Second Date (short story)

Second Date
Contents
Hero(es)	Jenny Everywhere
Featuring	Jenny Everywhere's boyfriend “Chef Jenny” “Biker Jenny” “Rifle-wielding Jenny” Jhenni “Ninja” Jenny “Dinosaur” Jenny “Bushy-haired guy” “Pale man”
Setting	The Restaurant
Technical Specs
Length	1750 words
Crew
Writer(s)	Scott Sanford
Background
Dates	2008
Original link	[1] [2]
Scott Sanford's Jenny Everywhere stories
Next →	Parallax

Second Date was the first Jenny Everywhere short story created by Scott Sanford, in 2008. It was a Multi-Shifter Story featuring numerous versions of Jenny.

Contents

Plot

On her second date with a new boyfriend, Jenny Everywhere decides to take him to an interdimensional restaurant staffed by, and principally patronised by, versions of Jenny — as a means of revealing her interdimensional nature to him. It takes a little while for him to realise the place is not simply owned by Jenny's surprisingly big family, although he is eventually forced to admit the truth of what Jenny is saying when he meets Jhenni, an anthropomorphic rodent version of Jenny. Despite a bit of mischief between a Ninja Jenny and a reptilian Jenny, the boyfriend, to Jenny's delight, soon voices utter delight and fascination with these revelations. She promises that she has much more wonderful places yet to show him.

Worldbuilding

Jenny Everywhere

• Jenny describes the number of her incarnations as “bigger than you can imagine. Bigger than anyone can imagine.” According to her “Some of us, an infinitesimal fraction, come [to the Restaurant] or places like it”.
• When her boyfriend notes that she isn't gay, Jenny replies, “Not usually”, the implication being that she is referring to a relative minority of her incarnations who are.
• The story's main Jenny is human and currently on a second date with a normal person.
• A number of other Jennies are seen in the Restaurant:
  • One dark-haired Jenny wearing a light scarf is manning the stove of the Restaurant itself.
  • One Jenny appears as “a young woman in classic motorcycle gear, complete with leather helmet”. She has a long white scarf with “something printed on it in Japanese”.
  • Another, who looks physically identical to the aforementioned “biker” Jenny, is wearing buckskins and a fringed shawl. Shhe has a 19th century lever-action rifle beside her.
  • A hooded ninja Jenny wears “night vision goggles (…), a straight sword and a blood red scarf”. She is apparently lways getting into fights with the “dinosaur Jenny”.
  • Jhenni is “a furry creature, the size of a human child with the head of a giant rodent”. She wears a “prim Victorian dress”, speaks in a cultured British accent, and wears “a long knit scarf”. She described by other Jennies as “a dear”, and as rather far away from home.
  • One Jenny has grey hair and wears a blindfold over her eyes.
• Jenny notes that the Paragraph keeps turning up around her. In this instance, it is printed on her boyfriend's placemat at their restaurant table.

Universes

• The story takes place in a largely mundane universe, in a city.

Other

• Also present at the Restaurant are a “bushy-haired guy playing with a yoyo” with European features, and a “deathly pale man with an electric-socket hairdo” who is “morosely pondering” “a ruby the size of a baseball”.
• The reptilian Jenny looks like “a miniature Godzilla”.

Continuity

• The gray-haired Jenny with the blindfold over her eyes, Cha Ni, would later play a more prominent part in PROSE: Paying It Forward.
• This story introduces a ninja Jenny. A different Jenny had previously mentioned in COMIC: Beauty as a Beast that she had trained as a ninja in another incarnation.

Behind the scenes

Background

When republishing the story on Dreamwidth in 2021, Scott Sanford appended some commentary looking back at the story:

Second Date was my first Jenny Everywhere story, all the way back in 2008. I'm unhappy with it in various ways but I'm reposting it as is anyway. I didn't have a good grasp on the version of Jenny that I wanted to use and the story has rather more cute ideas than plot or character. But it's got the one great quality people look for in an art work: it exists; it's done. I do remember that some of the cameo Jennies were ones for whom I had vague ideas, but all the notes on them from that era are long lost. (12 Sept 2021) Because I was asked on the Discord channel: Yes, those unnamed fellows are meant to be the Fourth Doctor and Neil Gaiman's Morpheus. There aren't that many people - even using the word loosely - who are likely to wander into a room full of Jennies... (18 Feb 2022) I'm pretty sure the early-20th century biker in this story isn't the high-tech 21st century biker in Paying it Forward parts six and seven; lots of Jennies ride motorcycles and they don't seem to have anything else in common. On the other hand the oracle is obviously Cha Ni, She Who Sees Everywhere, as seen in the first part of Paying it Forward. I hadn't planned that! It wasn't until well into the later story that I went back and looked at Second Date - and there she was in the prose, years earlier. Commentary found in a notes file from 2008: Well, where to start? This was my first JE story, and while lacking in plot it‘s a pretty cute little vignette. Also, since Jenny has special powers, conflict and drama arise in situations where those powers don’t help her, such as finding a decent boyfriend. If you liked Second Date, try looking up Roger Zelazny’s short story ‘A Very Good Year,’ which has a certain thematic similarity which I won‘t spoil here. Under no circumstances read that story first, however, as Zelazny was a better writer than I am… I stumbled over it again by accident after getting my first draft of Second Date done and realized that I had indeed read something similar before. A strong overtone of Zelazny’s writing style can be seen in the opening to the next story, Parallax.

—Scott Sanford

Read online

The story is available both on Sanford's original Jenny Everywhere Google Site and on the author's Dreamwidth website. There, it was given some Author's Commentary.