Kim (Parallax Universe)
Kim was Jenny Everywhere's roommate, and one of her closest friends, in at least one universe. Although she never referred to herself as one, she appeared to be a vampire.
Description
Physical appearance
David Lowe described Kim as “pretty”. (PROSE: Pit Stop) Jenny once indicated that if the two of them visited Barsoom, Kim could pass for a Thern. (PROSE: Jenny Everywhere and the Eye of Argon) Eric once met an unexpected visitor, observed she was “a tall blonde white woman, with a magazine model figure, who was wearing dark sunglasses on a not very bright day,” and made the logical but wrong guess that she was related to Kim. (PROSE: Auntie Matters)
Personality
Kim was willful, proactive, and practical — as well as a loyal friend to Jenny, whose life she saved on several occasions; (PROSE: Parallax) she was matter-of-fact, perhaps even blasé, about the strange happenings which resulted from Jenny's multi-dimensional nature and in which she often found herself involved, including encounters with different incarnations of Jenny than the one she was used to. Her practicality could help Jenny focus. (PROSE: Pit Stop)
Despite her evident vampirism, she seemingly refused to refer to herself as one. (PROSE: Parallax)
Kim made comments to Eric implying that she was gay; (PROSE: Misunderstandings) indeed, she took a disparaging view of men, and would make joke at their expense even if they happened to be friends of hers. (PROSE: Parallax)
Powers & abilities
Kim was used to bare-handed fighting. Although she never called herself one, she had abilities consistent with being a vampire, including immunity to ordinary tranquiliser drugs, superhuman physical strength (sufficient to kill a dinosaur bare-handed), and even such powers as the ability to levitate (PROSE: Parallax) and to turn into a swarm of bats. (PROSE: Camera Shy) She normally slept during the day, although she could be awakened from her catatonic sleep in case of an emergency by dribbling some blood into her mouth. (PROSE: The Absquatulation of Jenny Everywhere) She sometimes displayed a weakness to sunlight; if exposed to direct, stark sunlight her skin would begin to burn within seconds. (PROSE: Parallax)
Drinking the blood of a given individual would allow Kim to sense their location for a little while afterwards. Drinking Jenny Everywhere's blood gave her a temporary connection not just to the Jenny she'd drunk from, but all other Jennies in the Multiverse, and seemed to also temporarily give her shifting powers. Normally, she had none. However, Jenny did tell her about a few “backdoors out of the universe” just in case, (PROSE: The Absquatulation of Jenny Everywhere) and she possessed a mysterious ability to get through solid doors and to appear behind people without warnings, which Jenny did not fully understand; she confirmed to Jenny, at any rate, that it was not in any way comparable to Jenny's “dimensional shenanigans”, suggesting it was probably not mere teleportation. (PROSE: Fragment: The Summoning)
She habitually carried a small folding knife on her person. (PROSE: Return of the Puritan Streaker)
Kim had some knowledge of mathematics, feeling confident that he could help Eric learn “how to do exponents on the log scale” of a slide rule. (PROSE: Misunderstandings) She also had enough knowledge to “snicker” at the math-based April Fools' Day joke whereby the 10 on David Lowe's apartment door was replaced by an aleph-null. (PROSE: Morning After)
Biography
Origins
Kim's father was reportedly a “fine man”, who she said in the 21st century had passed away “years ago”. (PROSE: Morning After)
When David informed her that 50-year-old Morrie Greenberg had a romantic interest in her, Kim answered that he was “too young” for her. (PROSE: Pit Stop) David also pointed out to Eric that the secret bottle of Jenny's blood she kept in a hidden cupboard in her apartment was in an old, pre-modern style, sealed with wax by hand. (PROSE: The Absquatulation of Jenny Everywhere) She had lived through the era of macaroni fashion. (PROSE: Morning After)
At some point, a “long time ago”, Kim lived together with many other women. She attempted to flirt with many of them, progressively learning that taboo aside, not all women were actually sexually interested in other women, in contrast to what she'd previously assumed. She learned to deal with rejection “gracefully”. (PROSE: Misunderstandings)
Kim once suggested that she had visited London in the past. She also suggested that she had some familiarity with France, including the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. (PROSE: Return of the Puritan Streaker)
20th century
Kim had an eventful life in the 20th century. (PROSE: Cleaning Day) She lived through the 1970s, and, in contrast to David Lowe, didn't think that the fashion then was “that bad”. (PROSE: Morning After)
At one point in the 1980s, an adventure ended with her bringing home a bullet-proof, kevlar umbrella that had originally been the property of a Russian. (PROSE: Cleaning Day)
Friendship with Jenny Everywhere
At some point, Kim met and befriended a version of Jenny Everywhere. Jenny trusted her enough to eventually give her a bottle of her blood for use in emergencies. Kim had cause to use it once, finding the experience extremely overwhelming; she was glad when her temporary Jenny powers subsided, and swore never to do it again, although she still kept the sealed bottle in a safe place in case of an emergency. She would go on to mention this contingency measure to David. Also in case of emergencies, Jenny told Kim about a few ways to leave the universe if it became necessary. (PROSE: The Absquatulation of Jenny Everywhere)
Meeting Jenny Nowhere
Kim once went out to a bar alongside Jenny and some of their friends. After Jenny began feeling nauseous, she accompanied Jenny to the bathroom, where they were confronted by Jenny Nowhere, whom this Jenny had never encountered in any form, and who was the one who'd slipped something in Jenny's beer. 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 (including in the air above a forest, in which location Kim's levitation abilities proved lucky). 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. After Fiona, a werewolf, defeated the King's two revenant guards, she 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 using wooden bullets. 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. (PROSE: Camera Shy)
Helping Ulysses Dumas
The next year, and six months after they'd foiled the Vampire King together, Jenny and Kim received a call from Ulysses Dumas, the musician they'd saved from the King's dungeon; it transpired that he had ended up turning into a vampire after all following his ordeal, and he was worried about how this would impact his career, given that some types of camera could no longer pick him up. Jenny went to the first meeting alone, but set a second appointment with Dumas where she brought Kim, who suggested he wear full-body make-up as part of his stage persona. (PROSE: Camera Shy)
Jenny's stories
After Jenny Everywhere suffered from a bout of shifter hangover, David Lowe dropped in to talk to Kim about what he'd learned about Jenny from her mutterings about her other lives, asking Kim if she'd ever met Jenny Everywhere's father. Their conversation awoke a napping Jenny, who told them a few more surprising anecdotes about other lives of hers, ending with a full a cappella performance of a song from a disco equivalent of Jesus Christ Superstar that a 1970s Jenny was apparently very into. (PROSE: Morning After)
With Princess Genevieve
When Genevieve, Princess of Everywhere visited Jenny and Kim's apartment, it was Kim who answered the door, as her Jenny was taking a shower at the time. Unimpressed with the medieval, magical “Jenny”, she approached the situation with curt practicality, translating the Princess's talk of “waylaid dream spinners” into the realisation that she had left her interdimensional vehicle unattended in the nearby parking lot. Kim helped Professor Awesome repair the device, and, after Genevieve repaid him with a large gold coin, she offered to help Eric translate that gold into modern money and to take him to the hardware store so that he could spend these “wages” on new equipment and parts. She explained that she was already all set to sell some gold, as she had to make something of a chest of pirate gold Jenny had brought back from a recent adventure. Before they could do so, an Angel appeared with much fracas in the very same parking lot, heralding yet another crazy adventure. (PROSE: Pit Stop)
Advising Professor Awesome
One day, after Eric came home from school, he dropped in on Kim and Jenny, feeling down about a row he'd had with a girl in his class, Judy, which his mother was “being weird” about. Coming to the incorrect conclusion that Eric had taken a romantic interest in Judy and been disappointed, she tried to give him a rambling collection of dating advice, helped by Jenny. Eventually, the misunderstanding became clear, and a somewhat mortified Kim offered to move on to helping Eric with his homework. Eric was mildly reluctant to put in the work for his math homework, not seeing what the point of learning to use a side-rule was when he had four calculator apps on his phone, but he eventually agreed, especially asking Kim to help him understand “how to do exponents on the log scale”. (PROSE: Misunderstandings)
Incidents at home
At some point, Kim greatly enjoyed some Martian bread brought home from another universe by Jenny. A month later, when Jenny ran out of sourdough to make bread, Kim reminded her of this bread, spurring Jenny to attempt to shift back to that version of Mars to get some ingredients from there. However, Jenny ended up in the fantasy world of Ecord instead, and Kim saw her rematerialise a little while later in a skimpy barbarian outfit, holding out a sword. This prompted some casual banter between the two, with them getting on the subject of a shared wish to someday visit Barsoom. (PROSE: Jenny Everywhere and the Eye of Argon)
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 conditions”. 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. As she arrived, she and the Troll were greeted by a rather confused Kim, who watched as Jenny tapped into the computer skills of some of her close alternates and successfully tinkered with the Robot Toaster to bring it out of “pet” mode and into “cyber-intrusion” mode. (PROSE: I Found Him On The Internet)
On another occasion Jenny was unable to wade through a dense and inaccessible physics text, and being rather dramatic about her trouble. Upon discovering that An Introduction to Recreational Metric Engineering had been, or was going to be, critical to Professor Awesome’s creation of the Time Pestle she pointedly reminded Jenny to lock it up when she was done not reading it. (PROSE: Heavy Reading)
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)
Unexpected awakening
One day, after Jenny mysteriously disappeared, a worried Eric broke into Kim and Jenny's apartment with the help of the Robot Toaster. Finding an unmoving, unresponsive Kim on the bed, he panicked and called David Lowe for help. Being aware of Kim's nature, David was not worried about Kim's apparent catatonia himself, but he agreed that Jenny's disappearance was concerning enough to warrant waking her up in the daytime. Recalling what she'd told him about the bottle of Jenny's blood, David located the hideaway and dribbled some of the precious liquid into Kim's mouth. She woke up with a start, lashing out like a wounded animal at David, with her claws out, until her higher brain functions came back online and she calmed down.
She was worried when David told her what blood he'd made her drink, as she couldn't actually feel Jenny's presence as she should have — not “her” Jenny, and not any of the other infinite Jennies in the Multiverse either. Before long, however, she felt their presences all returning, and her roommate reappeared with a “Pop” in the middle of the room. Jenny explained that she was never in any danger: (PROSE: The Absquatulation of Jenny Everywhere) her and all her other selves' temporary disappearance was something that occasionally happened to Jenny, serving to resynchronise the mental connection between them all. (PROSE: The Absquatulation of Jenny Everywhere, The Disappearance 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)
Jenny's reading
On one occasion, Jenny exchanged a few words with Kim about a story starring another of her incarnations that she's just read through. 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. (PROSE: Fragment: Fanfic Critique)
As an ethical advisor
One day she visited Professor Awesome, who had been bullied into building a Heteronormalizer by a teacher uncomfortable with the antics of hormonal teenagers. He explained that the gadget did not in fact work, but was a placebo meant to get him out of an awkward situation, and incidentally extract money from the teacher. She agreed that it was unethical to sell a machine he knew wouldn’t work but also that the teacher was wrong to have demanded it in the first place; he assured her he didn’t plan to make a habit of it. (PROSE: Professional Ethics)
Jenny's trip to France
On a day when she had nothing else to do, Jenny Everywhere 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)
Behind the scenes
The implications in Parallax and Camera Shy point to Kim being some form of vampire, but this is purposefully left ambiguous. On the topic of Kim's potential vampirism, Sanford later commented on the Jenny Everywhere Discord:
| And yet she never says the V word. No doubt there's a story there. [But] I think Kim is over-exposed in Jenny's circle of friends and shouldn't be front & center in anything else for a while. A quote did come to me a while back, which she may never say in a story: “I lived a very conventional life once. Then I had an appointment in Samara and realized I could take the scenic route home.” Or if she was feeling more blunt, “a rare condition; symptoms include nocturnal insomnia, changes in appetite, and a propensity to Cotard’s Delusion”. |
| —Scott Sanford |
In 2022, Aristide Twain created a visualisation of Kim, which to date remains her only depiction in visual media. She was depicted with facial features based on 1970s horror actress Ingrid Pitt, best known for portraying lesbian vampire Carmilla in the 1970 Hammer film The Vampire Lovers.
Aristide Twain's artwork of Kim.
Notes & references
- ↑ (Scott Sanford quote from the Discord server: “I wouldn't object to Kim making guest appearances in other people's stories. Go right ahead, if you feel like it.”)
