Professor Awesome (Parallax Universe)

Professor Awesome
A.K.A.	Eric
Character Information
Species	Human
Gender	Male
Occupation	Mad scientist
Parents	Eric's mother
Behind the Scenes
First seen in	PROSE: Paying It Forward
Also seen in	PROSE: Pit Stop PROSE: Misunderstandings PROSE: I Found Him On The Internet (mentioned) PROSE: Morning After PROSE: Cleaning Day (mentioned) PROSE: Professional Ethics
Copyright	Scott Sanford (?)

Eric, better-known as Professor Awesome, was a mad scientist known to Jenny Everywhere in multiple realities. Although in some he was a genuine threat and enemy, in at least one universe, he was mischievous thirteen-year-old boy genius who lived in the same apartment building as Jenny and Kim.

Description

Physical appearance

Professor Awesome's primary trait was the lab coat he wore. (PROSE: Pit Stop, Morning After) In Kim's world, Eric was a “gangly” teenager. (PROSE: Pit Stop) The more villainous Professor Awesome of another universe bore a “scraggly goatee” in his early twenties, and later managed to grow it out into a full beard. He also had “perfect white teeth”. (PROSE: Morning After)

Powers and abilities

Eric was particularly skilled at robotics. Despite his scientific leanings, he didn't have much of a head for straight-up mathematics, finding calculator apps sufficient for his purposes. (PROSE: Misunderstandings)

Biography

Kim and Jenny's neighbour

One version of Professor Awesome was usually known as “Eric”, and was a generally benevolent boy genius, although he did consider himself a “mad scientist”. He lived with his mother in the same apartment building as Jenny Everywhere and her roommate Kim. (PROSE: Morning After, Pit Stop, etc.)

Early exploits

At the age of nine, Professor Awesome built a robot cat. He later built the Time Pestle. (PROSE: Pit Stop)

Jenny first thwarted Professor Awesome's efforts at supervillainy when he was thirteen. He had been using a de-pants-icator to wreak mayhem. Awesome had also built a Robot Toaster for unknown reasons; Jenny took it home after she'd stopped the Professor. (PROSE: Paying It Forward) Awesome “just about injured himself laughing” on one April Fools' Day at the math joke of the number 10 on David Lowe's door having been replaced with an alpeh-null.

Later, on a morning when Jenny had been dealing with shifter hangover, Thoth informed her that “the kid” had been performing reckless mad science again, advising her to go check on him. He had been trying to design a new de-pants-icator, not out of intent to use it, but simply to prove to himself that he could improve on his earlier schematics. Jenny convinced him to keep it at that and not actually build the Mark 2 prototype, further promising not to tell his mother about the incident if he disposed of the page in his notebook once he was done with the thought experiment. (PROSE: Morning After)

Fixing the dream spinner

A little while later, they appeared to be on good enough term that Jenny took him to a parallel universe so that he could collect some live trilobites to bring to his science teacher, Mr Hernandez. When it transpired that Hernandez had only wanted fossil trilobites, and the numerous trilobites he'd brought got free and caused mayhem in the school, he was asked to go home early. Later in the day, Jenny went to him for help to repair the broken-down dream spinner, the dimensional vehicle of one of her counterparts. To his surprise and glee, she knocked at “Eric”'s door and asked him to take on the mantle of “Professor Awesome” once again.

After he successfully repaired the device with Kim's help, they shared some pastrami sandwiches from Morrie Greenberg's and said their goodbyes. Before leaving, Genevieve repaid Eric with a large gold coin. Kime offered to help Eric translate that gold into modern money and to take him to the hardware store so that he could spend these “wages” on new equipment and parts. She explained that she was already all set to sell some gold, as she had to make something of a chest of pirate gold Jenny had brought back from a recent adventure. Before they could do so, an Angel appeared with much fracas in the very same parking lot, heralding yet another crazy adventure. (PROSE: Pit Stop)

Argument with Judy

Some time later, Eric got into an argument at school with Judy, a girl with whom he'd become somewhat acquainted, because she wanted to put together a robotics project. Eric felt mildly jealous that she was getting into his own area of expertise, and also tried to dissuade her by telling her that as he was a mad scientist while she was just “an ordinary smart person”, he had a natural advantage and it would be unfair of him to let her try and fail to beat him — something which, obviously, she did not take very well. Going home, Eric tried to talk about it with his Mom, who mistakenly assumed, upon hearing that Judy was a girl, that Eric had some kind of romantic interest in her. Their talking at cross purposes did nothing for Eric's mood and he dropped in on Jenny and Kim, only for them to make the same mistake, delivering to him a long and rambling collection of dating advice. After the women realised their mistakes, however, Kim agreed to help Eric with his math homework. (PROSE: Misunderstandings)

Disappearance of Jenny

One day, having noticed that Jenny Everywhere had mysteriously disappeared, and worried that Kim wasn't answering when he tried to knock at her and Jenny's door, a worried Eric broke into Kim and Jenny's apartment with the help of the Robot Toaster. Finding an unmoving, unresponsive Kim on the bed, he panicked and went to David for help. Being aware of Kim's nature, David was not worried about Kim's apparent catatonia himself, but he agreed that Jenny's disappearance was concerning enough to warrant waking her up in the daytime. Recalling what she'd told him about the bottle of Jenny's blood, David located the hideaway and dribbled some of the precious liquid into Kim's mouth. She woke up with a start, lashing out like a wounded animal at David, with her claws out, until her higher brain functions came back online and she calmed down.

She was worried when David told her what blood he'd made her drink, as she couldn't actually feel Jenny's presence as she should have — not “her” Jenny, and not any of the other infinite Jennies in the Multiverse either. Before long, however, she felt their presences all returning, and her roommate reappeared with a “Pop” in the middle of the room. Jenny explained that she was never in any danger: (PROSE: The Absquatulation of Jenny Everywhere) her and all her other selves' temporary disappearance was something that occasionally happened to Jenny, serving to resynchronise the mental connection between them all. (PROSE: The Absquatulation of Jenny Everywhere, The Disappearance of Jenny Everywhere)

Presents set aside

When Jenny and Kim went through their closet to sort its contents, they found multiple items set aside for Eric, including a rocket boot which they decided to only give to him if his mother allowed it, and a broken “Carnot-engine” perpetual motion machine which they thought they might use as a birthday present for him. (PROSE: Cleaning Day)

Wreaking havoc

In contrast to the friendly boy known Jenny Everywhere and Kim, another version of Professor Awesome was a bona fide supervillain. In his early twenties, he began to grow a “scraggly goatee” which he eventually grew out into a full beard. Like his boyish counterpart, this Awesome wore a long labcoat.

On one occasion, he built a first Time Pestle. This Time Pestle had been lost to him, but there was reason to think he might have built another, on a day when he initiated much havoc in the city where he and his Jenny counterpart lived, setting it on fire. Standing on a turret on his Omnibus, he taunted Jenny about her inability to stop him, laughing madly. Jenny, however, had a pistol secreted away, and was, regretfully, attempting to get a shot at him.

The Jenny who was neighbours with the boy-genius version of Professor Awesome once got an involuntary glimpse of these events due to shifter hangover while talking with her version of Professor Awesome, finding them understandably disturbing. (COMIC: Morning After)

Behind the scenes

In 2022, Aristide Twain created a full-body illustration of the classic, kid version of Professor Awesome. To date, this remains the only visual depiction of the character. Based on notes from Scott Sanford, he was depicted as black, a detail which had not yet been mentioned in Scott Sanford's Jenny Everywhere stories themselves at the time.

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  Aristide Twain's artwork of Professor Awesome.