The Oubliette: Solution (short story)
The Oubliette was a Jenny Everywhere short story written by Jeanne Morningstar. It was a coda to the 30 Days of Jenny series (serving as its semi-official tenth and final installment), resolving the cliffhanger of the earlier entry The Oubliette.
Contents
Plot
Jenny Everywhere and Laura are still trapped in the Oubliette, but Jenny, unveiling her plan, astounds Laura by opening an escape door through a series of hand gestures and hummed musical notes. She explained that she telepathically communicated with her counterpart in this universe, who lived earlier in time, enabling her to bribe the architect who built the Oubliette. Before they make use of this unexpected exit route, however, Jenny finds the time to playfully scold her readers for not having sent any suggestions for how she could get out before she unveiled her own solution — much to Laura's further confusion.
Worldbuilding
Universes
- This story takes place in an unidentified universe.
Jenny Everywhere
- The story features a version of Jenny whose powers are limited: she needs time to “prepare” for any shift, and finds it difficult to teleport within a single universe. It is clarified that she is not the native Jenny of the universe in which the story takes place, who is shown to have lived earlier in time.
Laura Drake
Continuity
- This story is a direct sequel to PROSE: The Oubliette.
Behind the scenes
Background
After posting the story on Ficly, Jeanne Morningstar commented:
| This isn’t really part of the challenge—thus the short length. I just realized I was supposed to write a solution for this and then forgot. Next proper entry is tomorrow morning. |
| —Jeanne Morningstar |
Jenny's solution is a reference to a running joke in the Doctor Who comedy special The Curse of Fatal Death, where Rowan Atkinson's Doctor and his nemesis the Master repeatedly used their time-travelling abilities to bribe the architect of Castle Tersurus to retroactively build a series of traps and escape routes in a game of increasingly childish one-upmanship.
Read online
The story was released on Ficly.
