Lailoken

Glendalf
Character Information
Species	Human
Gender	Male
Residence	Variable
Occupation	Wizard
Romantic Partner(s)	Mumblecore (former)
Behind the Scenes
First seen in	PROSE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere

Glendalf, sometimes known as the Drag Wizard, was a flamboyantly queer wizard and adventurer. In the Collapsed Cosmos, Jenny Everywhere went on an adventure with him and a group of Orcs after falling afoul of a “reality accident” in a dimensionally-unstable library. Upon meeting him there, memories flooded to her of numerous previous adventures she had shared with him prior to the collapse of the Multiverse that had given birth to the Collapsed Cosmos.

Description

Physical appearance

Glendalf had a long white beard. During his adventure with Jenny Everywhere in the Collapsed Cosmos, he wore a “magnificently sparkly” silver-coloured dress and a tall conical hat to match. He carried a purse containing many useful items. (PROSE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere)

Personality

Unsurprisingly for a wizard, Glendalf was reclusive and eccentric, and much concerned with the “proper way” for a wizard to behave, which included being mysterious, and dropping in on people unannounced to drag them into quests. Enamoured with the idea of an adventure rather than the particular, he would insist his traveling companions stop in dangerous places simply because it was proper for an adventure to include digressions. He was also protective of the good names of magic and alchemy.

Although he strongly condemned one billionaire for her transphobic bigotry, Glendalf generally had little patience for “queer discourse” and sat out most debates of that nature, refusing to let any of their conclusions affect his lifestyle. (PROSE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere)

Powers & abilities

Glendalf made statements suggesting he was an alchemist as well as a wizard. He was also adept at disabling magical defences.

Glendalf carried a miniature airship in his purse which he could transform back into a usable, full-size vehicle with a few magic words.

Due to his nature as a wizard, Glendalf's dreams had a tendency of literally coming true in his sleep; for example, when an acid flashback caused him to dream that he was covered in spiders, such spiders actually materialised. (PROSE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere)

Biography

Early life

Glendalf once dated another wizard, the headmaster Mumblecore, but they broke up due to Mumblecore choosing the path of assimilationism while Glendalf preferred to remain an eccentric outcast. Glendalf was “condemned and then rehabilitated by successive waves of queer discourse, blissfully oblivious to all of it, keeping to himself and smoking various substances in his pipe”. (PROSE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere)

Adventures with Jenny

In the Collapsed Cosmos, upon meeting Glendalf, the “collapsed” Jenny remembered him as a “veteran partner in adventuring” of hers. They reminisced about a number of adventures they'd shared in the good old days, including “battling Lord Grallyx on the astral plane”, “besieging the Tower of Zirma with Octobriana”, and “getting high with the Magician of Mars in Washington to levitate the Pentagon”. He also once helped her deal with recurring memories of “shifting through the Overvoid”. Given the nature of the Collapsed Cosmos, was somewhat unclear if all of these memories featured the same incarnation of Jenny, or indeed the same version of Glendalf, but Glendalf was at any rate familiar with the existence of other incarnations of Jenny, including several who were wizards themselves. (PROSE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere)

In the Collapsed Cosmos

After the Multiverse broke down into a single Collapsed Cosmos, Glendalf seemed at first to have ceased to exist. However, after Jenny Everywhere was caught in a small accident in a library while reality was particularly unstable, she found herself in an adventure that mingled her daily life in the Collapsed Cosmos with elements from several books. This resulted in Glendalf knocking at her door with a group of twelve Orcs, including Jegrekk Gnashtooth, Absoldar, J. Barrington Boartusk and Agrzaan Lurgpin, intent on having an adventure with Jenny. He remembered his old adventures with Jenny and, more generally, the old order of things; her sheer encounter with him, even before he began reminiscing, helped Jenny recover more of her past identity (or, as the case may be, identities) than she'd had access to before.

Though intent on “an adventure” in general terms, Glendalf had no particular target in mind, hoping Jenny would think of something. Thus, while Jenny wracked her brains trying to come up with something, Glendalf and the Orcs stayed at her flat for dinner and overnight, with Jenny and Glendalf spending the evening reminiscing about past adventures and discussing the current sorry state of reality. Finally, one of the Orcs, Absoldar, suggested that they raid the mansion of a billionaire writer who had disgraced magic and alchemy through her bigotry. In addition to a large fortune, her mansion in Scotland was allegedly home to a Legendary Time Crystal, which Jenny believed could be used to restore reality to its former state.

After drawing plans for the rest of the evening, Glendalf, Jenny and the Orcs went to sleep, intent on leaving the next morning In the night, Glendalf had an acid flashback, dreaming that there were spiders all over his body; due to his magic, such spiders indeed materialised, and Jenny helped him deal with them. The following morning, they left for Scotland aboard Glendalf's magically-enlarged airship; on the way, Glendalf wanted the crew to stop for a “digression” in the woods of Faerie”, but the Orcs talked him down. Once they arrived at the mansion, Glendalf took down the magical defences, leaving Jenny and the Orcs to carry off the actual heist. After most of the plan went off smoothly, Jenny was confronted with Laura Drake; their duel had a destabilising effect on reality, causing the part-fictional narrative to crumble. Jenny woke up from it on a prehistoric beach with Glendalf nowhere in sight, with a dim awareness that she had “fallen into a book” prior to losing consciousness.

Later managing to shift herself back to the same frame of reference, however, Jenny discovered that after making it out of the mansion, Glendalf and the Orcs had indeed headed back to Faerie, where they came under threat from the Queen of Faerie herself. Glendalf was able to get the Orcs to safety through a portal, but the Queen “got her” and turned him into, or fused him with, a gnarled, barren tree in a clearing, using him as bait for Jenny. (PROSE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere)

Behind the scenes

Glendalf is a transparent parody of Gandalf, the wizard from J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbit and Lord of the Rings; the setup of him appearing at the protagonist's door with a number of representatives of a nonhuman species mirrors the opening scene of The Hobbit, where Gandalf arrives at Bilbo Baggins's door with a troop of Dwarves.