The Man in Grey (925th Universe)
The version of the Man in Grey active in (though not necessarily native to) the 925th Universe was a mysterious figure, who had once been the Man in Black before changing his identity for unclear reasons. He was behind the “Multidimensional Finders Service”, having tracked down Jenny Over-There to put her powers to good use as part of the Service.
During their first meeting, Bunny Everyhare bestowed upon him the nickname of “Mig”, to which he did not object. (PROSE: Who Laws the Lawyers?) He was similarly nicknamed “Big Mig” by Tetra-None Hepta-Oct and the rest of the M.F.S. Scottish Division. (PROSE: Annals of the Jen: Peter Thor's Day Off)
Description
Physical appearance
The Man in Grey's principle physical characteristic was the gray robes he wore, (PROSE: The Tribulations of Jenny Over-There) which had “many concealed pockets”. His face was “angular, wrinkled [and] not conventionally attractive”. He was unsure of how many hearts he had. (PROSE: Lovie Dovie Stuff)
Personality
The Man in Grey freely referred to himself as “evil”. Jenny Over-There thought of him as rude, and he was easily frustrated. (PROSE: Open Sourcing) Over-There once cited “working for the Man in Grey for extended periods of time” as something which “tend[ed] to shift one’s perspective a little on the relative badness of kidnapping situations”. (PROSE: Family Business) He combined an outsized confidence in his own mental faculties with a yearning for approval from his betters that left him crushed when he failed to get it. (PROSE: A Series of Queer Events)
His liking for the colour grey extended beyond his wardrobe, with him entire painting the M.F.S. office in this same shade. (PROSE: Open Sourcing) He also fell under the label of grey-asexual, but claimed this was a complete coincidence. (PROSE: A Series of Queer Events)
Powers & abilities
The Man in Grey had an aura of grayness which extended beyond his physical wardrobe choice. Jenny Over-There found Jenny Nowhere's comparable aura of wrongness eerily familiar. (PROSE: Family Business) He had the most potent meta-awareness of his branch of the Multidimensional Finders Service. (PROSE: Who Laws the Lawyers?) He was once observed to “hover” instead of simply standing, although he seemed unable to fly in any actually usable way, as he was seen in that same account to climb out of a window to safety — with some difficulty — rather than fly out of it. (PROSE: Open Sourcing)
Biography
Origins
- See main article: The Man in Black
The Man in Grey was once the Man in Black. (PROSE: Open Sourcing) As he once confessed to Professor Wogglebug, the Man in Grey had difficulty recalling this earlier existence, openly wondering: “I swear my robes were a lot darker than this… when did they even become grey?”. As a result he was unsure of what his real name was, or his original species; he didn't know if he was mortal or not, whether he was human, or how many hearts he had. (PROSE: Lovie Dovie Stuff) He did know enough to be keen to keep any association between himself and his darker-robed counterpart a secret; he did gave some awareness of the Man in Black's activities, reacting meaningfully to the mention of the name of “Fred”. (PROSE: Open Sourcing)
By the time he met Jenny Over-There, he was able to confirm to her that “the Man in Grey” was in fact his legal name. (PROSE: The Tribulations of Jenny Over-There)
Setting up the M.F.S.
In his new existence, the Man in Grey answered to a group he referred to as the Great Higher-Ups. Like himself, he considered them to be “evil”, (PROSE: Lovie Dovie Stuff) and he found the sight of them terrifying. (PROSE: Lovie Dovie Stuff)
After discovering that a young woman had gained the ability to sense the location of anything and anyone across the Multiverse, the Man in Grey tracked her down and offered her a job as the sole employee of a “Multidimensional Finders Service”, answering phone-calls on the Red Interdimensional Telephone from across the Multiverse, helping people who needed help finding something or someone. He offered her a salary of £5000, leading to her accepting. In addition to the “R.I.T.”, he also bought an office for her to use. With his funds running short by this point, he was only able to afford a fairly cheap toaster for the office. (PROSE: The Tribulations of Jenny Over-There) He stayed at the M.F.S. office at night, apparently having no other home. (PROSE: Workplace Reunion)
On Valentine's Day 2023, the Man in Grey recounted an occasion when he tried to get the Great Higher-Ups to understand that he was “unable to accept Glarded funds because [his] bank account [was] in a Tax Clode”, only for the Higher-Ups to keep sending him such funds anyway. The Man in Grey stated that this caused him to “wonder if they knew anything about Necronomics”. (PROSE: Lovie Dovie Stuff)
New hires
One day, the Man in Grey was informed by the Great Higher-Ups that they wanted him to set up a second branch of the M.F.S. in Scotland to add to the office in Wales where Jenny Over-There worked. Furthermore, they wanted all applicants to be free of “a certain legal tether”. The Man in Grey worked into the night getting a list of possible candidates together, eventually taking shortcuts and ended up with a final list full of heroes obviously unqualified for the job of finding things, as well a few villains and a distressing number of literal Nazis. He interviewed the lot of them, in succession, on the next day with Jenny, having temporarily closed up the Welsh office for business, disconnecting the Red Interdimensional Telephone, for the purpose.
The interview process ended early when Dynamite Thor activated a real grenade inside the office, although no one was injured, with the Man in Grey (for his part) making out the window in time. He eventually settled on the roster of Talbot Molossus, the Hydrant, 0000-8888888 and Doctor Know-It-All. Additionally, however, being frustrated by the difficulty of finding the coffee machine, he suggested to Jenny that they hire an intern for the Welsh office. Jenny, feeling sorry for the hapless Thor, suggested him for the part. (PROSE: Open Sourcing)
Later events
The Man in Grey was irate when Jenny Over-There disappeared for twelve hours, from 2 p.m. on June 17th, 2022 to 2 a.m. the following day, even after learning that this was because she had been kidnapped by Jenny Nowhere. However, he sent her home instead of insisting she catch up on the work, as he had just been told by the Great Higher-Ups that, in response to his bungling of the Pride Month P.R., they were sending in the Repairer of Reputations the next day to fix up the Service's image. (PROSE: Workplace Reunion)
At the Interdimensional Pride Council
Upon the following Pride Month, he was finally given the opportunity to act as ambassador of the Great Higher-Ups to the Interdimensional Pride Council, a long-held ambition of his. After printing a large number of posters and flyers for what he believed to be an accurate rainbow version of the Multidimensional Finders Service logo (although it really wasn't), and tasking Dynamite Thor with decorating the M.F.S. office, he decided to secure a number of sponsorships for the Interdimensional Pride Parade including DollarGraveClub, the Super Besties Justice Squad, Dibbsy, Kablamazon, and the god Dionysus. He also got a letter of recommendation from Dorian Gray, before finally heading off to the Diggs estate in the Land of Oz, where the first Council meeting was to be held.
After bumping into Professor Wogglebug at the entrance, he set down his suitcase containing the sponsorship deals and letter from Dorian Gray and entered the Councilchamber. Unbeknownst to him, it was found by Oscar Diggs, who mistook it for his own suitcase and carried it away. Meanwhile, the meeting was a complete failure due to his poor choice of sponsors; bad blood between Dorian Gray and Atlas the Traveller rendered his letter of recommendation actively unhelpful, and as for the sponsorship deals, Dionysus boycotted the Council when he learned that Stardust the Super-Wizard had been invited as the Super Besties' representative only for Stardust himself not to bother to show up, and the remaining members of the Council reacted violently to the identities of the representatives of DollarGraveClub — Dracula, Carmilla, Lord Ruthven and Mr Varney. Before they could try to salvage the situation, the Man in Grey and Wogglebug were confronted by an irate Ozma, who banished the Man in Grey from Oz for corrupting the spirit of Pride.
The Man in Grey returned to the M.F.S. office to tell Thor and Jenny Over-There to cancel all Pride theming and shred the flyers he'd printed, before heading off to sulk. A week or so later, he found himself in “the most heterosexual bar” he could find, having headed there to wallow. He ended up bumping into Wogglebug, who informed him that Jenny and Thor had set up a Pride party of their own at Professor Helvetius's Convenient Pride Decorations Shop using the decorations they'd bought to decorate the M.F.S. office prior to his counter-order. He managed to convince him to attend. (PROSE: A Series of Queer Events)
Romancing the Wogglebug
Following their unlikely meeting at the Interdimensional Pride Parade, the Man in Grey and Professor Wogglebug got in the habit of exchanging emails, and developed romantic — though asexual — feelings for one another, though both feared to admit to them. They did not see each other in the flesh again until Valentine's Day 2023, when they set up a restaurant date under the pretense of it being purely platonic. Eventually broaching the subject of love, they attempted to engage in a preposterous “study” of the matter to determine the nature of their feelings for each other, including watching terrible romantic comedies. Bonding further over how much they hated the experience, they ultimately agreed to consider themselves a couple. (PROSE: Lovie Dovie Stuff)
Meeting Bunny Everyhare
On an ordinary, boring day, after getting a fairly ordinary call from a version of Nyarlathotep, Jenny Over-There got a call from a gravelly-voiced villain asking for the location of Benito, of Super Benito Siblings fame. She was baffled when she realised that her powers weren't working on either Benito or the caller, and went to the Man in Grey for advice, finding him playing another, “particularly predatory” Kyujudo game on his smartphone. He helped her to realise that the figure who'd called her seemed to be actor Dwight White's version of the Super Benito Siblings villain Bonham; at his suggestion, she accepted another call, this one from Nyarlathotep's quarry Dwain Carter, and indeed found that she was still able to inform him of the location of what he wanted (that “damn fourth Shining Trapezohedron”), meaning the problem was exclusive to “Bonham” and related figures, as confirmed upon getting a second, angrier call for Bonham, at whom she hangs up again.
Next and most startling of all is a prank call from a squeaky-voiced individual asking for her own location right before jumping in through the window as soon as Jenny announces that this is where she is. The caller, who looked conspicuously like a cartoon-rabbit version of Jenny Everywhere, promptly introduced herself as Bunny Everyhare, a being from the Null, and explained that the “Bonham” who proceeded to blow open the doors of the M.F.S. office was in fact a manifestation of her archnemesis and fellow Null-entity, Bunny Nullhare, though he was not fully aware of it. As a cartoonishly destructive battle began with Bonham on one side, and Bunny Everyhare and Dynamite Thor on the other, Jenny and the Man in Grey found 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” would be considered funnier by Bunny's carton-physics-based powers. Brainstorming alternatives, they realised that as Bonham's canonical archnemesis Benito was a copyright lawyer, and Bonham-the-character was copyrighted fiction in this universe, it made narrative sense for them to call Kyujudo's copyright lawyers on them for a metafictional, comedic anticlimax. Kyujudo summoned a phalanx of the interdimensional Legalmen Collective, who managed to subdue Bonham, after which Bunny helped him fade back into nonexistence, returning to the Null herself in the process. (PROSE: Who Laws the Lawyers?)
Negotiations
Some time later, after spending the morning in Dawn 2218 attempting to broker a deal with the local incarnation of Sherlock Holmes, (PROSE: Dark Dealings, Annals of the Jen: One Year of Jenny Over-There: The Birthday Toaster) the Man in Grey became concerned with his ongoing banishment from the Land of Oz, and tried to draft an apology email to Ozma. With Dynamite Thor unavailable, he called on Jenny Over-There to read through it, prompting Jenny to report that the lifeless corporate apology he'd written up, and which contained no actual admission of wrongdoing, would not be up to scratch. Before she could finish coaching him on what to actually write, he received an email from Ozma, who reported that Professor Wogglebug had already written to her and successfully talked her into giving the Man in Grey a proper trial where he could argue his case. Taking advantage of his good mood, Jenny asked for the rest of the day off, claiming it was her birthday. (PROSE: Annals of the Jen: One Year of Jenny Over-There: The Birthday Toaster)
Wholeheartedly buying this, the Man in Grey hurriedly prepared a birthday party for her in the break room, complete with grey party hats and a grey — but tasty — cake. The awkward but touching effort helped Jenny to realise that she didn't actually dislike her M.F.S. job, contrary to her earlier musings, and was simply feeling overworked. Emboldened, she talked the Man in Grey into agreeing to renegotiate her work hours, with him agreeing with little fuss given that she was his most valuable employee. (PROSE: Annals of the Jen: One Year of Jenny Over-There: The Birthday Toaster)
Behind the scenes
The Man in Grey and the Man in Black were both devised by Callum Phillpott in loose reference to the 1980 song Man at C&A, whose fairly mysterious lyrics identify singer Terry Hall's character as “the Man in Grey”, seemingly distinct from “the Man in Black”, with both of them being knowledgeable but powerless figures in the context of the Cold War abruptly erupting into a nuclear World War Three.
| Warning, warning, nuclear attack! Atomic sounds designed to blow your mind! World War Three! Nuclear, nuclear attack! (…) The Man in Black, he told me the latest Moscow news about the storm across the red sea. They drove their ball-point views. I'm the Man in Grey, I'm just the Man at C&A, And I don't have a say in the war games that they play. |
| —Man at C&A |
The first incarnation of the character to make its way to released media was the Man in Black, who appeared in Phillpott's novel Cyber-Hunt, set in the Doctor Who universe. Adapted from the earlier audioplay of the same name, which featured no such figure, the book depicted “the man in black” (then uncapitalised) as a highly mysterious figure with whom Fred makes a deal. Various possible identities for the man in black were proposed or hinted at, including some version of the Doctor's nemesis the Master, the Time Lord messenger seen in the Doctor Who episode Genesis of the Daleks, Death, or Nyarlathotep.
A month after Cyber-Hunt was released, Phillpott published a short narrative Twitter thread, later collected as What Went Down at Facebook, satirising the then-current Facebook blackout. The narrative presented a tongue-in-cheek summary of a crescendo of strange supernatural events occurring at Facebook HQ, including water in the watercoolers turning to liquid mercury, alien-looking black mould growing in the server room, and “chanting in the server room”. Two items explicitly connected to the Man in Grey idea: one of the strange occurrences was an employee going into the server room to investigate, and coming out “wearing grey robes”; the other was an explicit name-drop of the character.
| January 2021, room 5b is finally found. Inside it are five prone bodies, later identified as the missing employees from January 7th of last year. During the funeral service, one of the deceased employees gets up, babbling about how the Man in Grey doesn’t care for our troubles. When the employees ask what they’re talking about, Mark Zuckerberg fires them on the spot. |
| —What Went Down at Facebook |
As stated by Callum Phillpott on the Jenny Everywhere Discord on July 8th, 2023:
| The Man in Grey definitely got tweaked a bit conceptually after What Went Down at Facebook, but he's been around for a while — in fact he might predate the Man in Black since a similar figure did pop up in an abandoned draft of a novella I was writing, but I can't remember which name I chose then. The story never got far (so it's entirely possible the Man in Black/Grey never left my loose story notes), but the story itself was a sort of romcom riff on Beyond the Wall of Sleep, with the Man in Whatever acting as a cold and removed eldritch matchmaker who was heavily implied or stated to be Nyarlathotep. This story was doomed to fail. This did nearly make it in to Minalopa as a subplot, but we all know what happened there. (…) It's probably a safe call to treat [What Went Down at Facebook] as a different universe. (Also, the reason it's a 50/50 chance of either being the Man in Grey or Man in Black is because I got both of these names from the Specials song Man at C&A — obviously they're quite generic names that have been used centuries prior, but that's where I got them from. |
| —Callum Phillpott |
The Man in PROSE: What Went Down at Facebook would go on to be referenced in PROSE: The Man in Grey's Christmas Carl as “whatever grey-robed busybody worked at Facebook all those years ago…”, suggested to have been an initially-distinct individual whose identity the 925th Universe's Man in Grey had subsumed, as part of a wider claim that the Man in Grey had a tendency to subsume other people's pasts into his own, although the Man at C&A Men were not specifically referenced.
The definitive Man in Grey was introduced in 2022 in The Tribulations of Jenny Over-There, an April Fools' Day story by Phillpott which also introduced Jenny Over-There. Phillpott's rendition of “the Paragraph” released Jenny Over-There as an open-source character in her own right under similar conditions to Jenny Everywhere and other recurring characters, and also said of the Man in Grey:[1]
| You can also just use the Man in Grey if you want, I won't get on your case about that, he's public domain now. |
| —Callum Phillpott |
PROSE: Open Sourcing would go on to humorously reference the connection to the Man in Black, now actively implying that the Man in Grey of The Nine-Two-Five Universe was the same character as the Man in Black from Cyber-Hunt under a false identity. PROSE: Lovie Dovie Stuff referenced the connection further, but altered the implication, with the Man in Grey now depicted as amnesiac about his past, unable to remember his origins as the Man in Black clearly. The backstory would ultimately be delved into in PROSE: The Man in Grey's Christmas Carol, where the Collective of the Retconning Crocodiles ended up diegetically retconning the Nine-Two-Five Universe Man in Grey a new backstory to replace the Man in Black.
Notes & References
| Incarnations of the Man in Grey |
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| What Went Down at Facebook • 925th Universe • Universe 925-B • 775th Universe |
| Open-source elements making up the core Jenny Everywhere mythos | ||||||||||||
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