Downtime (short story)
Downtime was a short Jenny Everywhere prose story by Mattkind, released for Jenny Everywhere Day 2023. It featured the multiversal Heroines Guild, and was strongly NSFW.
Contents
Plot
Picking up where The Showdown left off, Jenny Everywhere is still on Planet 19-1-14-4, taking her time carrying captured outlaw Amber Kelly to the closest Heroines Guild outpost. Jenny has made sure to parade the villainess through every town in a five-mile radius, allowing her to be pelted with rotten fruit and eggs. Finally, the two women reach Heroines Guild Outpost 4890. Jenny unties Amber but keeps her gag and puts a leashed collar on her as she leads her into the unimpressive-looking shack, which Jenny opens using her Heroines Guild wrist link and an identification code (JED 8/13/2023), revealing that it is a front for a high-tech underground facility.
There, Jenny asks Amber to be a “good girl” as she takes off her gag, but the villainess wastes her chance, punching Jenny and then fruitlessly trying to use the identification code to open the doors back up and escape; however, she soon realises that the code is useless unless one is wearing one of the high-tech wrist-bands. Holding her at gunpoint with one of her own ivory-handled guns, Jenny decides to punish her for this misbehaviour by not letting her clean herself up before her mugshot. After taking the picture in question, she has Amber move over to the Statufication-5000 pad, which freezes her in place, conscious but unable to move anything but her eyes. Jenny takes advantage of this to pose Amber like a doll, putting one of her hands between her legs to make it appear as though she is pleasuring herself, then takes a selfie with her and leaves her alone and frozen in the facility, though not before notifying her Heroines Guild handler Laura to send a team to pick up Amber and the horses.
Shifting back to the Heroines Guild HQ, Jenny heads to the offices, but, when she spots Gina's latest humiliation — the naked, bald witch has been strapped into a machine which forces her to clean and shine people's shoes with her tongue. Jenny relaxes in the chair and lets it run for a continuous 60 minutes while she drifts off for a little nap. After returning to her office, she boots up her computer and, after noticing that tickets are available for “this year's Hullabalooza” and ordering herself a couple, she considers beginning to write her mission expense report, only to decide that she needs a drink first. She wanders over to The Drunken Heroine, the Guild's on-site bar. There, she orders a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster.
She awakes in her own bed with a hangover of epic proportions, unsurprised to notice such facts as that her bender lasted two weeks; that, in a drunken haze, she wrote down her showdown with Kelly as an erotic story instead of a professional report, and then emailed it to one of her other selves with no context; that she's wearing a new shirt and no pants; and that her Guild handler Laura is lying naked on her bed, bound and gagged with a vibrator between her legs. Feeling that she still needs a nap, Jenny mumbles an apology to Laura for not untying her yet and drifts back to sleep. Laura doesn't actually mind, although she's concerned about the delays in paperwork.
Worldbuilding
Jenny Everywhere
- Jenny Everywhere appears as the incarnation previously seen in PROSE: Jenny Everywhere Visits the Heroines Guild and PROSE: The Showdown. Her state of undress at the end of the story establishes that she is a trans woman. When the story opens, she is still wearing the same outfit as in The Showdown, revealed to include a trenchcoat as well as “Hello Kitty panties”. Her shifting takes the form of her creating swirling green portals to walk through, producing a complicated sound effect rendered as “*ZAPP* *BUZZ* *PLOP*”.
Laura Drake
- The story features a version of Laura whose last name is not mentioned. She is Jenny's “handler” within the Heroines Guild, and the two are apparently prone to occasional bondage-filled drunken one-night stands, with the story's events marking “the fifth time this month”.
Universes
- The story opens in the unidentified universe previously seen in PROSE: The Showdown. Jenny then returns to the Heroines Guild HQ, shown in PROSE: Jenny Everywhere Visits the Heroines Guild to be located in Earth-O147.
Continuity
- This story acts as a direct sequel to Mattkind's earlier Jenny Everywhere Day story PROSE: The Showdown, and also as a surprise prequel to Scott Sanford's meta riff on that story, PROSE: Fragment: Fanfic Critique.
- Gina's predicament was previously seen in PROSE: Jenny Everywhere Visits the Heroines Guild.
Behind the scenes
Background
The story contains a number of obscure pop-culture references. The fictional band Spinal Tap originated in the 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap. Jenny gets tickets for Hullabalooza, a musical festival which appeared in the Simpsons episode Homerpalooza. The nightclubs from various dimensions which Jenny visited during her bender include Clouds from the video game Cyberpunk 2077, The Friendly Tap from the loose shared universe of American professional wrestling shows, and the Malibu Club from the video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The Electric Mayhem is the recurring in-house band of The Muppets; according to Mattkind, “Jenny seeing them live is supposed to be a reference to the end of The Muppets Mayhem TV show on Disney +, where they play the Hollywood Bowl”. Additionally, the superheroine Beet Feet, who makes a cameo at the Heroines' bar, was borrowed with permission from another DeviantArt creator, AtomicWick.
Read online
The story is available to read for free on Deviant Art.
