The Apocryphal Journeys of Jenny Everywhere (novel)

The Apocryphal Journeys of Jenny Everywhere was a Jenny Everywhere webnovel serialised by Aristide Twain starting in May of 2022. Although “freely edited”, the skeleton of the story was generated by various A.I. text-generation tools, such as A.I. Dungeon.

Jenny Everywhere has travelled to Reality B-89 54-Z and is preparing to enter the allegedly-haunted Candy Forest in search of a legendary witch called Grandmother Ginger. She spots a colourful shack on the edge of the forest and knocks at the door. The old woman who greets her, Old Mother Westwind, explains that this shack did in fact use to be Ginger's residence, but Ginger has now fled deeper into the Forest. Confirming that she is also a witch, Westwind agrees to join Jenny in looking for her.

Chapter 2: The Spider

Jenny Everywhere and Old Mother Westwind have been travelling through the Candy Forest for three days when Westwind, tired of eating nothing but sweets, decides to go hunting, having heard the yelps of some animal in the distance. While she's away, Jenny waits under a tree, daydreaming about what led her to this adventure. However, she hears sounds of a struggle between Westwind and a monster and rushes to help. She finds Westwind lying on her back with what appears to be a claw embedded in her chest — and a giant spider with purple stripes standing over her. Jenny attacks the spider, shifting a bucket of water into its mouth and kicking it; but instead of fighting back, the spider talks, and shapeshifts back into a spindly old woman in a striped purple dress — none other than Grandmother Ginger. When Ginger addresses her as her niece, Jenny finds the memories of her local incarnation flooding back to her, albeit in disorder, but she has little time to dwell on this new information when the real attacker makes his presence known, refusing to give his name.

Chapter 3: The Old Man of the Marshmallow

As she comes face to face with the Old Man of the Marshmallow, a hooded, ghostly figure, Jenny Everywhere feels a rush of the memories of her other self's memories, remembering more about her life and what Ginger told her about the Old Man — who is an undead version of a centuries-old, powerful witch, who leeched life-force from the living and plagued Sucria for hundreds of years and was eventually trapped by magic inside a single marshmallow which was buried beneath the Marsh Mallow. She interrupts his evil monologue to ask him how he escaped from that marshmallow in the first place, with him merely replying that he learnt a new spell.

He also reveals that he killed this world's Jenny days ago, much to Ginger's distress, although, not suspecting the existence of multiple Jennies, he thinks he was wrong and the Jenny he is now talking to is the same girl, having somehow survived. Taking off his cloak, he shifts back into his monstrous worm-like battle-form, but before he can harm Jenny, Ginger leaps at him. As she does so, she adopts a yet more monstrous form, a giant flying eel with a sharp, prehensile tongue, called a Black Nettle. They seem evenly-matched until Westwind, tearing the fang from her chest, joins the fight, sending a gale to blast into the Old Man. Though he tries to stoke the feud between the two witches, they refuse to break their alliance and continue fighting him in tandem.

Chapter 4: Witch-Fight in the Forest

Jenny Everywhere watches helplessly as the two living witches fight the Old Man of the Marshmallow, seemingly unable to prevail. On impulse, she shifts Ginger off to the other side of the Forest. The Old Man is baffled, as Ginger has never displayed the ability to teleport, and is unaware of Jenny having any preternatural powers. He briefly begins to accuse Old Mother Westwind, but before she can deny it, Jenny steps in to claim that it is in fact a new power of Ginger's.

After the Old Man gets riled up with frustration, she snaps her fingers and makes Ginger, who has adopted the defensive form of a huge scorpion with red eyes, reappear, now hovering over the clearing. After some snippy discussion with Ginger, made difficult by the distance between them, Ginger agrees to drop the hovering spell and let her huge scorpion form free-fall onto the Old Man — who is crushed in the impact, leaving behind nothing but a crushed marshmallow and a mysterious magical key. Ginger picks up the key, recognising it as something she's been seeking for years, and with no warning, embeds it in Jenny's forehead, claiming that its purpose is to open “the gates of [her] mind”.

Chapter 5: Journey to the Centre of Jenny Everywhere

Jenny Everywhere finds herself transported to a chaotic hell-scape populated with visions of people from her past, friends and enemies alike. Grandmother Ginger tells her that this place isn't real: the Key of Enecloog's power is to transport the people on whom it is used to an imaginary landscape shaped by their own mind. Jenny, taking this revelation on board, experiences a moment of transcendence, but Ginger slaps her back to her senses, explaining that she transported herself and Jenny to this mindscape for one specific reason: to get her niece back.

Chapter 6: A World of Me

Grandmother Ginger explains that she wants Jenny to tap into the memories she retained from Ginger's Jenny and use the power of the Key of Enecloog to reconstitute her as her own entity within the mindscape, then bring her back to the real world. Jenny protests that this isn't how it works, but Ginger won't listen to reason, and the two end up having an imagination-fight, changing the landscape around them based on their imagination, until Jenny gets the upper hand and drenches Ginger in cold water, bringing her to their senses. As they both regain their cool, the “world-of-Jenny” fades around them and they find themselves back in the clearing, where Old Mother Westwind has set up a campfire under the light of the curiously bonbon-like stars. Jenny comforts the crying Ginger and reveals to her that she does believe there is a way to get her niece back, just not in the manner Ginger had devised.

Chapter 7: Rocket Witchcraft

Grandmother Ginger and Jenny discuss ways to bring back Ginger's Jenny, with Jenny explaining that she wants them to try and retrieve her soul from the Afterlife, on the assumption that there is an afterlife in a magical universe like this. It turns out that the old legends say that the souls of the dead ascend into literal, physical Outer Space, so they need to build a space-ship of some kind. Old Mother Westwind interrupts the conversation to say she'll do it herself to save money, and she immediately uses her magic to create the Wisp, a giant, branching flying-broomstick they can use for such a long trip. They climb onto the contraption and are about to take off when Ginger suddenly shouts that she's left something at home.

Arc 2: Castaways

Chapter 1: The Captain

Starting a new diary some time after the earlier adventures, Jenny explains that Grandmother Ginger ended up electing to stay home, which turned out to be a good thing because Jenny and Old Mother Westwind crashed the Wisp very quickly. Going down over the Fall Sea, they crashed into a reef on which a ruined ship is also speared. Driven by a gut feeling, Jenny tries to swim away with a pair of old floaties, but eventually runs out of strength and tries to swim back to the reef. Unable to quite make it, she is fished out of the water by a stranger living inside the wrecked ship: Captain Agatha, a stern woman wearing sunglasses, who promptly has her run around the deck to get over her numbness. Some time later, Jenny is surprised at Agatha nonsensically tossing a scrap of paper overboard, which suddenly triggers her memory of the original purpose of the Wisp flight. She looks out over the edge of the ship, unsure what to do but certain that she must try to get away from the ship one way or another.

Worldbuilding

Jenny Everywhere

The story's main Jenny is, according to the cast list, from “Reality 18”. She appears as a young woman with Indian features, wearing a red scarf and red-tinted goggles.
She was led to Reality B-89 54-Z by the memories of her local incarnation, Grandmother Ginger's niece and ward.

Universes

The story's main Jenny is, according to the cast list, from “Reality 18”.
Arc 1 opens in Reality B-89 54-Z, a fantasy world which is home to a candy-themed fairy-tale land.

Other

Among the witches who fought alongside Ginger and Westwind in the Great Marsh Mallow War were Spicefinger, Sister Pond, Bat Hex and Mr Hex, all of whom died on the final day of battle.
Jenny thinks that Captain Agatha resembles “Mrs Harper from elementary school”, except that she is “a lot bigger”.

Continuity

This story's main Jenny, accompanied by Grandmother Ginger, made an authorised cameo appearance in PROSE: A Series of Queer Events by Callum Phillpott as guests at Jenny Over-There's party.

Behind the scenes

Read online

The story is available on Tumblr.