Lailoken
Lailoken was the Abstract of Knowledge, who often appeared in the guise of Glendalf, alias the Drag Wizard, a flamboyantly queer wizard and adventurer. In the Collapsed Cosmos, Jenny Everywhere went on an adventure with him and a group of Orcs after falling afoul of a “reality accident” in a dimensionally-unstable library. Upon meeting him there, memories flooded to her of numerous previous adventures she had shared with him prior to the collapse of the Multiverse that had given birth to the Collapsed Cosmos.
Description
Physical appearance
Glendalf had a long white beard. During his adventure with Jenny Everywhere in the Collapsed Cosmos, he wore a “magnificently sparkly” silver-coloured dress and a tall conical hat to match. He carried a purse containing many useful items. He was lighter, and a head shorter, than Octobriana. (PROSE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere)
Personality
Unsurprisingly for a wizard, Glendalf was reclusive and eccentric, and much concerned with the “proper way” for a wizard to behave, which included being mysterious, and dropping in on people unannounced to drag them into quests. Enamoured with the idea of an adventure rather than the particular, he would insist his traveling companions stop in dangerous places simply because it was proper for an adventure to include digressions. He was also protective of the good names of magic and alchemy.
Although he strongly condemned one billionaire for her transphobic bigotry, Glendalf generally had little patience for “queer discourse” and sat out most debates of that nature, refusing to let any of their conclusions affect his lifestyle.
He claimed that he “had a way of cropping up where [he was] never expected”. (PROSE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere)
Powers & abilities
Glendalf made statements suggesting he was an alchemist as well as a wizard. He was also adept at disabling magical defences.
Glendalf carried a miniature airship in his purse which he could transform back into a usable, full-size vehicle with a few magic words. He could also cast the [Sleep] spell using his staff, which would glow pink when he did so; he simply had the recite the name of the spell in the proper way for the spell to be cast.
Due to his nature as a wizard, Glendalf's dreams had a tendency of literally coming true in his sleep; for example, when an acid flashback caused him to dream that he was covered in spiders, such spiders actually materialised. (PROSE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere)
Biography
Early life
Glendalf once dated another wizard, the headmaster Mumblecore, but they broke up due to Mumblecore choosing the path of assimilationism while Glendalf preferred to remain an eccentric outcast. Glendalf was “condemned and then rehabilitated by successive waves of queer discourse, blissfully oblivious to all of it, keeping to himself and smoking various substances in his pipe”. (PROSE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere)
Adventures with Jenny
In the Collapsed Cosmos, upon meeting Glendalf, the “collapsed” Jenny remembered him as a “veteran partner in adventuring” of hers. They reminisced about a number of adventures they'd shared in the good old days, including “battling Lord Grallyx on the astral plane”, “besieging the Tower of Zirma with Octobriana”, and “getting high with the Magician of Mars in Washington to levitate the Pentagon”. He also once helped her deal with recurring memories of “shifting through the Overvoid”. Given the nature of the Collapsed Cosmos, was somewhat unclear if all of these memories featured the same incarnation of Jenny, or indeed the same version of Glendalf, but Glendalf was at any rate familiar with the existence of other incarnations of Jenny, including several who were wizards themselves. (PROSE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere)
With the League of Liberation
At some point, in what may or may not have been the same continuity as the above adventures, Glendalf was part of the League of Liberation in the 1960s, together with Jenny, Octobriana, the Magician from Mars, Ace Harlem, Butterfly, Trashman and Madam Fatal. The League was part of a wider secret organisation known as the Sixth International and opposed the Sixth Column, a villainous cult worshipping Stardust the Super-Wizard. Glendalf found Trashman in particular to be frustrating to work with because he was “desperately heterosexual” despite dressing in large amounts of leather. Like Jenny and Octobriana, howevr, Glendalf was very affected by Trashman's eventual tragic death. (PROSE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere)
In the Collapsed Cosmos
After the Multiverse broke down into a single Collapsed Cosmos, Glendalf seemed at first to have ceased to exist. However, after Jenny Everywhere was caught in a small accident in a library while reality was particularly unstable, she found herself in an adventure that mingled her daily life in the Collapsed Cosmos with elements from several books. This resulted in Glendalf knocking at her door with a group of twelve Orcs, including Jegrekk Gnashtooth, Absoldar, J. Barrington Boartusk and Agrzaan Lurgpin, intent on having an adventure with Jenny. He remembered his old adventures with Jenny and, more generally, the old order of things; her sheer encounter with him, even before he began reminiscing, helped Jenny recover more of her past identity (or, as the case may be, identities) than she'd had access to before.
Though intent on “an adventure” in general terms, Glendalf had no particular target in mind, hoping Jenny would think of something. Thus, while Jenny wracked her brains trying to come up with something, Glendalf and the Orcs stayed at her flat for dinner and overnight, with Jenny and Glendalf spending the evening reminiscing about past adventures and discussing the current sorry state of reality. Finally, one of the Orcs, Absoldar, suggested that they raid the mansion of a billionaire writer who had disgraced magic and alchemy through her bigotry. In addition to a large fortune, her mansion in Scotland was allegedly home to a Legendary Time Crystal, which Jenny believed could be used to restore reality to its former state.
After drawing plans for the rest of the evening, Glendalf, Jenny and the Orcs went to sleep, intent on leaving the next morning In the night, Glendalf had an acid flashback, dreaming that there were spiders all over his body; due to his magic, such spiders indeed materialised, and Jenny helped him deal with them. The following morning, they left for Scotland aboard Glendalf's magically-enlarged airship; on the way, Glendalf wanted the crew to stop for a “digression” in the woods of Faerie”, but the Orcs talked him down. Once they arrived at the mansion, Glendalf took down the magical defences, leaving Jenny and the Orcs to carry off the actual heist. After most of the plan went off smoothly, Jenny was confronted with Laura Drake; their duel had a destabilising effect on reality, causing the part-fictional narrative to crumble. Jenny woke up from it on a prehistoric beach with Glendalf nowhere in sight, with a dim awareness that she had “fallen into a book” prior to losing consciousness.
Later managing to shift herself back to the same frame of reference, however, Jenny discovered that after making it out of the mansion, Glendalf and the Orcs had indeed headed back to Faerie, where they came under threat from the Queen of Faerie herself. Glendalf was able to get the Orcs to safety through a portal, but the Queen “got her” and turned him into, or fused him with, a gnarled, barren tree in a clearing, using him as bait for Jenny. Jenny freed him using her hard-light staff, as given to her by the Illumination. However, the two, finding themselves in a different aspect of Faerie, which resembled overrun ruins, found themselves chased by the Wild Hunt as the Queen has warned.
After Jenny managed to deal some damage to the Wild Hunt, they managed to make their way to the Red Lion Inn, where Glendalf restored some of his strength with a mimosa-based drink. Jenny had met up with Octobriana and Glendalf joined the conversation. After Archondroids burst into the Inn and the unreasonable Octobriana tried to fight them, Glendalf cast a [Sleep] spell on her to protect her from herself, only to find that he was not strong enough to carry her unconscious form to safety. After turning the Archondroids against the Wild Hunt so that they'd keep each other busy, Glendalf and Jenny then smuggled the unconscious Octobriana to safety through the tunnels beneath the Red Lion Inn.
They emerged in a Limbo realm where they found an abandoned but fully-stocked cabin; there, they elected to hunker down and recuperate. Octobriana enjoyed a good night's sleep and, in the morning, after Jenny helped soothe bother her, Glendalf's, and Octobriana's heartaches by playing her theriamen, Glendalf slunk away to give the two some privacy as they caught up, with the excuse that he was going to do some further scouting of the Limbo dimension. (PROSE: The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere)
Other activities
“Professor Lailoken” was active at the Neptunian Orbital University in one universe, posing as an ordinary human scholar. He acted as something of a mentor to Laura Drake, discreetly encouraging her to make use of discarded university lab equipment for her own experiments. (PROSE: Extradimensional Experiments)
Behind the scenes
Glendalf is a transparent parody of Gandalf, the wizard from J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbit and Lord of the Rings; the setup of him appearing at the protagonist's door with a number of representatives of a nonhuman species mirrors the opening scene of The Hobbit, where Gandalf arrives at Bilbo Baggins's door with a troop of Dwarves.
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