OPEN POST.
๐ค๐ฅ๐๐ฃ๐ฅ๐๐ฃ๐ค / ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ฃ๐ฃ๐ช๐ ๐ง๐๐ฃ / ๐ฅ๐๐๐ ๐ ๐ง๐๐ฃ๐๐๐ ๐จ
diadem app;
Player Information
Player: Em
Contact:
Invitation OR characters played: Frank Castle, Laura
Are you over 18?: lol
Character Information
Character: Jack Townsend
Canon: Tales from the Gas Station: The Abandoned Zoo Story
Age: approximately 30
History: Link
Possessions:
Weapon: None
Powers/Abilities:
The combination of Jack's initially dormant supernatural aspects, lifelong exposure to a cosmic rift, and his instability manifest in a few weird ways. He's described by Sabine, an entity whose purpose is to be a caretaker for impossible things, as "something which is, but should not be".
His sleep disorder makes him largely immune to being knocked out by any force - be it pain, surgical 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 lightest possible stage of 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 flipside 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 supernaturally hypnotizes people into leaving and joining her in her hearse, never to be seen again. 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 in the case of the intensely powerful Dark God's compulsion to dig holes behind the gas station. That lasted closer to an hour, compared to the Dark God being able to fully brainwash other ordinary people seemingly indefinitely.
Jack has the ability to see the memories of people in proximity to him. He lives out these memories first-person as if he were them, understanding the basic context and train of thought of the person as they're living their memory. He is especially prone to this if he's under the effects of drugs or alcohol. These memories hit him out of nowhere, he doesn't choose to initiate them and he can't stop them once they start.
He's latently somewhat a little psychic. Sort of. It's complicated and nebulous and we'll almost ceretainly never get a clear explanation.
He is also a super-saturated sponge full of a thousand lifetimes of void-rift energy. This makes him a perfect vessel, or an awesome power battery for anybody that has the ability to harness that energy. Jack himself can do nothing with this power, but other characters in the game may find ways to tap him for it.
His hallucinations occasionally manifest in unexplainable and helpful ways - usually in clutch this-is-it situations, or when he's at peak instability. Objects randomly appearing, or conversations with dead people that may or may not actually be ghosts, are the two primary ways this manifests.
TL;DR he's too crazy even for cryptids & his insanity defies reality a little sometimes. Unfortunately, he can't control pretty much any of it, so it'll be used sparingly as neat thread hooks and for quality shitposting.
Application Questions
Who is the most important person in their life and why? What might be different if this person hadn't been around?
The answer, hands down, is Sabine. She was his childhood friend, then his girlfriend, his partner, his best friend. The one stable constant person he always had, during a lifetime of bouncing around from foster family to foster family. Without her, he never would have known love or kindness. He never would have been dissuaded from violence or an obsession with guns โ the time he brought one to show her and she shut him down for it radically changed his views on them at a time when he was incredibly impressionable. He almost certainly would have grown up to perpetuate the cycle of abuse without her in his life โ or at the very least, he would have stayed with the family in Texas that wanted to adopt him, rather than coming back to his shitty town just to be with her. He wouldn't have ended up working at the gas station, and without him there to stop a few different world ending events, it's possible the consequences could have been apocalyptic.
Is there an event in your character's life that they'd do differently? How so and why?
Content warning: Suicidal Ideation.
After the car accident that put Sabine into a coma, Jack fell into a devastating depression. For as bad as he seems five years later, it's nothing compared to the way he felt in the immediate weeks after the incident. One evening while on shift, Jack pulled out a handgun, put it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. The only thing that saved him was that same sheer dumb luck in the form of a piece of pocket lint jamming the firing mechanism.
As soon as he pulled the trigger, he hated himself for it. He was absolutely disgusted with himself, to such an extent that he actively repressed the memory. It's later resurfaced after Sabine's death, and with the benefit of hindsight, Jack would have chosen to never, ever even attempt to pull that shit again. It didn't teach him anything, it didn't help him, it didn't fix him. It just made him feel worse, and he'll be ashamed of it for his whole life.
What's the greatest challenge you foresee your character facing in the setting? How might this impact their ability to adapt and in what ways will they confront this challenge?
Jack's biggest challenge here will be the same one he faces back home โ that he's mostly just a Weird Little Guy, and yet is frequently put into situations with circumstances far larger than he should be able to navigate. He can do some weird stuff, but he doesn't have super powers in the traditional sense. He can't really fight with any remarkable skill. He's not a genius. He's just a weird little dude, and what do you mean he's facing down a hoard of zombies all of a sudden?
He'll likely overcome it the same ways he overcomes such situations in canon: a combination of helpful friends, dumb luck, and the strange coalescing of Weirdness that seems to follow him around everywhere and conveniently help him somehow survive the most inconceivable circumstances known to man. (He might also be getting a big ass raccoon as a bonus ac reward, because he needs a guard dog...)
What's the easiest thing you foresee your character adapting to in the setting?
The cosmic weirdness and the horror. He's from an eldritch horror creepypasta satire canon, the things that happen in games are literally just like the events of his daily life. It will take zero effort for him to adapt to this particular brand of weirdness. If it weren't for the absence of his friends, he honestly probably wouldn't even notice that big of a difference between Panorama and any other city he's ever traveled through.
Samples
Sample: Link
Entry tags:
An Eight Hundred Year Anthology;
Contained within are the collected works of the Summoned of Abraxas. These may be works of fiction, semi-autobiographical exaggerated recounts, or they may be accurate retellings. They may be poetry, prose, lyric, art, or any other free-form expressive writing. Works may be published under a pseudonym to protect anonymity. |
abraxas au event;
guardian of the wanderer
assignment
BLESSING: infinite storage โ
New phenomena; creating from nothing; dreams made real
AFFLICTION: endless aisle โ Warped reality or morals; trapped in liminal space; nightmares made real
AFFLICTION: endless aisle โ Warped reality or morals; trapped in liminal space; nightmares made real
personality
The vast majority of the time, Jack is in his dream persona. He's friendly and whimsical, a little surreal, a little illogical, a fan of fantasy and storytelling and wonder. He creates magic wherever he goes, and builds beautiful dreamlike worlds for his friends to venture into and out of at their desire. He's in the business of making dreams come true.
Unfortunately, this is not his only state. When he is threatened, or triggered, the Nightmare of the Witchwood takes over. He has no control over this โ he essentially enters a disassociated fugue state, his waking mind goes to sleep, and the nightmare with no empathy and no love takes the wheel. He traps those around them in their own nightmares, or in horrific dreamscapes of labyrinth-like liminal spaces. Things become a horror movie, a nightmare, the Backrooms. It takes a divine act of magic, love, or power to snap him out of this state.
Unfortunately, this is not his only state. When he is threatened, or triggered, the Nightmare of the Witchwood takes over. He has no control over this โ he essentially enters a disassociated fugue state, his waking mind goes to sleep, and the nightmare with no empathy and no love takes the wheel. He traps those around them in their own nightmares, or in horrific dreamscapes of labyrinth-like liminal spaces. Things become a horror movie, a nightmare, the Backrooms. It takes a divine act of magic, love, or power to snap him out of this state.
history
The Nightmare of the Witchwood is activated for the first time between 100-300 years into the AU, when Lucifer finally has enough power to see all of the void rift energy Jack is saturated with. Lucifer targets Sabine specifically to fuck with Jack, and when he realizes she's been thrown into a coma, the Nightmare takes over. Everyone within miles is trapped in an eternal waking nightmare, until Kyle intervenes and breaks him from this state. Afterward, Jack fears what he could revert into, and tends to hover around people who can nullify him. When he learns Cassian has that ability, he tethers himself to the man, or dreams him into reality when he is most needed. Unfortunately, Cassian is dust in the wind, and there are a few times over the next 500 years that Jack reverts without meaning to, requiring intervention in different ways. The Doctor's endless optimism and forced positivity help counter Jack's nightmares into dreams when all else seems lost.
Sabine; his other half, permanently entwined, always present, able to walk through his dreamscapes
Jerry; his best friend and brother, always with a starring role in these fantasies
Kyle; his protector and cherished champion, kissed by dreams
Cassian; his tether and encouragement, reassuring him of his own control
Kell; eternal gratitude and profound understanding
The Doctor; the counter to his drowning despair
Lucifer; fuck that guy
River; tbd
+ relationships
Rita; his familiar and companion, sometimes a small raccoon, sometimes a fucking dragonSabine; his other half, permanently entwined, always present, able to walk through his dreamscapes
Jerry; his best friend and brother, always with a starring role in these fantasies
Kyle; his protector and cherished champion, kissed by dreams
Cassian; his tether and encouragement, reassuring him of his own control
Kell; eternal gratitude and profound understanding
The Doctor; the counter to his drowning despair
Lucifer; fuck that guy
River; tbd
Name Em TIMEZONE EST DISCORD righteously PB Jay Baruchel • CODE
Entry tags:
story permissions;
 Jack's primary hobby aside from reading is writing โ mainly, recounting interesting events he's part of, or that he's been a witness to. In Abraxas, this takes the form of Jack writing Penny Dreadful-style novels which are generally retellings of game events from his own unreliable narrator perspective. The style is largely comedic but also greatly inspired by the creepypasta genre. To preserve the privacy of his fellow Summoned, he's made an effort to change the names (and occasionally the physical descriptions) of the people who play a part in these stories. Even with that in mind, I would like to make sure every character featured is only mentioned with the permission of their players! If it's cool for Jack to feature his adaptation of your character in these stories, please fill out the form below! |
Entry tags:
abraxas info
Jack Townsend
Tales from the Gas Station
โ BASICS โ
โ FIRST IMPRESSIONS โ
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 โ 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.
โ SKILLS โ
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
โ RUMORS โ
- Tends to stare into space vacantly for minutes or hours at a time
- Occasionally talks to himself
โ HAUNTS โ
- Anywhere with books โ he is perpetually reading
- Anywhere that serves coffee
โ ITEMS โ
- Prosthetic leg
โ MAGIC โ
- 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 โ a glowing raccoon moth thing
โ OUT OF CHARACTER โ
Em ยท She/Her ยท AZT ยท Em#8430 ยท ![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
paingravy
abraxas app
OOC INFORMATION
Player Name: Em
Are you over 18?: extremely
Contact:paingravy
Other Characters in Game: Dean Winchester, Sandor Clegane
IC INFORMATION
Character Name: Jack Townsend
Canon: Tales from the Gas Station
Canon Point: Post Book 4 & The Tale of the Spider Folk
Age: 28
Background: Here. As a warning, Jack's history and app contain a lot of disturbing content, including child abuse, murder, mental instability, amputation, self harm, and small-town southern ignorance.
Arrival Scenario: Thorne
Suitability:
Jack would be a re-app, retaining about a year's worth of memories of his previous time in Abraxas. In that time, he'd worked hard with people like Yennefer, Istredd, and Lucifer to learn how to control his own ambient magic, as well as learning Abraxan magic. He integrated himself fairly well with the Summoned, participated in events, and formed a connection with a couple of NPC siblings from Solvunn. Were he to come back he'd resume some of those lessons, he'd reach out to the siblings to see how they're doing and, with Mod approval and a plot engagement request, my goal is for him to actually start publishing in-game books about the events after they happen.
In terms of his canon, Jack is very much used to crazy shit going down and wild setting changes.
The gas station, when it existed, sat on top of what is basically a multidimensional rift. Because he's something just a little to the left of your ordinary human, he was chosen to be a vessel for one of the deities trapped in his town. To do that, he had to spend almost his entire life in proximity to the rift to absorb that energy into himself while it slowly changed him to be a viable host. The thing about this rift is it's like a cosmic dumping ground for the weird and supernatural, meaning the absolute balls to the wall weirdest shit has happened to him to the point that he's chronically unfazed by most things, and will generally roll with them. Showing up in a medieval alternate dimension is something he'd just sort of go with.
Powers:
The combination of Jack's initially dormant supernatural aspects, lifelong exposure to a cosmic rift, and his instability manifest in a few weird ways. He's described by Sabine, an entity whose purpose is to be a caretaker for impossible things, as "something which is, but should not be".
His sleep disorder makes him largely immune to being knocked out by any force - be it pain, surgical 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 lightest possible stage of 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 flipside 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 supernaturally hypnotizes people into leaving and joining her in her hearse, never to be seen again. 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 in the case of the intensely powerful Dark God's compulsion to dig holes behind the gas station. That lasted closer to an hour, compared to the Dark God being able to fully brainwash other ordinary people seemingly indefinitely.
As of book 4, Jack has the ability to see the memories of people in proximity to him. He lives out these memories first-person as if he were them, understanding the basic context and train of thought of the person as they're living their memory. He is especially prone to this if he's under the effects of drugs or alcohol. These memories hit him out of nowhere, he doesn't choose to initiate them and he can't stop them once they start.
He is also a super-saturated sponge full of a thousand lifetimes of void-rift energy. This makes him a perfect vessel, or an awesome power battery for anybody that has the ability to harness that energy. Jack himself can do nothing with this power, but other characters in the game may find ways to tap him for it.
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:
The ability to manifest objects into existence โ 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 broken credit card and 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 and slip free. 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. Also, one time he hallucinated a sandwich into existence and is too oblivious to realize that's where it came from. He is not always the sharpest tool in the shed.
The ability to speak with the dead, or something โ 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. These hallucinations, whether they're somebody alive or dead, occasionally warn Jack about things he can't possibly know on his own, implying some light psychic or prophetic capabilities.
TL;DR he's too crazy even for cryptids & his insanity defies reality a little sometimes. Unfortunately, he can't control most of it, so it'll be used sparingly as neat thread hooks until he slowly (re-)learns to control it over his time in the game. Of note, his reality bending doesn't involve actually reviving the deceased, only having vivid hallucinations of them that don't last very long.
PERSONALITY QUESTIONS
Describe an important event in your character's life and how it impacted them.
Shortly after Jack graduated from high school, he was diagnosed with a terminal illness called FFI - fatal familial insomnia. This is not the event that impacted him. It's just a small piece of what actually ruined his life.
When he was seven years old, Jack met a girl named Sabine. She became his best friend, his single source of stability as he was bounced from foster home to foster home. At some point down the line, she became his girlfriend. After he was diagnosed, Sabine insisted that they not waste his remaining time moping around in their shitty little town, but instead go out and see as much of the world as they could. Jack felt good for the first time in months, packed his bags, and volunteered to drive, even though at the time he believed he hadn't slept in four days.
They didn't make it a mile out of town before the car accident. Jack walked away without a scratch. Sabine went into a permanent coma. The sheriff told him a car came up behind them and bumped them off the road, but Jack couldn't shake the insistent thought that he could've fallen asleep at the wheel and caused it all.
Sabine was his person, his family, his other half, and suddenly, she was brain-dead. Jack shut down. Any ambition to leave town went out the window. All of his emotions closed in on himself. In a lot of ways, it was like part of him went into a coma with her. He resigned himself to working out the rest of his life in the gas station, waiting for his disease to break down his cognitive function and eventually kill him. Over the next five years and up to not long before his canon point, he became hollow, withdrawn, and isolated. Until Jerry muscled his way into Jack's life to become his best friend, Jack considered his closest friend to be a part-time employee that showed up twice a week and exchanged maybe ten words with him during them for over a year. He never dated again, and up to his canon point, has never moved on.
Does your character have a moral code, or other set of standards they try to live by?
Jack's moral code is definitely... something. He is generally good, and gets assertively indignant when he sees things like racism or sexism happening. On social issues, he's extremely progressive and generally an ally whenever possible. He doesn't like "Nice Guy" behavior, he doesn't like people who diss on what other people like just to feel superior, and really overall just likes people who are nice.
On the flip side, he's completely cavalier to things like, you know, murder. His first "best friend" Antonio showed up at the gas station one day after having borrowed his car, informing him that he'd killed a guy (it was totally an accident) and stuffed the body in the trunk. Jack's reaction was to be exasperated, stating if he'd known what was going to happen he probably still would have let Antonio borrow his car but he'd have at least put down tarps or something. His thought process was that Tony was a good guy, he was on probation, it was an accident, and a parole officer wouldn't be very understanding about accidental homicide. He didn't think Tony deserved to go to jail, so he helped him get rid of the body. Tony then proceeded to "accidentally" kill the SAME guy (plant-clones of a politician named Kieffer) like half a dozen times, and Jack never really wavered on his stance โ though he did begin to wonder about exactly how accidental it was.
Jack's actual best friend Jerry was a member of a murder cult who believed that a person's job in life was to maximize happiness and minimize suffering for humanity, but because happiness has diminishing returns and misery is constant, the only real solution is to end all suffering. To do this, their grand plan was to build a bomb to blow up the world, thereby eradicating all pain forever. Although Jack wasn't a fan of the cult and thought it was stupid, it had exactly zero impact on his friendship with Jerry. He's even described Jerry as having a "hard-on for homicide", and he's completely fine with it because Jerry only does it for the right reasons, with good intentions. It's the thought that counts.
He'd never kill somebody in cold blood or take a life if it was at all preventable, but he's also incredibly desensitized to horror and tragedy, so he'll do it if he has to in order to save or protect someone, or if he believes a person is bad enough to deserve it. He genuinely does not care what a person's backstory is, even if their track record is astoundingly questionable, so long as he has any type of bond with them. He's really more of a "who you are now" / "who you choose to be in the future" guy โ Satan himself could show up and Jack would be fairly neutral about it until he indicated he was going to do something fucked up. At that point it becomes his obligation to do something about it if he can.
What quality or qualities do they admire most?
Jack has been more or less on his own his entire life. His parents weren't together, his mother had a drug problem while he was in her custody, and as early as seven years old (probably earlier) she would lock him out of the house after school until she got home from wherever she went, leaving him to wander his apartment complex looking for people who might give him food. He routinely wandered in the woods on his own for hours or days at a time. His father was abusive, and he eventually wound up bouncing from foster home to foster home, with foster parents who largely did not give a shit about him personally. He's never really had anyone take care of him, or care about him in general, apart from Sabine.
The moment someone demonstrates that caring, he's pretty much immediately taken by them. He might insist that he's not a child and he doesn't need anybody, but being genuinely kind to or concerned about him with no ulterior motive makes him loyal to somebody really quickly. He's drawn to kindness, and it will make him like a person to the extent that he's willing to overlook other major issues with their personality.
He also respects people with integrity, when they're willing to stand up for their morals and put their money where their mouth is. One of his eventual closest friends is deputy Amelia O'Brien, and he still routinely hallucinates his prior mentor Tom, the town sheriff. In general, he doesn't like cops โ most of the ones in his home town are ignorant, but those two are actually good, and actively do something to make a difference in the world. They're also willing to break the law and bend rules in the name of doing the right thing, which is what helps cement that to him.
Do they have a part of themselves they dislike?
Although Jack is not insecure, he also doesn't like himself all that much. He doesn't think he's all that attractive or smart, he believes he's unremarkable, and generally doesn't value his own life. He's fairly tepid about his own personality.
His body, on the other hand โ specifically his mind โ is another matter. Though Jack doesn't have the fatal disorder he was told would slowly eat away at his cognitive function, he also isn't strictly sane. He suffers from trauma-induced parasomnia combined with somnambulism and narcolepsy, and has an extremely rare condition where his body usually can't access REM sleep. Essentially this means he spends a significant portion of his life in the early stages of sleep, but still aware of his surroundings and functional enough that people might not even notice. This leads to hallucinations, lost time, blackouts, basically an inability to reliably trust the things he sees or experiences. Because of how insane his life is, he often can't really know whether something is real or just a product of his screwed-up mind.
Deeper than that, though, are elements of his childhood he dislikes so much he's actually repressed them entirely and completely forgotten about them โ the small part of his mind that remembers subconsciously manifests as hallucinations of other people that represent his guilt and anger. As a child, because of his upbringing, Jack was prone to severe outbursts of violence. They weren't random, and were always a defense mechanism triggered by someone crossing boundaries. A few examples: as a child while riding at the back of the school bus, an older girl sat down next to him and tried to put her hand down his pants. He stabbed her in the ear with a pencil. In middle school, a bully pantsed him in a public, crowded hallway on his way to class. His body went on autopilot, walked into the kid's classroom, picked up a clay turtle the teacher's kids made for her, and bashed the kid over the head with it so hard it broke into pieces.
Though that defense mechanism largely went away as he aged and repressed his memories, emotions, and trauma, it still exists within him. He has a sociopathic stalker named Spencer, who once threatened his life and the lives of his friends at gunpoint in the gas station. Jack disassociated, blacked out, and slit his throat with a box cutter. When he came to, his mind rewrote the memory to believe that somebody else had done it. Spencer survived, and Jack had no idea what Spencer was referring to when he brought it up later, convinced it was a mind game until Spencer showed him the security tape of himself actually wielding the blade.
He dislikes this part of himself so much his mind actively protects him from it, and he doesn't realize it or remember it all until the end of the fourth book.
What is their sign, and why?
Jack's sign is the moon. He is quite literally a dreamer, considering his condition, and he spends a significant quantity of the time hallucinating or imagining things. Even when we're not being literal, Jack's favorite pastime is his obsession with books and trash fiction. He spends an unbelievable amount of time reading the absolute worst garbage fiction novels you can conceive of โ like the book about Napoleon Bonaparte having a secret island with a cloning machine where he made dozens of other Napoleons. It included a Napoleon on Napoleon love scene. He consumes that stuff like oxygen. His solutions to problems or inner conflict is to hallucinate things into reality, whether it's his deceased mentor Tom for a heart to heart, or a gun to shoot his way out of a pair of handcuffs, only for the gun to disappear right after.
SAMPLES
Samples: His most recent TDM top-level.
Player Name: Em
Are you over 18?: extremely
Contact:
Other Characters in Game: Dean Winchester, Sandor Clegane
IC INFORMATION
Character Name: Jack Townsend
Canon: Tales from the Gas Station
Canon Point: Post Book 4 & The Tale of the Spider Folk
Age: 28
Background: Here. As a warning, Jack's history and app contain a lot of disturbing content, including child abuse, murder, mental instability, amputation, self harm, and small-town southern ignorance.
Arrival Scenario: Thorne
Suitability:
Jack would be a re-app, retaining about a year's worth of memories of his previous time in Abraxas. In that time, he'd worked hard with people like Yennefer, Istredd, and Lucifer to learn how to control his own ambient magic, as well as learning Abraxan magic. He integrated himself fairly well with the Summoned, participated in events, and formed a connection with a couple of NPC siblings from Solvunn. Were he to come back he'd resume some of those lessons, he'd reach out to the siblings to see how they're doing and, with Mod approval and a plot engagement request, my goal is for him to actually start publishing in-game books about the events after they happen.
In terms of his canon, Jack is very much used to crazy shit going down and wild setting changes.
The gas station, when it existed, sat on top of what is basically a multidimensional rift. Because he's something just a little to the left of your ordinary human, he was chosen to be a vessel for one of the deities trapped in his town. To do that, he had to spend almost his entire life in proximity to the rift to absorb that energy into himself while it slowly changed him to be a viable host. The thing about this rift is it's like a cosmic dumping ground for the weird and supernatural, meaning the absolute balls to the wall weirdest shit has happened to him to the point that he's chronically unfazed by most things, and will generally roll with them. Showing up in a medieval alternate dimension is something he'd just sort of go with.
Powers:
The combination of Jack's initially dormant supernatural aspects, lifelong exposure to a cosmic rift, and his instability manifest in a few weird ways. He's described by Sabine, an entity whose purpose is to be a caretaker for impossible things, as "something which is, but should not be".
His sleep disorder makes him largely immune to being knocked out by any force - be it pain, surgical 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 lightest possible stage of 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 flipside 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 supernaturally hypnotizes people into leaving and joining her in her hearse, never to be seen again. 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 in the case of the intensely powerful Dark God's compulsion to dig holes behind the gas station. That lasted closer to an hour, compared to the Dark God being able to fully brainwash other ordinary people seemingly indefinitely.
As of book 4, Jack has the ability to see the memories of people in proximity to him. He lives out these memories first-person as if he were them, understanding the basic context and train of thought of the person as they're living their memory. He is especially prone to this if he's under the effects of drugs or alcohol. These memories hit him out of nowhere, he doesn't choose to initiate them and he can't stop them once they start.
He is also a super-saturated sponge full of a thousand lifetimes of void-rift energy. This makes him a perfect vessel, or an awesome power battery for anybody that has the ability to harness that energy. Jack himself can do nothing with this power, but other characters in the game may find ways to tap him for it.
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:
The ability to manifest objects into existence โ 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 broken credit card and 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 and slip free. 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. Also, one time he hallucinated a sandwich into existence and is too oblivious to realize that's where it came from. He is not always the sharpest tool in the shed.
The ability to speak with the dead, or something โ 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. These hallucinations, whether they're somebody alive or dead, occasionally warn Jack about things he can't possibly know on his own, implying some light psychic or prophetic capabilities.
TL;DR he's too crazy even for cryptids & his insanity defies reality a little sometimes. Unfortunately, he can't control most of it, so it'll be used sparingly as neat thread hooks until he slowly (re-)learns to control it over his time in the game. Of note, his reality bending doesn't involve actually reviving the deceased, only having vivid hallucinations of them that don't last very long.
PERSONALITY QUESTIONS
Describe an important event in your character's life and how it impacted them.
Shortly after Jack graduated from high school, he was diagnosed with a terminal illness called FFI - fatal familial insomnia. This is not the event that impacted him. It's just a small piece of what actually ruined his life.
When he was seven years old, Jack met a girl named Sabine. She became his best friend, his single source of stability as he was bounced from foster home to foster home. At some point down the line, she became his girlfriend. After he was diagnosed, Sabine insisted that they not waste his remaining time moping around in their shitty little town, but instead go out and see as much of the world as they could. Jack felt good for the first time in months, packed his bags, and volunteered to drive, even though at the time he believed he hadn't slept in four days.
They didn't make it a mile out of town before the car accident. Jack walked away without a scratch. Sabine went into a permanent coma. The sheriff told him a car came up behind them and bumped them off the road, but Jack couldn't shake the insistent thought that he could've fallen asleep at the wheel and caused it all.
Sabine was his person, his family, his other half, and suddenly, she was brain-dead. Jack shut down. Any ambition to leave town went out the window. All of his emotions closed in on himself. In a lot of ways, it was like part of him went into a coma with her. He resigned himself to working out the rest of his life in the gas station, waiting for his disease to break down his cognitive function and eventually kill him. Over the next five years and up to not long before his canon point, he became hollow, withdrawn, and isolated. Until Jerry muscled his way into Jack's life to become his best friend, Jack considered his closest friend to be a part-time employee that showed up twice a week and exchanged maybe ten words with him during them for over a year. He never dated again, and up to his canon point, has never moved on.
Does your character have a moral code, or other set of standards they try to live by?
Jack's moral code is definitely... something. He is generally good, and gets assertively indignant when he sees things like racism or sexism happening. On social issues, he's extremely progressive and generally an ally whenever possible. He doesn't like "Nice Guy" behavior, he doesn't like people who diss on what other people like just to feel superior, and really overall just likes people who are nice.
On the flip side, he's completely cavalier to things like, you know, murder. His first "best friend" Antonio showed up at the gas station one day after having borrowed his car, informing him that he'd killed a guy (it was totally an accident) and stuffed the body in the trunk. Jack's reaction was to be exasperated, stating if he'd known what was going to happen he probably still would have let Antonio borrow his car but he'd have at least put down tarps or something. His thought process was that Tony was a good guy, he was on probation, it was an accident, and a parole officer wouldn't be very understanding about accidental homicide. He didn't think Tony deserved to go to jail, so he helped him get rid of the body. Tony then proceeded to "accidentally" kill the SAME guy (plant-clones of a politician named Kieffer) like half a dozen times, and Jack never really wavered on his stance โ though he did begin to wonder about exactly how accidental it was.
Jack's actual best friend Jerry was a member of a murder cult who believed that a person's job in life was to maximize happiness and minimize suffering for humanity, but because happiness has diminishing returns and misery is constant, the only real solution is to end all suffering. To do this, their grand plan was to build a bomb to blow up the world, thereby eradicating all pain forever. Although Jack wasn't a fan of the cult and thought it was stupid, it had exactly zero impact on his friendship with Jerry. He's even described Jerry as having a "hard-on for homicide", and he's completely fine with it because Jerry only does it for the right reasons, with good intentions. It's the thought that counts.
He'd never kill somebody in cold blood or take a life if it was at all preventable, but he's also incredibly desensitized to horror and tragedy, so he'll do it if he has to in order to save or protect someone, or if he believes a person is bad enough to deserve it. He genuinely does not care what a person's backstory is, even if their track record is astoundingly questionable, so long as he has any type of bond with them. He's really more of a "who you are now" / "who you choose to be in the future" guy โ Satan himself could show up and Jack would be fairly neutral about it until he indicated he was going to do something fucked up. At that point it becomes his obligation to do something about it if he can.
What quality or qualities do they admire most?
Jack has been more or less on his own his entire life. His parents weren't together, his mother had a drug problem while he was in her custody, and as early as seven years old (probably earlier) she would lock him out of the house after school until she got home from wherever she went, leaving him to wander his apartment complex looking for people who might give him food. He routinely wandered in the woods on his own for hours or days at a time. His father was abusive, and he eventually wound up bouncing from foster home to foster home, with foster parents who largely did not give a shit about him personally. He's never really had anyone take care of him, or care about him in general, apart from Sabine.
The moment someone demonstrates that caring, he's pretty much immediately taken by them. He might insist that he's not a child and he doesn't need anybody, but being genuinely kind to or concerned about him with no ulterior motive makes him loyal to somebody really quickly. He's drawn to kindness, and it will make him like a person to the extent that he's willing to overlook other major issues with their personality.
He also respects people with integrity, when they're willing to stand up for their morals and put their money where their mouth is. One of his eventual closest friends is deputy Amelia O'Brien, and he still routinely hallucinates his prior mentor Tom, the town sheriff. In general, he doesn't like cops โ most of the ones in his home town are ignorant, but those two are actually good, and actively do something to make a difference in the world. They're also willing to break the law and bend rules in the name of doing the right thing, which is what helps cement that to him.
Do they have a part of themselves they dislike?
Although Jack is not insecure, he also doesn't like himself all that much. He doesn't think he's all that attractive or smart, he believes he's unremarkable, and generally doesn't value his own life. He's fairly tepid about his own personality.
His body, on the other hand โ specifically his mind โ is another matter. Though Jack doesn't have the fatal disorder he was told would slowly eat away at his cognitive function, he also isn't strictly sane. He suffers from trauma-induced parasomnia combined with somnambulism and narcolepsy, and has an extremely rare condition where his body usually can't access REM sleep. Essentially this means he spends a significant portion of his life in the early stages of sleep, but still aware of his surroundings and functional enough that people might not even notice. This leads to hallucinations, lost time, blackouts, basically an inability to reliably trust the things he sees or experiences. Because of how insane his life is, he often can't really know whether something is real or just a product of his screwed-up mind.
Deeper than that, though, are elements of his childhood he dislikes so much he's actually repressed them entirely and completely forgotten about them โ the small part of his mind that remembers subconsciously manifests as hallucinations of other people that represent his guilt and anger. As a child, because of his upbringing, Jack was prone to severe outbursts of violence. They weren't random, and were always a defense mechanism triggered by someone crossing boundaries. A few examples: as a child while riding at the back of the school bus, an older girl sat down next to him and tried to put her hand down his pants. He stabbed her in the ear with a pencil. In middle school, a bully pantsed him in a public, crowded hallway on his way to class. His body went on autopilot, walked into the kid's classroom, picked up a clay turtle the teacher's kids made for her, and bashed the kid over the head with it so hard it broke into pieces.
Though that defense mechanism largely went away as he aged and repressed his memories, emotions, and trauma, it still exists within him. He has a sociopathic stalker named Spencer, who once threatened his life and the lives of his friends at gunpoint in the gas station. Jack disassociated, blacked out, and slit his throat with a box cutter. When he came to, his mind rewrote the memory to believe that somebody else had done it. Spencer survived, and Jack had no idea what Spencer was referring to when he brought it up later, convinced it was a mind game until Spencer showed him the security tape of himself actually wielding the blade.
He dislikes this part of himself so much his mind actively protects him from it, and he doesn't realize it or remember it all until the end of the fourth book.
What is their sign, and why?
Jack's sign is the moon. He is quite literally a dreamer, considering his condition, and he spends a significant quantity of the time hallucinating or imagining things. Even when we're not being literal, Jack's favorite pastime is his obsession with books and trash fiction. He spends an unbelievable amount of time reading the absolute worst garbage fiction novels you can conceive of โ like the book about Napoleon Bonaparte having a secret island with a cloning machine where he made dozens of other Napoleons. It included a Napoleon on Napoleon love scene. He consumes that stuff like oxygen. His solutions to problems or inner conflict is to hallucinate things into reality, whether it's his deceased mentor Tom for a heart to heart, or a gun to shoot his way out of a pair of handcuffs, only for the gun to disappear right after.
SAMPLES
Samples: His most recent TDM top-level.
blog submissions
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Jack's primary hobby aside from reading is blogging โ mainly, retelling interesting events he's part of, or that he's been a witness to. I'd love to have him start up a blog again in game, but I'd like to use something other than just rehashing my threads as the content he writes about. My brilliant, genius idea: leave me a summary (as detailed as you can get) about something interesting that happened to/with your character. This can be something between your character and Jack, your character and another character (with their permission) that Jack was around to witness, or your character vs. the environment.
Fill out yonder template below with as much info as you can give me if you're interested in being featured! As a disclaimer, I may not use all of these, or I may not use them in order. Just depends on time/motivation/state of the game/etc.
I'll hit you with a draft of it prior to posting to make sure it all seems IC for your character.
Comments screened for The Surprise and The Mystery
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๐ฅ๐๐ฉ๐ฅ | ๐ก๐๐๐ฅ๐ฆ๐ฃ๐ | ๐๐๐๐ | ๐ง๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ | ๐๐๐ฅ๐๐ ๐
Kink List
( this is copied and pasted across several of my journals, it's not tailored to this specific character. )
* = allowed but I find it boring if that's the entire focus of the thread; I like to roll these in with other things.
don't ask me about those ants, you don't wanna know
These are not IC kinks. Jack may enjoy some of them, others will need to be set up through alternative means.
| YES | OPEN | NO |
| โ cockwarming โ somnophilia โ stress ball - ( the objectified person may be expected to strip naked and then sit quietly next to the dominant party; the other person may then work, play a video game, or do anything else that may require their attention. Without really paying attention to the objectified person, he may grope or fondle them the way someone might play with a stress ball. ) โโ size play โโ objectification โ edging โ condescension โ deprioritization / being inconsiderate of the sub ie "leg humping only", "you get off after I do" โโ macro/microphilia โ insertion with the above โ dubcon โโ noncon โ frottage โ oral sex โโ mental sex โ enclosed spaces โโ accidental stimulation โ cock transformation โ hypnotism/mind control โ orgasm control / denial โ sex pollen/potions/aliens/forced โ body sharing โ dom/sub (usually dom) โ face fucking โ vaginal sex โ Dollification - ( the objectified person is used like you would an inflatable sex doll. The โdollโ is not allowed (or is unable) to move, speak, or react while being used. ) โ handjobs โ rough sex* โ dirty talking* โโ multiple orgasms โ Masturbation aid - ( the objectified person is deprived of agency and treated like a masturbatory device on demand. This can also be combined with utility D/s; for instance, using the objectified person as a laptop computer table, and penetrate her while at work (or watching porn!) on their laptop. ) โ multiple partners โ public sex โโ normalization of sex in public spaces โ torture โ sex toys โ sex toy transformation โ humiliation โ free use โ bukkake (giving) โ overstimulation (giving usually) โ cock worship (usually receiving) โ forced/targeted voyerism ie "you look only at my cock" or "maintain eye contact" โ training, ie "say thank you when you climax" โ begging (him to be allowed to come) โ him saying no tbh |
โ orientation play โ pegging โ power imbalance โ spanking* โ incest โ sounding โ clothed sex* โ anal sex* โ hair pulling* โ biting* โ scratching* โ choking โ drugged/drunk โ blindfolds โ gags/ties/light bondage* โ knifeplay* โ gunplay* โ hatesex โ watersports ( for the purposes of humiliation or control, ie making the sub take it out and hold it, not into the fluid itself. ) |
โ beastiality โ animal parts โ scat โ fisting โ amputation โ inflation โ extreme physical age differences โ mpreg โ ants โ a single ants โ ants or a single ant being the cock transformation โ cuckolding with some shaming but specifically about the one partner going into forests and fucking ant hills and shaming the other party about being a city boy/girl/person and how they'll never feel as connected to them as they are to nature and how pathetic they are to think they could satisfy their needs and compete with thousands of ants โ sex toys shaped like very large ants โ enemas โ foot play โ gender play โ guro / vore / heavy gore โ infantilism โ food play โ also beetles |
* = allowed but I find it boring if that's the entire focus of the thread; I like to roll these in with other things.
don't ask me about those ants, you don't wanna know
These are not IC kinks. Jack may enjoy some of them, others will need to be set up through alternative means.
permissions & preferences;
PLAYER
NAME: Em
CONTACT:paingravy
ACTIVE TIMES/PACE: variable; boomerang when possible, sometimes slow; EST.
BRACKETS/PROSE: No preference
OFFENSIVE SUBJECTS & TRIGGERS: Nary a single one, amigos.
PLAYSTYLE: here!
CONTACT:
ACTIVE TIMES/PACE: variable; boomerang when possible, sometimes slow; EST.
BRACKETS/PROSE: No preference
OFFENSIVE SUBJECTS & TRIGGERS: Nary a single one, amigos.
PLAYSTYLE: here!
IN CHARACTER
PHYSICAL AFFECTION: Yes, he'll be awkward but appreciative. To be honest, he could really use more positive touch in his life.
PHYSICAL VIOLENCE: He's extremely used to it, yes. He can take a hell of a beating.
RELATIONSHIPS: Romance will be extremely slow burn, due to a 15 year relationship (childhood sweethearts) with a traumatic end; his ex wound up in a coma after a car accident; prior to book 4 she's still alive but has demonstrated no brain activity in over four years. After book 4, shipping becomes much easier, as he spends almost the entirety of the book grieving her loss and coming to terms with her death. OOCly, I'm 100% open to it because I'm ship trash, but I like to let things develop organically rather than preemptively committing to anything. I'm also down for love triangles and polyamorous situations if that's how it goes. Jack has only had one relationship in his life, so his sexuality isn't very well established - I default to bisexual as a general rule.
Platonically, he can be hard to get to know because a) he's awkward as fuck and b) he's crazy as fuck, which generally tends to turn people off. He also comes across as standoffish or like he doesn't care, but that isn't the case, that's just his demeanor. If you can get past all that, he's extremely loyal, and he cares a Lot.
PSYCHIC & PSIONIC INFORMATION: Jack has an interesting brain. He seems to be immune to supernatural influence when it comes to stealing his memories or knocking him unconscious. He's also mildly resistant to influence such as charms and compulsions, but any particularly powerful being can overcome that for a few hours - eg he kept waking up in the middle of digging a hole after being compelled to by the Dark God.
As of Bedside Manor, he has demonstrated very mild precognitive feelings, and seems to have a low level of psychic ability which is enhanced in certain circumstances or around certain individuals. Jerry refers to this as Jack having "The Shining".
As of volume four he has also demonstrated post-cognition / the ability to accidentally experience people's memories, living them first-person as if they were happening to him. He initially does this only under the influence of a metric shitload of drugs, but eventually the more it happens the less substances it seems to take until it just sort of happens now and then at random.
MAGICAL INFORMATION: Jack has the ability to occasionally see and speak with the dead. Or he's just crazy. The jury's really out. Jack's hallucinations also occasionally assist him in unexplainable ways, such as the imagined voice of his best friend giving him information on a short area around him he shouldn't know, or the hallucination of Spencer giving him a gun just long enough for him to shoot one bullet, and then both Spencer and his gun disappearing. He seems to hallucinate things into existence in clutch circumstances.
People with magical or enhanced perception may feel something off or impossible about him. Extremely powerful entities might be able to discern that he is a power sponge containing a thousand lifetimes of void rift radiation meant to make him the perfect vessel for a demi-god. He cannot use this energy himself, and is more functionally just a battery that can be tapped into if one is capable of such things.
MEDICAL INFORMATION: He's missing the pinky on his left hand, and his right leg below the knee. He also suffers from a sleep disorder which prior to the end of volume three he believes to be Fatal Familial Insomnia (but is revealed to be something different โ spoilers: trauma induced parasomnia, with somnambulism). In any case, he doesn't appear to sleep, like, ever โ but the truth is that he's very often in the lightest stage of REM sleep even while interacting with other people or performing daily tasks. As a result of his sleep disorder, he suffers from occasional hallucinations, lost time, confusion, memory loss, and disorientation.
OFFENSIVE SUBJECTS & TRIGGERS: We Do Not Talk About His Ex Girlfriend. Jk, talk about her it'll get weird.
In terms of triggering or offensive subjects likely to come from Jack's tags, there are many. I'll list a few, and it's safe to assume that anything tangentially related or on the same level as these may be likely:
โข Terminal illness
โข Suicidal ideation & a history of (one, failed) suicide attempt
โข Graphic descriptions of violence including amputation and death
โข Mental illness including hallucinations, gaslighting, and deteriorating sanity
โข Mentions of alcohol and drugs, both prescription and recreational
โข General Spooky Stuff like eldritch horrors and the babadook or whatever
โข References to historical child abuse
โข References to small-town southern prejudice, not from Jack (who is extremely liberal & open-minded) but regarding Jack's ignorant hometown
โข Strong or offensive language, the latter usually not from Jack, but canonically used by characters around him e.g. people frequently calling him various offensive slurs for persons with an intellectual disability. This will likely only come up if a tag quotes canon for some reason.
PHYSICAL VIOLENCE: He's extremely used to it, yes. He can take a hell of a beating.
RELATIONSHIPS: Romance will be extremely slow burn, due to a 15 year relationship (childhood sweethearts) with a traumatic end; his ex wound up in a coma after a car accident; prior to book 4 she's still alive but has demonstrated no brain activity in over four years. After book 4, shipping becomes much easier, as he spends almost the entirety of the book grieving her loss and coming to terms with her death. OOCly, I'm 100% open to it because I'm ship trash, but I like to let things develop organically rather than preemptively committing to anything. I'm also down for love triangles and polyamorous situations if that's how it goes. Jack has only had one relationship in his life, so his sexuality isn't very well established - I default to bisexual as a general rule.
Platonically, he can be hard to get to know because a) he's awkward as fuck and b) he's crazy as fuck, which generally tends to turn people off. He also comes across as standoffish or like he doesn't care, but that isn't the case, that's just his demeanor. If you can get past all that, he's extremely loyal, and he cares a Lot.
PSYCHIC & PSIONIC INFORMATION: Jack has an interesting brain. He seems to be immune to supernatural influence when it comes to stealing his memories or knocking him unconscious. He's also mildly resistant to influence such as charms and compulsions, but any particularly powerful being can overcome that for a few hours - eg he kept waking up in the middle of digging a hole after being compelled to by the Dark God.
As of Bedside Manor, he has demonstrated very mild precognitive feelings, and seems to have a low level of psychic ability which is enhanced in certain circumstances or around certain individuals. Jerry refers to this as Jack having "The Shining".
As of volume four he has also demonstrated post-cognition / the ability to accidentally experience people's memories, living them first-person as if they were happening to him. He initially does this only under the influence of a metric shitload of drugs, but eventually the more it happens the less substances it seems to take until it just sort of happens now and then at random.
MAGICAL INFORMATION: Jack has the ability to occasionally see and speak with the dead. Or he's just crazy. The jury's really out. Jack's hallucinations also occasionally assist him in unexplainable ways, such as the imagined voice of his best friend giving him information on a short area around him he shouldn't know, or the hallucination of Spencer giving him a gun just long enough for him to shoot one bullet, and then both Spencer and his gun disappearing. He seems to hallucinate things into existence in clutch circumstances.
People with magical or enhanced perception may feel something off or impossible about him. Extremely powerful entities might be able to discern that he is a power sponge containing a thousand lifetimes of void rift radiation meant to make him the perfect vessel for a demi-god. He cannot use this energy himself, and is more functionally just a battery that can be tapped into if one is capable of such things.
MEDICAL INFORMATION: He's missing the pinky on his left hand, and his right leg below the knee. He also suffers from a sleep disorder which prior to the end of volume three he believes to be Fatal Familial Insomnia (but is revealed to be something different โ spoilers: trauma induced parasomnia, with somnambulism). In any case, he doesn't appear to sleep, like, ever โ but the truth is that he's very often in the lightest stage of REM sleep even while interacting with other people or performing daily tasks. As a result of his sleep disorder, he suffers from occasional hallucinations, lost time, confusion, memory loss, and disorientation.
OFFENSIVE SUBJECTS & TRIGGERS: We Do Not Talk About His Ex Girlfriend. Jk, talk about her it'll get weird.
In terms of triggering or offensive subjects likely to come from Jack's tags, there are many. I'll list a few, and it's safe to assume that anything tangentially related or on the same level as these may be likely:
โข Terminal illness
โข Suicidal ideation & a history of (one, failed) suicide attempt
โข Graphic descriptions of violence including amputation and death
โข Mental illness including hallucinations, gaslighting, and deteriorating sanity
โข Mentions of alcohol and drugs, both prescription and recreational
โข General Spooky Stuff like eldritch horrors and the babadook or whatever
โข References to historical child abuse
โข References to small-town southern prejudice, not from Jack (who is extremely liberal & open-minded) but regarding Jack's ignorant hometown
โข Strong or offensive language, the latter usually not from Jack, but canonically used by characters around him e.g. people frequently calling him various offensive slurs for persons with an intellectual disability. This will likely only come up if a tag quotes canon for some reason.
OUT OF CHARACTER
BACKTAGGING: Yep totes, though I tend to progressively lose motivation as a thread ages if every tag takes quite a bit of time. I tend to have the best chemistry with people I can sync up & boomerang with now and then.
THREADHOPPING: Highly encouraged.
FOURTHWALLING: lol if his canon is something that exists literally anywhere else, by all means
NOT INTERESTED IN: prolonged slice of life or smalltalk without objectives
THREADHOPPING: Highly encouraged.
FOURTHWALLING: lol if his canon is something that exists literally anywhere else, by all means
NOT INTERESTED IN: prolonged slice of life or smalltalk without objectives
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
VISUAL:
โข Pale
โข Messy black hair in need of a cut
โข Smaller stature than average
โข Looks younger than he is
โข Dark bags under his eyes at all times
โข Green eyes
โข Resting bitch face
โข Prosthetic leg - right, knee down
โข Missing finger - smallest, left hand
For his PB, I'm using Jay Baruchel
AURAL: sample; when speaking Jack is generally polite and neutral-sounding. A little monotone, and absurdly cavalier or casual in a way that often doesn't fit the severity of the situation. This changes when he actually feels stressed or desperate for some reason, at which point his voice picks up speed and he occasionally rambles.
OLFACTORY: Jack often smells like coffee as he drinks two to three pots a day. When not in absolutely insane situations, he's got good hygiene, and so will generally smell like cheap deodorant or whatever body wash/soap/shampoo they stock at gas stations because it's right there and he's not really worried about fancy brand name anything.
DEMEANOR: Reserved, unchallenging toward friends, a little standoffish to strangers and acquaintances, a lot fatigued all the time. He puts off the vibe of a polite guy that generally wants to mind his own business. Interestingly, this demeanor would stay the same even if, like, a seven-foot tall demon from beyond the void showed up to have a discussion about the planes of hell or something.
The exception to this arises when he's under extreme duress, or in a desperate situation involving the safety of his friends or his planet. In this case, he can step up and take charge very efficiently. He is also incredibly stubborn, a little petty, and tends to do the opposite of what he's told if he doesn't like the person issuing the order.
โข Pale
โข Messy black hair in need of a cut
โข Smaller stature than average
โข Looks younger than he is
โข Dark bags under his eyes at all times
โข Green eyes
โข Resting bitch face
โข Prosthetic leg - right, knee down
โข Missing finger - smallest, left hand
For his PB, I'm using Jay Baruchel
AURAL: sample; when speaking Jack is generally polite and neutral-sounding. A little monotone, and absurdly cavalier or casual in a way that often doesn't fit the severity of the situation. This changes when he actually feels stressed or desperate for some reason, at which point his voice picks up speed and he occasionally rambles.
OLFACTORY: Jack often smells like coffee as he drinks two to three pots a day. When not in absolutely insane situations, he's got good hygiene, and so will generally smell like cheap deodorant or whatever body wash/soap/shampoo they stock at gas stations because it's right there and he's not really worried about fancy brand name anything.
DEMEANOR: Reserved, unchallenging toward friends, a little standoffish to strangers and acquaintances, a lot fatigued all the time. He puts off the vibe of a polite guy that generally wants to mind his own business. Interestingly, this demeanor would stay the same even if, like, a seven-foot tall demon from beyond the void showed up to have a discussion about the planes of hell or something.
The exception to this arises when he's under extreme duress, or in a desperate situation involving the safety of his friends or his planet. In this case, he can step up and take charge very efficiently. He is also incredibly stubborn, a little petty, and tends to do the opposite of what he's told if he doesn't like the person issuing the order.
โ code by kimmiserate โ
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:
โข 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.
โข 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.
โข 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 โ 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.
โข 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.
โข 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.
info post;
ย
stats
| Name | Jack Townsend |
| Gender | Male |
| Age | Late 20s/Early 30s |
| Canon | Tales from the Gas Station |
| PB | Jay Baruchel |
permissions
| Backtagging | Y |
| Threadjacking | Y |
| Fourthwalling | Y |
| Mind-reading | Y - he has strange psychic Stuff, hit me for details |
| Injury | Y |
| Death | Y |
appearance
โข Pale
โข Messy black hair in need of a cut
โข 5'9", underweight
โข Looks younger than he is
โข Bags under his eyes at all times
โข Green eyes
โข Resting bitch face
โข Prosthetic leg - right, knee down
โข Missing finger - smallest, left hand
โข Messy black hair in need of a cut
โข 5'9", underweight
โข Looks younger than he is
โข Bags under his eyes at all times
โข Green eyes
โข Resting bitch face
โข Prosthetic leg - right, knee down
โข Missing finger - smallest, left hand
about
โAt the edge of our town, thereโs a shitty gas station thatโs open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If you were to go inside, youโd see row after row of off-brand chips, cookies, potted meats, and pickled curiosities. Expiration dates suspiciously missing from the canned goods like they were filed off years ago in some misguided attempt to control inventory turnover. A faded โwet floorโ sign from way back covers 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 and the occasional small rodent.
Nobody ever complains about the aesthetic. By some providence bordering on the supernatural, the health inspector has repeatedly signed off on the business, always kindly ignoring the faint smell of some kind of mysterious chemical cocktail that is the defining characteristic of the establishment. More noticeable than the steady mechanical hum of the frozen drink machine that was installed in the seventies and never once serviced. More distracting than the random pockets of cold and warm air that seem to follow you around. And more annoying than the family of mutated raccoons that lives in the crawlspace behind the grease trap.โ
Jack Townsend is the main protagonist of Tales from the Gas Station, he is a chronic insomniac and works as the central employee. Jack is trusted greatly by the owners, so much so he would eventually find himself as the new owner. He bears first-hand witness to most of the weird things that happen within the gas station, and he uses the long stretches of time without customers to document his findings in a blog. โ wiki
Noteworthy Psychic & Magic Stuff: Proficient magic users or characters who have the ability to detect supernatural aspects may pick up on the fact that Jack is a walking sponge of a thousand lifetimes' worth of powerful dimensional void-rift radiation, meant to make him the ideal vessel for a demigod. Many lesser beings who aren't deities themselves perceive this as something just being off or inherently impossible about him. He can't actually use this himself, he's just a battery or a vessel.
Psychics or people with extremely advanced knowledge of sleep disorders may pick up hints he might be actively dreaming even while having a conversation with them, or while going about his day performing basic tasks. Throughout the day, he intermittently dips into the lightest stage of REM sleep while seemingly awake.
He has a mild natural immunity/resistance to compulsions & charms, and is in essence fully immune to being knocked unconscious/put to sleep by any means, including medical-grade anesthesia or god-tier deities. The more complicated answer is that he's got a sleep disorder that does not allow his brain to go further than the lightest stage of REM sleep, which means his mind retains some level of awareness of his surroundings, and his parasomnia/somnambulism means he walks, talks, and physically moves to act out his dreams. So he's... asleep, but awake and functional. It's complicated.
Jack has the ability to accidentally, randomly experience memories of the people around him, first-person and with all the necessary context, as if he were the person living it as it plays out. If you'd like Jack to experience a memory, just let me know, I love using this in RP!
personality
In the words of his therapist, "Jack, you have a hyper-logical approach to dealing with grief. I worry that you may have already shut down emotionally as a way of coping with your impermanence. You aren't dead yet, but sometimes you act like you don't know it.โ
To which Jack responded, "Okay. Cool."
Jack is generally an easy-going person with a remarkable ability to mind his own business. Jack seems to be fairly intelligent, even if he doesn't believe himself to be. His chronic illness and brain damage make him act in ways that are a little smooth-brained sometimes, so people tend to think he's stupid until they get to know him better.
Jack has a passionate love for reading as both a personal hobby and a way to pass time amidst long periods without rest.
Jack thinks extremely literally, often latching onto the first thought that comes across his mind when in conversation. While not shy about asking for clarification, he can often phrase questions in an overly blunt way or rude way.
He has a tendency to be irritated with others, especially if they happen to be strangers. He's pretty self-aware about being socially awkward, and he's okay with it.
Beneath all that apathy and awkwardness is a very caring guy with the ability to step up and take charge when necessary. He has a lot of baggage, a lot of lingering trauma, clinical depression, and a desire for permanent family that even he isn't fully aware of.
Quotes:
I meant to scream, but it happened so fast it totally slipped my mind, so instead I asked, โWhat're ya doinโ?โ
I hadn't gotten any better at improvisation or deception, so I said, "We're gonna go touch butts."
I was fighting and pleading for my life and Marlboroโs life not because I didnโt want to die, but because I didnโt want Tony to become a killer. That would be worse than dying. That would be so much worse. It really would.
To which Jack responded, "Okay. Cool."
Jack is generally an easy-going person with a remarkable ability to mind his own business. Jack seems to be fairly intelligent, even if he doesn't believe himself to be. His chronic illness and brain damage make him act in ways that are a little smooth-brained sometimes, so people tend to think he's stupid until they get to know him better.
Jack has a passionate love for reading as both a personal hobby and a way to pass time amidst long periods without rest.
Jack thinks extremely literally, often latching onto the first thought that comes across his mind when in conversation. While not shy about asking for clarification, he can often phrase questions in an overly blunt way or rude way.
He has a tendency to be irritated with others, especially if they happen to be strangers. He's pretty self-aware about being socially awkward, and he's okay with it.
Beneath all that apathy and awkwardness is a very caring guy with the ability to step up and take charge when necessary. He has a lot of baggage, a lot of lingering trauma, clinical depression, and a desire for permanent family that even he isn't fully aware of.
Quotes:
I meant to scream, but it happened so fast it totally slipped my mind, so instead I asked, โWhat're ya doinโ?โ
I hadn't gotten any better at improvisation or deception, so I said, "We're gonna go touch butts."
I was fighting and pleading for my life and Marlboroโs life not because I didnโt want to die, but because I didnโt want Tony to become a killer. That would be worse than dying. That would be so much worse. It really would.
history
Jack grew up in and out of the foster care system from an early age. His father was extremely physically and mentally abusive. Jack mentioned that his father had taken him to his first Klan rally when he was 3, broke his arm and 3 of his toes when he was 7, refusing to take him to the hospital, resulting in him having to hitchhike. At one point, his father even threw him out of a moving car because he couldn't stop hiccupping. Jack's mother is an addict, and from ages even earlier than seven she would lock him out of the house. He routinely wandered the apartment complex after he got home from school looking for people who would give him something to eat.
Jack was incorrectly diagnosed with Fatal Familial Insomnia as a teenager.
He began working at the gas station right after graduating from high school.
From seven years old onward, he had a friend (and eventual girlfriend) named Sabine, the daughter of the owners of the gas station. She was the only permanent person in his life. After learning of his condition being fatal, the pair decided to leave together and see what they could of the world. They barely made it a mile out of town before another car ran them off of the road, leaving Sabine in a permanent coma. After several years of this she would eventually die โ but Sabine wasn't human in the strictest sense. Who knows what death really means for her?
Jack was incorrectly diagnosed with Fatal Familial Insomnia as a teenager.
He began working at the gas station right after graduating from high school.
From seven years old onward, he had a friend (and eventual girlfriend) named Sabine, the daughter of the owners of the gas station. She was the only permanent person in his life. After learning of his condition being fatal, the pair decided to leave together and see what they could of the world. They barely made it a mile out of town before another car ran them off of the road, leaving Sabine in a permanent coma. After several years of this she would eventually die โ but Sabine wasn't human in the strictest sense. Who knows what death really means for her?