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Pythagoras-858 was a robotic detective whom Jenny Everywhere teamed up with to solve the Rifts crisis. He was a member of an organization called the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids and was a traveller through the multiverse in his own right, by means of his Fog Ship.
Description
Physical appearance
As a Clockwork Cherub, Pythagoras was a small golden, winged, humanoid robot with a round, sketchy face and short, wiry hair. He usually wore a beige trench-coat and a brown hat with a green ribbon. (COMIC: Jenny Everywhere Meets The Crew Of The Copper-Colored Cupids)
Personality
Pythagoras-858 was a highly driven individual, always remaining focused on whatever his current mission was, to the exclusion of his own interest. (COMIC: Jenny Everywhere Meets The Crew Of The Copper-Colored Cupids) He once claimed that “everything he did” was always “pragmatic”. (PROSE: The Grand Multiverse Hotel) He could be brusque, or even downright unpleasant, to people he suspected of deceit, though he was kind and respectful to those he trusted. (COMIC: Jenny Everywhere Meets The Crew Of The Copper-Colored Cupids)
He had enough of an independent conscience to deplore the unethical aspects of the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids' modus operandi, but not enough free will to rebel against his programming altogether; thus, he instead devoted all his time to preoccupations which were genuinely beneficial to everyone, including but not limited to the Crew, other than romanticising people. (PROSE: The Grand Multiverse Hotel)
Biography
Early life
At some point, Pythagoras-858 travelled to ““an alternate timeline where the Pharaohs defeated the Macedonians and their civilisation advanced well into the 16th and 17th centuries, complete with thaumato-technological advances well ahead of anything Western civilisation [was] doing in […] the early 21st century”. There, he acquired an Electromagnetic Ankh.
Pythe claimed to have been instrumental to the Crew's binding of the Embodiment of Time, Lord Thymon. (PROSE: The Grand Multiverse Hotel) At some point, Pythe met and befriended the Prime Universe's Sherlock Holmes at a point in the detective's life when he was already retired. (PROSE: The Time of the Toymaker)
Defeating Claus-025
Christmas 2019 saw the multidimensional entity known as "Santa Claus" begin to assert his existence in the Cupid Homeworld in the form of Claus-025. Pythagoras-858, who understood the danger presented by Santa Claus, “tackled [Claus-025] before he could start distributing presents, released his reindeer into the wilderness of an uninhabited snowbound dimension, and stuffed him in a burlap sack until Boxing Day". When the sack was opened, Claus had mostly evaporated; only "a few crumbs of chocolate cake and a red pompom hat" were left behind. Pythe deposited those in the Void before burning the burlap sack. (PROSE: The Time of the Toymaker)
Pursuing Mandragora-257
Pythagoras-858 explained to Jenny Everywhere that prior to their meeting, he had, for considerable amounts of time, been tracking a criminal of his own people, Mandragora-257, (COMIC: Jenny Everywhere Meets The Crew Of The Copper-Colored Cupids) having failed originally to stop him on Venus at Morningstar 1 — during which event several Wellsians also escaped despite his best efforts. (PROSE: The Grand Multiverse Hotel) Pythe observed him taking several physical forms and cheating death, and learned that Mandragora's incarnations all shared his golden eyes. (COMIC: Jenny Everywhere Meets The Crew Of The Copper-Colored Cupids)
Meeting Jenny Everywhere
Some time into his quest to find and defeat Mandragora, Pythagoras became cut off from the Cupid Homeworld due to the Rifts. However, as he had “been told” that there was not much someone like him could do about the crisis, he simply continued to seek Mandragora. While he was flying his Fog Ship through the Void, a version of Jenny Everywhere who had been looking for a way to stop the Rifts shifted into the back seat of his Ship. In the ensuing confusion, they crash-landed the Ship on a desert planet and talked things out. While initially mistrustful of Jenny, Pythe as convinced of her good intentions; after she shared what she knew about the Rifts, he decided to investigate the location of the hideout of the Consistency Imperium, and let her come along in his Ship — being that she had lost faith in her abilities as a Shifter so long as the crisis continued. (COMIC: Jenny Everywhere Meets The Crew Of The Copper-Colored Cupids)
Travels with Jenny
Pythagoras spent several months travelling with Jenny Everywhere, looking for the source of the Rifts. They found a number of suspects, including a “bull-guy” who had invented a Rift-making ray, a time-traveller with a bowtie, and a young space behemoth called Fyargathaaark865blububurgh$1gkzo who had been playing with xir dad's chemistry set. However, they noticed that all of these situations had righted themselves without their help; whether or not they were the starting point of the Rifts epidemic, they came to the conclusion that they were not the right point at which to attempt to influence the Crisis's development. Instead, the path to salvation was to find whoever had been accelerating the Rifts' spread from dimension to dimension.
As they were reaching this agreement, the two stopped at Hilbert's, the Interdimensional Hotel, to have dinner. There, Pythe helped Wendy VII revive the Queen of the Black Market, who had been poisoned by a Wellsian, Forga sog-Forgos. However, for fear of preventing a paradox (as he realised the Wellsian existed in his past), he was unable to foil the Wellsian's broader plan. During those same events, Pythe unwillingly parted ways with Jenny as she involuntarily shifted to parts unknown in a fit of temper upon running into Sylvester Shoebill. Pythe thus left the Hotel on his own in his Fog Ship. (PROSE: The Grand Multiverse Hotel)
He ultimately ended up coming back to the Cupid Homeworld with Marksmanship-522, Bibliophile-962 and Tracker-764 in the Faction of the Fooling Fish's tachyonic sailing ship following the destruction of the Consistency Imperium's base and the end of the Rifts Crisis. It had transpired that Pythe's hunch was correct and Mandragora-257 was indeed partially responsible. (PROSE: Rifts Crisis Officially Over!)
Christmas crisis
In December 2020, Pythe was tasked by the Cupid Parliament with acquiring toys from the Interdimensional Toymaker so that the Cupid Homeworld could celebrate the winter holidays without needing to give Santa Claus a foothold in their world. He traveled to the Workshop of Madame Tarsa thanks to Pessimist's Fog Ship, only to discover that Tarsa had been frozen in place by an unknown party. He then set off into the Multiverse to find the culprit, though not before sending Juliet-178 and Arganthone-056 to the Workshop to investigate possible ways to unfreeze Tarsa.
Pythe made his way to 1895 London in the Prime Universe and recruited Sherlock Holmes (in what was their first meeting from Sherlock's perspective). He transported Sherlock to the Workshop, where he had the British detective examine the crime scene. Holmes pointed out that Tarsa's cane had been stolen, and helped Pythe arrive at an additional hypothesis: that one of Tarsa's own living toys, one she'd just created, was responsible. (PROSE: The Time of the Toymaker)
April Fools' Day
On April Fools' Day 2021, Pythe was called by Jenny Everywhere after she'd encountered a member of the Faction of the Fooling Fish who'd been posing as her. Pythe flew his Fog Ship to the Fish's tachyonic sailing ship and talked the Fish's hired bodyguard, Lainya Vantrik, into letting him see the Faction's higher-ups. They greeted him jovially as an old friend, and he was able to make them apologise for having gone overboard with some of their pranks this year in their rush to make the most of their newly-acquired interdimensional capabilities. (PROSE: Multiversal Mischief)
Behind the scenes
Origins
Pythagoras-858 is one of the main protagonists of the The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids series, of which Jenny Everywhere Meets The Crew Of The Copper-Colored Cupids was an installment as well as being a Jenny Everywhere story. His prior history with Mandragora-257 was detailed in preexisting prose stories, The Resurrection of the Wellsians and The Dark Cabaret, also starring Pythagoras. The start of the character's journey through the Void during the Rifts crisis, leading him where he is at the beginning of the Jenny story, was depicted in the short story Pythagoras-858 and the Quest for the Stovepipe.
Notes & References
- ↑ First appearance in directly Jenny-related media; actual debut was in 2019's Lord Thymon and the Department of Problem-Solving.