The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere (novel)

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The Hermetic Garbage of Jenny Everywhere is a Jenny Everywhere webnovel currently being serialised. The work of Jeanne Morningstar, it is divided in several Acts, currently being up to Part IX of Act II.

The storyline concerns the fallback from the collapse of the Multiverse into a single reality, dubbed the “Collapsed Cosmos”, and Jenny Everywhere's journey through a very frayed reality as she tries to restore reality to its former infinite scope.

Contents

Plot

Act 1

Part I

The Multiverse is breaking down, its time-crystals shattering. Jenny Everywhere tries to put it back together as it unravels, but can't manage it in her state of discorporeality, where she is not a singular incarnation with a singular point of view, but simply the collected wills of all Jennies, perceiving fragments of all their lives all at once. She tries to push herself into a single, human frame of reference — and succeeds a little too well. As a single mashed-up reality again reaches some kind of stability, Jenny is a human woman sitting in front of a computer — and remembers nothing of the predicament she was just in…

Part II

Waking up, Jenny reflects on how odd it was that she really believed herself to be some kind of multi-dimensional traveller in her childhood as she makes her coffee. Hearing Laura Drake stirring in the bed, she is briefly comforted by the knowledge that at least, this is a universe in which they're friends — before shaking herself free of the “foolish notion” of her and Laura existing in many universes. Jenny prepares to walk out to the library, but not before grabbing a gas mask (which appears to be entirely normal in this world) and checking the reality stability on her smart phone (81%).

Part III

Walking through the street, where the sky is a “dull staticky grey”, a rather depressed Jenny wonders whatever happened to the heroic hopes and ambitions of her youth. She crosses other paths with other “Chaos-touched souls” wearing gas masks.

Part IV

Jenny arrives at the library, a rather imposing place staffed by librarians wearing long robes and white masks. She uses a password and a glyph on a paving stone to float up to the second level of the library, where she begins looking for the book she came for, the collected poetry of Emily Dickinson. Flipping through the pages, she fixates on the lines “I dwell in Possibility –/A fairer House than Prose –”. Putting down the book thoughtfully, she realises that someone is standing beside her.

Part V

It is a librarian, who speaks in a crackling voice like a distant radio transmission and speaks a confusing prophecy to Jenny: “Beware the hares of March. Beware the march of ideas. Beware of God. Follow the Red Lion. Solve et coagula.”. Their voice then becomes unintelligible and they leaves.

Part VI

A chaos alarm begins blaring, signaling that the reality stability has decreased; as everyone runs for cover and books begin following out of the shelves, and even from the ceiling, Jenny finds herself swallowed up by a whirlpool of books.

She wakes up walking down the street with the Dickinson book, plus and a book on time crystals for Laura, in what may well be a nested fictional reality rather than the “real world” (such as it is), though she has no awareness of that fact at present, merely a niggling sensation that something has slipped her mind.

Part VII

Back in their apartment, Jenny finds Laura lying despondently on the couch. She triumphantly presents Laura with the book on time crystals she asked for. Jenny asks Laura to give her a simplified explanation of what time crystals actually are. As Laura explains, she confusedly feels that some part of her knew all of this already.

Part VIII

Laura asks Jenny about the reason for her absence of three hours; Jenny is surprised to learn she'd been gone that long, and the two discuss the way in which “time appears to be dissolving”. Jenny hopes that this is only a transitional stage in some kind of cosmic alchemical process (“Solve et coagula”). As they talk about all this, Jenny begins to lean in to kiss Laura — but they are interrupted by a knock on the door. When she opens said door, she finds herself faced with a wizard.

Part IX

The wizard is Glendalf, a flamboyantly gay magic-maker and old acquaintance of Jenny's, who had spent the last few years as a recluse. Cheerfully oblivious to Jenny's annoyance at her intimate moment with Laura being nipped in the bud, Glendalf marches a group of twelve leather-clad Orcs into her living room, promising to explaint he reason for his visit momentarily.

Part X

While the Orcs prepare a barbecue dinner, Jenny asks Glendalf what he wants, noting not without annoyance that his intrusion appears to have temporarily caused Laura to drop out of the narrative altogether. Glendalf explains that he intends to go on an adventure with her and the Orcs, though he does not actually have a precise adventure in mind and would like to know if Jenny has any ideas.

Part XI

With Jenny unable to think of an adventure for the time being, she, Glendalf and the Orcs settle in for dinner, since the Orcs have finished preparing their feast. After the meal, while the Orcs talk politics, Jenny and Glendalf get to reminiscing about some of their old adventures together.

Part XII

Jegrekk Gnashtooth, one of the Orcs, overhears Jenny's tales about how she used to shift, and asks her if there's anything to the claims by kids on TikTok that they've achieved the same. Jenny doesn't believe so, as she thinks that shifting is not possible at all in the new reality. The conversation then falls on a billionaire writer who's disgraced the name of magic; Absoldar suggests that they choose as their adventure a break-in at her mansion, to steal not only all her money, but also the Legendary Time Crystal she is said to keep in her basement.

Part XIII

After laying plans, the newly-formed team tuck in for the night. Glendalf has a nightmare in which spiders cover his body, and, due to his wizardly nature, such spiders actually materialise, forcing Jenny to nurse him through it. In the morning, Jenny, Glendalf and four of the orcs (Absoldar, Jegrekk, J. Barrington Boartusk and Agrzaan Lurgpin) set out for the heist aboard an airship which Glendalf had been carrying around in his purse in miniature, but which he is able to magically restore to full size with a few magic words.

Part XIV

On the way to Scotland by blimp, the Orcs tell Jenny about the history of their species. Though nearing the billionaire's mansion, they fly over the woods of Faerie; hearing strange noises, some of the Orcs, and Glendalf, argue that they should touch down to investigate, feeling that no good adventure should be devoid of detours and side-steps. Jenny ends up suggesting the compromise that they make straight for the billionaire's mansion for now, but circle back to the Woods of Faerie once they've obtained the Crystal — something to which the others uneasily agree.

Part XV

As the airship nears the billionaire's huge, overdesigned gothic mansion, the gang go over their plan once more. It involves Jenny and J. Barrington Boartusk gaining entry by posing as documentary filmmakers while Glendalf disables the magical defences; Agrzaan will then sneak to the basement, joined by Jenny, to take the Time Crystal.

Part XVI

The plan goes off without a hitch — until Jenny and Agrzaan hit a snag in their part of the plan: the basement is an endless maze of room filled with miscellaneous memorabilia, with the location of the Time Crystal far from obvious. As they are considering their options, Jenny's phone inconveniently rings as she gets a call from her mum, apparently from “the end of time”. The sound causes various alarms to go off.

Part XVII

After fighting off an East India Company mobile drone cannon, Jenny and Agrzaan finally locate the vault where the Time Crystal was kept, only to find it empty. They get a call from Jegrekk, who reports that the billionaire has been killed by someone with their own agenda and plan, who snuck into her mansion disguised as one of her servant-robots. Jenny deduces that this person must be the one who took the Time Crystal — and just then, said person reveals herself, as none other than Laura!

Part XIX

Laura berates Jenny for having failed to prevent the Multiverse from collapsing; she refuses to give Jenny the Time Crystal and allow her to restore the continua, instead intent on rebuilding the Multiverse herself to what she believes will be a more stable structure, with her as its ultimate ruler. Jenny, though disappointed, refuses to give in and takes a seemingly-magical collapsible staff from her pocket, beginning to duel Laura. As they fight, reality becomes more unstable than ever, rapidly shifting between all the places the two have fought before. As the world dissolves, Jenny screams.

Act II

Part I

A tired, battered Jenny Everywhere wakes up on a deserted beach, having apparently washed up with the tide alongside a log of driftwood. She attempts to remember her last few experiences, which only come back to her in blurry fragments — including the Librarian's prophecy, where “there was something about a hare and something about a lion, and the hare was bad and the lion was good, or something like that”.

Part II

Looking around, Jenny realises that she is on a fairly standard Earth, seemingly devoid of any signs of human life. She realises she was inside a book before, during her adventure with Glendalf, and she wonders if she is now in another or if she is back in the “real world”, such as it is. Looking over what she's carrying in her pack, she finds (among other things) the poems of Emily Dickinson again.

Part III

Reading through the poems, Jenny tries to find prophetic meaning in the words she happened upon. They help her realise that a shrewlike creature she's been watching is actually a very early mammal ancestor to Homo Sapiens, and that she is in the distant past of the Earth. She decides to put herself in a trance to “fast forward” to the rise of humanity.

Part IV

After finding a suitable cave, Jenny puts herself in the trance and remains vaguely aware as the world speeds up around her; she watches as local communities rise and fall, coming to worship the strange, ageless woman in the cave as some kind of deity. Time continues passing, with Jenny unable to come out of her trance — until she sees the sun expanding to engulf the Earth and the stars dying one by one. Once she is surrounded by perfect void, she knows she has reached the End of Time, and is confronted by none other than her mother.

Part V

Jenny's mother is revealed as Amelia Midnight, formerly an adventurer in her own right (existing as one of Jenny's parents in a number of realities across the Multiverse); the amalgamation of all her story-paths, this Amelia “retired” from transtemporal adventuring to become an Archon of the Redoubt after passing on her scarf and goggles to her daughter.

Part VI

Jenny and Amelia bicker about whether Jenny was right to make her own way through the Collapsed Cosmos rather than contact her mother and work with her and the other Archons to fix the hypercontinuum. However, their fight does not last long, and after awkwardly reconciling, they go wait for the Null-Train.

Part VII

After boarding the Null-Train, Jenny and Amelia discuss the current affairs of Redoubt on the way. When they arrived in the part of the Redoubt that is made up of part of Westbrook, they get off the Train, as Amelia is called for professionally.

Part VIII

Jenny heads to the apartment on North Wintle Street which the version of her native to the continuum that this Westbrook was taken from used to share with her adopted sister Julie. She has a heart to hear with Julie about her conflicted feelings concerning Archon Midnight. As Julie heads out on a date, Jenny agrees to keep watch on the apartment for her.

Part IX

When they come to pick Julie up, her new date reveals themself as Death, much to Jenny's unease. The two lovers depart, leaving Jenny to wryly ponder how long this affair is going to last.

Part X

Alone in the apartment, Jenny realises that it has turned back into the very apartment she started from. She reflects sullenly on the current status of the Collapsed Cosmos. Picking up Moorcock's Cornelius Quartet from her shelf, she flips through it randomly and finds a passage that leads her to a fanciful reflection on how the very idea of the Multiverse has been co-opted for profit by small-minded 21st-century companies, losing its wonder.

Worldbuilding

Jenny Everywhere

  • This story features a Jenny who, due to the damage to reality, has ceased quite believing that she ever actually had counterparts in other universes as more than figments of youthful imagination. She has muddled memories from various incarnations of hers from before the Multiverse's collapse, including:
  • It is noted that Jenny often has a talent for seeing both sides of an issue.
  • In a number of realities, Jenny Everywhere had two mothers: Captain Amelia Midnight, an adventuress in her own right (captaining the hypership Zephyrus), and the Princess Katerina Corwin, with “Corwin” being a last name used by many incarnations of Jenny. She was raised on the hidden interdimensional Island of Barbelo, thus keeping her safe from her mothers' many enemies. Eventually, each Jenny would in turn leave their version of Barbelo, sometimes drawn away by Laura Drake or her fellow shifter Penny Anywhere, sometimes as its only survivor after its destruction.
  • In another set of continua, Jenny grows up in Westbrook, Wisconsin with a pair of adopted white parents and an adopted sister called Julie. She then tends to “pass back and forth between a large number of careers which usually tend to end in disaster, from landscaper to circus acrobat to giant robot pilot”. In some of these universes she gets along with her parents, but in others they end up becoming estranged.

Laura Drake

  • In the Collapsed Cosmos, Jenny and Laura are friends. They appear to live together in a single apartment, with Jenny being at least willing to take their relationship further. Later, inside Jenny's adventure with Glendalf, which may reflect a nested fictional reality, Laura resurfaces in a more villainous incarnation, appearing as “a woman in a sort of deep blue Napoleonic military uniform with a white cape, holding a sword at her side”.

Jenny Anywhere

  • “Penny Anywhere” is a fellow shifter to Jenny Everywhere. In a number of incarnations, her arrival on the Island of Barbelo is what inspires Jenny to leave it to explore the outside world.

Death

  • Death is referred to with “they/them” pronouns. They appear as “a gloomy-looking individual dressed in a black suit, with black lipstick and nail polish”, speaking in a “deep sepulchral voice”.

Universes

  • The story takes place in a “Collapsed Cosmos” where reality has become transient and friable.

Other

Continuity

Behind the scenes

Background

Jeanne Morningstar wrote an introduction for the story when they began serialising it.

Well, I’d been stalled on my writing for a while and I wanted to write a chaotic, improvisatory piece where I’d be able to add a little bit to it every day. I decided a Jenny Everywhere story would be perfect for that.

I’ve made a lot of attempts to write Jenny Everywhere stories that didn’t work out, including the previous revamp of this blog, but the Jenny Everywhere wiki and the recent small burst of activity this Jenny Everywhere Day inspired me to have another go at it. It’s worked out surprisingly well so far, easily the longest piece I’ve ever written with the character.

A major catalyst for this piece was finally reading all of Michael Moorcock’s Cornelius Quartet. This story involves much more in the way of sexual content and incendiary politics than previous Jenny Everywhere stories of mine, in keeping with its inspirations, the counterculture-inspired Barbelithic roots of the character, and the general tenor of the historical period in which we are living.

This story involves a number of open source characters and ones from public domain literature and Golden Age comics; all the attributions will be gathered in the final post.

—Jeanne Morningstar

The story is also preceded by a quote from The High History of the Holy Graal, translated by Sebastian Evans:

Josephus telleth us that the semblances of the islands changed themselves by reason of the divers adventures that by the pleasure of God befell therein… For, when they had entered into a forest or an island where they had found any adventure, and they came there another time, they found holds and castles and adventures of another kind, so that their toils and travails might not weary them, and also for that God would that the land should be conformed to the New Law.
—“The High History of the Holy Graal”

It contains a number of cultural references and allusions. For example, the transphobic British billionaire-writer against whom Glendalf bears a grudge is transparently a satirical depiction of J.K. Rowling, while Glendalf himself and his twelve Orcs knocking at Jenny's doors are reminiscent of J.R.R. Tolkien's Gandalf and his company of Dwarves at the beginning of The Hobbit.

Additionally, the title is a pun on The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius, or more specifically on its original French title (Le Garage Hermétique de Jerry Cornelius), playing on the fact that the French term “hermétique” (which actually, at least in this context, translates as “airtight”) resembles the English alchemical term “hermetic”.

Read online

The story is available on Tumblr.

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