Second Date (short story)
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.
Plot
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”.
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.
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. |
| —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.
