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Fragment: Heavy Reading was a short story by Scott Sanford in 2022. It was the sixth of Sanford's “Fragments” shorts.
Contents
Plot
Jenny Everywhere exhausts her patience with a dense tome titled An Introduction to Recreational Metric Engineering and dramatically discards it on the floor. Her roommate Kim inquires as to what caused this. Jenny explains that the book is an instruction manual on “changing the properties of local spacetime” but is so densely and pretentiously written that it’s inaccessible even to other Jennies.
Kim guardedly asks why Jenny is reading such a thing and she admits that she wanted to know what was in it, as "next year" she’d left it out where Professor Awesome could read it and he was inspired to create the Time Pestle.
They agree that this should not happen again and the book should be securely locked away.
Continuity
- The Time Pestle had been mentioned before but not when it was created.
Behind the scenes
Background
When releasing the story on Dreamwidth in 2022, Scott Sanford appended some commentary to the story:
| Over on the Discord server we happened to get on the subject of the Understanding Teleportation book that appeared as a background detail in Misunderstandings. This brought up the subject of what else Jenny Everywhere might be reading – or not reading – and I remembered I had a half written scene about that. |
| —Scott Sanford |
Read online
The story is available on the author's Dreamwidth website.