Extradimensional Experiments (short story)

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Extradimensional Experiments, subtitled “or, Photonic Neptuniversity”, was a Jenny Everywhere prose story by Lupan Evezan released for Jenny Everywhere Day 2022.

Contents

Plot

In her dorm room aboard an orbiting space station, Laura Drake is frustrated by her failed inventions when one of her fellow university students, Jenny drops by.

After talking briefly Jenny summons a flower into her hand and admits she’s discovered how to make things appear. After repeating the trick several times and trying to understand they decide they need more information and go to the library to use old lab equipment. After experimentation Laura conjectures that Jenny is calling in objects from parallel dimensions.

While trying to verify this one of the experiments works too well and calls in a shapeless mass of shadow that destroys some equipment and escapes from the lab.

Trying to send it back, Jenny instead calls up an adventurer who identifies herself as Gwenivar, Wanderer in Everywhere, wielder of the magical sword Worldbridger.

Making some quick plans and catching up with the Creeping Shadow, Gwenivar confronts the monster as Laura tries one invention after another and finally disperses it to soap bubbles.

Gwenivar departs for her home world, leaving the schoolgirls to ponder their unexpected partnership. As they talk and contemplate other universes, Jenny suddenly disappears into thin air – only to reappear a moment later and confirm that they have a new situation to examine.

Worldbuilding

Jenny Everywhere

  • The story's main Jenny is a “stout, dark-skinned young woman” whose birth name is “Jennifer Everstar”. She is nineteen years old and uses she/her pronouns. As required by her location, she wears a thermal suit and oxygen field generator, with the former coloured green. She also wears the typical red scarf and pair of aviator goggles. She is a history major at the Neptunian Orbital University, having always been “strangely good” at the subject except for sometimes vividly remembering events from other versions of history (such as a “Zeppelin War” on 20th century Earth).
  • Gwenivar, Wanderer in Everywhere is an adventurer from a fantasy universe. She wears “an adventurer’s cloak, a hand-woven scarf, and a pair of wooden goggles”. She claims that her sword, called Worldbridger, which she obtained as a child, is what allows her to travel through the Multiverse, although it is suggested that she is wrong and would be able to shift just as well without the sword if she thought to try.

Laura Drake

  • The story's main Laura Drake has “frizzy orange hair” and wears glasses. She is a “physics engineering major” at the Neptunian Orbital University. Her thermal suit is purple.
  • Gwenivar's archnemesis is “the Draconic Sorceress”. Their relationship seems to be the typical mix of rivalry and romantic entanglement, with Gwenivar openly discussing how the Sorceress “always calls off her dark enchantments in time to challenge [Gwenivar] to a bout of intimate swordplay” and later claiming that she will relish the chance to “regale her with my mighty tale over a calming bout of swordplay”.

Lord Grallyx

  • Lord Grallyx appears as Laura's stuffed animal, a “plush alligator with too many arms and too many eyes — a factory error, handed down from her grandmother from a time when factories still made errors on things as simple as toys”.

Hakhe

Neeta

Universes

Other

  • Prior to attending the Neptunian Orbital University, Laura considered taking a job at the Alexandria Archive.
  • Laura's dorm room is lit by a hovering photon-sphere.
  • Laura's inventions include a photon-freezer (a device meant to “capture a wave of light in time” in order to get “perfect-accuracy astronomical snapshots”) which somehow turns any electromagnetic radiation it comes into contact with into soap bubbles, and a turbo-toasting ray that toasts bread perfectly on both sides. The cloud solidifier and the photon phonograph are also mentioned.
  • Subsidiaries of the Altern Corporation include “Altern Food Solutions, Altern Media Productions, and the federal government of the United States of America”. The Alterna hologram also mentions the “Altern Civil Justice Division”.
  • The laws of “the Solar Union”, and a “recent Altern/Martian Treaty”, are mentioned. In relation to the latter, it is mentioned that “psychic data” collected during conversations done in the presence of Altern technology “may be shared with relevant entities”.
  • Jenny and Laura have a neuroseismology class together.
  • “Matter transmission technology” is being studied by Altern's cutting-edge labs, but has yet to be optimised for personal use or portable models.
  • Jenny mentions having looked through the “holonet portfolios” of all the physics engineers at the University before settling on asking Laura for help.
  • CDs are antiquated enough that when Jenny materialises one, Laura arranges for its transfer to the “ancient texts department”.
  • Laura named Grallyx after the “grawlix” that appeared in old comics like the 20th-century series Asterix, which Laura's grandmother used to read to her.
  • Transport pods allow travel from one part of the Orbital University to the other.
  • The University has holo-displays, which feature, among other things, “the hourly telecomic”.
  • The zoology department of the University has a “micro-biosphere” storage site to which Altern ship the shrunken biospheres of natural locations they want to build over, having found that this drew fewer complaints from environmentalist activists than simply letting them perish.
  • The station has an “ambient energy supply”. The Library is designed as a huge antenna to be able to draw sufficient power to sustain its huge banks of holotexts. Holotext magnets are illegal devices capable of not only copying a holotext, but pulling it right out of the archive. The library itself appears as “a vast chamber filled with portable holoterminals which float past at all angles, each displaying a different text”.
  • Altern SmartPets are artificial robot pets which have become very popular. When new models of a given animal come out, Altern usually allows households to trade in their old one for a newer model (although this is not compulsory and Laura's family held on to the same SmartFerret for ages), reprogramming the repossessed SmartPets for other purposes. Many become spy drones, although Laura and Jenny meet a robot cat who's been given the power of speech and checks library cards at the entrance of the University's Library.
  • Jenny once “really confused [her] tenth grade social studies teacher” by talking about the Grand Battle of Knights and Sorcerers, apparently an event from Gwenivar's world.
  • Gwenivar describes magic as “the energy that flows through all the worlds and all who dwell within them”.
  • Components needed by Laura to rebuild her soap-creating would-be-photon-freezer include a protonic frazzler and a molecular eggbeater (described as “a very important device in the scientific world”).

Continuity

Behind the scenes

Background

The story's original release including a statement that:

All concepts and plot events introduced in this story are hereby declared open-source and may be used in any work provided that a paragraph is included noting their status as open-source concepts.
—Lupan Evezan


Read online

The story is available to read for free on WordPress.

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