Sylvester Shoebill
Sylvester Shoebill was an bowler-hat-wearing anthropomorphic shoebill native to the Prime Universe. A con artist or at the very least a shady dealer, Shoebill was multiversally active and often wound up in debt to individuals from other dimensions than his own.
Biography
Shoebill once sold Jenny Everywhere a faulty contrafibulator for twice the market price, vanishing before she could complain.
Three years later, Shoebill had ended up in debt to the Queen of the Black Market for “seven hundred and ten interstellar yozals, two vridors and twenty-four clemdings”. With the help of mysterious ‘protectors’, Shoebill acquired the Crystal of Thrash, which he hoped to give to the Queen in place of a monetary reimbursement. He set her a dinner date at Hilbert's, an interdimensional hotel located in the Void.
On the interdimensional shuttle carrying him there, he met a disoriented first-time dimensional traveller, Wendy Severn, who had gotten onto the shuttle by mistake. Though showing her the ropes of being an interdimensional wanderer, Shoebill secretly hoped to get her to sign over her soul to him, and then to offer that to the Queen to pay his debt, keeping the Crystal for himself. However, after losing him in the crowd of the hotel lobby (due to his ducking out of the way of another one of his creditors, a Saturnian tailor), Wendy ended up meeting the Queen first. The Queen took a liking to her and exposed Shoebill's duplicity to her.
During the ensuing, tense dinner for three, the Queen was poisoned seemingly to death. Keeping the Crystal as insurance, Wendy got Shoebill to transport the Queen's body back to her room while she went to get help. The two individuals Wendy brought up to the room were Pythagoras-858 and, as luck would have it, Jenny Everywhere, albeit in a different incarnation. She recognised him instantly, although this was not reciprocated. The two began to tussle as Jenny demanded that he pay her back; in her unstable state, Jenny involuntarily shifted to parts unknown, taking Shoebill with her. (PROSE: The Grand Multiverse Hotel)
