Who Laws the Lawyers? (short story)

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Who Laws the Lawyers? was a short story by Delilah H. Smith, published in the spring of 2023. It tied in with Callum Phillpott's Jenny Over-There: The Nine-Two-Five Universe series, and introduced several new open-source elements to the Jenny Everywhere mythos. As the entire story was released under a Creative Commons 0 license, this technically included all original elements featured therein, including the Legalmen Collective, but Bunny Everyhare and Bunny Nullhare were specifically highlighted by being granted their own variants of the Paragraph.

Contents

Plot

On an ordinary day at the M.F.S. office, Jenny Over-There gets a phone call from an unnamed caller who is evidently Nyarlathotep, and who asks for the current location of “the descendants of [his] dear friend Randolph Carter”. Her powers allow her to easily locate the young man and woman, currently “driving towards lower Manhattan”, on track to meet the caller at his current location. After a call from a random old woman looking for her keys and an equally-generic call from some version of Lord Grallyx fruitlessly demanding the location of Jenny Everywhere, she finally gets a different call in the form of a person with gravelly voice asking after the location of Benito, one of the Super Benito Siblings of Kyujudo's eponymous flagship video-game franchise. She is baffled to find her powers fizzing out as she considers the question, without giving her any answer at all, and she frantically hangs up.

She runs to the Man in Grey's office — finding him playing another, “particularly predatory” Kyujudo game on his smartphone — who walks her through taking another call, which shows that her powers have not disappeared altogether. That call turns out to be from Dwain Carter and his sister, asking after “the fourth Shining Trapezohedron”, which Jenny's powers inform her is being held by the Nyarlathotep who called before. As she dwells on what might have happened with the prior call, the Man in Grey helps her realise that the caller was none other than Benito's antagonist Bonham, King of Hoppas, as portrayed by actor Dwight White in the recent Dibbsy Super Benito Siblings movie. Just then she gets a second call from the villain himself, but is once again unable to locate Benito and hangs up — also realising at the Man in Grey's prompting that she couldn't feel Bonham's own location.

The next call, however, is more baffling yet, coming from a person with a squeaky voice who asks “where is Bunny Everyhare”. Jenny instantly replies that this person, whoever she is, is right outside her own window, and in hops what appears to be a cartoon-bunny version of Jenny Everywhere, complete with the Kablamazon outfit of this world's Jenny — which she explains by saying that she “always looks like the nearest Jenny Everywhere”. She immediately jumps to asking them if they've been noticing any strange phenomena relating to nonexistent things popping in and out of existence at random, which she explains would be connected to the Null, a stratum of the nothingness beyond existence which exists “beyond” the Void as experienced by interdimensional travellers. Nothing that travels into the Null can travel out again, but Null-entities sometimes make their way out; naturally they don't exist until they leave it, but are contained therein in potentiality because the Null is so absolutely empty that it doesn't quite contain “nothing” either.

The Finders' attempt to cajole Bunny into using her cartoon-based powers to find Benito and Bonham is interrupted when they hear an explosion coming from the front of the building, for which Dynamite Thor instantly protests that he is not responsible. Indeed, the culprit turns out to be Bonham, driving a personal armed hovercraft. Upon closer inspection, the villain, wreathed in a thin, smoky aura of nothingness, turns out to be an incarnation of Bunny Nullhare, Everywhere's opposite number, who decided to mimick Bonham to match Bunny's cartoon-character aesthetic. Stuck in-character, the villain announces that he's going to “destroy you all, tear down this finder's service, and then (…) use it to find Princess Plum, [and finally] defeat Benito and his scrawny brother once and for all!”. Bunny Everyhare readies for battle by drawing a cartoonishly large mallet out of nowhere, declaring herself “the third most powerful being in the Multiverse”.

A battle soon breaks out between Bunny and Bonham, with Dynamite Thor rapidly depleting his store of dynamite to try and help (and loudly denying that he is the same person as Peter Thor was here a moment ago). As the slapstick drags on, Jenny and the Man in Grey find themselves unwilling to gamble on which of “Bonham loses to a small bunny-girl with a big mallet” or “the alleged third-most-powerful-being-in-the-Multiverse loses to an unimpressive cartoon villain” will be considered funnier by Bunny's carton-physics-based powers. Brainstorming alternatives, they realise that as Bonham's canonical archnemesis is a copyright lawyer, and the character is copyrighted fiction in this universe, it makes narrative sense for them to call Kyujudo's copyright lawyers on them for a metafictional, comedic anticlimax.

Soon enough, a group of dour-faced, yet ontologically unshakable lawyers arrive in a succession of plain-looking cars, introducing themselves as a subset of the Legalmen Collective currently contracted by Kyujudo Company Ltd., Kyujudo of Europe, and The Wilt Dibbsy Corporation. Bonham refuses to comply with their cease-and-desist for his “unauthorised appearance in this reality”, but literal ‘Legal immunity’ allows the Legalmen to withstand a cannon-blast from him, and equally-literal ‘Legal action’ sees them tearing through the hovercraft like paper by tossing a legal brief at it. Once he's put out of commission, the Legalman parlay with the good guys, with Bunny Everyhare offering to transport her villainous equivalent back to the Null. As the Bunny Nullhare loses his illusion of being the real Bonham, Everyhare asks him if he would like to take up residence in Bunny Town, an island of reality within the Null that a Jenny Everywhere aware of his true nature, but he ultimately declines, saying that he would rather “not exist for a while”. Raising wings of Null-mist, she takes off with him back into nothingness.

With the matter clearly resolved, Jenny returns to her ordinary duties, getting another phone call — again from Nyarlathotep, though now in a different avatar which looks conspicuously like a Bunny Nullhare — just in time to inform him, but only with Yog-Sothoth's express permission, that Dwain and Karolyn are safe in Kadath.

Worldbuilding

Universes

Jenny Everywhere

The Man in Grey

  • The Man in Grey is specified as “the one with the best meta-awareness”. He is surprised, though not particularly displeased, when Bunny refers to him as “Mig”, belatedly realising that the nickname is drawn from the initials of “Man In Grey”.

Other

Continuity

Behind the scenes

Background

When releasing the story, on both Tumblr and ArchiveOfOurOwn, Delilah H. Smith included plentiful commentary:

One morning as I was getting out of bed, I started wondering about a possible video game equivalent of Dibbsy Corporation and Mammon Mouse from Callum Phillpott’s Jenny Over-There stories. My train of thought was basically “Hm, 'Ten-Eleven-Do’ …? Wait, no, I know 'nine’ and 'ten’ in Japanese, Kyu-juu-do!” I then spent half an hour looking up Italian names with one tab open to the Wikipedia article on katakana, and chose Benito (as a reference to Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy during World War II) and Giovanni (literally the only name besides “Luigi” I could find that ended with “I”, had the right number of syllables, and worked just as well with katakana as “Luigi”). Their arch-nemesis … 'Bonham’ has the same etymology as 'Bowser’ (in one draft his name was 'Goodman’).

He also went from a turtle monster to a bunny monster — that is, from a tortoise to a hare. The clincher with that decision was when I decided to include Bunny Everyhare, whom I’d already been planning to introduce at some point, whereupon the plot basically wrote itself. In case it wasn’t obvious from Bonham’s ending and, well, everything to do with the Bunnies Nullhare, Bunny Everyhare is also a Null-creature herself! I have a half-written origin story for her which I’ll release later. In the strictest technical sense, going by the intent of the original Paragraph as described by the Shifter Archive website, Bunny Everyhare is “a character related to Jenny Everywhere”, so technically you don’t 100% need to include Bunny’s version of The Paragraph if Jenny Everywhere is already involved and you include her Paragraph, but it’s more-or-less traditional to include all of them regardless; ditto the Bunny Nullhares with Bunny Everyhare’s Paragraph.

As for the Null itself … the Void Between Worlds itself didn’t 100% have the exact properties I wanted, but “beyond the Void” is simple enough to explain and common enough in eldritch stories. (An early draft had it as “on the opposite side of the same coin” as the Void, but I decided that was too convoluted.) Null-entities which have somehow entered reality don’t need to be cartoon characters; actually, in the strictest technical sense, they should be “nothing”, but “nothing” cannot exist as such in reality — it’s a contradiction in terms — and so they must instead be “something”, which means that in practice they can be anything.

The Shining Trapezohedron is an artifact from HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, which is already in the public domain along with Randolph Carter and the Outer God Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos; the Trapezohedron has some sort of vague connection to Nyarlathotep. Randolph Carter is a recurring protagonist in Lovecraft’s stories, in at least one of which Nyarlathotep was the antagonist. I figured it’s like ninety years after Randolph’s adventures, so let’s give him some descendants instead. “Karolyn” just sprang to my mind randomly; “Dwain” is one possible anglicization of the Irish name “Dubhán”, which has the ultimate definition of “little dark one”. In other words, he’s “Shadow the Carter”, as in “where’s that DAMN fourth Chaos Emerald?” Dwain “The Shadow” Carter. (I didn’t actually know about Li'l Wayne, so I had to change the spelling from what I originally had …) Being that this story is released as Creative Commons 0, you don’t need any permission to use Karolyn or Shadow Carter. Ditto Nyarlathotep’s not-Bunny-Nullhare form.

The Legalmen Collective … basically I decided to include lawyers with lawyer-based wacky superpowers (I came up with the idea of no-selling an attack while shouting lawyer-terms before I decided that they would be a whole Thing), and came up with the entire concept more or less on the spur of the moment. As the leader describes above, they can only actually use these wacky superpowers against someone if 1. the target falls under their current jurisdiction or a legal case they’re presently working on, and 2. they have been called on to make a cease-and-desist or whatever, like in the current situation, or they’re prepared to argue in court that the target is actually in violation of a relevant law. They’re a hive mind, just like Jenny Everywhere, and can recall each other’s memories. Really helpful for coming to decisions as a group. They are not, however, heroic: they serve whoever they’re hired or assigned to work with, good or evil. These ones in particular are working for Dibbsy and Kyujudo, after all.

—Delilah H. Smith

Read online

The story is freely available online on Tumblr and on ArchiveOfOurOwn.net.

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