. The alpha (a muscular, three-foot-tall son of a bitch named Rocco) has been caught multiple times chewing on customer’s tires. So far, he’s been run over on at least three different occasions. Yet he keeps coming back, stronger and dumber than ever.

When it comes to upkeep, the gas station aims for “good enough” and usually misses. A faded wet floor sign sits atop a large crack in the foundation by the cooler where layers of sticky spill-off have formed a miniature tar pit, preserving countless insect corpses as well as the occasional small rodent. One of the doors on the cold drink case is held together with nothing but duct tape and prayers. And the smoke detector may or may not be an old frisbee. Year after year the health inspector, through some divine intervention, pure laziness, or simple old-fashioned bribery, has signed off on the business, kindly turning a blind eye to the “good-enough” fixes and a blind nose to that overwhelming aroma that hangs over the gas station.

That lingering smell--a sweet combination of honeysuckle, ammonia, and vomit--has never been positively identified, but the prevalent theory is that it’s coming from underground, wafting up through the thin fissures in the concrete that grow and spread with each year of architectural settling. It’s strongest right after a rain and tear-inducing if you get too close to the storm drains, where even Rocco and his clan refuse to tread.

Were you to answer nature’s call during your visit to the gas station, you might see the bathroom cowboy. He's sort of an urban legend around here, only ever appearing when you’re alone and unsuspecting. Some people say he wears a long leather duster jacket, bandanna, jeans, chaps, and boots with spurs. Some say he wears nothing but a black Stetson cattleman, checkered boxers, and ornate tribal tattoos. Some folks have witnessed him handing out balloon animals or playing the harmonica; some claim that he sings to them with the voice of a southern angel while they’re busy doing their business.

Should you be lucky enough to see the cowboy who haunts the bathroom, don't worry. If he's real, he’s harmless. And quite polite, to boot. Customers have reported a spiritual high after meeting him, and old Bob Hoover credits the encounter with curing his gout.

Honestly, the cowboy doesn’t seem so bad, especially compared to some of the other things you may encounter. If you do go inside, there’s a great chance you won’t see the cowboy, or the racoons, or anything that might register as out of the ordinary. But you will probably see me. After all, I’m the only full-time employee, which means I’m on the clock more often than not.

Most of the time, you can find me sitting behind the counter by the cash register. You may catch me reading a book because, for some reason, the internet doesn’t work way out there, and cell phone service is dicey on good days and nonexistent on most.

If you need to make a phone call, you can leave and go up the hill, back towards town. (Definitely do not continue any further downhill, where the road snakes into the hungry mouth of a wild sweeping forest. Trust me. You don’t want to know all the reasons that’s not a good idea.)

Alternatively, you can pay me twenty-five cents a minute to use the store’s landline. That sacred arrangement was cooked up by the owners years ago and yes, I have to actually enforce it because yes, they do check the phone records. I’m sorry. We get at least one new person every month wandering back into town from the woods (normally barefoot), sometimes claiming they’ve just escaped aliens or monsters or government conspirators or the like, and that they have no money but need to make a call and could I please let them use our store phone before “they” find them again? But rules are rules, and I’m not inclined to lose my job just because you didn’t escape captivity with a little spare change in your pocket.

—Jack Townsend, Tales from the Gas Station: Volume One