Jenny Over-There (925th Universe)
The version of Jenny Over-There from the 925th Universe, sometimes known as the Finder, was a woman from one universe who accidentally gained the ability to know where any item or person in the Multiverse was located. Discovered by the Man in Grey, she became the original employee of his “Multidimensional Finders Service”.
She was occasionally nicknamed Jen or Jen-dog by Peter Thor, (PROSE: Annals of the Jen: One Year of Jenny Over-There) and once used the throwaway alias of the Lovebomber while posing as a supervillain. (PROSE: Lovie Dovie Stuff)
Description
Physical appearance
Jenny was frequently described as having an “under-described” face; (PROSE: Open Sourcing) one account stated that “her hair was a scruffy brownish-reddish mangle” and “her face was… [add description later]." (PROSE: Lovie Dovie Stuff) Another source concurred that she had “reddish-brown hair”. (PROSE: Annals of the Jen: One Year of Jenny Over-There: Wakey Wakey) By one source, she appeared as “a skinny woman wearing dark trousers and a red cardigan”. (PROSE: Family Business)
Personality
Jenny Over-There was not very happy with her lot in life, often dreaming of the simpler life she might have had if she'd never gained her powers. She found her rather mundane workdays stifling and held little fondness for the Man in Grey. She seemed to share Jenny Everywhere's taste for toast. (PROSE: The Tribulations of Jenny Over-There)
She didn't much care for crowded, over-busy parties, and once remarked that she “wasn't a singer” and “barely even a talker”. (PROSE: A Series of Queer Events (2024 reedit)) Even before she got her powers, she had been planning, to some possibly un-serious extent, to set the SatNav factory she worked at on fire out of frustration. (PROSE: Open Sourcing) She was proudly aromantic and asexual. (PROSE: A Series of Queer Events)
Powers & abilities
Because SatNavs sometimes pick up information from other universes, “which is why SatNavs sometimes tell you to drive off the road”, Jenny somehow gained a similar ability after her accident. She had merely to concentrate on the subject of search to get a mental image of it and its current surroundings, as well as abstract knowledge of where they were located. When she was awake, her brain more generally “buzzed with coordinates for anything and everything”.
Also due to the SatNav chips embedded in her brain, she could, to a point, “speak any language”, although she had to wait for machine translations to occur to her back and forth in a synthetic voice only she could hear, before repeating the foreign-language answer phonetically — making cross-language conversations quite challenging at any length. (PROSE: The Tribulations of Jenny Over-There)
At the M.F.S. office, she had access to an easily-used, portable teleportation ray. (PROSE: Open Sourcing)
She had some degree of Fourth Wall Awareness. (PROSE: Family Business)
Biography
Early life
Before being convinced of an arbitrary lie which suggested otherwise, the Man in Grey believed Jenny's birthday to be “sometime in May”. (PROSE: Annals of the Jen: One Year of Jenny Over-There: Happy Birthday, Jenny Over-There!)
Jenny was very fond of the Sherlock Holmes books as a child. (PROSE: Annals of the Jen: One Year of Jenny Over-There: The Birthday Toaster) She once noted that she “wasn't the best student in school”. (PROSE: Family Business)
As they grew up, she and her cousin Marietta Over-There were the best of friends. Highlights of their interactions included “playing tag, talking about boys in a way that made it very clear that neither of [them] felt any attraction towards them despite feigning it due to societal norms”, and watching “scary movies” such as The Little Shop of Horrors, “[not] even the good one” but the one “with the bad paper mâché plant”. (PROSE: A Very Jenny Over-There Christmas) By another telling, the two were kinder to the film, with Marietta simply describing it as not even being “the scary one”, prompting Jenny to comment that really, neither of the films had been meant to be scary. Despite its relative unscariness, the young Marietta was very frightened of the nasal-voiced plant and had recurring nightmares about it. At any rate, the other two girls also amused themselves by “looking at all those goofy pictures in the John Dee translation of the Necronomicon”. (PROSE: A Very Jenny Over-There Christmas (2024 reedit))
At any rate, a fourteen-years-old Marietta got drawn deeper into occultism and, making contact with Nyarlathotep, was convinced by him to sacrifice Jenny's cat Grober in a ritual to summon Yog-Sothoth. Heartbroken and horrified, Jenny ceased all contacts with Marietta for ten years, during which Marietta, brought to her senses by her cousin's reaction, sought to atone for her mistake by using her magic for good as the heroic “Lady Satan”. (PROSE: A Very Jenny Over-There Christmas)
Jenny once took a culinary arts class, but ended up failing. (PROSE: Annals of the Jen: One Year of Jenny Over-There: The Birthday Toaster)
Gaining her powers
Jenny originally worked at a SatNav factory. Frustrated with her bosses, she had made up her mind to set fire to the factory when it exploded of its own accord. Bizarrely, the accident, (PROSE: Open Sourcing) which left the building to become deserted, gaining the nickname of “the Abandoned, Possibly Haunted SatNav Factory”, (PROSE: Lovie Dovie Stuff) conferred upon her an “inhuman sense of direction”, her brain now able to instinctively know the location of any given item or person in the Multiverse — although, at first, she did not realise she could also tap into universes and merely thought she knew where everything in her world was. As an unpleasant side-effect of the accident, she also began to hear a faint, electronic hissing sound permanently.
She first noticed her powers while in hospital after the accident, when she was able to tell a nurse where she'd put down her glasses despite not having seen her do so. The nurse, however, thought nothing of it. Her powers only attracted public notice a short while later when “a small boy got trapped by a fallen tree in the middle of a field” and she provided the coordinates which made his rescue possible. Among the people who contacted her were O.M.S.C.F., Kablamazon affiliates, her own nan whom she had previously believed to be dead — and, finally, the Man in Grey, who asked if she’d like to participate in a study of her powers, and was the only petitioner to promise monetary compensation. After realising her powers were multidimensional in nature, he offered her a job which paid £5000, as the sole employee of the Multidimensional Finders Service. (PROSE: The Tribulations of Jenny Over-There)
As sole employee of the M.F.S.
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As the key employee of the M.F.S., Jenny's task was to take calls on the Red Interdimensional Telephone for a whole work day, telling callers from across the Multiverse (and across all walks of life) how to find whatever they wanted found. She was not supposed to refuse any requests, save for demands to know the location of Jenny Everywhere, due to such a question being inherently meaningless.
One otherwise-typical day saw her, in-between calls, getting a personal visit from Doctor Omega, who dismantled her toaster to “borrow its thermal reactor. Jenny Over-There ordered a replacement toaster at Kablamazon and was surprised when, near the end of the work-day, it was delivered by a version of Jenny Everywhere, who had briefly called her earlier in the day with “Jenny O.” realising who she was talking to. Just before going home, “Jenny O.” decided to leave a call about Jenny Everywhere unanswered even though she was now able to answer it. (PROSE: The Tribulations of Jenny Over-There)
New hires
One day, Jenny reported to the M.F.S. office only to find the Red Interdimensional Telephone disconnected and her desk gone. The Man in Grey explained that he wanted her help screening new applicants as the Great Higher-Ups wished for the Multidimensional Finders Service to hire more people than just her. After harrowingly narrowing down the list of 193 applicants to just four — Talbot Molossus, the Hydrant, 0000-8888888, and Doctor Know-It-All — Jenny was crushed to learn that they were to staff a new M.F.S. office in Scotland, rather than join her in Wales. However, the Man in Grey then also asked her opinion on the possibility of hiring an intern to help run the Welsh office. She enthusiastically agreed and ended up recommending hapless failed superhero Dynamite Thor for the post, feeling sorry for him after he had made multiple bungled attempts to get hired for the new positions throughout the day. (PROSE: Open Sourcing)
Pride Month with Peter
When the Man in Grey set up a Pride Month campaign, Jenny was initially irritated by the Man's inane proposal that the M.F.S. would, for the duration of Pride, allow callers to ask to know arbitrary people's sexualities. When the Man in Grey tasked Dynamite Thor with decorating the M.F.S. office, she gladly took the opportunity to get out of the office to help him shop for decorations. The two discovered Professor Helvetius's Convenient Pride Decorations Shop, where they found a great number of flags and other decorations. When they brought them back to the office, however, they found the Man in Grey waiting for them, put in a very bad mood by his dismissal from the Interdimensional Pride Council over having tried to sell out to a number of unethical sponsors. He forbade Thor and Jenny from decorating the office at all, greatly distressing Thor.
Seeing how much his first official Pride Month meant to her new friend (who explained that he had only recently come out as asexual, even to himself), she clarified to him that she was herself aroace, and suggested that they use the stock of decorations to throw their own party, which they spent a week planning, using Helvetius's interdimensional, bigger-on-the-inside shop as a venue. The party lived up to Thor's hopes and he had a great time, as did Jenny Over-There, who spent most of it hanging around one of the multiple versions of Jenny Everywhere in attendance, (PROSE: A Series of Queer Events) the 38167th Universe's Jenny. (PROSE: Family Business)
Abducted by Jenny Nowhere
On or slightly before June 17th, 2022, Jenny received a phone call on the Red Interdimensional Telephone from a mysterious woman who was actually the 38167th Universe's Jenny Nowhere, who asked her for the location of Pixie Pristine's crystal ball in order to steal it. After Jenny guilelessly gave it to her, Nowhere appeared in the M.F.S. office and kidnapped Over-There, taking her to Nowhere Island and dispassionately tying her to a tree for Jenny Everywhere and friends to find as, in turn, they made their way through the Island. After they untied her, Over-There was able to direct them to the Castle of Nowhere in the middle of the island, and to confirm Sophie Everytime's presence inside. After they made their way there and were captured by Nowhere, Over-There interrupted Nowhere's evil monologue, demanding explanations about the history she was alluding to, which Nowhere agreed to provide. After Nowhere was defeated, the heroes rowed out to sea from the Island to get out of the shift-cancelling era, and Jenny Everywhere then shifted everyone back home. (PROSE: Family Business)
Reappearing in the darkened M.F.S. office, Jenny was pleased to note that it was now 2 a.m. and she had missed an afternoon at work. After noticing absently that she had mistakenly brought Pixie Pristine's crystal ball with her, she almost literally tripped over Dynamite Thor and then was confronted with the Man in Grey, thus discovering in short succession that both of them had no other home than the M.F.S. office and stayed there at night. While Thor was distraught to have hissed his chance to rescue his friend as a damse-in-distress, and insisted on giving her one of his “Thor Signallers” (modified grenades), the Man in Grey half-heartedly scolded her before sending her home, insisting that she needed to be on her best behaviour the next day as the M.F.S. would be getting a visit from the Repairer of Reputations. (PROSE: Workplace Reunion)
Christmas 2022
On Christmas Eve 2022, Jenny took her leave from the M.F.S. office and drove back to the Over-There family home. There, though happy to see her parents, she was upset to find Marietta, whom she had not forgiven for killing Grober. She briefly tried making conversation but Marietta's seemingly overly casual attitude about the event soon caused her to storm upstairs to her room, where she listlessly switched on the television. However, after a while, Marietta came up to join her and explained that she had in fact regretted the deed bitterly for these ten years, and it had driven her to start using her powers for good. She further revealed that she had, at last, found a safe way to magically bring Grober back to life, gifting Jenny a magical coin which would allow the both of them to visit the Underworld to bring Grober back.
After Jenny forgave her, Marietta noticed reports on the televised news about an ongoing crisis at the Dibbsy Store in America, and abruptly asked Jenny for its exact address, which Jenny gave; Jenny was surprised, though only mildly so, when she then learned the truth about her cousin by seeing the news broadcast continue by reporting on the sudden appearance at the scene of the magic-wielding superhero Lady Satan. Afterwards, she went down to have Christmas dinner with her family, pleased to see that Marietta had already returned and would share in the meal. (PROSE: A Very Jenny Over-There Christmas)
Some time later, the two visited the Underworld together and successfully brought Grober back, although Jenny's apartment turned out to have a no-pets policy, forcing her to leave him with her parents. (PROSE: Annals of the Jen: One Year of Jenny Over-There: Wakey Wakey)
Valentine's Day 2023
On Valentine's Day 2023, the aroace Jenny was trying to enjoy a werewolf movie and a box of cheap chocolates in the comfort of her own home when she was called upon by Peter “Dynamite” Thor, who wanted her help to handle the matter of his secret identity with Glenda Sif, his girlfriend. Unable to convince Thor that his girlfriend obviously already knew, she ended up being put through to Glenda herself, who confirmed as much. Having learned that Thor's main worry was that publicly being known as a superhero's girlfriend would lead to her getting abducted by supervillains, they decided to neutralise that worry by making Thor think that Glenda had gotten kidnapped even without that knowledge.
To do so, Jenny adopted a hastily-improvised supervillain identity as “the Lovebomber”, a maniac who kidnapped people's partners on Valentine's Day and attempted to blow them up using sticks of dynamite with impractically long fuses. After incompetently tying Glenda to a chair in the Abandoned, Possibly Haunted SatNav Factory (where Glenda had insisted on setting the scene despite Jenny's bad memories associated with the place) and luring Thor there, Jenny lit the fuse then left the premises, quickly returning home and taking off the ridiculous mask and heart insignia once and for all. The madcap scheme actually worked out to Thor and Glenda's satisfaction, with Thor confessing his true identity. Glenda, who found that she had missed the thrill of being a damsel-in-distress (to which she'd been accustomed in her days dating Grant Farrel), told Jenny to give her a call if she decided to carry on being a supervillain, though a significantly disturbed Jenny shot down the idea flatly. (PROSE: Lovie Dovie Stuff)
A short time later, while on his way out to get some lunch for himself and Jenny, Thor found himself face-to-face with a visitor, something the M.F.S. got excessively few of. He was the Man in Gray, a counterpart of the Man in Grey from a nearby universe who wanted to discuss the Man in Grey's lack of a Talisman of Restriction with him. Thor was oblivious to the difference between them, unlike Jenny, who informed the visitor that the Man in Grey was out. Telling her to inform the Man in Grey that he would return, the Man in Gray left with no further fuss. (PROSE: Fragment: A & E)
Meeting Bunny Everyhare
On an ordinary, boring day, while scrolling through her smartphone looking for some games to while away her working hours, after getting a fairly ordinary call from a version of Nyarlathotep, Jenny got a call from a gravelly-voiced villain asking for the location of Benito, of Super Benito Siblings fame. She was baffled when she realised that her powers weren't working on either Benito or the caller, and went to the Man in Grey for advice. He helped her to realise that the figure who'd called her seemed to be actor Dwight White's version of the Super Benito Siblings villain Bonham; at his suggestion, she accepted another call, this one from Nyarlathotep's quarry Dwain Carter, and indeed found that she was still able to inform him of the location of what he wanted (that “damn fourth Shining Trapezohedron”), meaning the problem was exclusive to “Bonham” and related figures, as confirmed upon getting a second, angrier call for Bonham, at whom she hangs up again.
Next and most startling of all is a prank call from a squeaky-voiced individual asking for her own location right before jumping in through the window as soon as Jenny announces that this is where she is. The caller, who looked conspicuously like a cartoon-rabbit version of Jenny Everywhere, promptly introduced herself as Bunny Everyhare, a being from the Null, and explained that the “Bonham” who proceeded to blow open the doors of the M.F.S. office was in fact a manifestation of her archnemesis and fellow Null-entity, Bunny Nullhare, though he was not fully aware of it. As a cartoonishly destructive battle began with Bonham on one side, and Bunny Everyhare and Dynamite Thor on the other, Jenny and the Man in Grey found themselves unwilling to gamble on which of “Bonham loses to a small bunny-girl with a big mallet” or “the alleged third-most-powerful-being-in-the-Multiverse loses to an unimpressive cartoon villain” would be considered funnier by Bunny's carton-physics-based powers. Brainstorming alternatives, they realised that as Bonham's canonical archnemesis Benito was a copyright lawyer, and Bonham-the-character was copyrighted fiction in this universe, it made narrative sense for them to call Kyujudo's copyright lawyers on them for a metafictional, comedic anticlimax. Kyujudo summoned a phalanx of the interdimensional Legalmen Collective, who managed to subdue Bonham, after which Bunny helped him fade back into nonexistence, returning to the Null herself in the process.
With the matter clearly resolved, Jenny returned to her ordinary duties, getting another phone call — again from Nyarlathotep, though now in a different avatar which looked conspicuously like another Bunny Nullhare — just in time to inform him, but only with Yog-Sothoth's express permission, that Dwain and Karolyn Carter were now safe in Kadath. (PROSE: Who Laws the Lawyers?)
Contacted by the 775th Universe
At one point, in the 775th Universe, Laura Drake received a question from an interdimensional observer inquiring as to the name of the universe in which this Laura resided. Before Laura could answer, the Interdimensional Ham Radio she was using spontaneously put her through to the Multidimensional Finders Service, and a bored-looking Jenny Over-There informed her that her universe was “Reality #775” before hanging up. (COMIC: The Demon and the Butterfly: Special Q&A)
Unexpected birthday
One morning, after waking up too early, Jenny realised with a start that she had been working for the Multidimensional Finders Service for a full year, something to which she initially reacted quite negatively, dreading the prospect of spending her whole life doing this unfulfilling throwaway job. (PROSE: Annals of the Jen: One Year of Jenny Over-There: Wakey Wakey)
At work, she remained fairly gloomy, with even a call from the actual Doctor Watson (PROSE: Annals of the Jen: One Year of Jenny Over-There: The Birthday Toaster, PROSE: Dark Dealings) failing to cheer her up. While she was contemplating the toaster in the break-room — which had been there as long as she had —, she was accosted by the Man in Grey, who unexpectedly asked her for advice on how to protest his banishment from the Land of Oz — in the process breaking the news of his romantic entanglement with Professor Wogglebug to a baffled Jenny. After an elated Man in Grey received news that at the Professor's intercession, Ozma had agreed to set a formal trial date for him, Jenny decided to take advantage of his good mood to ask for the day off, spuriously claiming that it was her actual birthday. He agreed to give it to her, provided she stayed an hour more to complete this shift. (PROSE: Annals of the Jen: One Year of Jenny Over-There: The Birthday Toaster)
Before the hour was up, she was called back to the breakroom by the Man in Grey, where she was surprised to see that, taking the claim that it was her birthday quite seriously, he had set up an emergency birthday party for her, complete with grey party hats as well as a grey, but tasty, cake. This helped her realise that she liked working for the M.F.S. well enough, and her weariness was more down to being overworked than due to the nature of the work or environment. Daring to push her luck, she thus asked the uncharacteristically pleasant Man in Grey if she could renegotiate her working hours, and, granting that she was an essential employee and thus in a position to bargain, the Man in Grey agreed in principle, with the two retreating into the Man in Grey's office to discuss it further. (PROSE: Annals of the Jen: One Year of Jenny Over-There: Happy Birthday, Jenny Over-There!)
Behind the scenes
Genesis
Jenny Over-There was introduced in 2022 in The Tribulations of Jenny Over-There, an April Fools' Day story by Callum Phillpott. Phillpott's rendition of “the Paragraph” released Jenny Over-There as an open-source character in her own right under similar conditions to Jenny Everywhere and other recurring characters.[1]
| The characters of Jenny Everywhere, Jenny Nowhere, Jenny Somewhere, and now Jenny Over-There are available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Over-There, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed. |
| —Callum Phillpott |
Notes & References
| Incarnations of Jenny Over-There | ||||
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