A Very Jenny Over-There Christmas (short story)

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A Very Jenny Over-There Christmas was a short story written by Callum Phillpott. The fifth in Phillpott's Jenny Over-There: The Nine-Two-Five Universe series, it was the series' first Christmas special.

On July 26th, 2024, a significantly edited version of the story was released on the official Nine-Two-Five Universe website.

Contents

Plot

It's Christmas Eve. Jenny Over-There is driving home to have dinner with her family, having already been offered a predictable gift of a stick of dynamite by Dynamite Thor. When she reaches the house, however, she is surprised and dismayed to find not only her parents Mr and Mrs Over-There, but also her cousin, Marietta “Mary” Over-There, who is acting aloof and glitzy as usual, smoking a cigarette indoors and wearing a red dress with a black coat on top.

Meanwhile, somewhere Northern, the Man in Grey visits the tower where a very eldritch Santa Claus resides, one who apparently governs the assignment of hundreds of “Santaforms” across the rest of the Multiverse. He explains that he is here to renew the alliance between him and the Great Higher-Ups, but also asks for — and obtains — a favour for the Multidimensional Finders Service itself: the use of a Santaform to film a last-minute Christmas ad for the service.

Dynamite Thor, for his part, has flown to America to buy a special gift at the Dibbsy Store. Though viewing the rest of the waiting crowd as “enemies”, he is fortunately prevented from throwing explosives at them by the fact that he gave all of his sticks of dynamite away to people for whom he had forgotten to buy any conventional gifts. Finally, the doors of the shop open and Thor does his best to squeeze his way in along with the rest of the crowd.

Back at the Over-There family home, the family has sat down at the dinner table, and Mr and Mrs Over-There try to make light conversation, but things remain tense, and as soon as Marietta tries to socialise with her, Jenny is reminded of why they parted on bad terms ten years ago, and, when the parents leave to give them some space, explicitly brings it up: having gotten wrapped up in occultism, a younger Marietta killed Jenny's cat Grober as a sacrifice to Nyarlathotep. Mary says that she's sorry, but seems to make light of it, casually trying to explain to Jenny that she no longer worships Nyarlathotep in the first place and is now in a group called the Order of the Red Key; this proves too much for Jenny, who storms upstairs.

The Dibbsy Store, for its part, has turned into a “veritable warzone” as customers battle for rare items, with a surprising number of notable individuals including Bart Hill (out of costume), the Beastmaster (riding a wild bear), Jenny Everywhere, Jenny Nowhere, Jenny Somewhere, Laura Drake and Alias the Dragon. Amidst the chaos, however, Thor keeps his eyes on his prize: the Dibbsy Toaster. When a nondescript man grabs it at the last moment before he can get to it, Thor briefly hesitates, then lunges at him.

Meanwhile, Marietta goes up to Jenny's room, finding her listlessly watching TV, and tries to apologise better, reminding Jenny of their childhood friendship. She cryptically suggests that her current occult activities were transformed by the guilt she felt over what she did to Jenny, and then says that she has at last found a way to “make it up” to her: she then hands Jenny her Christmas gift, a magic coin which allows safe passage into the Underworld on Charon's boat, promising to help Jenny journey into the Underworld to find the cat and bring him back to life. Won over, Jenny hugs her and forgives her. The conversation is cut short when Marietta spots a news broadcast about the “small war” happening at the Dibbsy Store, and asks Jenny to use her powers to give her its exact location.

Just as Peter Thor leaves with his prize, having managed to reason himself out of feeling bad about not paying for it, a magical red fissure appears next to the now-flaming store — and Lady Satan steps through.

Back at the Over-There home, Jenny happens to catch the Man in Grey's crummy Christmas ad on the television when she gets a call from Thor, who asks for Glenda's current address so he can give her the hard-won Mammon Mouse toaster. After answering him, she hangs up and is startled to see the follow-up news broadcast about the Dibbsy Store fire, which explains that the fire was magically put out by the mysterious occult superheroine Lady Satan — whom Jenny easily recognises as Marietta wearing a domino mask. She is only mildly surprised by this, however, or by the fact that Marietta is already back at the Christmas table by the time Jenny goes back downstairs — act which she no longer resents.

Worldbuilding

Universes

Other

  • Jenny Over-There's family home is “nested in the middle of one of the more urban areas in Wales”.
  • The Man in Grey “hasn't had hair for years”.
  • He believes himself to be immortal, but “never really tested that”.
  • Santa Claus is “the bearer of unearthly gifts, the Burzee King, the slayer of the Awgwas, the son of nymphs and the ruler of elves”.
  • Lady Satan habitually fights “cultists”.
  • Dynamite Thor thinks of the Dibbsy Toaster as his “Holy Grail”.
  • An ad which runs every year sees “the Kooba Cola bus” coming by with Santa Claus's face on it. On the news, Jenny hears that Kooba Cola are thinking of buying yet another company and is annoyed by this notion, especially as Kooba Kola also recently bought Kablamazon.
  • Jenny and Marietta reminisce about their friendship before Grober and the falling-out: “playing tag, talking about boys in a way that made it very clear that neither of us felt any attraction towards them despite feigning it due to societal norms” and watching “scary movies” such as Little Shop of Horrors, “[not] even the good one” but the one “with the bad paper mâché plant”.
  • The world is supposed to end if Azathoth ever wakes up. Nyarlathotep misled the younger Marietta into believing this fact applied to Yog-Sothoth, and told her that the purpose of the ritual was to summon him.
  • Marietta was fourteen when she killed Grober “ten years ago”, suggesting she is now twenty-four.

Continuity

Behind the scenes

Backgound

The edited version published on July 26th, 2024 significantly expanded the story, adding over a thousand words. The foremost of these edits are as follows:

  • The location of Jenny Over-There's flat is identified as Knighton.
  • Marietta Over-There is described at greater length; she has a “stilted, posh voice made for reading large tomes with perfect enunciation”, and a physical description yields that “her resting face was a permanent sneer which, combined with her dark hair and red dress, gave the impression of an unamused flapper who’d somehow found their way to the 21st century”.
  • Upon seeing her at her parents' house, Jenny Over-There says Marietta's name with an aggravated sigh instead of outright “growling” it.
  • The Man in Grey is stated to simply remember that he “hasn't had hair for years”, as opposed to only now noticing it.
  • He is less certain than in the original edition that he is immortal, although his advanced age seems to imply such; he merely hopes that his strange life-path means that he is somehow “special”.
  • The eldritch Santa Claus's list of titles is changed from “the bearer of unearthly gifts, the Burzee King, the slayer of the Awgwas, the son of nymphs and the ruler of elves” to “the bearer of unearthly gifts, the Burzee King, the Hag-Son of Zurline, the Slayer of the Awgwas, the Tyrant King of the Elves”.
  • The eldritch Santa specifies that his elves handle his emails for him.
  • The insignia of Mammon Mouse outside the Dibbsy Store is stated to have a pair of glaring, red eyes. The Store is also guarded by two guards in green uniforms, wearing Mammon Mouse ears, and its storefront is noted to contain merchandise based on various Dibbsy films such as Aphantasia (a parody of Fantasia) and Dalmatians 1-0-1 (a parody of One Hundred and One Dalmatians).
  • The doors of the Store are now described as parting “like the red seas”.
  • Dynamite Thor is stated to have super-strength (or at least, believe himself to do so), using it to try and push past the other shoppers.
  • The Over-There parents now head into the kitchen because the turkey was about to burn, rather than doing so casually.
  • Grober is explicitly described as male.
  • The Dibbsy Toaster or Mammon Mouse Toaster is now exclusively referred to by the latter moniker. Of this prize appliance, it is said that “some reviews complained about how it left the toast inedible, or how the mark of Mammon Mouse looked more like some sort of bunny alien, but that didn’t matter to Peter”.
  • The Kooba Cola Corporation ad is described in greater detail.
  • A description of the upstairs TV set of the Over-There house is given; it is described “slightly smaller than the average laptop screen, and accompanied by a blocky, plastic aerial that meant it could play just about any rubbish that was airing”.
  • Jenny and Marietta's reminiscences about shared childhood activities now include “looking at all those goofy pictures in the John Dee translation of the Necronomicon”. The discussion of The Little Shop of Horrors is different, with the two decrying the one they watched not as “not even the good one” but simply “not the scary one”; Marietta doesn't disparage the papier mâché plant, instead noting in reply to Jenny's aside that “neither of them were meant to be scary”. Jenny then finds herself reminiscing about how scared Marietta used to get of “that nasally plants”, sometimes waking screaming from nightmares about the character during their sleepovers.
  • Marietta calls Nyarlathotep an “Elder God”, only for Jenny to point out that he isn't actually one; more broadly, Jenny disparages Marietta for having been too naive in her dealings with the eldritch abomination, demonstrating a better grasp of Lovecraftian lore and alluding to the gawking-at-the-Necronomicon anecdote by scathingly asking Marietta: “Did you even read that book or did you just stare at the pretty pictures?!”.
  • Marietta declares herself to be “an occultist” and “Acolyte of the Order of the Red Key”; the way she spoke of her membership of the Order in the first edition was much more casual and made it sound like a more recent development than the phrasing in the new edition suggests.
  • Instead of claiming that it “turns out the Greeks got most of it right when it came to the afterlife. Go figure”, which implied that the Greek Underworld was the default afterlife of the 925th Universe, it is suggested to only be one of many afterlives, operating on the Discworld-style principle of individuals winding up in the afterlife that corresponds to their beliefs. Marietta is sure that Grober is specifically in the Greek Underworld because she somehow discovered that “Grober was actually an ardent follower of Hecate”.
  • During Jenny's heart-to-heart with Marietta, a “schmaltzy” Kablamazon ad about a kid befriending a monster is seen playing on the TV set, and Jenny finds herself relating it to her own situation.
  • In the burning Dibbsy Store, Dynamite Thor briefly considers using dynamite to blow out the fire (a wildly destructive method which one of the original public-domain Dynamite Thor comics actually showed the character's original incarnation pulling off), before realising that he is all out of dynamite.
  • Instead of the scene ending with Thor seeing Lady Satan's portal forming, her arrival on the scene is seen on-page and she exchanges a few words with Thor (to whom she promises that she'll clear his “theft” of the Dibbsy Toaster with the police) before haranguing ravenous customers who keep trying to go back into the Store to salvage their purchases instead of fleeing to safety, ordering one to put down a “Mammon Mouse Funhouse Playset” (presumably a piece of merchandise for an analogue of the Disney preschooler animated TV series Mickey Mouse Clubhouse).
  • Glenda Sif's current address is given as “some random place in Texas, in a different universe entirely”.
  • The obol gifted to Jenny by Marietta is given a visual description, being “a muddy gold, with black etchings of Charon in a boat on both sides”.
  • In the final scene, Jenny is initially less sure than in the first edition that she's ready to forgive Marietta, past the initial rush of emotion of discovering a chance to bring Grober back. Only after discovering Marietta's new life as a benevolent hero does she find herself, partly to her surprise, wishing she'll soon be seeing Marietta again.
  • The TV broadcast reporting on Marietta's exploits as “Lady Satan” is described in more detail. Unlike the original edition, which implied Lady Satan was already an established hero whom both Thor and Jenny had heard of, it now appears that her intervention at the Dibbsy Store is Marietta's first public appearance as Lady Satan, or at any rate the first to receive prominent media attention, with her formally announcing her alias to the world as part of the interview (a reedit performed a day after the edited version's release included expanded dialogue in which Marietta insists she has been active since Halloween, notably stopping “the Wrexham Crisp Fiend”, and is offended that the reporter hasn't heard of her yet). She also states that her mother and her grandmother previously used the “Lady Satan” persona, whereas the original edition gave no inkling that Marietta was not the one and only version of Lady Satan in this timeline.

Read online

A Very Jenny Over-There Christmas was released on Archive Of Our Own, where it is still available. The edited version can also be found online on the official Nine-Two-Five Universe website.

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