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Laura Drake was a woman who, like Jenny Everywhere, existed across the multiverse in a variety of incarnations, although she was incapable of shifting and many of her incarnations didn't even have any awareness of their other selves. Each universe's Laura was some form of acquaintance to her corresponding Jenny, but their relationship could land anywhere from friend to lover to mortal enemy. (PROSE: Jenny Everywhere and the Lord of Hell)
Although “Drake” was her most common last name, it sometimes varied between realities, whereas the name “Laura” did not. (PROSE: Laura in Waiting)
Description
Physical appearance
Although, like Jenny Everywhere's, Laura's physical appearance varied across universes, certain core traits tended to remain: she had red hair, wore glasses, and was taller than her corresponding Jenny. She often wore at least one purple article of clothing. (PROSE: Jenny Everywhere and the Lord of Hell) One Laura's hair was “frizzy”, and she sometimes tied it in a bun. (PROSE: The Disappearance of Jenny Everywhere)
Personality
TBA
Biography
Shifting with Jenny for the first time
In one universe, Jenny Everywhere had long told her best friend and potential love interest that she could shift, but the latter had never believed her. She finally proved she had been telling the truth by taking her friend along with her on a trip to another universe. After a moment of confusion, she was delighted and laughed with Jenny. (PROSE: Somewhere)
Family life
In one universe, Jenny Everywhere and “her love” founded a family. They had at least two daughters. Jenny once played tag with the youngest, running through the trees, fondly looked upon by her spouse, who thought this behaviour a bit childish, if charming. (PROSE: Somewhere)
Loving another
In one universe, Jenny Everywhere lost “her love” to another woman. Jenny forced herself to be happy for her, despite her grief, as she watched the two kiss in the moonlight from afar. (PROSE: Somewhere)
The tragic death of a villain
In one universe, Jenny Everywhere was forced to bring down a version of “her love interest” who had become a world-threatening supervillain. This ended with the latter lying at Jenny's feet as the sky burned, with a shattered Jenny still wishing there had been another way. (PROSE: Somewhere)
Meeting Jenny at a party
In one universe, Jenny Everywhere had a social obligation to attend a dreary party. She soon caught sight of “someone else” in the crowd who “looked as uncomfortable as she was”. Though hit with a series of flashes of how her relationships with other versions of this person in other universes had gone (good and bad), Jenny decided to push it all aside, and ducked through the crowd to go and meet her, flashing her a charming smile. (PROSE: Somewhere)
Student with Jenny
In one universe, Laura Drake was Jenny Everywhere's friend, having grown up with her. Throughout their shared high school years, Jenny tried to tell her about her nature as “the Shifter”, but Laura never believed her, though she took to playing along to humour Jenny. This changed one night at a party, by a time when they were both of age.
While Laura had taken refuge in a bathroom, wishing the interminable party would end so she and Jenny could go back home and rest, a drunken Jenny stumbled in and tried once more to tell Laura about her other selves. When Laura seemed skeptical, Jenny decided to prove herself by shifting both herself and Laura, for just a few moments, to a universe with two moons. She quickly shifted them back again, having given herself a headache by trying to shift while inebriated. (PROSE: The First Voyage)
Living with the Shifter
In one world, Laura and Jenny Everywhere were in a serious enough relationship that they eventually started living together. They seemed happy, although some time into their shared home-life, Laura had still not gotten used to how much Jenny tossed and turned in her sleep, which hindered Laura's own capacity to fall sleep. When she called her girlfriend out on it only for Jenny to joke in response that she was, after all, "the Shifter", Laura playfully threw a pillow at Jenny. (PROSE: Origin of the Shifter!)
Summoning Lord Grallyx
In one universe, a particularly impulsive Laura studied with Jenny, and appeared to be unaware of her multi-dimensional nature. (PROSE: Jenny Everywhere and the Lord of Hell) Jenny was her best friend, defending her from bullies in grade school. (PROSE: The Disappearance of Jenny Everywhere) She hoped to make it into an advanced science class, but was afraid of failing her final history exam. Finding an old book of demonology, she enlisted Jenny's help to summon the demon Lord Grallyx, intent on making a deal with him to ensure her success at the exam.
Grallyx went out of control, but a more experienced Jenny covertly took over Laura's friend's body and dealt with the situation. Grallyx was eventually trapped inside Laura's own demonology book. Laura gave up on the demon-summoning plan, and the two left the cave where they'd settled for the ritual, with Jenny pledging to help Laura study for the exam. (PROSE: Jenny Everywhere and the Lord of Hell) This version of Laura graduated successfully and remained best friends with Jenny into early adulthood, with Jenny helping Laura land a job at the Altern Corporation, the world's leading scientific innovators. Jenny eventually revealed her multi-dimensional nature to Laura, taking her along on a shift to a universe where Jenny lived in a quiet seaside town as her first taste of interdimensional travel. From then on, Jenny always warned Laura before she left on interdimensional adventures which might keep her for a long time.
She once invented a Heat Ray which she planned to give to Jenny as a present, so that she could use it to toast bread “on the go”. One day, before Laura had gotten the chance to give her the Ray, Jenny disappeared without warning (as, that week, all of her incarnations across the Multiverse had been zapped off to a secret realm beyond Time for their own good). Panicking, Laura built an interdimensional portal to try and find her (using “borrowed” Altern resources). After catching glimpses of hundreds of Jenny's other incarnations' past exploits, she came to a halt in the Void where she joined forces with Jenny Anywhere, Hakhe and Jenny Somewhere to enter the Infinite. After they did not find any trace of Jenny Everywhere even there, they made their way to the seaside town to “mourn” Jenny, beginning to accept that she may be gone for good. There, they were attacked by the Fallen One but managed to defeat it on their own, just in time for Jenny to triumphantly return to reality, leading to celebrations. (PROSE: The Disappearance of Jenny Everywhere)
Behind the scenes
Genesis
Laura Drake was created by Jeanne McClure, a prolific author of short Jenny Everywhere-themed short fiction on Tumblr and Ficly in the early 2010s. She was originally intended to be one member of a wider recurring cast for a never-materialised long-form Jenny project, and designed as more of a viewpoint character who would act as a contrast or "straight woman" to Jenny's antics, only for the concept to evolve into something more.[1]
After the basic idea of a character with whom Jenny had a wide variety of relationships across universes was introduced in Somewhere, the named character of Laura debuted quietly in the short story The First Voyage on June the 5th, 2012, whereupon she was released in the public domain by McClure. However, it was only on August the 28th, 2013 that they expounded on the conceit behind the character:
| So Laura – she was the first and currently most developed of the supporting cast for JE I’ve been thinking up. She started out as being more of a straightforward companion character but her concept wound up being “What if Luthor had stayed Superman’s friend?”
See, there’s a certain dynamic that occurs between male characters a lot of the time–characters who are enemies and embody some kind of symbolic opposition but also have this sort of intimacy between them, and they have a past background of friendship. (Which obviously includes a fair bit of shipping potential.) For example Superman and Luthor, Reed and Doom, Xavier and Magneto, the Doctor and the Master. We don’t see a lot of these kind of relationships between women, and one of the things I want to do with Jenny is to explore the kind of tropes that get applied to iconic male heroes like the Doctor. But of course the whole nature of Jenny Everywhere is that AUs and “imaginary stories” are the norm. There’s also the fact that I want magical girl tropes to be part of Jenny Everywhere too, because magical girl tropes are cool. I see her as the kind of hero who makes friends with her former or potential enemies, like Sailor Moon or Golden Age Wonder Woman. That means it’s possible to explore their relationship from any number of angles–they could be “just” friends, or they could be happily married, or they could be deadly foes, or archenemies with benefits, or what have you. Ununnilium pointed out that the ideal counterpoint to the character who’s a constant across all worlds is one whose relationship with her is always changing. Also, because everything I’ve written with her has been from her POV, I haven’t actually described what she looks like. So–she has (naturally) red hair (even in the contexts where that wouldn’t make sense–), and tends to wear glasses. I see her as significantly taller than Jenny, even though she looks up to/feels jealous of her. She is quite fond of purple. In character terms, she’s someone who can be difficult to like. She’s one of those people who tends to have strong Fixed Ideas about things and so conversations with them are full of bizarre mine fields. She can be petty and jealous and resentful and have Nice Guy tendencies. She’s not the “sociopath” that some people think she is though–she has to deal with the frustration of living in a world where most people aren’t on her level intellectually, and that means she’s built up a lot of anger and neediness and resentment, but she does have a conscience. But that can sometimes be very dangerous in and of itself, because of she is very certain about what’s right and wrong, and (as with, say, Magneto) that certainty can lead her down dangerous paths. Whereas Jenny is someone whose power is to consider things from a million perspectives at once. So why does Jenny not only put up with her but actively care about her so much, and keep getting drawn into the multiversal train wreck in world after world? Well, Laura is brilliant, for one thing. Because of her voracious imagination and intellect she can understand where Jenny is coming from in a way most other people can’t. Jenny is someone who’s very simple, but in a way that has a lot of layers–she’s coming at things from a very strange perspective, so a lot of people don’t understand what her deeper emotions are. Laura’s also very thorough and good at thinking things through–as is Jenny, but in a completely different way. Jenny is someone whose thought processes are very nonlinear and can sometimes end up in strange places, so she needs someone who can question her and stand up to her when she’s doing something that’s a spectacularly bad idea, as she sometimes does. Because Jenny is someone with a lot of wisdom and insight, but not necessarily good sense. That’s how I see things, anyway. |
| —Jeanne McClure |