Open Sourcing (short story)

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Open Sourcing was a short story written by Callum Phillpott. The second in Phillpott's Jenny Over-There: The Nine-Two-Five Universe series, it continued the story of their creations Jenny Over-There and the Man in Grey, and featured appearances by multiple other public-domain and open-source characters.

In 2024, a heavily updated version was published on the official Jenny Over-There: The Nine-Two-Five Universe website.

Contents

Plot

One morning, Jenny Over-There reports to the M.F.S. office for what she expected to be a routine day at the office, only to find her desk and the Red Interdimensional Telephone gone, and the Man in Grey waiting for her. He explains that normal operations of the Multidimensional Finders Service are suspended for the day so that Jenny can help him interview new candidates interested in joining the Service. As they settle in the interview room, the first candidate shows himself in the person of Dynamite Thor, but the Man in Grey rejects him on the basis that he was formerly copyrighted and he only wants candidates who are, in this metafictional sense, “open-source”.

The first serious candidate is a man made of metal called Metal O'Maniac, who casually confesses to having set his previous place of work on fire due to them not paying him enough, making both nervous. He is followed by the pair of best friends Talbot Molossus and the Hydrant; despite Talbot's urbane and professional demeanour, Jenny and the Man in Grey find it exceedingly difficult to take them seriously due to their looking respectively like a humanoid dog and a humanoid fire hydrant. An hour and a half in, a man who looks suspiciously like a version of Batman walks in, and ends up biting the Man in Grey on the shoulder when he accuses him of being Bruce Wayne rather than his actual identity of Wayne Bruce.

As the Man in Grey nurses his wound, he discusses the possibility of dropping some of the less promising names from the interview list. She persuades him to drop the surprisingly numerous “patriotic” heroes such as the Iron Lady, and also points out to him that a distressing number of names on the list are Nazi supervillains. Next up is Doctor Know-It-All, about whom they have concerns due to his fairly blatant resemblance to “the time-traveller guy”, but Know-It-All blackmails the Man in Grey into provisionally accepting him by pointing out his knowledge that the Man in Grey is himself suspiciously similar to someone else.

After finally interviewing a qualified candidate in the form of 0000-8888888, they are slated to meet with Captain Omega, but the real Captain Omega has been impersonated by Dynamite Thor, who isn't giving up. When the real Captain Omega bursts in to confront Thor, Thor throws a “smoke grenade” to escape stealthily, but the grenade turns out to actually just be an actual grenade. Although everyone makes it out alright (Captain Omega wears protective armour as part of his costume, the Man in Grey leapt out the window in time, and Jenny used the M.F.S. teleportation ray to transport herself to safety), this brings an end to the interviews for the day.

Eventually, the Man in Grey announces that he's settled on hiring Talbot, Fred, 0000-8888888, and Doctor Know — but also reveals to a disappointed Jenny that they are going to staff a new M.F.S. location in Scotland, not in the Welsh officer with her. However, after the new hires leave to party about their successful interviews, the Man in Grey asks Jenny what she would think of hiring an intern to help the Welsh office run more smoothly. She ends up recommending Dynamite Thor for the position, feeling bad for him. The next day, he starts work, bringing Jenny tea (albeit having made the kettle explode) while she's taking a call from a man trying to find a Mr Gatsby.

Worldbuilding

Universes

Other

Continuity

Behind the scenes

Background

In addition to the miscellaneous variants of the Paragraph required for the various open-source characters used, Callum Phillpott's author-notes read:

A big thank you to the Public Domain Superheroes Wiki for making the finding of obscure Open Source characters way easier on my part. All characters mentioned can be found on there (except Batman, he's copyrighted).
—Callum Phillpott


The updated, illustrated version published on the official Jenny Over-There: The Nine-Two-Five Universe website on July 12th, 2024 expanded the wordcount by over one thousand and five hundred words. The most significant of these edits are:

  • In the opening scene, an aside is added in which Jenny Over-There thinks to herself that the Man in Grey reminds her “of a cheap Halloween decoration. One that maybe should’ve seen a psychiatrist a decade ago”. The latter phrase humorously alludes to the Man in Grey's official bio published as part of the Character Index of the newly-launched website at the same time as the updated version, in which it was revealed that the Man in Grey had indeed spent the 1994-2006 period having “an existential crisis”.
  • Jenny reacts less angrily to the disappearance of her desk, taking the Man in Grey's nonsense in stride. She now agrees to help with the interviews not just for a generic offer of money, but in exchange for a promise that she'll get her own office.
  • The Man in Grey reveals that he fulfilled Jenny's position for about a month under his prior boss, before “she” was fired and the Great Higher-Ups promoted him in her place.
  • It is confirmed that the grey “interview room” which serves as the setting for most of the story is the same room in which Jenny went through her own job interview for the M.F.S.. Its description is subtly changed to the window only being “tinted” grey, rather than outright occluded with a grey paint-over as in the original.
  • In recognition of the importance the character would ultimately take on in the series, Dynamite Thor's first scene in this story is significantly expanded, now including more back-and-forth. The mention of “the Fox universe” is changed to “the Foxverse” (the term used in PROSE: Lovie Dovie Stuff), with Thor explaining that he can travel back and forth between it and the 925th Universe thanks to having “a friend back there with a multidimensional thingamajig”. When called down on the fact that he is not an open-source character, Thor, though confessing that he isn't particularly good with “the metaphysical stuff”, tries to argue his case, explaining before he is interrupted that “Fox Features Syndicate never registered or renewed the copyright, so —”.
  • The conversation with Metal O'Maniac is expanded, with O'Maniac now being more reluctant to admit he burned down his previous place of work.
  • The aside mentioning that Jenny had been thinking about setting fire to the SatNav factory on the day it “coincidentally blew up” is omitted.
  • Talbot Molossus's outfit is described as resembling a “Royal Officer” rather than a “British royal”. Jenny guesses that he is in his 20s.
  • Wayne Bruce now insists on keeping the lights dimmed while he is being interviewed, and, when he tackles the Man in Grey, tries to bite down on his neck — implying he is a vampire-like being. The last few lines of the scene make it clearer that, precisely due to the dimmed lights, Jenny and the Man in Grey genuinely believed him to be Batman, rather than simply dismissing him for being too Batman-like.
  • While recovering from being bitten by Bruce, the Man in Grey ruminates that “in many ways, this form was severely limiting, but it was the one he had”.
  • Jenny and the Man in Grey now have a bit of back-and-forth about the fact that the Iron Lady is friends with a version of Pixie Pristine, who went unmentioned in the original version, though this association is part of the two characters' actual open-source blurbs.
  • Jenny now notices that Volksstrum is a Nazi not because he is wearing an Iron Cross on his chest in his file picture, but because he wrote his name out as "VolkSStrum".
  • Jenny extorts extra money from the Man in Grey for going through the list in-between applicants and crossing out all the obvious Nazis; agreeing without much fuss, the Man in Grey ends up handing her an arbitrary amount of banknotes from his wallet without counting them out.
  • Similar to Thor's, Doctor Know's introduction scene is significantly expanded. He boasts of having “lived a thousand lives and journeyed to a thousand wolds”. The Man in Grey loses his cool and, snatching up the Doctor's incriminating picture of the Man in Black, “tears it up like a deranged goblin”, only for the Doctor to use magic to repair it, then add that it was irrelevant anyway because he has several backup copies in his archives. He also taunts the Man in Grey by saying he might tell the Great Higher-Ups about the Man's involvement with “the War—” before he is interrupted by the Man in Grey agreeing to his terms.
  • There is more focus on the Teleportation Gun, which is stated to be “one use only”, ostensibly retroactively explaining why it never reappeared in the series (although this introduces an apparent contradiction with PROSE: Family Business where Jenny implies that she tried to use it again when she was abducted by Jenny Nowhere; this contradiction was resolved with a further edit on July 24th which broke the Fourth Wall by claiming the Gun could only be used “once per series”). Instead of using it on herself to escape the explosion within the building, she aims it at “Captain Omega” and his grenade, and they explode outdoors, just outside the window. This is bad news for the Man in Grey, who had still tried to escape by climbing out the window, although he suffers no serious injury.
  • 0000-8888888's spelled-out name of Tetra-None Hepta-Oct is mentioned, unlike the original, briefer scene in which only the numerical form was presented. She give more detail on her background, noting that she recently left her homeworld for unspecified reasons; features of human culture to which she still has trouble acclimatising include “living in linear time” (“I keep forgetting that seconds happen consecutively, and that time passes whenever I speak”) as well as “the gender thing”, which Tetra states doesn't exist among the Cyclocks, with time signatures being the closest concept. Tetra expresses willingness to use she/her pronouns “for now”, but to “give them all a try” over time.
  • Jenny's conversation with Dynamite Thor towards the end of the story now takes place in the small personal office given to her by the Man in Grey as promised, rather than in the waiting room outside the interview room.
  • Their heart-to-heart is significantly expanded, with Jenny sharing her feelings of loneliness and dissociation from reality, while Peter describes the failure of his superheroic career at somewhat greater length, mentioning that he has become redundant in his home universe thanks to the prevalence of other heroes such as the Dart, the Spider Queen, and Electro.

Read online

Open Sourcing was released on Archive Of Our Own, where it is still available. The updated version is available on the official Jenny Over-There: The Nine-Two-Five Universe website.

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