Morning After (novel)

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Morning After was a Jenny Everywhere webnovel serialised weekly by Scott Sanford starting in early May 2022. It acted as a direct sequel to Sanford's earlier serialised story Paying It Forward.

Contents

Plot

Part 1: Haroun the Thrice Cursed

Waking up in the morning, Jenny Everywhere feels a “shifter hangover” coming on. She phones her editor at Stone, Haroun, to warn him that she's “not a hundred percent today” — and finds herself slipping into florid, antiquated language while talking to the phone operator. However, she does get through to Haroun eventually, with him telling her to give his regards to “David al-Hajar” if she sees him. After hanging up, she experiences a flash from the life of a sea-faring Jenny who's somehow trading between Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul. When she begins to think about eating some toast, she gets a flash from a Jenny who has been working, alongside several other people, on building a mill so that they can make themselves bread, and who have just gotten it working at last. She decides to go talk to David, if only to warn him that “some weird stuff” might be going on.

Part 2: David

Jenny goes across to David's apartment and knocks. After he answers the door, she explains her predicament to him at some length, also telling him about a few of her ghost-memories to double-check that they don't match with anything she's mentioned before and are indeed spillovers from other Jennies. Walking back, she bumps (quite literally) into Thoth, Steven's talking cat familiar, who asks her to tell Steven to buy him more tuna when next she sees him, and also advises her to go check on “the kid” downstairs, as he is “doing mad science again”.

Part 3: Professor Awesome

Jenny heads down the stairs, getting another glimpse of another universe (where another Jenny is engaged in an adventure with Octobriana) when she looks out the window, and finds Eric sitting on the stairs and scribbling schematics in his notebook. Looking over his shoulder, she recognises the design as a new kind of de-pants-icator and reminds him of how much trouble he got in with the last version. A sulky Eric protests that he has no intention of using the new device, but merely wants to prove to himself that he could improve the design. She briefly gets a glimpse of yet another universe, where an older version of Professor Awesome has become a genuine, murderous supervillain whom her local self is fighting in earnest. Dismissing the vision, she simply convinces Eric that he's already proven his intellectual worth by drawing the plans, and there's no need to actually build the device in real life. They chat for a while, with Jenny cautioning the boy against foolhardy plans, before Jenny heads off. Feeling her grasp on this reality becoming increasingly unsteady, she decides to go take a nap.

Epilogue

Jenny tries to sleep on the couch with some soft Tchaikovsky music in the background, but is woken up when David drops in and starts talking with Kim. Some of what they talk about rouses further memories from Jenny, who gets up and excitedly gives them more details on some of her remembered lifetimes. By the time she remembers a bizarre disco version of Jesus Christ Superstar plucked from the memories of a 1970s Jenny, and gives them a rousing a cappella rendition of the main song, her chuckling friends conclude that she seems back to her normal peppy self.

Worldbuilding

Jenny Everywhere

  • The story stars the “default Jenny” of Scott Sanford's Jenny Everywhere stories. However, she gets telepathic glimpses of the lives of her other selves in several other universes, including:
    • a sea-faring Jenny who's somehow trading between Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul;
    • a Jenny who has been working, alongside several other people, on building a mill so that they can make themselves bread, and who have just gotten it working at last;
    • one who grew up in a suburban house in Wisconsin with a white father, recognisable as a variation of Jenny Jacobs;
    • one whose origins matched the inaccurate origin story once read by Retro in one world;
    • one who “grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania” with “her mother's biplane hidden behind the barn”. This mother was herself an incarnation of Jenny, and the daughter began to get glimpses of her memories when she turned fourteen, learning how to use the biplane, which was more scientifically advanced than meets the eye. She was forced to leave her daughter with “Jacob and the other Plain people”, and never came back from whatever dangerous journey she undertook.
    • one who is busy reconverting an old space-ship into a cloning factory to make new Jennies to seed across the Multiverse.
    • one who was familiar with a boisterous version of Octobriana who rode a dinosaur and intended to travel back in time to fight Robo-Stalin.
    • one who was fighting a genuinely dangerous version of Professor Awesome.
    • one who owned a fire-breathing cow and had frequent dealings with the Fae.
    • one who was present at the very beginning of the universe, witnessing the introduction of linear time, which she perceived to some degree as “the end” of the timeless universe she'd known. Other versions of her later witnessed the end of another universal epoch.
    • one who is a “space cloud”, a sentient gaseous being living in the interstellar spaces, living at speeds that would seem unimaginably slow to a human.
    • one who was active in the 1970s and was familiar with a disco musical about Jesus Christ (apparently no earlier than 1978, by the music it used).
  • Jenny also thinks back to two of her other selves who bickered with each other at the after party, the “very English” Jenny Cornelius and the “very French” Jeanne Partout.
  • In conversation with Eric, she mentions a version of her who brought a Panzer III to the Battle of Camlann. It proved insufficient to turn the tide of the battle but did “come in handy during the evac to Avalon”.

Jimmy Wherever & Jimmy Anytime

  • One of Jenny's hangover-induced ghost-memories is of hanging around with “a guy in a Canadian flag T-shirt” — “tall, broad-shouldered, maybe blond. Or brown hair. Probably not a redhead”. As far as David knows, no such person is around in this world.

Octobriana

Universes

Other

  • Jenny recently sent in a review for a band called Coelacanths and Possums.
  • Jenny gets what she describes as a “shifter hangover” as a result of overusing her shifting powers the previous ays. She describes it as: “my head is too full. Way too full of way too many of me. And among other stuff it’s got me remembering the wrong things”. It also causes minor “glitches” in reality around her.
  • On April Fools' Day, somebody replaced the “10” on David's apartment door with an aleph-null; “Kim snickered and Professor Awesome just about injured himself laughing”.
  • Both Jenny and David are familiar with the story of Superman. His father was a scientist and he was shot me away from their doomed planet of Krypton as a baby; his space pod then dropped out of the sky and he grew up on a farm in Kansas with a family called the Kents”.
  • The alternative Professor Awesome gets around in an Omnibus with a turret.
  • When asked how she obtained a Panzer III, Jenny prevaricates, “as a rule, Nazis have more weapons than they should, so if you steal weapons from Nazis it’s a public service”.
  • Kim recalls that she had a father who passed away years ago but was “a fine man”.
  • Kim and David have both lived through the 1970s and, earlier, through the heights of macaroni fashion, although David never went in for the latter.

Continuity

Behind the scenes

Background

Scott Sanford gave some commentary to the story, broken down by part.

I hope the brief flashes of other Jennies works well for the readers. I found them fun to write; some of these worlds are ones I’d like to know more about.
Part One:
This is the first mention of Haroun the Thrice-Cursed and the first naming of the magazine that pays Jenny to write about music. (I had meant Rolling Stone not Slate but when the potential ambiguity was pointed out on the wiki page I liked it.)
It's logical that Jenny Cornelius was the 1970s Jenny who was playing chess with the priest; I don't think our viewpoint Jenny described Jeanne Partout during Paying It Forward.
Part Two:
Jenny’s fathers include a white guy from Wisconsin and a scientist with a pod. Hm. Diplomatic of David to say, “You probably had a father”.
The Canadian guy? Jenny might remember him any time, or wherever they met. Or not. If she can't remember that there are at least two of them, he must not be that important to her.
It was probably wise not to get sidetracked into discussing her family's biplanes.
And Steven has a talking cat. At this point I can’t even be surprised.
Part Three:
That dinosaur-riding woman sounds like a trouble magnet.
Nobody needed armored cavalry support at the Battle of Camlann. On the brighter side, the Devil's Arse has been cleaned up a lot in our universe.
Jenny conflates a house and an apartment; I can’t blame her, could you?
Incidentally, if anyone feels inspired by any of the worlds Jenny flashed onto and wants to investigate them more, please be my guest. Some of those Jenny Everywheres are obviously doing very interesting things that barely got touched upon in this story. I’d like to know more about the crew of the Cheshire Catamaran and what the deal is with Jenny’s fire breathing cow...
—Scott Sanford


Read online

The story is available on the author's website.

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