𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑡𝑜𝑙𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝐼 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑐𝑟𝑎𝑧𝑦

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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — specifically his mind — 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 — 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 — 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.