Jenny Nowhere
Jenny Nowhere, sometimes dubbed the Anti-Shifter or the Nemesis, was Jenny Everywhere's antithesis and one of her most persistent foes throughout the Multiverse; though not as ubiquitous as Everywhere, Nowhere existed in a wide array of universes, and shared Jenny's ability to shift in body or in mind from one to the next — although unlike her benevolent counterpart's, all of Jenny Nowhere's selves tended to have distinct styles and personalities with no particular unifying trait aside from her evil.
The two Jennies often considered each other “sisters”, and were literal siblings in some incarnations; however, other incarnations of Nowhere were corrupted incarnations of Everywhere, or unrelated to her by blood (to the point that some versions of Nowhere had a romantic interest in Everywhere). Additionally, there existed at least one “strain” of malevolent shifters in the Multiverse, using the name “Jenny Nowhere”, who were in actuality originally incarnations of Jenny Everywhere, but had lost their link to the hive mind and become agents of evil. Their relationship to the independently-telepathic Jenny Nowheres documented in other accounts is unclear.
Description
Physical appearance
Jenny Nowhere's physical appearance was more variable than Jenny Everywhere's. There were two main trends; some versions of Nowhere were taller than Jenny Everywhere and very conventionally attractive, almost statuesque. They tended to have blond hair. (COMIC: Damn Fine Hostile Takeover, Truth Serum, etc.; PROSE: Nowhere)
Meanwhile, others looked identical to their corresponding Jenny Everywhere, albeit with a different costume or color scheme; for example, one version of Nowhere was almost a negative image of her Everywhere, with white hair instead of black, a blue superhero outfit instead of red, and strange “inverted” eyes, with white pupils set in black eyeballs. (COMIC: The Jenny Everywhere Chronicles) One Nowhere was wholly identical to her Everywhere to the point of being easily able to impersonate her; she even had a tattoo on her lower back (COMIC: Tales To Behold) to match Everywhere's. (COMIC: Ghost Story)
Other Nowheres still had similar physical features to Jenny Everywhere, though wearing mostly black outfits, but could be recognised at a glance by their chalk-white skin. (PROSE: Psychopomp, COMIC: Jenny Nowhere Wearing Makeup To Look Like Jenny Everywhere, etc.)
However, there were also Nowheres who did not fit into any of these categories, such as the one who dueled a college-age Jenny Everywhere with wooden swords, who looked noticeably different from Everywhere but dressed in a similar eccentric style and dyed her hair dark red. (VIDEO: Mitigating Circumstances)
Although not universal, many versions of Jenny Nowhere favoured mostly-black outfits. (COMIC: Damn Fine Hostile Takeover, Truth Serum, etc.; PROSE: Nowhere) Some incarnations favoured such distinctive outfits as a black cape, boots, gloves, skirt and tank-top, (COMIC: Truth Serum, etc.) or a tight-fitting, full-body black leather outfit. (COMIC: Damn Fine Hostile Takeover, PROSE: Parallax) Some Nowheres also wore a skull-shaped hair-clip, a dark counterpart to the flower hair-clip occasionally worn by Everywhere. (COMIC: That Feeling When Your Antagonist Is Gay For You, Jenny Nowhere Is Sus, She's The Impostor!)
Personality
In contrast to Jenny Everywhere's ready smile and optimistic attitude, Jenny Nowhere was often grim and preoccupied, (COMIC: Damn Fine Hostile Takeover) to the point of being downright unnerving to normal people, in combination with her unearthly nature. (PROSE: Nowhere) However, she was quite capable of villainous glee when a scheme of hers went as planned. (COMIC: Truth Serum) She did not like sunlight. (PROSE: Century Smith and the Time Terror)
Although variable from one incarnation to another, Jenny Nowhere's motivations often had more to do with revenge on Jenny Everywhere, or otherwise hurting her, than any independent agenda. (PROSE: Nowhere) Nowhere once told Jenny Anywhere, for whom she had little respect, that she had no wish to destroy Jenny Everywhere completely, believing that her existence would have no meaning without the other Jenny to stand against. (PROSE: The Disappearance of Jenny Everywhere) Indeed, at least one incarnation of Nowhere harboured romantic feelings for Everywhere. (COMIC: That Feeling When Your Antagonist Is Gay For You) Despite her antisocial nature, she was known to sometimes team up with, or act on behalf of, other evil-doers. (COMIC: Truth Serum, The Jenny Everywhere Chronicles) The set of Jenny Nowheres who were “divergent Everywheres” thought themselves to be benevolent, and would do their best not to do lasting harm to Jenny Everywhere or her friends, at least by their definition of ‘harm’. (PROSE: Parallax)
Some incarnations of Nowhere were capable of a flawless impersonation of their counterpart Everywhere, including for extended periods of time. (COMIC: Tales To Behold, etc.) However, others found it harder to keep their evil tendencies in check, even when it would benefit them. (COMIC: Jenny Nowhere Dooming Herself To Be With Her Enemy.)
Powers & abilities
Jenny Nowhere's abilities mirrored Jenny's: she was a shifter, capable of shifting items in and out of reality from other dimensions and travelling between universes herself. As with Jenny Everywhere, not all incarnations of Jenny Nowhere were automatically aware of their multidimensional nature, even after they'd learned to harness the power of shifting as related to items other than themselves. (COMIC: The Jenny Everywhere Chronicles) However, it was anomalous for a Nowhere not to be able to patch into the psychic network of her other incarnations, so long as she was aware of its existence. (PROSE: Century Smith and the Time Terror) Nowhere was skilled at physical combat. (PROSE: The Disappearance of Jenny Everywhere)
Biography
Origins
At least one version of Jenny Everywhere remembered Jenny Nowhere as her older sister, for whose approval the younger Jenny had always yearned even though the older girl was arrogant and selfish. They had grown up together until Jenny Everywhere was at least six years old. (PROSE: Memories of Nowhere)
However, this relationship was not reflected in all universes where echoes of one or the other Jenny existed. In one universe, for example, Jenny did have a sister called Julie, and another even younger one called Jordan, but the local incarnation of Jenny Nowhere was unrelated to either. (COMIC: The Jenny Everywhere Chronicles)
According to one account, there were many Nowheres with various names and agenda across the Multiverse, who all adopted names of the form "[First Name] Nowhere". Known for being “cautious, curious and stubborn”, the Nowheres, who had chaotic counterparts in the form of the Anywheres, aimed to streamline and stabilise the Multiverse, including by destroying entire timelines if need be. It is unclear what relationship Jenny Nowhere could be said to bear to these Nowheres. (GAME: The Everywheres)
Yet another cluster of Jenny Nowheres were not actually proper incarnations of the wider Jenny Nowhere (sharing no telepathic link to one another or other Nowheres), but instead, were incarnations of Jenny Everywhere who had been artificially cut off from the Everywhere psychic network and become disillusioned with the metaphysical ethics of Jenny Everywhere's hyper-dimensional nature. They believed, in essence, that individual Jennies did not have free will; they saw themselves as liberated and sought to “pass on” this “gift” to other incarnations of Jenny Everywhere by any means necessary, whether they liked it or not. (PROSE: Parallax)
In Right-On By The Sea
One incarnation of Jenny Nowhere was a grim-looking woman in a form-fitting leather catsuit. She smoked and had short blonde hair. She arrived in Right-On By The Sea under heavy rain one night, with evidently nefarious intent, shadowing Jenny Everywhere and Clea even as the two ironically discussed how they wished things would quiet down around them for a while now that their adventure fighting off Apollo Coffee was done. (COMIC: Damn Fine Hostile Takeover)
Divergent Everywheres
The "original Jenny Nowhere"
One Jenny Nowhere was originally an incarnation of Jenny Everywhere until a freak accident cut her off from the Jenny Everywhere psychic network. Suddenly free from the constant influence and watch of the billions of other Jennies, she came to believe that she had only now gained free will, with all the other incarnations of Jenny living in a kind of mindless slavery, mere puppets of a hyper-dimensional entity. She reverse-engineered her injury and worked out how to replicate its effects through controlled brain surgery, and began finding other Jenny Everywheres in other worlds. Each of them in turn became a Jenny Nowhere with similar convictions to the original and spread out further to unmake Everywheres herself. (PROSE: Parallax)
Killed by a dinosaur
One of these Jenny Nowheres, an unknown amount of links down the “chain of succession”, was physically identical to the Jenny who was friends with Kim in one universe, but wore tight, black leather clothing. Before she was operated upon, she kept the company of unusual people; she would later remember “from when [she] was an Everywhere” how “anyone Jenny Everywhere hung out with would be special”.
Tracking down the aforementioned “Kim's friend” Jenny to a bar in her home universe, Nowhere put something in Everywhere's beer to induce nausea in her. When she rushed to the bathroom with Kim, Nowhere attempted to render Kim unconscious with a tranquiliser dart, although it failed due to Kim's unusual constitution, and began explaining herself to Everywhere. With Kim proving a physical threat Nowhere shifted away, only for Everywhere to chase her through several landscapes.
Realising sunlight was Kim's weakness and Kim was Jenny's, Nowhere shifted to the Giza desert at high noon, forcing Everywhere to shift Kim somewhere shady instead of continuing to try to capture Nowhere. However, Nowhere did not keep the upper hand for long; foolishly choosing to pursue Everywhere in turn to the cool jungle she had chosen as the place to take Kim, she realised too late that it was a prehistoric jungle and was mauled to death by a dinosaur. Kim later examined her body, finding the surgical scar above her left ear which revealed she was not the original Jenny Nowhere. (PROSE: Parallax)
Duel with Jenny
In one universe, Jenny Nowhere had long reddish hair, and she wre a light blue scarf and green-tinted goggles. She once fought Jenny Everywhere in a duel of wooden swords which both took extremely seriously, and in which Nowhere somehow managed to indeed injure Jenny sufficiently that she had to ask for an extension on a university essay that she had due to Professor Alexander, although Everywhere still evidently emerged the victor. (VIDEO: Mitigating Circumstances)
In Reality Z-25 31-H
Posing as Jenny Everywhere
Abducted by Doctor Brain
At some point, Jenny arrived in Reality Z-25 31-H. She was knocked out and captured by the supervillain Doctor Brain, who, discovering she had shifting powers, strapped her to a complex piece of machinery to use her as a power source for an interdimensional portal. The machine worked, but rather than the portal being one-way, it allowed an eldritch horror from another dimension to begin crossing over into Brain's world. The superhero Captain Evening intervened, managing to free Jenny from the portal and thereby close the gateway, forcing the horror to retreat. She introducing herself to the Captain as simply “Jenny”. (COMIC: Tales To Behold)
Meeting Mervin
The two headed to the Captain's home, where Jenny began claiming that she was really Jenny Everywhere. Before she got very far in introducing ‘herself’, however, they had to deal with the intrusion of a Griffin called Merv in the Captain's home.
It quickly turned out that, although not personally malicious, Merv had been magically compelled by Doctor Brain's witch daughter Jesse to wander the world until he killed Captain Evening. To save the Captain, Jenny quickly used her shifting powers to switch him out with his counterpart in a parallel world who was a zombie. Merv dealt what would have been a killing blow to the zombie, fulfilling his magical contract. He resolved to remain in Reality Z-25 31-H, however, to try and get his revenge on Doctor Brain and his daughter. Jenny and the Captain agreed to help him with this goal, having their own grudges against the villain. (COMIC: For Whom The Toll Bells)
Enter Evil Cloak
In parallel to her activities as Jenny Everywhere, Nowhere created a second guise, a menacing cloaked figure simply known as “Evil Cloak”. She began attempting to recruit other supervillains, first materialising in the kitchen of Doctor Brain. She only succeeded in startling him, however, with him soon regaining his wits and attempting to shoot the apparition. “Evil Cloak” then teleported out as easily as she had come, leaving Brain quite confused. (COMIC: In Dr. Brain's Kitchen)
She appeared to Doctor Brain again as he drove home after dropping off Jesse at a dance club. Startled by the figure appearing in the middle of the road, Doctor Brain crashed his car, with his suit's bowl being damaged in the crash. With Brain pinned to the ground lest his brain-bowl's fluid leak out, Evil Cloak leaned in and reiterated her suggestion of a partnership. (COMIC: Following Up)
Meeting Rodney Rabbit and Armstrong Fatbuckle
Jenny and the Captain greeted Professor Madison and Rodney Rabbit when they visited the Captain's home in order to experiment with a device intended to detect any further transdimensional portals opened by Brain. While the Captain and Merv tested it with Madison, Rodney soon convinced Jenny to slipd away and sleep with him. A short while later, however, Jenny was back in action, joining Merv, the Captain, Madison and Rodney in an assault on the building where Madison had indeed detected another portal being opened — although it turned out to be nothing to do with Doctor Brain, but rather a conflict between Armstrong Fatbuckle and the Legion of Light. After Armstrong (a living skeleton) was broken apart during the ensuing fight, Jenny enthusiastically participated in the puzzle-like effort to put him back together again, and cheered when the Captain offered him the chance to join the team. (COMIC: Enter–the Legion of Light!)
Facing Armagedda
With the Captain having formalised the unlikely grouping of himself, Jenny, Armstrong Fatbuckle and Merv the Griffin as a proper superhero team, now known as “the Odds”, Jenny found herself involved in the investigation of a series of “reverse robberies” perpetrated across the city. Looking for clues at one of the banks that had been “reverse-robbed”, Jenny used Professor Madison's device to detect “cosmic particle residue” and, shifting herself and the team, followed it to its origin: the sewers where Armagedda had taken up residence. The Captain ordered an ill-advised head-front charge at Armagedda and her henchmen with predictable result, but Jenny escaped captured. With the Captain telling her that Armagedda had a weakness to magic, she got the idea to channel her shifting powers through the Magic Sword of the Legion of Light to forcibly exile Armagedda to another universe, which she was able to do after Armstrong had tricked Armagedda into taking human form. (COMIC: Redistribution)
Recruiting Jesse
Having been recruited by “Evil Cloak”, Doctor Brain was unavailable to bail his daughter Jesse out of jail when she was arrested for suspected underage drinking that same day. Instead, Jesse found, already waiting for her in her cell, “Evil Cloak”, who promised her that the two of them would soon be “good friends”. (COMIC: Redistribution) Back among the Odds, “Jenny Everywhere” decided to throw off suspicion even more decisively by convincing the Captain and Armstrong that she had temporarily lost her shifting powers as a result of her face-off against Armagedda. (COMIC: Shower Intermission)
The Woman Without a Shadow
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One version of Jenny Nowhere was a stern, joyless woman of statuesque appearance with long blond hair; she wore a black suit and, most strikingly, a gas mask. She cast no shadow and once stated that she had “lost” her name “a long time ago”. On one occasion, she resurfaced in the multiverse and, after frightening a male associate of Jenny Everywhere, told him to go warn her that Nowhere was back and “it was her turn”. (PROSE: Nowhere)
Agent of Chaos
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In one universe, Jenny Nowhere was originally a Vertginite, a member of an alien race of doppelgänger-like creatures. She was sent to Westbrook by Chaos in the form of a crystal orb, and took on a negative version of the local Jenny Everywhere's appearance, also acquiring a duplicate of her shifting powers in the process and taking on the name of “Jenny Nowhere”. Her first fight with Jenny Everywhere didn't go well, as she couldn't control her powers very well yet and had no knowledge of other Jenny Nowheres; Jenny Everywhere forced her to admit that she'd been sent by Chaos and sent her running for her life. (COMIC: The Jenny Everywhere Chronicles)
Team-up with Ketchum
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One version of Jenny Nowhere, who had pale eyes, long blonde hair, and the classic black outfit, teamed up with evil chemist Caleb Ketchum as part of some scheme which involved tracking down a rabbi in hiding. They managed to capture Jenny Everywhere and feed her truth serum, but found, to their disappointment, that she didn't actually know the answers to their questions. (COMIC: Truth Serum)
EMO Jenny
One incarnation of Jenny Nowhere resembled a more cynical doppelgänger of her universe's Jenny Everywhere, with a darker palette and a glum attitude. When an in-universe fan of the webcomic Jenny existed in asked when they would meet Jenny Nowhere, Nowhere replied by asking Everywhere to "leave [her] out of this." (COMIC: Road to Nowhere)
Betraying Century Smith
One universe's incarnation of Jenny Nowhere was born without a psychic connection to the network of her other selves' minds, though she was still aware of who she was, and had the means of travelling across dimensions. She was “pale, with dark hair and thin features”; she sounded “reserved, almost monotone” and, becoming a dimensional scientist in the hope of fixing her condition, she took to wearing an increasingly ragged white labcoat. She began building a machine that could split her across the Multiverse, hopefully merging her into the wider Jenny Nowhere “network”. However, it needed tremendous amounts of paradox energy to power itself up.
This Nowhere met Century Smith during his first travels through the Multiverse. Recognising him as an agent of the Consistency Imperium, she hoped he would be able to lead her to useful space-time anomalies. Thus, she convinced him that she was his friend. Their deceitful friendship lasted for years. She also visited and studied the planet Sanguivor, hoping to learn from its “particular transdimensional properties”.
Smith contacted her, setting her a date at the Interdimensional Tavern, in the hope that she could help with his new friend Briar's vampirism. She accompanied the two to the Interdimensional Library to seek a cure, but then managed to convince them to head to her own house in her home universe. There, she strapped Briar in her machine and prepared to absorb the energy from her mysteriously-split timeline. However, Briar managed to push her out of the way and was zapped instead; the machine thus ironically caused the very divide in her timeline whose potential Nowhere had used to power it. The paradox caused a dangerous feedback that caused the machine to explode. When the dust cleared, Nowhere had vanished, though Century Smith guessed that she had simply shifted to safety. (PROSE: Century Smith and the Time Terror)
Romance with Everywhere
One incarnation of Nowhere had chalk-white skin and short black hair. She went barefoot and wore a black sleeveless shirt and shorts, as well as a flowing black scarf and dark gray goggles of her own. She had a skull-shaped hair clip, a large white skull print on the front of her T-shirt, and skull-shaped badges (matching her Jenny Everywhere's flower badges) on her T-shirt, scarf, and shorts.
This version of Nowhere was desperately in love with Jenny Everywhere. She once declared to Everywhere that though her powers “may give [her] the ability to run wherever and whenever”, “the one thing [which she couldn't] outrun” was Nowhere's love. Everywhere was baffled at this statement, although it was far from obvious that she did not reciprocate. (COMIC: That Feeling When Your Antagonist Is Gay For You) The two cautiously started dating, and became embroiled in an adventure together. At one point, Everywhere told Nowhere that they could get through “this” so long as Nowhere “didn't do anything”. Nowhere claimed she wasn't going to do anything, but blatantly appeared to be considering literally stabbing Everywhere in the back. (COMIC: Jenny Nowhere Dooming Herself To Be With Her Enemy.)
At some point, this Nowhere used a mysterious machine to trap Jenny Everywhere in a universe where she couldn't use any of her shifting powers, or even remember anything about the other universes she'd visited in the past, though she did recall the existence of such universes. Also trapped were versions of Everywhere's parents from another universe, and the incarnations of Jimmy Wherever, Jenny Anywhere, Jenny Somewhere and Jimmy Anytime that these Jennies were familiar with.
After figuring out what had happened, Jenny was confronted by Nowhere, who once more tried to get her to "confess" that she loved Nowhere back. With Jenny refusing and all of her friends standing with her against Nowhere, the villainess admitted defeat and switched off the machine that cancelled the shifters' abilities, allowing them all to move on to new adventures. (PROSE: Jenny Everywhere and the Very Normal Story)
At some later point, Nowhere surprised Everywhere by trying to cover her bleached-white skin with make-up to look more like Everywhere. (COMIC: Jenny Nowhere Wearing Makeup To Look Like Jenny Everywhere)
Defeated by Anywhere
Shortly after Jenny Everywhere disappeared across the Multiverse, one dour incarnation of Nowhere was dueled and defeated in one universe by Jenny Anywhere, who tied her down with shift-preventing chains. Anywhere then interrogated Nowhere, trying to get her to tell Anywhere how to bring Everywhere back. However, Nowhere managed to make Anywhere realise that she was not actually responsible, being neither capable or interested in wiping Jenny Everywhere from reality completely. She provisionally left Nowhere tied up until Everywhere could be found, promising to go back for her if and when Jenny Everywhere did turn up again, or it otherwise became apparent that Nowhere hadn't been responsible. (PROSE: The Disappearance of Jenny Everywhere)
As an Impostor
In one universe, Jenny Nowhere was a member of a futuristic, spacesuit-wearing crew; her spacesuit was black, with a skull motif. Also in the crew Jenny Somewhere and Jenny Everywhere. Unbeknownst to Everywhere and Somewhere, however, Nowhere was actually a murderous Impostor. After a body was found near some vents, the two real Crewmates began investigating, deducing that the Impostor must be someone from electric; however, returning to the scene of the crime, they seemed unaware that Nowhere was lurking in the shadows in person, dagger in hand. (COMIC: Jenny Nowhere Is Sus, She's The Impostor!)
Behind the scenes
Genesis
After making her debut as a twist ending to COMIC: Damn Fine Hostile Takeover, Jenny Nowhere was defined (as it were) by Nelson Evergreen on Episode #20 of the Webcomic Beacon podcast as “a blank slate. How she looks, how she dresses, her character quirks, what her agenda might be – it’s all up to the individual who wants to do something with the name. Anyone can create their own Jenny Nowhere from the ground up.”[1] He explained:
| We’d imagine that – whatever she is – she functions in some way as a “prime antagonist” to Jenny Everywhere, like you say. Yin to the yang, and that. Which can work in all sorts of ways. I like the idea that in each universe there’s a Jenny Everywhere who’s recognizably Jenny Everywhere in name, character and appearance… and somewhere in each universe there’s a Jenny Nowhere who’s recognizably Jenny Nowhere in name only.
Maybe creators should be encouraged to come up with a Jenny Nowhere that actively avoids comparisons with existing versions of the character… to go out on a limb and make up something totally unique. |
| —Nelson Evergreen |
Upon creating their own version of Jenny Nowhere, Jeanne McClure noted that they “were fine” with people using that design, although they did also enjoy seeing other people's takes.[2]
Artist "Lady Kraken" later created her own version of the character, giving the following description:
| Jenny Nowhere is also known as "The Shifter Slayer", or simply "Nowhere". She is the sworn enemy of Jenny Everywhere, and seeks to kill any and all Shifters that live throughout the many alternate universes. She has the same Shifter powers as Everywhere, but she uses them in a far more sinister manner. She's a public domain character who can be used by anyone, so long as you include this paragraph. |
| —Lady Kraken |
Notes & References
| Open-source elements making up the core Jenny Everywhere mythos | ||||||||||||
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| Recurring elements of The Cosmic Beholder | ||||||||||
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