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In the Parallax Universe, Eric, better-known as Professor Awesome, was a mischievous thirteen-year-old boy genius who lived in the same apartment building as Jenny Everywhere and Kim. He cheerfully and explicitly identified himself as a mad scientist.
Description
Physical appearance
Professor Awesome's primary trait was the lab coat he wore. (PROSE: Pit Stop, Morning After) He was a “gangly” teenager. (PROSE: Pit Stop) He had a skin tone “similar” to dark-skinned Sophie Everytime. (PROSE: How Jenny First Met…)
Powers and abilities
Eric was particularly skilled at robotics. Despite his scientific leanings, he wasn't sure he needed Kim's lessons about slide rules, finding calculator apps sufficient for his purposes. (PROSE: Misunderstandings)
Biography
Early exploits
At the age of nine, Professor Awesome built a robot cat. He later built the Time Pestle. (PROSE: Pit Stop)
Jenny first thwarted Professor Awesome's efforts at supervillainy when he was thirteen, (PROSE: Paying It Forward) by which point he lived with his mother in the same apartment building as Jenny and her roommate Kim. (PROSE: Morning After, Pit Stop, etc.) He had been using a de-pants-icator to wreak mayhem. Awesome had also built a Robot Toaster for unknown reasons; Jenny took it home after she'd stopped the Professor. (PROSE: Paying It Forward) Awesome “just about injured himself laughing” on one April Fools' Day at the math joke of the number 10 on David Lowe's door having been replaced with an alpeh-null.
Later, on a morning when Jenny had been dealing with shifter hangover, Thoth informed her that “the kid” had been performing reckless mad science again, advising her to go check on him. He had been trying to design a new de-pants-icator, not out of intent to use it, but simply to prove to himself that he could improve on his earlier schematics. Jenny convinced him to keep it at that and not actually build the Mark 2 prototype, further promising not to tell his mother about the incident if he disposed of the page in his notebook once he was done with the thought experiment. (PROSE: Morning After)
Fixing the dream spinner
A little while later, they appeared to be on good enough term that Jenny took him to a parallel universe so that he could collect some live trilobites to bring to his science teacher, Mr Hernandez. When it transpired that Hernandez had only wanted fossil trilobites, and the numerous trilobites he'd brought got free and caused mayhem in the school, he was asked to go home early. Later in the day, Jenny went to him for help to repair the broken-down dream spinner, the dimensional vehicle of one of her counterparts. To his surprise and glee, she knocked at “Eric”'s door and asked him to take on the mantle of “Professor Awesome” once again.
After he successfully repaired the device with Kim's help, they shared some pastrami sandwiches from Morrie Greenberg's and said their goodbyes. Before leaving, Genevieve repaid Eric with a large gold coin. Kime offered to help Eric translate that gold into modern money and to take him to the hardware store so that he could spend these “wages” on new equipment and parts. She explained that she was already all set to sell some gold, as she had to make something of a chest of pirate gold Jenny had brought back from a recent adventure. Before they could do so, an Angel appeared with much fracas in the very same parking lot, heralding yet another crazy adventure. (PROSE: Pit Stop)
Argument with Judy
Some time later, Eric got into an argument at school with Judy, a girl with whom he'd become somewhat acquainted, because she wanted to put together a robotics project. Eric felt mildly jealous that she was getting into his own area of expertise, and also tried to dissuade her by telling her that as he was a mad scientist while she was just “an ordinary smart person”, he had a natural advantage and it would be unfair of him to let her try and fail to beat him — something which, obviously, she did not take very well. Going home, Eric tried to talk about it with his Mom, who mistakenly assumed, upon hearing that Judy was a girl, that Eric had some kind of romantic interest in her. Their talking at cross purposes did nothing for Eric's mood and he dropped in on Jenny and Kim, only for them to make the same mistake, delivering to him a long and rambling collection of dating advice. After the women realised their mistakes, however, Kim agreed to help Eric with his math homework. (PROSE: Misunderstandings)
Disappearance of Jenny
One day, having noticed that Jenny Everywhere had mysteriously disappeared, and worried that Kim wasn't answering when he tried to knock at her and Jenny's door, a worried Eric broke into Kim and Jenny's apartment with the help of the Robot Toaster. Finding an unmoving, unresponsive Kim on the bed, he panicked and went to David for help. Being aware of Kim's nature, David was not worried about Kim's apparent catatonia himself, but he agreed that Jenny's disappearance was concerning enough to warrant waking her up in the daytime. Recalling what she'd told him about the bottle of Jenny's blood, David located the hideaway and dribbled some of the precious liquid into Kim's mouth. She woke up with a start, lashing out like a wounded animal at David, with her claws out, until her higher brain functions came back online and she calmed down.
She was worried when David told her what blood he'd made her drink, as she couldn't actually feel Jenny's presence as she should have — not “her” Jenny, and not any of the other infinite Jennies in the Multiverse either. Before long, however, she felt their presences all returning, and her roommate reappeared with a “Pop” in the middle of the room. Jenny explained that she was never in any danger: (PROSE: The Absquatulation of Jenny Everywhere) her and all her other selves' temporary disappearance was something that occasionally happened to Jenny, serving to resynchronise the mental connection between them all. (PROSE: The Absquatulation of Jenny Everywhere, The Disappearance of Jenny Everywhere)
Presents set aside
When Jenny and Kim went through their closet to sort its contents, they found multiple items set aside for Eric, including a rocket boot which they decided to only give to him if his mother allowed it, and a broken “Carnot-engine” perpetual motion machine which they thought they might use as a birthday present for him. (PROSE: Cleaning Day)
An ethical difficulty
A school PE teacher unhappy about the rampant hormones of junior high school kids, and knowing Eric to be a mad scientist, cornered him and badgered him into doing something about the situation. Eric's refusals to do anything being themselves refused, he eventually capitulated and created a "Heteronormalizer" that would provide blinking lights and the illusion that something was happening. (PROSE: Professional Ethics)
Watching the sky
At past one in the morning on the night between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, a sleeping Eric was woken up by Jenny, who talked him into joining her on the roof. Quickly getting dressed in his day clothes — complete with labcoat and “essential gadgetry” including “both robo-spiders and the stochastic photon homogenizer” — he followed her to the said roof, where she explained that she wanted to watch “the flyover”. The Professor slowly realised that she meant “the bringer of presents… the lurker at chimneys… the eater of a billion cookies”; Jenny, appearing to treat him as incontrovertibly real, advised Eric not to say the name out loud, though she told him that she had borrowed an “Amulet of Unheeding” from Steve and Thoth just in case.
Before they could see anything, however, Jenny was hit in the face by a large snowball coming from nowhere in particular, and they were then knocked down by a sudden gust of wind. When they got up again, there were contrails suddenly criss-crossing the sky, as though hundreds of aircrafts — or just one, moving extremely fast — had passed over the city in the blink of an eye. Melodramatically angry, Jenny started waving a fist in the air and shouting up at the sky: “You just wait! I know who’s driving the fat man this year!” — but she got no reply, and Eric calmed her down by calling her attention to the two large, scarlet-wraped presents with their name on them that were suddenly lying on a parapet. (PROSE: Watch the Skies)
The Valentine's Day intruder
On Valentine's Day of the following year, Jenny had dozed off on the couch while reading The Tail of Jack the Bodice Ripper when a strange copper-coloured robot made its way into the apartment through the balcony. It tried to sneak up on Jenny, but was tackled by the Robot Toaster, waking Jenny with a start. After punting the intruder into the kitchen with a kick, Jenny ran to Professor Awesome's apartment, assuming he was to blame, but he told her otherwise, explaining that his last invention to date had been a new grappling hook for one of the robo-spiders. Followed her back to the apartment, the Professor briefly admired the “sweet engineering” of the golden robot before managing to separate it from the Toaster, with whom it was still wrestling, but it then revealed that it had the ability to fly and escaped out the window, leaving only its bow. Jenny was left to wonder what the whole encounter had been about, while the young mad scientist resolved to try making robots capable of flight in the future. (PROSE: Valentine's Visitor)
Later events
At some point prior to April Fools' Day 2023, Professor Awesome constructed the non-canonical imaginizer, a device which could project events onto the Fourth Wall. Kim got her hands on it in time to use it as part of an April Fools' Day prank. (PROSE: Return of the Puritan Streaker)
Meeting Herbie and Sophie
Noting that the boy didn't seem to have many friends his age, Eric's mother and David Lowe agreed to have David drive Eric to a “dinner thing” at the Emanuel temple on Sukkot week. After the meal, Eric was initially bored, but then ran into Herbie Popnecker and Sophie Everytime, taking a shine to the latter. When he caught up with them to take Eric home, David greeted Herbie casually, having known him for “some time”, but was surprised at Sophie, perceiving that she was someone “special” but never having met the likes of her before. As he and Eric drove home, David told him what little he knew about Herbie, but confessed to her that he was unfamiliar with Sophie, though he seemed optimistic about the young mad scientist's chances of figuring out how to to contact her. (PROSE: How Jenny First Met…)
The Sophiad
Some time later he had an accident with an explosive left behind by a careless visitor during one of Jenny’s adventures. At exactly the right time Sophie reappeared and gave him a magical healing lollipop of the kind Herbie enjoyed, admitting, “You can’t get them around here”. She then told him she didn’t think she should be there yet, gave him a strange plush toy, and shifted away. (PROSE: Preludes and Knick-Knacks)
Reasoning that Sophie might be in a nearby universe, and that he’d run into her at temple the first time, he built his own shift engine and tried to voyage to temples in neighboring worlds. Instead he found himself in a strange emptiness where he encountered an gargantuan eldritch abomination which he recognized as matching the toy Sophie had given him. To his surprise it knew him by name, warned him he was out of his universe too early, and told him, “You will return home. And tell Sophie that Tiny says hi.” Eric instantly found himself back where he started, with a broken shift engine but a very welcome prophecy that he and Sophie would see each other again. (PROSE: The Doll’s Source)
One day Eric came home to a letter on his door from Sophie, inviting him to meet her elsewhere in the city early in the morning the next day. When he got off the bus she took him to a nearby park where she had concealed a peculiar dimensional transport, which she explained she couldn’t take home or leave unguarded – so she planned to blow it up! She enlisted his help to rig up a time delay mechanism to make the machine shift to another dimension after they had gotten out and then set off some dynamite. After doing this, they had all day to spend together. (PROSE: A Game of Two)
An unwelcome visitor
Some time later Eric encountered an unfamiliar woman in the hall outside his apartment carrying an odd gadget. The visitor did not at all get along with Kim and in the excitement she left behind a strange electronic device, a pistol, and a motorcycle. (PROSE: Auntie Matters)
Behind the scenes
In 2022, Aristide Twain created a full-body illustration of the classic, kid version of Professor Awesome. To date, this remains the only visual depiction of the character. Based on notes from Scott Sanford, he was depicted as black, a detail which had not yet been mentioned in Scott Sanford's Jenny Everywhere stories themselves at the time. Sanford later commented:
| I'd originally imagined him as a skinny pale white kid, a very stereotypical nerd. When asked about his hair color, I said brown and remarked that going purely by textual evidence there was no particular justification for any particular appearance or ethnicity. And I got this delightful picture. Apparently Professor Awesome is black now. Cool. |
| —Scott Sanford |
Eric's ethnicity was later established in-text in Sanford's How Jenny First Met…. The illustration would go on to be used in PROSE: Preludes and Knick-Knacks.
Aristide Twain's artwork of Professor Awesome.
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