Good Crieff - The Tribulations of the Scottish Division (short story)
Good Crieff - The Tribulations of the Scottish Division, rereleased as Good Crieff: The Tribulations of the Scottish Division, was a short story written by Callum Phillpott. The sixth in Phillpott's Jenny Over-There: The Nine-Two-Five Universe series, it was the first story in the series to not directly feature Jenny Over-There. On July 26th, 2024, an edited version of the story was posted on the official Jenny Over-There: The Nine-Two-Five Universe website.
Contents
Plot
In Crieff, the ragtag crew recruited last year by the Man in Grey are doing their best to man the Multidimensional Finders Service' Scottish Division. While Tetra-None Hepta-Oct handles the Grey Intercepting Telecommunicator, Talbot Molossus is pacing around anxiously at the continued absence of Doctor Know. After trying to mollify him, Tetra takes a call from a woman who's lost her keys, who is frustrated at the process being more complicated than the simple question-and-answer provided by Jenny Over-There at the Welsh branch. Emboldened by the Hydrant's emotional support, Talbot insists on trying to use Doctor Know's computer, even though he's never managed to handle it before.
He quickly gets so frustrated with the unresponsive machine that he agrees to switch positions with Tetra, with the Cyclock being the one to attempt to use the computer while Talbot takes up the Telecommunicator, soon striking up a conversation “in dog language” with the client's pet dog, who feels neglected, as it gets too few treats for its liking and only gets to go walkies once a day. Eventually, the woman announces that she has found her keys herself and hangs up. Just then, the Hydrant brings back Doctor Know, who'd been hanging out at the coffee shop down the road. He successfully uses the computer to inform the woman of her key's real location after she calls back, hoping to get the Welsh line an admitting that she was lying when she said she'd found them. Ironically, they turn out to have been in the very place the woman arbitrarily claimed they were. Content with a job well done, Doctor Know goes off to make himself a sandwich as the others hopelessly ask him to stay in the office for any length of time; already, the phone is ringing again.
Worldbuilding
Universes
- This story takes place in the home universe of Jenny Over-There.
Other
- The M.F.S. Scottish Division's gray and non-euclidean headquarters were constructed in the 1970s by the wizard Artemas H. Whipple to use as a wizard school where he groomed young wizards as child soldiers in his ongoing conflict with the Yellow King, specifically teaching them to despise non-magical humans and to worship one child with a peculiar birthmark as “the Best Boy”.
- One button on Doctor Know's computer “required the user to shift their hand through the keyboard into the 4th dimension to hit a button made millions of years in the future by a race known as the Heloiglobians”.
- The Cyclocks were “hand-crafted by the Guardians of Time themselves to watch over the timelines of many universes”.
- On one occasion, Tetra-None Hepta-Oct “was handed the legendary Rubix Configuration that imprisoned the Celebites, said to be impossible to solve”, and “solved it in seconds” such that “the Celebites hadn’t even finished putting on their chastity gear by the time they were freed”
- Reciting his various titles, Doctor Know lists: “Co-writer of the Necronomicon, Editor of Necronomics for Dummies, writer of the video essay ‘The King in Yellow is a Bad Play and Here's Why’… Knowheresville calls me the Grand Mayoral Authority, Ozma calls me the Veritable Virtuoso of Macrology, the Beanie Babies wiki calls me God!”.
Continuity
- The Scottish division of the Multidimensional Finders Service was formed in PROSE: Open Sourcing.
- The title calls back to PROSE: The Tribulations of Jenny Over-There, the very first Jenny Over-There: The Nine-Two-Five Universe story.
Behind the scenes
Background
The edited version posted on the Jenny Over-There: The Nine-Two-Five universe website on July 26th, 2024 expanded the wordcount by around three hundred words. The most significant of the edits involved were as follows:
- Artemas H. Whipple no longer claimed to fight “the Yellow King” directly, but “the Infernal Forces of Carcosa”.
- Tetra-None Hepta-Oct is depicted using both she/her and they/them pronouns, rather than she/her pronoun exclusively — in line with her stated intention in the edited version of PROSE: Open Sourcing to switch gender presentations up regularly.
- The Hydrant is revealed to be one of the few things Talbot Molossus still has from his homeworld.
- Talbot's legs are no longer described as dog-like. His demeanour is less animalistic overall, with a later instance of him nearly barking in frustration being excised.
- There is an extended explanation of how Doctor Know's computer works:
| In theory, Tetra should've been able to peer into the future and see the result the computer would give from either this timeline or a divergent one, but it wasn’t that simple. Since that computer contained information deemed highly valuable – most of all, to Doctor Know — the sorcerer had installed every form of protection he could, including Quantum Encryption. This meant that the machine was constantly purging past and future timelines so that it and its files only existed in the Constant Present… so, as far as Tetra knew, the computer suddenly stopped existing in the future, and thus gave out no result. |
| —The explanation of Doctor Know's computer |
- It is mentioned that Tetra “still isn't used to Earth-speak”.
- Doctor Know's computer is described as having “at least” seven layers of keyboards, rather than a definite seven; some of its keys are stated to be visible only from a certain angle, as opposed to being invisible altogether.
- The Cyclock are no longer described as having been created by the Guardians of Time to watch over the timelines of “many universes”, but specifically of “this universe”; it is stated that they were granted “technologies far beyond the capabilities of anything that had existed and will ever exist”, hence Tetra's bafflement at being unable to comprehend Doctor Know's computer, which is, “by Cyclock standards, (…) impossibly advanced. Literally. It simply wasn't ever possible for any creature living or dead to get this advanced… except Doctor Know”.
- It is clarified that Tetra didn't know solving the Rubix Configuration would unleash the Celebites when she did so; it is explained that they had been “contained” within the Configuration for “centuries” and, after being freed, “went on to cause a very chaste brand of havoc across the universe”, for which reason Tetra avoided bragging about her intellectual feat in solving the puzzle.
- Tetra is explicitly described as having been “exiled from her own people”.
- Doctor Know alludes to being centuries old.
- The aside about the proper symbol for the “kwy” key being impossible to replicate is removed.
Read online
Good Crieff - The Tribulations of the Scottish Division was released on Archive Of Our Own, where it is still available. The edited version is additonally available on the official Jenny Over-There: The Nine-Two-Five-Universe website.
