For some time now, the Governing Council of Jenny Everywheres has had a robust social media presence on Bluesky, courtesy of Xavier Llewellyn. For Jenny Everywhere Day, the Council has a very special appeal that will be sure to tug at the heart-strings! Bonus photo under the cut.
The third of Xavier Llewellyn's contributions to Jenny Everywhere Day '24, also posted on the Realms of Ink website, is also the first Jenny comic of Xavier's making, Here's to many more!
In this second contribution by Xavier Llewellyn to JED 2024, Jenny Everywhere foils a kidnapping attempt of open-source star Joyce York, orchestrated by kooky new creations, the Woman in Mauve and the Belgian Ducks. But another villain known to long-time Jenny-fans is waiting in the wings, with a very unexpected question to ask…
Read it here or below the cut.
The chatter and buzz of the crowd softened as the lights dimmed. A hush fell over everyone as their attention was diverted from their drinks and friends; a spotlight appeared, illuminating a perfect circle over the drawn, red curtains.
The space was dark, save for this and the sparkle of fairylights and soft lamps near the bar.
“Good evening, distinguished guests! I am most honoured to see such an attentive crowd tonight,” came an ostentatious voice, divorced from any visible corporeal form. “It is with great pleasure that we announce it: we have here with us, tonight, the one, the only…”
A pause. For dramatic effect.
“…Joyce York!”
A soft rumble came from the crowd, a mixture of well-mannered claps and assorted praises. The curtains withdrew unto themselves, revealing the figure inside — a rose budding in a matter of moments.
There she stood, the venerable Miss York, dressed in a slinky dress of crushed black velvet. She stepped daintily forwards, to the microphone, with the poise of a ’30s pop idol.
She began to sing, transfixing the crowd. All eyes were on her.
Her voice didn’t just demand the attention of every guest; her every gesture, too, commanded the gaze of all who beheld her — each one perfectly matched to the lyrics. She was masterful.
Within the crowd, there sat a woman who idly sipped at a martini without caring to glance down. She too, was transfixed. She had forgotten why she was there.
*********
Just a couple of hours before, she’d intercepted an encrypted digi-message — which had, to say the least, not stayed encrypted for very long. She had been entirely unable to discern its recipient or sender. What was discernible, without any degree of subtlety, was its purpose.
Kidnap international star Joyce York.
It hadn’t been hard to find where Miss York was, given that her performance at the Inky Palace was the hot topic right now.
She had prepared her most appropriate attire and travelled to the club with the utmost urgency; she didn’t know when York was to be kidnapped, so she figured it would be better to be safe and get to her as soon as possible.
*********
The night continued on, as Miss York displayed her level of range, from genre to vocals. Very few people were critics. Song after song, until the voice announced that York would be concluding soon.
The visitor, finally remembering why she was here, delicately excused herself from the table to the lavatory. Glancing over her shoulder to make sure nobody was looking, she sharply turned and slipped through the door labelled ‘private’, in the direction of the backstage dressing rooms. Thankfully, she was alone.
Nobody to question why she was sneaking around.
Counting the seconds and biting her nails, Miss York finally retreated offstage with a muffled round of applause. She stepped out of the shadows as York approached her — or rather the dressing room.
“Miss York?” she began, with a hint of uncertainty in her voice. There was no guarantee York would listen to her. “I need you to listen to me — your life may depend on it.”
“Excuse me?” York was taken by surprise.
“Please, I’m not sure here is the best place to talk, can we talk somewhere… more private?” she nodded her head in the direction of the dressing room.
York shot her a concerned look as she fumbled with the doorknob, swinging it open. She flicked on the light, beckoning the stranger inside. Once they were in, York shut the door and locked it.
“Before anything else,” York said, “who are you?”
“Oh, right! Of course!” She had forgotten to introduce herself. It passed through her mind that Miss York would have many questions, and no reason to trust her. “I’m Jenny Everywhere!”
“Charmed,” said York. “You have an… interesting name,” she added after a moment.
Jenny felt a hint of snideness in that remark, and paused, caught off-guard. She hadn’t expected snobbery to be a concern in persuading the singer, only the perfectly natural mistrust one might direct at an alarming intruder; and it wasn’t a concern which Jenny was sure she knew how to smooth over.
Thankfully, York seemed to sense her uncertainty, and, obviously having come across harsher than she had intended, she softened her stance. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!”
Jenny’s heart had already sunk, a little, by that point. But she was an understanding person, so she dismissed it and continued on, explaining the knowledge that people were going to kidnap her.
York took a seat. She was pale, and steadied herself with a hand on the table. “I… I mean, I should have expected this at some point. Everyone has their crazed fanatics, don’t they?”
“Yes, but given the nature of how the message was transmitted, I doubt they’re your average stalker. They didn’t exactly text it!”
“No, yeah, that makes sense. Then, the question remains, who is after me?!”
As if, right on cue, came a murmur from behind the door. Jenny pressed her ear up against it, her curiosity overriding her self-preservation skills.
It was almost as if…
…no.
It couldn’t be.
Surely?
Quack.
Quackquackquack.
The door burst open, doorframe splintering, Jenny tumbling.
“Quack quack quack, quack, quack, quack quack quack quack quack!’ the nearest duck said, which Jenny perfectly understood as ‘there she is, duckies, get her now!’.
“Joyce, get outta here!”
Frustratingly, York stood there. She shifted her gaze from the bruised Jenny, to the daggle of rather angry looking ducks waddling towards her. She looked back at Jenny, incredulously. “They’re just ducks! Cute ducks, at that!”
“Darnit woman, can’t you see? Those aren’t just any ducks, they aren’t any of your pond or river variety, no — they’re Belgian Ducks!”
“What’s wrong with ducks that come from Belgium?”
Jenny rolled her eyes. The ducks had reached York now, and were snapping their beaks at her heels, biting her with force. She yelped.
“They’re not ducks-from-Belgium, they’re Belgian Ducks! Entirely different! Now run!”
She was already at the door, Belgian Ducks in hot, feathery pursuit.
Jenny righted herself, rubbing her bruised forehead. She was going to have one hell of a headache tomorrow.
Jenny exited the room, to see Miss York at the far end of the corridor, squealing and flapping more than the damn Ducks themselves.
She glanced in the other direction.
Jenny didn’t see her at first, but, seemingly appearing out of nowhere, stepped forth a woman from the shadows. An older, yet gracefully-aged, woman with an auburn pixie cut and a mauve suit dress.
“Hello, darling,” came her voice, stretching and lingering on each and every vowel. “I am the Woman in Mauve.”
Her pace quickened towards Jenny, as she extracted a slight gun from the folds of her suit and steadied it towards her head. If she’d had time to think, she would’ve questioned the Woman — if only because she would have made the connection between her and the Man in Grey with whom she’d already become acquainted. At the moment, however, she had more pressing matters to be focusing on.
Jenny ducked and ran as laser bolts sizzled into the wall at the end of the corridor.
“Come back here, little mouse!” the Woman called, whilst continuing to fire, growing more irritable as Jenny danced around the beams of death. Jenny reached the corner — and flung herself around it, noticing a beam burn into the wall where, only a moment ago, she herself had stood. The paint flaked as the energy charred the brick inside.
Jenny ran as fast as she could, nearing Miss York, hopping over the ducks. She took her hand, and fled through the fire exit, trapping the Ducks inside.
“That’s what you get for not having opposable thumbs, yeah!” Jenny taunted. York tapped her shoulder and she turned around to see…
Oh come on.
The Woman in Mauve had — as if by magic — appeared outside before them.
“How did you —” Jenny cried.
“What, darling, appear here?” she finished Jenny’s sentence for her. “Quite simple really.”
Keeping her gun fixed on Jenny, she walked to the door and kicked it hard with her heel, busting it open and allowing the Ducks to join her.
“What is?”
“Excuse me?”
“How is it simple?” Jenny asked. “Weren’t you about to explain?”
“No I wasn’t, darling.”
“But you —”
“Quiet!”
Jenny complied with a gulp. She noticed York’s uneasiness, but felt that, given the circumstances, it may have not been best to try to comfort her. She didn’t want to test the Woman’s patience.
Well, she did, but not with a gun to her head.
“Quack quack quack?”
“Indeed, pet. I intend to.”
She gestured to a wall with her gun, indicating for Jenny to stand next to it. She passed the gun to one of the Ducks, who held it with an unusual degree of precision directly at Jenny’s forehead. The Woman extracted a ceremonial dagger, and approached York.
“What are you doing, you mad woman! Get away from me!” she yelped as the Woman dragged the point across her palm, drawing blood. The Woman rubbed her hand against hers, transferring a smear of blood, before raising her bloodied hand towards the sky.
“Oh, Evil One, hear my command, here and now! Oh Grand High Lord, with this blood drawn from a virgin adored by the masses, come to us, your eternal servants, so that we may transcend with you to the Stars and Beyond!”
York scowled. The Ducks giggled. The night, which had been mild and calm, turned instantly into a ferocious thunderstorm. Lightning crackled, thunder boomed.
And then there was laughter.
The most wicked, evil laughter echoed from no-place at all.
Between the Woman and York, as she stepped back, lightnight and sharp beads of rain coalesced into a figure. An upright, hulking, Crocodile.
“Bonsoir, underlings!” Grallyx reverberated. “How parfait it is to be here at last!”
He stepped towards York, and took her hand — and kissed it. York squirmed, not because of all his teeth and scales and size, but because, well, he was a bit creepy. As far as weird reptilian demons went.
Compared to some of the men she had the most unfortunate pleasure of having to put up with, he, in all fairness, could be a lot worse.
“However,” he continued, “I do not care to know what you were expecting of me. I work alone.”
He snapped his clawed digits and cracks opened up in space-time and the Belgian Ducks and the Woman in Mauve were sucked through. Their assorted protests of “quack” and “but daaaaaarling” fell silent as the cracks sealed up behind them.
Jenny wasn’t particularly worried about where they went, but she was concerned about the giant Crocodile whom she could’ve sworn had the expected amount of arms and eyes only moments before who was now getting down on one knee and…
Proposing.
“Miss Joyce York, will you accept my hand in marriage?!”
He opened a ring-box, revealing a fleshy ring with a tiny tooth in place of a gem. It appeared to be pulsating — more than that, squirming.
“Um,” York mumbled, “no?”
Grallyx arose, and Jenny prepared herself to challenge him. But, before she could speak, he had already begun himself.
“Understandable,” he smiled, taking the rejection remarkably well. “Have a good day!”
He waved to York and Jenny, snapping his digits once again to open a friendlier-looking crack, however that was possible.
“Wait!’ Jenny called. “I hate to poke the dragon, but, um, is that all?”
“Yes,” Grallyx replied bluntly. “I may be an Eternal Prince of Darkness, whom the Legions of the Damned and Tormented fear and worship, but I do have a concept of respect. Joyce said no, and I am a gentleman, if nothing else. So I shall now take my leave! Au revoir!”
And, with that, he stepped through the crack, which sealed itself discreetly behind him.
*********
Some time later, after Joyce had put on something more comfortable, she and Jenny went out for a walk in the cool night air.
“Well! That was an… interesting night.”
Jenny winced at the comment — then turned to find that Joyce was grinning. Jenny relaxed. It was as she’d hoped: given how bizarrely peaceful it had all turned out, the singer had come to look on the preceding few hours as a fun little adventure.
“Oh, it was nothing,” Jenny said with playful boastfulness. “You should see what I get up to normally — makes this look like a walk in the park.”
“Miss Everywhere, we are walking in a park!” York giggled.
That seemed to break the last of whatever tension existed between the Shifter and the singer. Within moments, the two were laughing, clutching each other, tears running down their faces. Jenny wiped them away.
“You should join me sometime. It would be fun. I can’t guarantee it’ll be as simple as tonight, but fun? Absolutely.”
“I’d like that.”
Jenny looked her in the eyes, and she returned her gaze. They neared each other, they leant close, so close they could feel each other’s breath. Their heartbeats, in sync, pounded oh-so-fast, and then —
“Oh shit!”
Joyce pulled away from a crestfallen Jenny.
“Oh — uhm — sorry if I’ve misread — I mean, we can just travel as friends —” the Shifter stammered.
“No, no, no! My cats!” said York, already dashing away and obviously not listening to Jenny’s babbled apologies. “I haven’t fed my cats!”
She sprinted away, hair billowing in the air behind her.
Jenny took a moment to be relieved that she had — as best she could tell — not been misreading anything. Then something occurre to her.
“Wait, how should I find you? You haven’t given me your number! Should I meet you at the Inky Palace tomorrow? Joyce?!”
There came no response.
Joyce was already too far away.
*********
THE END
*********
The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed.
The character of Lord Grallyx is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Lord Grallyx in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed.
The Man in Grey is an open-source domain created by Callum Phillpott.
Joyce York is an open-source character created by Sasha Henriksen, alias @opencharacters.
The first of several contributions by Xavier Llewellyn is the spooky little tale of a Jenny who finds something rather ghastly in some dimly-lit tunnels — something more familiar than she'd like to admit.
This story is part of the anthology series dubbed Everywhere's Extraordinary Escapades. Xavier also participated in the Jenny Everywhere Collaborative Novella, to which this may or may not act as a companion piece. It's all a matter of point of view…
Jenny Everywhere shifted into another universe, not with a pop! or a bang!, but with a shift!
Opening her eyes after a moment’s lightheadedness, she looked at her surroundings, taking time to ingest every detail; the process of shifting with only a hazy idea of her destination in mind could yield unpredictable new worlds. Which was just what she’d been looking for, in this instance — and not just to keep things interesting, as other, more dilettante-type Jennies sometimes did. She had a job to do.
She found that she was in a tunnel, one with a textured, grooved tiled floor for grip, and tiled walls too; the individual white tiles were smaller in size, with colourful advertisements adorning spaces every few strides. Above, the ceiling was made from concrete, complete with hanging, yellow, fluorescent strip lights. There was also a sole LED sign with directional instructions, which flickered and stuttered. The tunnel itself was lengthy, but she could see steps ahead, with sunlight reflecting on the surfaces, and she could hear a distant chatter of people.
Behind her, the tunnel curved, hiding its end. There was an oppressive totality to the brutalist style which enclosed her — grasping instinctively for any hint of human warmth, she looked closer at the advertisements, taking stock of the distinctive Cyrillic characters and the subjects of the adverts themselves: there were posters for new films, makeup, fast food chains, and a few others from public services to governmental information. Nothing notable, other than the language itself, which told Jenny she was probably somewhere Russian.
Now, closer towards the wall, she could tell the tunnel was grotty, evidently not having been cleaned in a long time — and thus, green mold was spreading along the grooves between tiles like an infectious disease and grime had accumulated in streaks from leaking water. She inhaled through her nose — well, through the nose of whatever Jenny she had shifted into — and detected a combination of stagnating water and urine.
She was in a subway tunnel.
Unimpressed, she patted her pockets to find a small compact mirror and a lock-pick. She’d hoped the Jenny she’d shifted into would be a more interesting one, so she opened the mirror and returned the pick. She panned it from head to toe, revealing that she was wearing a fur ushanka over short, straw-blonde hair, her face sharp with defined cheekbones and thin lips, and a pair of wire glasses pushed high up the bridge of her nose. No make-up. She was wearing a thick, dark brown parka and nondescript trousers, complete with heavy-duty work boots.
Well, she could work with this. She guessed this Jenny was somewhere in her late twenties. She jumped, and stretched, gauging how athletic her body was — she wanted to be sure of her own ability, if it came to a fight or flight situation. She didn’t feel that flexible, but she noted that her movement was also being restricted by her heavy clothes.
Not a particularly unique Jenny, as far as appearance went.
She began walking towards the steps, wanting a grasp on her location other than just being a grimy tunnel. Her footsteps sent echoes through the tunnel, the thick, hardened rubber thump-thump-thumping on the tiles. A few metres before the steps she stopped at a basic, windowless service door, extracting the lock-pick from her pocket, discreetly sliding the two wires into the lock with a single swift movement, opening it with a soft click. She pushed it ajar, wincing at the squeak of the unoiled hinges. She leant backwards, taking a glance either side of her to ensure she was still alone. She slipped into the room and found a cord with a plastic blob on the end. She gave it a tug and smaller lights sputtered into life, revealing the hidden secrets of the room… forgotten mops and bleach and buckets and a few plastic floor signs, with a pictogram of a man slipping, covered in a thick layer of concrete dust. Nothing interesting here, either.
However, as she went to exit the room as inconspicuously as she had entered, she heard a noise.
Shift.
She wasn’t alone.
Shit.
She calmly backed out through the door. Someone had shifted into this world alongside her, shifted with a shift sound, and that meant two things.
One: whoever shifted in had to be a Jenny Everywhere; only a Jenny Everywhere could shift quite like that. Nobody else could have heard the difference, but she knew it on instinct.
Two: the Jenny outside had to be one of those Jennies, who preferred shifting physically from universe to universe. Reckless behaviour. Stupid behaviour. Her current employers would never stand for that sort of thing; it was a needlessly disruptive form of universe-hopping at the best of times, entirely inimical to a serious, scientifically-minded Survey. She could just see her, whatever goggle-wearing eccentric had just landed in the middle of her survey area like a fly taking a freestyle dive into a bowl of expensive consumé. With any luck she’d have brought friends, companions.
Well, Jenny wasn’t going to stand for that. Somebody would have to answer to the C.S.C., and it wouldn’t be her.
She stomped confidently around the corner, ready to give her other self a piece of her mind.
But whatever Jenny had expected to see… she didn’t. She could never have guessed.
What she saw was a horrific mass of flesh, filling the tunnel towards the far end before the curve. Her blood ran cold. It was a barely humanoid figure, much larger than herself, likely over ten foot tall if it stood fully erect. It had limbs — too many limbs: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, she couldn’t keep count — which were appalling masses of many smaller limbs. Some were human arms and legs, others were animal. But they all formed larger limbs, with dry, pallid, blotchy skin stretched over, making it impossible to quite tell where one ended and another began. These rose up to the thing’s body, which was a mass of nude bodies stretched and amalgamated together in a sick parody of a human torso. The smaller bodies formed ribs and other bones. Again, she couldn’t tell where one ended and another began. Worse still, many of the bodies’ faces were visible. They were Jennies.
However, as she looked up at its head, Jenny’s already icy cold blood entirely froze over. There was a central skull, an ordinary human skull that was disproportionate to the rest of the figure’s size, with many other jawbones split down the centre and fused together at the lower jawbone, forming toothed, snapping mandibles. Its hair, if you could call it that, was strands of flayed skin, welted and red and bloody. The face of a young Jenny, just that of a child, was stretched over the main skull, but her eyes… her eyes were missing. So was the skin of her eyelids. In place of her eyes were deep black orbs. So, so deep.
Those eyes calmed Jenny. Nothing was wrong. She was calm. Nothing was wrong. Nothing was wrong. Nothing was wrong. Nothing was wrong as the creature shambled towards the motionless Shifter, its chest splitting open — nothing was wrong as arms unfurled from inside and began grasping towards her, to pull her into the gaping cavity. Nothing was wrong. Nothing wrong as a woman behind Jenny screamed —
The scream broke Jenny out of trance and she recoiled backwards, scrambling backwards the steps, careless of the griminess of the floor. Something was wrong, wrong, wrong; appallingly, inconceivably wrong.
Once, Jenny had encountered the Fog. When she had been forced to physically shift and with no destination in mind, she had found herself opening her eyes to a dark space, an endless, liminal expanse barely illuminated by what appeared to be distant stars. It had appeared without warning, its arrival all the warning she got of what she was about to experience. The Fog not only consumed her, blocking out all light to the point where she could only tell by sensation she had her eyes open, but it overwhelmed her auditory senses. A slow resonant noise would, over a short span of time, become deafening to her. Worse, she felt it in her chest, like the beat of a drum stretched impossibly long. She had only fully experienced the phenomenon once, having been quickly overwhelmed; after her first encounter she never stayed there long.
Now the creature let out a noise, not just from its head but from all of the Jenny heads across its body. And it was the noise of the Fog.
Jenny righted herself and stumbled up the steps towards the outside, snapping her head from side to side to get an idea of her surroundings before she could even adjust to the sunlight. She saw she was on a train platform. She heard a voice on the tannoy, presumably about the electrical passenger train that was passing through the station.
Making sure, with a directed, goading shout, that the creature was following her and not any of the civilians around her, she jumped down onto the rails and ran to the other side as the train driver activated the horn. A futile warning. She hurriedly dragged herself onto the other platform. The creature leapt onto the rails —
— and the suburban train rammed into the creature, pushing it down to the ground, crushing it between the undercarriage and the rails. With a shift! it disappeared from the world, and the train… derailed. The side of the train scraped and collided with the side of the platform, concrete debris and sparks raining down above Jenny, who had propped herself up on her back, out of breath. She watched in horror as she saw the train was full of commuters, who were being flung forwards as the train ground to a halt. She saw how the people on the platform were running in the opposite direction, and the guards who were running towards her. She panicked. She shifted away, leaving the native Jenny behind. She hated herself as she did it, but she was already gone.
When she’d made her report to the Cosmological Survey Corps, both about the universe and about the creature, the eggheads had surmised that the latter must have been an aberration — a case of multiple Jennies, by sheer coincidence, all shifting into the exact same location at the same time, merging together, corrupting each other through ruination of their space-time signatures. Just the sort of nonsense to which physical shifting exposed yourself; a shifting collision when doing mental shifting couldn’t cause anything worse than a temporary split personality. It made sense, it was a perfectly cromulent answer to the mystery.
But what good did that do, even if it was correct? And it didn’t feel correct, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was simpler, and it didn’t fit on a C.S.C. form.
It was still out there, subsuming more Jennies as it nearly had done to her.
She had returned to the universe she had originally shifted into, and found that the native Jenny had escaped the authorities. Better yet, there had been no fatalities.Somehow, that didn’t make Jenny feel any safer — for herself, or for the kind of Multiverse that could birth such horrors.
*********
THIS IS NOT THE END
*********
The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed.
