Jenny Over-There and the Repairer of Reputations (short story)
Jenny Over-There and the Repairer of Reputations was a planned Jenny Over-There: The Nine-Two-Five Universe prose story developed, and ultimately discarded, by Callum Phillpott between August and December 2022.
Overview
The end of PROSE: Workplace Reunion, released on August 14th, 2022, was meant to lead into what was then supposed to be the next Jenny Over-There: The Nine-Two-Five Universe story, and, as such, ending on the Man in Grey telling Jenny Over-There that the Great Higher-Ups would be sending them the Repairer of Reputations (from Robert W. Chambers's public domain short story of the same name) in the morning in an effort to improve the Multidimensional Finders Service's image after the Interdimensional Pride Parade fiasco depicted in PROSE: A Series of Queer Events. The following day, Phillpott stated on the Jenny Everywhere Discord server that an “outline” of Jenny Everywhere and the Repairer of Reputations had been written; the following day, parts of the story had been written in earnest, and Phillpott additionally alluded to having created a visual of the Yellow Sign to illustrate it (“I’d share it, but I’m not sure if that would be ethical”).
On July 7th, 2023, Phillpott mentioned that a version of Glenda Sif very different from that eventually introduced to the series in PROSE: Lovie Dovie Stuff would have made her debut in Repairer of Reputations, whose status as a cancelled story was now definitive.
| Fun fact: back when I was still trying to write Jenny Over-There and the Repairer of Reputations, I did nearly have Glenda make her first appearance there, though it would've been very different. [She and Thor] would've been broken up for starters, mainly due to him being… well, Dynamite Thor. Glenda also would've been written differently — partly because I hadn't yet had my revelation of “Huh, I keep writing women as only down-to-Earth straight-men characters, I should stop this” and partly because the version of her we see in the Valentine's special is me looking at the character and thinking “What sort of person would willingly stay in a relationship with this version of Dynamite Thor?” (something I wouldn't naturally think of if it's implied they broke up at some point). |
| —Callum Phillpott |
Indeed, PROSE: A Change in Management, released on July 17th, 2023, had quite definitively pushed the plans for the story out of series continuity, resolving the now-redundant setup by off-handedly mentioning that the Repairer of Reputations' appointment with the M.F.S. had been permanently cancelled in-universe to his unexpected death. Jenny's understanding was that he “had been killed by his cat or something”, humorously implying that a version of the actual Chambers plot played out off-screen in parallel to the events of the series. At the end of Chambers's original tale, the Repairer does indeed appear to die in circumstances involving his cat, although a man with a knife is — perhaps more relevantly — also present on the scene. (A popular interpretation of the story is in fact that the Repairer never existed as more than a figment of the narrator's deranged imagination, and the narrator simply kills the cat and believes he has murdered the Repairer of Reputations. However, this is probably not applicable to the putative Nine-Two-Five version of events, where the Great Higher-Ups would be unlikely — though not entirely so — to attempt to hire a madman's delusion as a P.R. subcontractor.)
Also in allusion to the story's cancellation, the only significant change in the updated version of PROSE: Workplace Reunion story that was posted on the newly-created official Jenny Over-There website on July 12th, 2024 was that it ended on a spurious “To be continued” announcement, with the title of Jenny Over-There and the Repairer of Reputations in large print and the outrageous release date of “30th of February, 2875” in very small print.
