Michael Wherever
Michael Wherever was a man of whom several incarnations existed in the Multiverse. Most of them possessed physical shifting abilities similar to Jenny Everywhere's, but his various incarnations did not have a mind-link like Jenny Everywhere's or Jenny Nowhere's. Many versions of Michael were friends or associates of Jenny's.
Description
Physical appearance
Michael Wherever usually appeared as a blond man with pale skin, clean-shaven, with broad shoulders and a stout figure. (COMIC: Untitled) Some of his incarnations wore glasses. (GAME: The Jenny Everywhere Roleplaying Game)
Personality
As well as an explorer, the curious Michael was a collector, always looking for books and “interesting trinkets” to add to his collection. (GAME: The Jenny Everywhere Roleplaying Game) Although committed to stamping out true evil such as Chaos, (COMIC: The Jenny Everywhere Chronicles) Michael had little remorse about an occasional bit of theft to add to his collection, considering that such a thing was meaningless in the Multiversal scheme of things, since an infinity of versions of any one item existed across the dimensions. (GAME: The Jenny Everywhere Roleplaying Game) He was willing to risk his life for his friends (such as Jenny) or in pursuit of the greater good of saving the Multiverse from Chaos. (PROSE: The Disappearance of Jenny Everywhere)
Powers and abilities
In addition to shifting powers comparable to Jenny's, (GAME: The Jenny Everywhere Roleplaying Game) at least one incarnation of Michael could teleport at very short range in clouds of blue (COMIC: Untitled) or purple smoke. (PROSE: The Disappearance of Jenny Everywhere)This same version of Michael had some practical skill with dimensional engineering, as demonstrated by his having once helped Stix to fix the Wilson's synchs (COMIC: The Jenny Everywhere Chronicles) and again when he managed to cobble together a means for the Wilson to enter the Infinite, something which was believed to be impossible. (PROSE: The Disappearance of Jenny Everywhere) At least in some incarnations, Michael was less skilled with his powers than Jenny, not being able to teleport at short range too many times in a row. He could only take two people along with him when she shifted at the most, and only by physically touching them with his hands at the moment of shifting. (GAME: The Jenny Everywhere Roleplaying Game)
Biography
Onboard the Wilson
One incarnation of Michael Wherever became an Anchor of Jenny Everywhere, which was presumably related to how he acquired his teleportation powers. After she became friends with him, he began to take an active part in helping her fly the Wilson and lead its crew in the fight against Chaos. (COMIC: The Jenny Everywhere Chronicles)
Some time after the Illumination became part of the crew, Jenny disappeared, not just from the Wilson, but from the entire Multiverse. After sending out the rest of the crew to look for ways to bring her back, Michael and “Lit”, left in the Wilson, managed to jerry-rig a way for the ship to potentially make a jump into the Infinite to look for any lingering Jennies. Though the procedure was untested and dangerous, Michael's courageous gambit paid off. However, they found the Infinite to be deserted, save for other friends of Jenny's from other universes who had also come looking for her.
Joining up with them, Michael and Lit travelled to a universe home to a seaside town that had been a particularly meaningful place to Jenny across her incarnations, to mourn their disappeared friend. Instead, they ended having to fight off a vengeful entity in Jenny's name, before Jenny finally returned to reality, explaining that she had never actually been in danger, but merely away to replenish her mental shifting abilities in a secret realm beyond Time accessible only to versions of her. Much partying ensued. (PROSE: The Disappearance of Jenny Everywhere)
On one occasion, on Jenny's birthday, Michael, wielding a stick and making use of his teleportation, helped her fight Chaos himself head-on. (COMIC: Untitled) However, Michael was ultimately “lost” in an incident whose memory remained painful to Jenny, in part because some part of her believed she could have saved him if she had not given in to her impulse to run away and save herself. However, Jenny still continued to crew the Wilson. (COMIC: The Jenny Everywhere Chronicles)
Searching for Jordan
A different incarnation of Michael, who was shorter and heavier-set and wore glasses, was a collector, travelling the Multiverse for the next trinket to add to his collection. He wore a dull-blue shirt and carried a brown leather satchel. At some point, this Michael began travelling alongside a Jenny Everywhere, a Julie Jacobs, Odious, Lol and the Chosen. The group had as their ultimate goal to find Jordan, Jenny and Julie's younger sister, who had been abducted three years prior by some interdimensional fiend.
While camping together in one universe, the group were abducted to a mysterious facility where they were made to compete and fight with yet another Jenny's team, which included another Abstract than Odious, Rae of Luminance. They eventually made it back to their camp, but never figured out who had set up the facility and why, nor the endless cycle of one team fighting another, each forced to teleport in a newer team to get a chance to go home. (GAME: The Jenny Everywhere Roleplaying Game)
Band shirt Michael
One incarnation of Michael wore jeans, a leather jacket and a shirt promoting a rock band, matching the shirt of the version of Jenny Everywhere with whom he travelled. In addition to Michael, that Jenny also travelled in the company of Richard, ShatterScreen, Delta 22-6 and Silence. Their group, while using an empty warehouse as a base of operations, was forcibly teleported to the testing complex where they had to compete with the team of the Jenny who travelled with Odious. Some way into the trials, however, the older team managed to convince the band shirt Jenny's team that they meant them no harm, and got them to instead sit with them and discuss which would concede to the other for the portal. (GAME: The Jenny Everywhere Roleplaying Game)
With a blonde Jenny
One version of Michael travelled with a blond-haired version of Jenny Everywhere. This version of Michael wore a blue parka over an orange T-shirt, with black or dark-gray trousers. He had short blond hair and a round face, but was not otherwise overweight. He carried a brown satchel and wore rimless glasses. (COMIC: The Mind of Jenny Everywhere)
Witness to the Everywhere-Nowhere rivalry
Another version of Michael was part of Jenny Everywhere's friends group, alongside Jimmy Wherever and Kim. All three witnessed a fight between Jenny Everywhere and Jenny Nowhere in an “alien flower field” in one universe. After Jenny Everywhere did nevertheless win, Michael and the others left with Jenny for another universe to celebrate. (PROSE: Jenny Everywhere and the Nowhere Spiral)
Behind the scenes
Despite the similarity in names and their coincidentally both being blond-haired men, no relationship is known to exist between the characters of Michael Wherever and Jimmy Wherever, who was introduced a few years after Michael, either in-universe or in terms of behind-the-scenes history.
Benj Christensen noted the following idea about Michael's backstory on the Jenny Everywhere Discord server on April 25, 2024:
| Some of the ideas I had but’ll never use are that Michael Wherever was raised in the Infinite. When he’s taken in by Jenny as a baby she puts him there to raise him. I imagined there was a whole town/city inside the infinite where Jenny is the entire population doing various things. I had this image in my head of Michael at school with a class full of Jennys and a star field out the window. He learns to shift by reading books and traveling into their stories. |
| —Benj Christensen |
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