Jake Chambers (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
waystation) wrote2017-11-04 11:48 am
waystation) wrote2017-11-04 11:48 am
basic stats
"He is just a boy, but not average"
- The Gunslinger
- The Gunslinger
information
NAME: Jake Chambers
CANON: The Dark Tower (film series)
AGE: 11
SEX: Male
SPECIES: Human
HEIGHT: 5'3" or thereabouts. Jake's actor was in his mid-teens at time of filming and already around 5'5" to 5'6" WHICH IS FRICKIN' TALL FOR AN 11-YEAR-OLD. I'm knocking off a bit to be more considerate of age, but he's still tall-ish.
HAIR: Canonically blond, but more like dark blond/light brown.
EYES: Blue
APPEARANCE: I | II | III | IV
• Described as "well-made" and "handsome."
• Bags under eyes/general tired complexion from chronic fitful sleep.
• Starting to grow into his body and has that gangly baby foal look to match.
DEMEANOR: Placeholder for actual relevant info.
CURRENT STATUS: Fine.
history
ABOUT JAKE
The only son of Elmer and Laurie Chambers, Jake was born to a normal, loving family in Manhattan, New York. A happy child, if he ever seemed different from others having been born with latent psychic ability, it was so slight as to be unnoticeable. He shared a close relationship with his father, a firefighter.
Approximately a year ago when Jake turned ten, his psychic abilities began manifesting via clairvoyant dreams. Around the same time, Elmer Chambers died in the line of duty while saving a group of people during a gas explosion. The dreams and visions only increased in intensity from then on. Looking for a means to support her struggling family, Laurie Chambers remarried a man named Lon, but though they were secured financially, step-father and step-son never warmed to each other, and Lon's frustration over Jake's "mental issues" raised tensions between them.
By age eleven, Jake has earned the reputation for being the friendly neighborhood psycho and is seeing a psychologist for help taming his dreams, though his abilities have only grown stronger. New York is plagued with earthquakes almost as frequently as he gets visions. Although he doesn't realize it right away, the two phenomena are connected.
ABOUT THE DARK TOWER SERIES
Jake's dreams center on the Dark Tower, a legendary place it's said sits at the center of all creation and holds the universe together under its beams. He also dreams about Roland Deschain, a gunslinger from another realm called Mid-World who seeks to find and protect the Dark Tower. Malevolent forces comprised of the Crimson King and his henchman, the man in black (sometimes known as Walter, one of his many aliases) conspire against Roland and the Tower, seeking to destroy the latter. As the linchpin holding together space, time, and the multiverse, should it fall demons and darkness will overrun all worlds everywhere.
In actuality, this isn't the first time the Tower has been in danger or the first time Roland has gone in search of it. He's already been on this quest many times, but neither he nor other characters like Jake know it. He searches, he encounters companions like Jake, and he eventually succeeds in locating the Tower--but once he does, he's sent back to the beginning of his journey with no memory of the one before it.
The truth is, Roland is unknowingly stuck in a time loop with people and events altering slightly each time, moving in an endless cycle of life and death and reincarnation. Jake is one such figure whose role and history differs depending on the cycle.
The Dark Tower novels recount one such time cycle. Jake was one of the last companions to properly join Roland's quest in this version of events. Living in New York in 1977, he was a boy with strong psychic potential from a loveless home eventually killed on Earth by the man in black and revived in Mid-World. Upon meeting Roland at a waystation in the desert, he became something of a pseudo-son to the man until circumstances forced Roland to make a decision--either save Jake from falling to his death, or pursue the man in black for information. Stephen King, author of the series, puts it best in a quote: "Given a choice between the Tower and child, possibly between damnation and salvation, Roland chooses the Tower." Later on while in the process of recruiting two others--a drug addict named Eddie Dean and a wheelchair-bound woman named Susannah--Roland got the chance to ease his guilty conscience by going back in time and saving Jake from ever being murdered on Earth.
His intervention created a new timeline where Jake never went to Mid-World and never met Roland. However, Roland and Jake still remembered both sets of events and the discrepancy drove them to the point of insanity until Roland, with the help of Eddie and Susannah, brought Jake back to Mid-World and healed the rift in their minds. Jake travelled with them from that point on, becoming a gunslinger-in-training, until he was killed a third and final time in the act of helping Roland attain the Tower.
That is where Jake's role in the novel series concludes, and the latest cycle depicted in the film begins.
THE STORY
The movie brings the novels full circle and explores a new time loop. In this, events take a different turn, with Jake being a troubled boy in the year 2017 who recently lost his father and has been dreaming about Mid-World long before setting foot there.
As his dreams about Mid-World, the Tower's destruction, and the catastrophic results therein preoccupy his waking life, Jake begins to see evidence of Walter's minions following him on the streets: people who don't look quite human. Wrong somehow.
They're part of Walter's ploy to kidnap psychics (people otherwise known to have "the shine" or "the touch") from all manner of worlds and use them as "Breakers," what are essentially people-batteries for a machine that weaponizes psychic energy to break the Tower's beams. Each attack on the Dark Tower sends earthquakes rippling across dimensions. Walter is particularly interested in psychic children as their potential is strongest, and unbeknownst to the boy himself, Jake is one of the most powerful.
Disguised as intake officers for a facility for troubled children, they initially try to convince Jake's parents to institutionalize him, a chance Lon jumps at. However, Jake's peculiarly strong shine allows him to see they're monsters wearing human skin and he flees before they can take him. Seeing no other option except to try and piece together his visions, Jake tracks down an old street address that appeared to him in one of his dreams. It brings him to an abandoned house--one that in actuality hides a portal used for travelling between worlds, a remnant of a time when people used to cross dimensions more often.
The portal is protected by a powerful guardian demon that inhabits the house and kills anyone who sets foot inside, but Jake is able to overpower it and make the jump to Mid-World, finally embracing that everything he's dreamed about is real.
It's there he encounters a familiar face: Roland, the last of the gunslingers.
This Roland, embittered toward the Tower and its salvation, wants only to find and kill Walter out of revenge for past injustices. He has no interest in humoring a child until he discovers Jake has been dreaming about Walter as well as himself--more importantly, the location of Walter's hidden stronghold. Thinking there is more valuable information to unlock in these visions, he decides to take Jake to a more experienced Mid-World seer who can hopefully read his mind and find what they need. They bond slowly over the course of the long trek, restablishing the connection they've shared in past encounters.
In the course of fighting off another demon attack, Roland is wounded while protecting Jake and suffers blood poisoning. As his condition deteriorates, they make it to the seer's village in time to determine the fastest way to get to Walter's base is to return to New York and use another portal there. However, before they can act on this information more of Walter's minions attack the village in pursuit of Jake.
While they were hunting for Walter, Walter was doubling down on his hunt for Jake, having realized that the boy's shine is powerful enough to bring down the Dark Tower single-handedly. This discovery comes by way of a fatal encounter with Jake's mother and step-father: Walter interrogates them on Earth and finds out Jake, a stronger psychic than anticipated, has been having visions of the Crimson King's machinations for a year or more already. He kills Laurie and Lon and leaves their bodies to be discovered in their apartment before turning his attention to tracking Jake's psychic signature in Mid-World. Unfortunately, his attempt to capture him in the village fails as Roland and Jake manage to portal back to Earth in time.
Their first stop is at a modern hospital to treat Roland's injuries. Their second is Jake's apartment, where they then find the remains of Jake's family. Jake nearly undoes their progress by letting himself be overwhelmed by a vision of his mother's last moments--Walter's intention all along. Knowing that Walter can track Jake each time he taps into his powers, Roland intervenes, getting him to calm his mind before he loses control. He promises to kill Walter for the both of them.
That said, petty vengeance doesn't appeal to Jake like it does the more aged, cynical Roland--it means nothing with the Tower and countless worlds still in danger. It's through Jake's wish to look beyond revenge and protect the worlds in jeapordy that Roland re-kindles his own desire to find the Tower... this time to save boy and Tower both. He gets his chance to correct past wrongs when Jake is eventually separated from him and taken to become a Breaker--the last Breaker, should Walter's plan succeed. Despite Jake's best efforts to resist Walter's influence, his anger toward the man who killed his mother provokes him into activating the machine. But Roland pursues them in time to confront Walter, and though the odds are stacked against him, with Jake's help Roland is able to gain the upper hand. Walter is presumably killed, his machine destroyed, and the attacks on the Tower halted (for the time being).
Seeing that the boy no longer has a home to call his own, Roland invites Jake to return to Mid-World with him and train as a gunslinger, a thing he readily accepts. As a result, Jake becomes the first of Roland's companions to join him this time around.
personality
To put it simply, you don't go through the kinds of things Jake's gone through and stay a normal, naive pre-teen. Combined with the fact he leans toward a sober maturity in general, Jake is a boy who tends to come off older than his age.
Sensitive and mild-mannered, he's the sort of kid moms like to brag about, the good kid who says "please" and "thank you," does his homework, and keeps his head down and nose out of trouble. To his Mid-World companions, he's more: someone with a survivor's spirit, dependable, resourceful, able to contribute to the group rather than slow it down. For the most part, he's a calm and even-tempered individual, usually slow to outbursts (usually because let's be honest, he's almost a teen and teens = mood swings). Mistaking Jake's youth or reserved nature for weakness is a mistake antagonists of the series often regret--they hide a strength of character hardened into steel by circumstances that forced Jake to grow up faster than most kids should. He's capable of great acts of self-sacrifice, as well as violence when shit hits the fan and he has to kill in self-defense. Where some see him as the sum total of his years, Roland sees him for what he really is: a child who's lost his innocence and been propelled too far into adulthood to turn back, stuck in a tug-of-war somewhere in the middle. His response to insistence Jake is only a child and should be sheltered from heavy subjects is "not anymore."
One of Jake's greatest strengths is adaptability in the face of hardship. It's on account of this quality Roland comes to not only care for him over the course of their travels, but respect him and his fortitude. In the novels, still fresh from experiencing his own death and being transported to another world, when Roland comes across Jake in a desert, Jake nonetheless follows him without complaint, managing the difficult trek with what Roland describes as "a calm reservoir of will that the gunslinger appreciated and admired." Rarely does Jake give in to fits of crying or helplessness; when he does, it's usually short-lived, and he quickly tries to get himself together and push on. Roland goes so far as to call it "unnatural self-possession" for a child.
This self-contained demeanor of his has to do with a long time feeling like a misfit who doesn't belong anywhere. To lose someone you love, develop a connection to another world, and then have your remaining friends and family pity you for the former and not believe the latter would be rough on anyone, let alone an eleven-year-old. He develops thick skin and self-sufficiency in response, living in his head and keeping his own counsel. When he realizes monsters have showed up at his apartment to kidnap him, he does his best to hold it together until he can get his parents alone, trying one last time to warn his mother. In so doing, he reveals to his step-father he's well aware of the man's less than noble intentions toward him--aware and a hell of a lot more strong-minded than the man gives him credit for. When his gambit still isn't enough to sway them, he takes matters into his own hands, putting on the obedient son act long enough to pack a bag, escape out a window, and find a way to Mid-World on his own.
Loneliness is consequently a defining feature of his character whether in one timeline or another; Jake is stifled on Earth with no one who really gets him. His mother does her best, but she doesn't understand what he needs, and most others trying to help him get back to "normal" don't see they're putting him in a box he's already outgrown. It isn't until he meets Roland and his band of travellers, a ragtag group of misfits in their own right, that he finds the companionship and acceptance he's looking for.
This is not to say Jake can't be impetuous and childish and everything else in between. For every moment of surprising maturity or quiet thoughtfulness, there's another where he impulsively kicks the crap out of a classmate for taking something of his, or flusters at a vulgar joke. In the end, he's still a kid, still learning, and there remains a large part of him that often just wants to set aside adult-sized burdens in favor of laughing, playing, and letting his guard down. He's still a WIP.
abilities & skills
Jake has psychic powers, what are referred to as "the shine" or "the touch." These can take the form of numerous different abilities, depending on skill level. The greater a psychic's shine, the greater their power. Jake's is reportedly so vast that if weaponized he could tear down the fabric of the universe... l-lol, yeah, that's sure a thing. He has more potential than practical skill, however, so most of this power remains undeveloped.
Below I've listed some abilities based on his current skill set, with the possibility of adding more as they develop. Interested in opting in/out? Want to do something with him? Feel free to go here and fill out his abilities permissions form!
CLAIRVOYANCE
Jake has the ability to acquire knowledge through extrasensory means. Often manifests as either intuition or just knowing, or visions/impressions that he experiences, such as seeing a historical battle play out in dreams. This allows him to see through some illusions, read auras, and generally be a touch more sensitive than your average folk.
PRECOGNITION
Tied into clairvoyance, he is capable of mildly precognitive dreams about future events. Given he dreams about multiple outcomes, it stands to reason he doesn't predict a single concrete future so much as possible scenarios.
TELEPATHY
If concentrating, he can use telepathy to speak, read minds, or go the opposite route and share what he's seeing.
TELEKINESIS
His least developed area. He can form psychic attacks in moments of high emotion (anger, fear, etc.), but it's an unreliable skill at best and he hasn't demonstrated any control over it.
GUNSLINGER SKILLS
On the physical end of the spectrum, Jake has the winning combo of a good eye, a steady hand, and fearlessness to make him a formidable gunslinger-in-training like all of Roland's companions.
What's a gunslinger, you may ask? In Mid-World they're the equivalent of knights and lawmakers, and Jake continually shows the aptitude to apprentice as one, up to and including carrying his own gun and participating in fights to support his comrades throughout the series. In the film, the circumstances of his training are different, but he similarly displays a talent for it, able to go into a state of disciplined calm and land a perfect shot during his first lesson. This also applies to throwing discs--Jake exhibits impressive aim with projectiles. Whether you chalk it up his past lives or in-born talent, he's a tiny tot who's quite capable of gunning down a bitch if need be.
OOC INFORMATION
name. Shira age. 29 timezone. MST
plurk.
discord. bubblebear#4826 (usually ghosting but will check messages!)