Morning After (novel)
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”.
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”.
- one who is busy reconverting an old space-ship into a cloning factory to make new Jennies to seed across the Multiverse.
- 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.
Jimmy Wherever
- 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.
Universes
- The story, starring Scott Sanford's “default Jenny”, primarily takes place in her universe, but Jenny gets telepathic glimpses of the lives of her other selves in several other 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”.
Continuity
- This story acts as a direct sequel to the earlier serialised story PROSE: Paying It Forward, taking place immediately after its events.
- Jenny's job as a music critic, first seen in PROSE: Camera Shy, is featured once again.
- Jenny gets flashes of her father, despite, in this incarnation, not being sure that she's ever had one. They include “a white guy in Wisconsin” who lived in a suburban house and had a workshop — Simon Jacobs as seen in COMIC: The Jenny Everywhere Chronicles — and a scientist in a labcoat who “shot [her] away from our doomed planet as a baby” in “a space pod”, matching the purported origin story for Jenny Everywhere given in COMIC: The Secret Origin of Jenny Everywhere.
- Shift energy is mentioned. “Shifter energy” was previously prominently featured in COMIC: Makeshift Multiverse.
Behind the scenes
Read online
The story is available on the author's website.
