Past Prologue (short story)
Past Prologue was the title given to the twenty-seventh short story in the Timeline anthology series by Nicholas Ahlhelm, which originally only bore the heading 2002 – Jenny Everywhere, when he republished it as an ebook in 2014, nearly three years after its original release on Jenny Everywhere Day 2011. This latter publication made use of the notorious lineart full-body portrait of Jenny Everywhere created by Diana Nock, which was not created for this story, but was released under a Creative Commons license.
It was an introduction to the character of Jenny and a multi-Shifter story, with a more experienced incarnation of Jenny helping a younger one understand her nascent powers.
Contents
Plot
While shopping, a girl named Jenny discovers some goggles and immediately decides she looks awesome. After buying them she and her friend Amber head out to a party; Jenny is cold but Amber has a scarf in her purse. As they wait for their bus, Jenny has a brief flash of another world’s events, where the bus goes up in flames; knocked to the ground by the shock of the vision, she then comes to and tries to convince Amber not to board the bus, but she is unable to quite articulate why. They board the bus, gossiping about the friends.
However, Jenny has another moment of involuntary shifting, finding herself tied up at the mercy of an unknown enemy speaking to her through a device that distorts his voice. Realising that the Jenny he's talking to does not know who he is, the villain darkens the room and allows her to return to her own life, where she wakes up with a start in the bus, to the sight of Amber hurrying her off the bus, as they've reached their stop.
The party provides a welcome distraction but soon she encounters a very familiar-looking woman with dyed purple hair who greets her and takes her outside – rather far outside, to an empty field in broad daylight. She quickly introduces herself as having the same legal name as her, Jennifer Evers-Werth — “only most people know me as Jenny Everywhere.” She quickly explains the broad strokes of being Jenny Everywhere, bringing her younger self up to speed on the reality of the Multiverse. The more experienced Jenny then departs, leaving her other self to discover her own adventures.
Worldbuilding
Jenny Everywhere
- Both of this story's Jennies have the birth name of “Jennifer Evers-Werth”; the story's main Jenny, however, states that she dropped the hyphenation after her mother disappeared, and she is known as “Jenny” to her friends. The older Jenny has been going by “Jenny Everywhere” for some time, and makes no mention of having dropped the hyphenated “-Werth” from her own name aside from that.
- The younger Jenny is of mixed heritage, with black, white and Asian ancestry. She takes to wearing goggles and a white scarf with red stripes on both ends within the events of the story.
- The older Jenny looks almost identical to her “if she was white”, and dresses in a goth style with a jet-black, “heavy” sweater and a pair of bell bottoms, a “mop” of purple hair and lipstick of the same colour. Her skin is “alabaster”, looking almost colourless.
- While explaining her nature, and how to shift, to her younger counterpart, the older Jenny claims that it is nearly impossible for a Jenny to use her shifting powers to teleport within a single dimension; according to her, only a few Jennies have managed it, at great cost to themselves, with all of them dying within a few hours of the feat at the longest. She also claims that only very few Jennies discover their powers themselves, with most needing to be introduced to their true nature by an experienced Jenny, and that most Jennies' life history includes one of their parents mysteriously vanishing, setting them on the path to adventure.
Universes
- The story beings in the city of Springfield in an unnamed, apparently mundane universe.
- Jenny has a vision of another world, similar to her own but warmer and with more grass in the cracks of the sidewalk.
- While she is asleep, her mind finds itself in the body of her counterpart from a third world; this Jenny seemingly looks identical to the story's main Jenny, as she does not remark on her different physical appearance. There, however, Jenny is already an experienced adventurer, with an established enmity with the unnamed villain.
- Finally, the more experienced Jenny takes the story's Jenny to another dimension for privacy; there she has an illuminating talk in an otherwise unremarkable field.
Continuity
- The scarf the story's main Jenny is given is white with red stripes at either end, a very common style for Jennies, especially in the works of Benj Christensen — notably being used in COMIC: The Jenny Everywhere Chronicles.
Read online
The original site is gone but the story is preserved on the Internet Archive. Alternatively, a version of it can still be purchased on Amazon as a Kindle ebook for a little over one dollar.
