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Octobriana, sometimes known as N. Pacenikov, was an immortal avenger who travelled in Time and Space in the Wonder Machine. The self-proclaimed “Spirit of the October Revolution”, hence her name, Octobriana was a communist hero who would often fight against the corruption and tyranny of allegedly communist regimes in the Cold War. Several versions of Octobriana across the Multiverse were familiar with Jenny Everywhere, who generally considered her a friend.
Description
Physical appearance
Octobriana usually appeared as a tall, athletic woman with big hair and a distinctive tattoo of a star on her forehead. (PROSE: The New Mission, VIDEO: Legacy of the Masque, PROSE: Morning After) Although most versions of her had light brown skin, (PROSE: The New Mission) others were white, with pale skin and blond hair. (VIDEO: Legacy of the Masque, PROSE: Morning After) She tended to wear fairly revealing clothing, regardless of the weather. (PROSE: Morning After)
Personality
Octobriana was immovable and confident in her beliefs; many of her origins involved her preferring to be exiled from everything she held dear than continue to be complicit in a corrupt system. She was, according to the Bartender, prone to getting into fights. (PROSE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere)
Powers & abilities
Octobriana was capable of carrying out a space mission. (PROSE: The New Mission) She was a fearsome physical fighter, capable of holding her own even against a jötunn such as Skadi. (PROSE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere)
Biography
As N. Pacenikov
One version of Octobriana was also known by the more conventional name of “N. Pacenikov”. She was listed, under both her legal name and the “Octobriana” alias, as an associate of Jenny Everywhere on a wanted poster put out for Jenny across her incarnations by an alliance of various organisations. (PROSE: Wanted for Questioning)
With Glendalf and Jenny
In the Collapsed Cosmos, Jenny Everywhere and Glendalf reminisced about an adventure during which they had besieged the Tower of Zirma with Octobriana. (PROSE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere)
With the League of Liberation
At some point in a universe before the collapse of the Multiverse, Octobriana was a member of the League of Liberation alongside Jenny Everywhere, Glendalf, the Magician from Mars, and several other heroes including Butterfly, Ace Harlem, Trashman and Madam Fatal. This venture ended badly, however, with the tragic death of Trashman, which impacted Octobriana so deeply that her Collapsed Cosmos counterpart temporarily swore off adventuring altogether due to overbearing memories of the event. (PROSE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere)
Legacy of the Masque
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One version of Octobriana once crossed paths with Miss Masque around the same time as a version of Jenny Everywhere. This Octobriana was a tall fair-skinned woman with blond hair; she wore blood-red lipstick. (VIDEO: Legacy of the Masque)
Mission Doppleganger
In one universe, Octobriana was a dark-skinned woman with light brown hair. She was active during the Second World War as a top Soviet agent. After the planet Doppleganger unexpectedly appeared in the solar system, America and Russia came to an agreement for a joint space reconnaissance mission that would beat Germany to the potential prize, and ascertain whether there was any life on Doppleganger (and, if so, if it was hostile). Octobriana was sent as the Soviet representative while spy-smashing superhero Miss Victory acted as the American representative. Also on the team was Jenny Everywhere. The two were seen off by the mechanic Neeta as they left for space. (PROSE: The New Mission)
In Reality Z-25 31-H
A version of Octobriana existed in Reality Z-25 31-H's native Octobriana. She appeared as a tall white woman with long blond hair, wearing green trousers and a brown band of cloth around her chest. This Octobriana once travelled to Riegel 6 and had an adventure involving the “slimy mutants” who existed on that planet, who complained at the name, insisting that they “weren't that slimy”, to Octobriana's annoyance. (COMIC: Octobriana and the Slimy Mutants of Riegel 6!)
In the Collapsed Cosmos
A version of Octobriana existed in the Collapsed Cosmos. She was “tall, muscular”, with “majestic” silver hair in a ponytail; “beautiful in the way a mountain [is] beautiful”. She wore cut-off jean shorts and a ripped T-shirt saying “TRANS RAGE”, and as well as bearing her usual tattoo of a red star on her forehead. With the Wonder Machine being damaged, she took refuge, like many legendary heroes and entities, at the Red Lion Inn; there, she got into a fight with Skadi that almost destroyed the bar. With the Bartender deciding not to cross her despite these transgressions, she was still there when Jenny Everywhere and Glendalf entered the Inn, fleeing from the Wild Hunt.
She did not deal with the collapse of the Multiverse as comparatively gracefully as Jenny, having fallen into a deep depression due to feeling like nothing was real. Having Jenny and Glendalf with her (as she remembered their pre-collapse adventures in the League of Liberation) helped her regain a bit of purpose and grounding, but not entirely to good effect, as she made to fight the Archondroids bare-handed when they threatened the Inn. To save her from her own rash decision, Glendalf used a [Sleep] spell on her. After turning the Archondroids against the Wild Hunt so that they'd keep each other busy, Glendalf and Jenny then smuggled the unconscious Octobriana to safety through the tunnels beneath the Red Lion Inn.
They emerged in a Limbo realm where they found an abandoned but fully-stocked cabin; there, they elected to hunker down and recuperate. Octobriana enjoyed a good night's sleep and, in the morning, after Jenny helped soothe bother her, Glendalf's, and Octobriana's heartaches by playing her theriamen, Glendalf slunk away to give the two some privacy as they caught up. Jenny and Octobriana's tender words soon turned to a kiss and finally to sleeping together, for the first time in ages. (PROSE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere)
Fighting Robo-Stalin
One version of Jenny Everywhere whose life was glimpsed by the “Kim's friend” Jenny during her shifter hangover once bade farewell to a version of Octobriana who rode a dinosaur through a modern street, and was about to travel back in time to 1971 to fight “Robo-Stalin”, promising to bring back his head. This Octobriana spoke in somewhat broken English and appeared as ““a blonde woman wearing a red star on her forehead and not enough clothing for the weather”. (PROSE: Morning After)
Behind the scenes
Origins
Octobriana is widely considered the predecessor to Jenny Everywhere as an “open-source comic-book hero”, willfully created to operate in the public domain. She was an influence on the Barbelith community during the early stages of Jenny's creation in 2001, being cited by the Institute for the Future of the Book's Jenny Everywhere essay as Jenny's somewhat less successful “print prototype”.
Octobriana's origins are, however, somewhat murkier than Jenny's. The first two Octobriana stories, The Living Sphinx of the Kamchatka Radioactive Volcano 1934 and Octobriana and the Living Suns of Comrade Mao, were created by by the writer Petr Sadecký by reskinning unfinished comics he had commissioned from Czech artists Bohumil Konečný and Zdeněk Burian for an unpublished comic book series named Amazona, which would have no particular political background. Sadecky then brought his “Octobriana” stories to the West across the iron curtain without having actually paid Konečný and Burian for their work.
He published them in the book Octobriana and the Russian Underground not as original comics, but as part of a literary hoax claiming that they were only two extracts from a long-running series of Octobriana comics created in the 1960s by underground artists working in Soviet Russia. As Sadecky's claims included that “Octobriana's creators” had created her as a character that anyone could use, it is usually understood that he functionally released his creation Octobriana into the public domain. Unlike the Paragraph used for Jenny and related characters, Octobriana is not usually reckoned to require any kind of statement to be lawfully used in new productions.
Other matters
The 2013 The Cosmic Beholder comic story Journey Out Of Misery briefly featured a superhero called Americana, who appeared to be an American counterpart to Octobriana's Russian stylings. Octobriana herself, however, did not feature in the story and no explicit link was drawn between the two characters.
External Links
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