Pratfall (short story)
Pratfall was a Jenny Everywhere short story written by Scott Sanford in 2022. It was a fanfiction of the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett (on whose name the title was a pun), complete with a cover created by Aristide Twain in the style of traditional Discworld book covers;
Contents
Plot
While fighting a giant scorpion, the Jenny Everywhere of the Discworld gets killed and finds herself in the Desert, facing Death. She takes this in stride, and, when he shows her her empty life-timer, she simply waves a hand and shifts a few additional decades of sand back into the top bulb. Death weakly protests that this does not seem fair, but Jenny brushes past these qualms and tells him to “call ahead” next time he is scheduled to meet with her. She also gives him the offer to drop in on her now and again for purely social visits, much to his surprise. Showing her the scorpion's life-timer, which has almost run out, he advises her to hurry to return to the living world and complete her current adventure. After she leaves, Death is left sighing to himself on how Jenny keeps doing this whenever they meet, and will no doubt do it again countless times.
Worldbuilding
Jenny Everywhere
- This story features a Jenny Everywhere native to the Discworld, originating in the Agatean Empire. She has brown eyes.
Death
- The story features the Death of the Discworld, who appears as a tall skeletal figure with “stygian blue” eyes, wearing “a hooded cloak the color of a black hole’s event horizon”.
Universes
- The story takes place in the Desert, the afterlife of the Discworld.
Other
- Jenny Everywhere's life-timer is made of octiron and engraved with her name written in Agatean pictograms.
Continuity
- Scott Sanford cited PROSE: Psychopomp, where Jenny Everywhere briefly encountered Neil Gaiman's own Death, as an inspiration for this story.
Behind the scenes
Background
When releasing the story on Dreamwidth in 2022, Scott Sanford appended some commentary looking back at the story:
| Aristide Twain recently wrote a story about Jenny meeting Death of the Endless (Psychopomp, available on Archive of Our Own). There are two modern British writers who have brought us memorable incarnations of Death, and while I am neither Gaiman nor Pratchett I did have enough inspiration to produce a brief imagining of that other meeting...
The story starts with Jenny falling and title is of course a pune or play on words. I make no apologies. |
| —Scott Sanford |
He added a [second piece] of commentary shortly after release, as a separate blog post:
| So apparently I'm doing author's afterwords to my stories…
I’m assuming here that Pratchett readers recognize this desert and others will infer the situation from its context. …the name Jenny Everywhere inscribed in the pictograms of the Agatean Empire… Written as Jenny, all places, urinating dog. …Jennie’s brown eyes meeting his stygian blue sockets. Stygian blue is an impossible colour, literally; it is one of the chimerical colors that cannot be shown on a screen or printed page, but can be seen by exploiting quirks of the human eye. Stygian blue may be seen by staring for a time at bright yellow, which leaves a dark blue afterimage, and then looking at black – the afterimage remains a dark blue but is also as dark as the black. |
| —Scott Sanford |
Read online
The story is available on the author's Dreamwidth website.
