Fragment: Nowhere Plan (short story)
Fragment: Nowhere Plan was a Jenny Everywhere short story written by Scott Sanford in 2022. It was the second of Sanford's “Fragments” shorts, after Fragment: Frogs.
Contents
Plot
Jenny Everywhere relates the events of her recent birthday party at “this place [she] made”, to which she had invited “a few hundred friends” and “a few hundred of [herself]”. It was crashed by a version of Jenny Nowhere, who “had big plan again” as well as “some new tricks”. However, Jenny's friends fought back, including ones who are far from ordinary — “warriors. Wizards. Kaiju. Mad scientists. Superheroes. Gods and things beyond gods” — and Nowhere predictably failed. Jenny is left reflecting on why Nowhere keeps trying even though she must know she is going to keep failing, however many times they do this.
Worldbuilding
Jenny Everywhere
- A Jenny, confirmed by Scott Sanford in his Jenny Everywhere Table of Contents not to have been the version usually foregrounded in his stories, narrates the story. A “few hundred” other incarnations were present at the birthday party.
Jenny Nowhere
- Jenny Everywhere seems to treat Jenny Nowhere as some emanation of the darker sides of her own nature: “People say everyone has hidden urges and uncomfortable secrets. I guess it’s true. But for me things are a bit different. (…) Sometimes… Well, you have self destructive urges once in a while, don’t you? Sometimes she calls herself Jenny Nowhere. She can’t be a unique person any more than I can”. A specific version of Jenny Nowhere crashed Everywhere's birthday party.
Universes
- The birthday party occurs in a “place” which Jenny says she made.
Continuity
- Although they can be interpreted otherwise, the mention of “mad scientists” and “things beyond gods” among Jenny's friends may have been intended by Scott Sanford as references to Professor Awesome, a recurring character in his stories, and to Jenny's friendship with Death of the Endless in PROSE: Psychopomp and Dream in Sanford's own PROSE: Second Date.
Behind the scenes
Background
When releasing the story on Dreamwidth in 2022, Scott Sanford appended some commentary to the story:
| On the Discord channel some of us were kicking around the idea "Jenny Nowhere shows up to ruin Jenny E's birthday celebration". This is not that story. This is a few words from one of the witnesses after the fact. |
| —Scott Sanford |
Sanford's Jenny Everywhere Table of Contents additionally clarified that the Jenny in the story was not the same incarnation as the one usually seen in his stories.
Read online
The story is available on the author's Dreamwidth website.
