Jenny Everywhere (Parallax Universe)
The Parallax Universe's version of Jenny Everywhere worked (to a fairly loose schedule) as a music reviewer. She shared an apartment with her unflappable and vampiric friend Kim, in an apartment building which housed many other eccentric characters.
Description
Physical appearance
This Jenny looked “maybe Chinese, maybe Native American, maybe not”; her hair was short and “need[ed] professional attention”. As well as the traditional goggles and scarf, she wore a long coat. (PROSE: Parallax) She was once told that she resembled Mikasa Ackerman. (PROSE: I Found Him On The Internet) She spoke with a “broad American accent”, but otherwise resembled Jenny Cornelius except for hair-style and clothes. (PROSE: Watch the Skies)
Biography
Everyday life
She lived in an apartment where she collected toasters. Its actual number was “8”, but the plaque was usually askew, reading “∞” instead — which suited Jenny. (PROSE: Paying It Forward) This Jenny looked “maybe Chinese, maybe Native American, maybe not”; her hair was short and “need[ed] professional attention”. As well as the traditional goggles and scarf, she wore a long coat. (PROSE: Parallax) She was once told that she resembled Mikasa Ackerman. (PROSE: I Found Him On The Internet) She spoke with a “broad American accent”, but otherwise resembled Jenny Cornelius except for hair-style and clothes. (PROSE: Watch the Skies)
She had a semi-regular job as a music critic, being, as she put it, “paid to tell bands that they suck[ed]”. (PROSE: Camera Shy) Her reviews were edited by a man called Haroun and published by Stone. (PROSE: Morning After) This Jenny was friends (PROSE: Parallax) and roommates (PROSE: Camera Shy) with the enigmatic Kim. (PROSE: Parallax, Camera Shy) Her circle of acquaintances included several other odd characters including preteen mad scientist “Professor Awesome”, or Eric, and the also mysterious David Lowe. (PROSE: Misunderstandings, etc.)
Undated adventures
Cha Ni chided Jenny for having once, with the best of intentions but extremely poor result, ended up “putting the ram in the Rama Lama’s ding-dong”. (PROSE: Paying It Forward) Jenny's complex and inadvisable scheme in Shangri-La had also involved skinny-dipping. (PROSE: Morning After)
Jenny and Kim defeated the Vampire King when he “came to town” one year, saving at least one captured bystander, Ulysses Dumas, from his dungeon. (PROSE: Camera Shy)
At some point, Jenny and Kim learned of the location of the “mystic” Spear of Longinus, or possibly acquired it themselves. By the time of Jenny's involvement in the Jiujinshan anime con, it was safely locked away somewhere other than Jenny and Kim's apartment. (PROSE: I Found Him On The Internet)
Meeting Jenny Nowhere
Jenny, Kim and three male friends of theirs once partied a bar together. However, a version of Jenny Nowhere, whom this Jenny had never encountered in any form, slipped something in her beer which forced her and Kim to rush to the bathroom, where Nowhere confronted them. She revealed herself as originally a version of Jenny Everywhere who had become disconnected from the wider telepathic network. To Everywhere's horror, she viewed it as a liberation which she planned to “share” with her, willing or not.
However, Nowhere had not counted with Kim's special abilities, which meant her tranquiliser drug had no effect on Jenny's friend. Forced to flee through shifting, Nowhere was pursued by Everywhere 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. Shaken by these revelations, Jenny Everywhere and Kim agreed to go back home for another drink — with no music. (PROSE: Parallax)
Facing the Vampire King
Kim participated in a raid on the lair of the Vampire King after he “came to town”, alongside her friends Jenny Everywhere and Fiona, a werewolf. Jenny was the last of the three to enter the fray, using explosives to break her way into the lair, which her two friends had already managed to infiltrate. She found that Fiona had already defeated the King's two revenant guards, and ran ahead to the throne room where Kim was engaged in one-on-one combat with the King, trying to get him with a wooden stake. However, they were too evenly-matched and the killing blow was ultimately delivered by Jenny herself using wooden bullets fired from a shotgun. After the dust literally cleared, Fiona played one last part in the day's adventures by informing her that she still smelled one live vampiric presence in the dungeon, allowing Jenny and Kim to locate the captive Ulysses Dumas; Kim ripped the steel door out of its hinges to get to him, once again impressing Jenny with her strength. When it became apparent that Ulysses may have been turned into a vampire himself, she declared him Kim's problem. (PROSE: Camera Shy)
Ulysses Dumas and the Eye of Tripoli
Six months later, now into the next year, (PROSE: Camera Shy) Jenny had to “stay up until dawn” to save the Internet from the Eye of Tripoli. (PROSE: Camera Shy, Paying It Forward) The next morning, she was woken up by a phone callf rom Ulysses Dumas, the musician she'd saved from the Vampire King, who said he had an “unusual” problem which he hoped she could help him deal with. She arranged to meet him the following night at the Faux Fur End. There, she learned from Dumas that he had been turned into a vampire himself; although he had mostly made his peace with it, he wondered how he could continue his musical career when cameras could often not detect him (due to vampires' invisibility in mirrors). Before she could think of a solution, she was called away on another adventurer: it was “raining frogs at the mosque again”. She arranged to meet Dumas again a few days later, and, this time, brought Kim, who was able to offer a solution to his problem. (PROSE: Camera Shy)
Helping other Jennies
At some later point, Jenny foiled thirteen-year-old supervillain Professor Awesome. Shortly after this, she shifted to the universe of Cha Ni and visited the Temple of the Oracle. She exchanged some words with the Oracle herself before collecting a list from her. It was a list of other Jennies leading more difficult lives whom this Jenny could go help. Her first destination was the Eurasian steppes of one universe, where she found a pilot Jenny who had downed her aeroplane and gave her the spare part she needed to get off the ground again. The pilot Jenny, in thanks, offered to fly her to her next destination.
The pilot Jenny dropped her off in an African veldt in the next universe on her list, where she met Janni, “She Who Walks In Every Place”, her local counterpart and an Amazon on a mythical quest. One of the items she was tasked with finding being a “wheel of number”, Jenny guessed that what she needed was the round spare flight computer she'd brought to the pilot Jenny alongside the spare part she actually needed. With Janni noting that she couldn't simply accept this prize as a gift, the two made a formal wager of it, with Janni winning the wheel from her in an arm-wrestling contest.
She next headed to a universe whose native Jenny was a djinn, “Genie Everywhere”, trapped in a bottle which had acquired by a museum, where it had obliviously been placed, alongside other similar but non-magical antiques, in a glass case. Breaking the glass, Jenny then unstoppered the bottle, allowing “Genie Everywhere” to begin spilling out of the bottle as magical smoke. The smoke was only beginning to turn back into a human form when the other Jenny made her escape, though she already had enough of a distinct shape to give thankful thumbs-up to her rescuer. Next on her list was the medieval world of Genevieve, Princess of Everywhere. Climbing (with some difficulty) the wall of a castle where the Princess was kept hostage, she slipped her a gun through an arrow-slit, hoping she would make good use of it as part of an escape plan.
Visiting a very familiar universe, she helped avert a fire on the pier of the city, but very nearly evaded notice by the locals (not wanting to cause a fuss by being seen in the same place as her local counterpart). She then ironically headed to a world with exactly opposite requirements, as her local counterpart had summoned dozens of other Jennies to prove a point to a sandy-haired man who'd caused her offence in unspecified ways. Hitching a ride on the bike of the “biker” Jenny alongside a shih tzu Jenny, she was present at the confrontation between this world's proper Jenny and the sandy-haired man at Elysium Park.
She was then invited by the biker Jenny to the “afterparty” alongside a few dozen other Jennies, in another universe. She appreciated the chance to take literal “me time” and hang out with her very diverse other selves, who included a priest Jenny and a Jenny in a futuristic jumpsuit, and even a male incarnation going by Jerry. (PROSE: Paying It Forward) She had some difficulty keeping the “very French” Jeanne Partout and “very English” Jenny Cornelius from arguing too violently with each other. (PROSE: Morning After)
Shifter hangover
On the morning following her “self-helping” adventure, Jenny woke up with shifter hangover due to having overexerted her powers. She phoned her publisher, Stone, to warn her editor Haroun that she might not be at her best in the coming days, though she confirmed that she had sent him one more review, of a band called Coelacanths and Possums. Haroun asked her to also give his regards to her neighbour David, and she complied, taking the opportunity to double-check some of the memories she was suddenly being flooded with against David's own recollections, helping her sort through which were hers and which were bleeding over from other worlds.
She also bumped into Thoth, who warned her that Professor Awesome was “doing mad science again” and might need checking in with. She indeed found young Eric down the stairs working on a new design of de-pants-icator, and talked him out of taking the project further than schematics, promising, in trade, not to tell his mum about the incident. Continuing to be plagued by sideways flashes, including a disturbing one of a world where Professor Awesome was a genuinely dangerous villain and “she” was about to kill him to save the world, Jenny decided to go take a nap to try and sleep it off. (PROSE: Morning After)
Second adventure with Genevieve
An unknown amount of time after these events, Jenny went on an adventure during which she “stole” some pirate treasure, coming back with a chest full of doubloons and a tricorne hat with a large plume.
A short time later, Eric, having been told by his science teacher Mr Hernandez to bring trilobites to school if he had any, and not realising he meant fossils, got Jenny to shift him to a universe where trilobites survived into the modern day and evolved to become terrestrial. They collected a box full of trilobites.
After Jenny went home, Princess Genevieve, one of the Jennies she'd helped and who had attempted at the afterparty, dropped in at her apartment (although the door was actually answered by Kim, as Jenny herself was taking a shower at the time). It quickly surfaced that Genevieve, not possessing reliable shifting powers of her own, had come here using a dream spinner which had a broken down as she was on her way to another, more distant cosmos. Jenny got Eric to fix the device, allowing her other self and her companions Wu and Willow to continue on with their journeys. Immediately afterward, however, a new adventure began as an Angel appeared in the parking lot with much fracas. (PROSE: Pit Stop)
Dating woes
At some point in the winter, Jenny began dating someone who turned out to be the lost Prince of the Lizard Kingdoms, for which reason the relationship did not work out. Mole People attacked the apartment building from the basement, looking for the Prince. Jenny was initially much aggrieved by this turn of events, but had gotten over it by the time Eric came to her and Kim one afternoon, feeling upset about a row he'd had at school with a classmate. Like Kim, Jenny initially got the impression that Eric had had a crush on the girl and been disappointed, and tried to give her advice on the matter, although she couldn't help but bring up the rather improbable circumstances of her last break-up, derailing the conversation somewhat. Eventually, however, she realised the misapprehension. (PROSE: Misunderstandings)
From Mars to Ecord
At some point, Jenny visited a version of Mars in another universe. She brought back some money from there, as well as a kind of Martian bread which she and Kim agreed was delicious. A month later, when she ran out of sourdough while baking bread at home, Kim reminded her of her Martian escapade and she impulsively decided to shift back there to buy some ingredients from them. Instead, however, she found herself materialising in a fantasy world called Ecord, which spontaneously altered her outfit and behaviour into something fitting its narrative, putting her in the (skimpy) clothes and mindset of a clichéd barbarian adventuress.
Soon enough, she had cause to make use of the sword with which she'd ended up as she was attacked by a giant rat. After killing it, she met a warrior called Tyse who had been on its trail. He explained that it was one of many magically-enlarged, monstrous rats sent out by the sorcerous Shamen of Argon to plague the land. Deciding to go along with the flow, she decided to join his quest, with her riding with him to the Temple of Argon to confront the Shamen themselves. On the way, they found their conversation becoming increasingly flirtatious, and they ended up stopping by a riverbank for a short “dalliance”.
Eventually they made their way to the Temple, and, within, to a circular chamber where the Shamen were gathered around a deep pit with their High Priest. After Jenny and Tyse fought off a bevy of giant rats sicced on them by the Shamen, Jenny directed Tyse to keep the lesser Shamen at bay while she confronted the High Priest, who was trying to summon a demonic entity. Ultimately, Jenny killed the creature but, in the same instant, found herself shifting back home, without getting to say goodbye to Tyse. Back home, she gave Kim the High Priest's jeweled, golden necklace which she had grabbed during the fight. (PROSE: Jenny Everywhere and the Eye of Argon)
The anime con misadventure
While trying to track down DVDs of Season 3 of an anime show about herself called Bugendai no Jenī no Itarutokoro, Jenny shifted to a nearby universe to attend the Jiujinshan anime con. However, she found that it was “being held up by some industry A.I.s on strike wanting better working condition”. Somewhere along the way, she picked up a new sidekick in the form of a literal Internet troll. Bringing him back with her, she hopped back to her home universe and apartment in order to pick up the Robot Toaster, intending to bring him back to the anime con, to have him infiltrate the A.I.s' cybernetic fortress, and then, once they accepted him, to have him act as a “spokes-robot” to permit fair negotiations between the A.I.s and humans. Tapping into the computer skills of some of her close alternates, Jenny successfully tinkered with the Robot Toaster to bring it out of “pet” mode and into “cyber-intrusion” mode, before heading off with the Toaser and the Troll — though not before explaining all of this to a rather confused Kim. (PROSE: I Found Him On The Internet)
The Staan worshippers affair
Jenny once found flyers advertising a night-time ritual to “SUMMUN STAAN”. Despite the incompetence implied by the typo-ridden flyer, Jenny resolved to observe the meeting from afar to ensure they did not stumble into successfully summoning anything truly dangerous. While making her way to the disused comic shop where the cultists had made their lair, Jenny bumped into Kim, who asked to know what she was up to, and ended up helping her break in. All their worries proved to be for naught: although the cultists succeeded in summoning the object of their worship, it was not Satan, as they'd mistakenly assumed, but the harmless Stan. (PROSE: Fragment: The Summoning)
Absquatulation
This version of Jenny was one of the ones (PROSE: The Absquatulation of Jenny Everywhere) who disappeared for a little without warning, having been “zapped off” to a secret realm beyond Time. (PROSE: The Disappearance of Jenny Everywhere) There, she and many other Jennies “re-synchronised with [themselves]”, readjusting their shifting powers and mental network after the last few millennia or millions' worth of entanglements and glitches. She reamterialised in her apartment in mid-air over the coffee table, to find that David and Eric had been very worried about her disappearance, going through the trouble of waking Kim up in the middle of the day and making her drink some of a bottle of Jenny's own blood that she kept in a secret cupboard for emergencies. (PROSE: The Absquatulation of Jenny Everywhere)
Cleaning day
Jenny had a bad habit of indiscriminately stuffing items brought back from interdimensional jaunts into the apartment's closet. When one of the items within it — a mammoth-fur coat — got wet and began to stink up the apartment, Kim finally browbeat Jenny into helping her to go through the closet's contents to sort them out. The many strange items they unearthed, most of them Jenny's, included an amnesia orb which caused them quite a bit of trouble as it kept erasing itself from their memories and getting lost again, until Kim finally thought to wrap it inside an old shirt and stuff it into a box before they let it out of their sights again. Eventually, they located the mammoth-fur coat and, “with great relief”, consigned it to the dry cleaner. (PROSE: Cleaning Day)
Interview
This Jenny was the subject of the 23rd entry in Jennifer Dao Chu's series of interviews of herself, which was later printed on a brochure intended to be shared through the Infinite with young incarnations of Jenny who were just getting started. Over the course of the short interview, the music-critic Jenny spoke about her job, her views on the omni-jennic principle, pop culture that may be of interest to shifters, Laura Drake (whom she had never met) and Jenny Nowhere. She ended it on a piece of advice for young Jennies to not give up on trying to pursue something special and personal even in the face of the infinity of other Jennies. “When you know what your thing is,” she explained, “you'll have something special to show to the rest of us.” (PROSE: So You're Jenny Everywhere)
Light reading
On one occasion, Jenny read through a web story which starred another one of her selves. Kim walked by just as she was finishing it, and they exchanged a few words about it. Kim was amused, upon her summary of the tale (where Jenny ended up riding off with a partially-undressed girl tied to her saddle), to hear that it was “one of those stories”, needling Jenny about her pronounced longing to have a little of that kind of fun of late, and the two shared some surreal banter on the subject of whether some pretty boys would be allowed as pets by the terms of their apartment lease — referencing a recent update to those terms from the apartment company's lawyers, pursuant to an incident involving a spherical cow for which Jenny still insisted she wasn't to blame. (PROSE: Fragment: Fanfic Critique)
Watching the sky
At past one in the morning on the night between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, a sleeping Professor Awesome 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.
Subsequently, Jenny headed to another universe where it was currently Epiphany in the 60s, and found Jenny Cornelius out on a date with her Laura Drake, whom the “Kim's friend” Jenny had yet to meet. With no further preamble, the visiting Jenny dropped a fistful of snow down her other self's back, giggling that “turnabout [was] fair play”. After a moment's confused flailing, Jenny Cornelius admitted as much and pulled the other Jenny into a big hug. Laura was rather confused about all this, asking if the “other Jenny” was some kind of a relative, but her good manners prevailed upon her common sense and she asked the other Jenny if she wants to join their day out on the town. (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 as he followed her back to the apartment. The Professor managed to separate the strange robot 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. (PROSE: Valentine's Visitor)
Visit to France
On a day when she had nothing else to do, Jenny received a message from her French counterpart Jeanne Partout in another universe, asking her to take care of minor supervillains the Puritan Streaker and La Frotteuse, (who were up to their usual japes in Nice) while Jeanne was busy in Paris fighting rather more serious threats. Jenny, happy to have an excuse to take a holiday to France, and had faced the dimension-hopping Streaker before, agreed to go, with Kim staying behind because she had some shopping to do.
Though Jenny had been prepared for the Streaker and La Frotteuse, she was taken by surprise by a third member of the villainous alliance, Yaoi Boy, who “knows Shibari-Jitsu”. Finding herself stripped and tied up with magical Japanese knotweed, she tried shifting back to her apartment, but the vines came along with her and she had to wait on the floor until Kim returned from her shopping and was able to cut her free. Jenny later insisted that this story “shouldn't be told” but, on April Fools' Day, Kim insisted on using Professor Awesome's non-canonical imaginizer to project a recording of the events directly onto the Fourth Wall. (PROSE: Return of the Puritan Streaker)
With Octo-Brianna
Jenny once found herself enlisted by a version of Octobriana who was a literal octopus named Brianna, a “friend of a friend” who had “some stuff going on in her world” which Jenny's “amazing superpowers of breathing air and walking on land” might help resolve. Consequently, she was encountered by Professor Awesome on the parking lot behind the apartment building they shared, carrying Brianna in a harness. After double-checking everything in her backpack, Jenny shifted away — inadvertently dropping a grenade, which exploded right after she'd vanished. However, the boy genius's injuries were soon attended to by Sophie Everytime. (PROSE: Preludes and Knick-Knacks)
Behind the scenes
An illustration of this Jenny was created by Aristide Twain on March 29th, 2023 and added by Scott Sanford to the Table of Contents of his Jenny Everywhere stories.
Aristide Twain's artwork of Jenny.
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