Jenny Everywhere: How Jenny First Met ...
Apr. 7th, 2023 04:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scott_sanfordFiction time!
Gosh, who is this mysterious girl we've never seen before?
People who know Jenny Everywhere in
How Jenny First Met...
by Scott Sanford; April 2023
...Laura Drake?
...Lord Grallyx?
...Professor Awesome?
...Sophie?
Laura Drake was head down in her paperwork when she became aware there was another person in the office.
“Hi,” said a chipper young voice. “I came to talk to you but you look busy.”
“Yes. I’m in a bit of a hurry, young lady,” Laura said, not fully keeping the impatience out of her voice. “I have a report to finish and not much time to do it.”
“Oh! In that case, yes you do,” said the visitor. “I’ll give you some time. You finish up what you’re doing and we can talk after that.”
Laura glanced up and saw a civilian girl considerably younger than she was, oddly dressed. The girl sat down in a nearby chair and pulled out a book, apparently ignoring her. Laura saw that the office was empty except for the two of them, but she had things to do so she returned to her labors.
After a while she finished and stripped the last page out of the typewriter. Hoping she wasn’t late she checked the clock on the wall, which didn’t seem to have moved a bit; she still had more time than she’d hoped.
The visiting girl lifted her head out of her book and Laura told her, “I have to turn this in. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
The girl nodded and went back to her book. Wary but in a hurry, Laura stapled her report together and left the girl where she was.
When she returned it was as if the girl hadn’t moved an inch.
“So what brings you by, young lady?”, she asked once she was back at her desk. Now that she had a chance to think about it she was sure her visitor wasn’t any normal inhabitant of the office. She was a teenager who should probably still be in school, with dark skin and strikingly blue eyes, her hair hidden by an unconvincing wig. It was a good question how she’d even gotten into the office; it was supposed to be a secure facility, yet the girl was here...
“My dad said I was going to talk to a bunch of people about, um, somebody we know.” She fixed Laura with a preternaturally blue gaze and said, “I’m Sophie. You’re Laura. You know Jenny.”
“Oh. Of course this is about Jenny.” She considered the unearthly child at her desk. Her unusual appearance and inexplicable presence were still unexplained, but Jenny Cornelius was the common thread linking every bizarrely dressed eccentric she met. “You know that there’s a lot that I can’t tell you or anyone about a lot of things–”
“𝒮𝔭𝔢𝔞kᵏ”
Laura froze momentarily, her train of thought derailed.
“Sorry,” Sophie said. “I mean, um, how did you two meet?”
“Oh! Ah, we’ve known each other for years,” Laura found herself saying. “I suppose we must have run into each other at something, early on. We saw each other off and on for a while. She’s a cheeky girl, you know. Completely outrageous. And one day she took it into her head that we needed to go somewhere together...”
“How about a marathon ride on the Tube?”, Jenny Cornelius offered. “That would be a doddle, we hop aboard and we’re away. We could meet at Leicester Square and then ride the whole Piccadilly Line, from Uxbridge to [bleep]fosters and back.”
“What was that noise?”, Laura asked.
“What noise?”
“Never mind. I’ve ridden the Tube, it’s hardly exotic.”
“Good point. We should take my car,” Jenny said, shifting gears as smoothly as a well maintained transmission. “We could drive into the countryside, see parts of England that city dwellers only pass through on the train.”
“No thank you,” Laura said with a smile. “Really, cows and such?”
“Or not to the depths of ruralshire!” Jenny grinned at her with a wild expression. “What if we drove to far-away, fantastical lands, wondrous imaginary places only found in the wildest fantasies? Neverland! Tir na Nog! Oz! France!”
“No?”, Laura snickered. Offhand she thought that if anyone could drive to those places it would be Jenny, but that was a silly idea.
“Oh!”, Jenny gasped in delight, a sudden realization evident on her face. “I know where to take you! Never you mind where now, it’s going to be a surprise.”
Laura trailed off, looking into the distance.
“What happened?”
“Oh, a few days later she banged us into the car and off we went into the wilderness. That was her old car, the Mini, not the E-Type she’s got now, so we weren’t even making very good speed.
“It was insane. She drove for hours, and we were somewhere out near Birmingham when she finally told me we were going up to see some silly teenage boys who had a band. Really! We’re going halfway to Scotland for this? Yes, apparently we are.”
“Some boys with a band?”, Sophie giggled lightly. “That sounds… so like her.”
Laura nodded, remembering.
“That must have been about ‘58 or so and she drove us all the way over to the west coast. And once we got to Liverpool we did indeed see some boys playing music.” She sighed and shook her head wryly. “I will never know how anyone in London could have heard of the Quarrymen...”
Far out in the Oort Cloud, thousands of times farther from the sun than Earth’s warm lands, the space is dark, cold, and empty. Space doesn’t get much more outer than this until the abysses between galaxies. Millions of years will pass without anything happening, barring encounters with the wrong rock.
Against the infinite blackness a bright blue light moved, closing in at a tenth of lightspeed, headed straight for the Wrong Rock.
It didn’t get there. When it was still light-seconds out a lethal flash of gamma radiation exploded across the star field, spreading destruction in all directions.
Several hundred seconds before the antimatter mine exploded, the blue spark hung motionless in space.
“Hmph,” the spark pouted, watching the megatons of radioactive hell in the prospective future fade out now that she wasn’t going to detonate the mine. “I guess they can’t just put up a ‘No Visitors’ sign out here. Not that I’d listen anyway.”
She surveyed the region in ways difficult to explain to humans, or anyone else trapped in a mere three contiguous dimensions and sequential time.
She’d already seen the antimatter bombs. Farther in there were X-ray lasers, focused-gravity matter disruptors, anti-ship missiles, and a navy’s worth of other destructive weaponry.
It all looked much too dramatic so she side stepped all of it and re-appeared floating a hundred meters from the surface of the comet that was not actually like a billion other comets. Once oriented she moved forward, passing down into the body of the comet, ghosting untouched through ice, rock, armored panels – even, she noted, magical wards to stop actual ghosts.
A mile down she entered a large chamber fit for visitors, provided with human compatible air and temperature. A vast window occupied one entire wall, overlooking the much bigger cavern within where the rock’s single resident whiled away the centuries.
She unfolded a pocket of space and brought out her humanoid body from where she kept it when she didn’t need it.
Alarms blared around her but she moved to a clearly marked control panel and entered the code that her father had told her that she had told him would work. The alarm fell silent.
“Who dares disturb me?”, demanded a booming voice from beyond the barrier.
“I do. I have come to speak with you, Lord Grallyx.”
“Why do you disturb me? And why should I care?”
“How many visitors do you get here?”, she retorted. “I have come a long way for you to speak with me.”
The imprisoned demon hissed at her in frustration. Or perhaps it was hatred, or contempt, or some other emotion she didn’t care about. She stood unimpressed.
“I have come to hear your story of how you came to be bound here,” she told him.
“The Band of the Scarlet Scarf? Can this not be history?”
“As if. I can read books. I want to hear it from you.”
“Do you think the great Lord Grallix is a storyteller to children? I have ruled nations! I have burned nations! You are nothing to me!”
“I have asked nicely,” Sophie pointed out. “𝕴 cͨoͦuͧldͩ 𝖆𝖘𝓴 𝕒𝖌𝖆𝖎n͛.”
Grallyx shrieked as the sound of her voice echoed through the nearby worlds.
“What are you?”, he wailed.
“I’m the one willing to ask nicely.” Sophie crossed her arms and glared. “I can give you a century off of your imprisonment, if I like what I hear. Or I can draw out your waiting by a millennium if I do not.”
“Will you free me from this place?”
“I will not do that,” she told him. “I also will not tell you when or how you leave this place. But I can change the time you will wait.”
“You must already know the story of my imprisonment,” seethed the demon lord skeptically. “You seek some knowledge of the Band of the Scarlet Scarf that is not common knowledge.”
“I’m guessing the Scarlet Scarf people got their name from Jenny Everywhere.”
“The Everywhere!”, bellowed Grallyx, rearing up in outrage. “Of course it did! I could have defeated them all, save for the Everywhere!”
“Yeah, heard that one before,” Sophie said quietly to herself. She rolled her eyes, as teenagers often do when adults state the obvious.
But she didn’t need to prompt him again. Grallyx was just getting warmed up, this clearly being a topic of great interest to him. She stood in the reception hall as Grallyx held forth about politics and battles and a war she had no interest in following. She already knew how it had turned out.
Occasionally he did mention the mysterious leader of the opposition, who seemed to know everything and be everywhere. She listened to those bits and mostly tuned out the rest. Fortunately he liked hearing himself talk; once he got going he didn’t need much prompting.
“And they imprisoned me here! For centuries! Surely someone tracks these otherwise uncounted years. Do you know how long I have already been held here, away from the living universe?”
Sophie only shrugged.
“It must not continue thus forever,” he proclaimed. “I have no subjects, no enemies, no prey – there is only the great Lord Grallyx and a swarm of mindless robots.”
“Dude,” Sophie said dismissively, rolling her eyes. “Do not get me started on being surrounded by robots. I know all about weird annoying robots.”
“I have ruled armies and I am now in a hole inside a miserable rock! Beyond this there is a galaxy that awaits my conquest!”
“You know what, that’s good enough. You talked to me, I’m going to keep up my end of the deal.” Sophie turned her blue eyes upon his many yellow ones and looked past his physical flesh to the spacetime it occupied. The rest was simple, for someone like her or her father. Below her Lord Grallyx was still speaking, though she was done listening, and his voice dropped to a basso-profundo drawl. Sophie carefully checked the small footnote to reality that she had added, making sure that it would expire harmlessly in two hundred years of outside time.
If anyone wanted to talk to him before then, well, they could just live with him going half as fast as the rest of the universe.
She saw that it was good. Sophie folded space around herself and left.
Eric felt awkward.
Lots of kids his age felt awkward a lot of the time, which Eric was aware of and which he’d wished adults would shut up about, but right now he was feeling left out because he didn’t know most of the people here and felt out of place.
He didn’t blame his mom or David, who were adults themselves and adults telling kids “you need to get out and meet kids your own age” was normal. He wasn’t entirely sure how that had led to “go eat dinner” and “get some exposure to new things” but he’d found himself in David’s car getting a long explanation about a holiday that wasn’t new at all and something about branches and citrus fruit.
So here he was downtown at the Emanuel temple and not sure what to think of all the stalls they’d set up. The booths were important for some historical reason he hadn’t gotten straight. The roofs were of open branches or something and the mad scientist parts of his mind wanted to redo those and make them more watertight but apparently it was Tradition or something.
David had brought him for a dinner thing they were doing, which had been nice since he could just sit next to David and follow along with everyone else, but now he’d wandered off somewhere to talk to people he knew, leaving Eric without anyone he knew.
He felt bored.
“You. You’re new here.”
Eric turned to see a kid about his age with a really unflattering bowl haircut looking at him coolly.
“Yeah,” he acknowledged. “You’re around here a lot, huh?”
“Around a lot of places,” the other boy confirmed.
“Hi, I’m Eric.”
“Herbie.”The other boy blinked owlishly at him from behind his thick glasses. “Saw you with Lowe earlier.”
“Yeah, I came over with him; we live in the same building.”
“Good to have neighbors.”
Eric was wondering what this kid was up to, and if this was going to be weird, when someone walked up to them and said, “Hey, Herbie.”
Eric looked over to see a girl maybe a year or two older than he was with the most amazing blue dreadlocks. It crossed his mind that she couldn’t have been around earlier; there were lots of people he hadn’t met but there was no way he wouldn’t have spotted her hair at a distance. And he’d have remembered a cute girl if he’d noticed her.
“Sophie,” Herbie said blandly.
“I didn’t know you cared about Sukkot week,” she said.
“Don’t. Saw someone I knew. Stopped to talk.”
“Oh.” She looked over Eric and said with more warmth than Herbie, “Hi, I’m Sophie.”
“Hi, Sophie, I’m Eric.” A twinge of honesty made him add, “I think Herbie stopped to talk to the guy I came here with, though.”
“Whatever.” It didn’t seem to concern her.
“So I guess you know each other,” he ventured.
“Yeah, we get candy at the same place; we run into each other there a lot.”
“Lollipops,” Herbie confirmed.
“Uh-huh,” Eric grunted, distracted. He’d noticed Sophie had a skin tone much like his but intensely blue eyes. The color didn’t quite match her hair but he appreciated her attention to detail; most girls would never have thought to find colored contacts.
For some reason he thought that was very interesting.
“Why are you here?”, Herbie asked without any evident interest.
“Oh, my dad’s got me going around talking to people about my mom. I was passing by, noticed that my mom is around here somewhere, and stopped to see if I could spot anyone I recognized. And then I saw you over here.”
“Yes. I am here.”
“Did you see my mom?”, Sophie asked, looking around idly. “I think she’s somewhere in the city, probably.”
“Haven’t seen her,” Herbie said.
“Well, she could always look different, but you’d probably recognize her.” Sophie gazed off vaguely then suddenly focused again on Eric, making him suddenly very interested in return.
“You’ve probably met some interesting people, right, Eric?”, she asked after a moment.
“Yeah, a few,” he agreed quickly, trying to figure out who he could tell her about. “There are lots of interesting people where I live.”
“Yeah, I know how that goes,” Sophie said. She gave a little laugh and told him, “Sometimes it’s nothing but weird and interesting people where me and my parents live.”
“Where is that?”, he asked.
“Ah, there you are,” said a familiar voice. Eric turned and saw his neighbor David had shown up. “I think I’m about done here, how about you?”
“I guess so,” Eric said. “I can be, anyway.”
“And you’ve met Herbie, I see. You boys getting along?” David smiled at the young men.
“No problems,” Herbie said “Good to see you again”
“This guy’s your ride home?”, Sophie asked, her contacts glinting strangely in the light.
“Yeah. Uh, this is David Lowe, we live in the same building. David, this is Sophie.”
“Hello…” greeted David, who noticed Sophie and looked as if he wasn’t expecting to see her. “Nice to meet you, young lady?”
“Um, hi.” Sophie looked up at David curiously and asked, “So, uh, you know Herbie?
Eric thought that there was a subtext he was missing. They knew Herbie but they didn’t know each other, did they?
“Oh, for a while,” he allowed. “You know Herbie too, yes?”
“Everybody knows Herbie,” she said.
“Ah, yes, so they do. Quite a few people, I’ve noticed.” He chuckled quietly and asked Eric, “So, you good to say goodnight?”
“Sure,” Eric said, taking the hint. He told the others, “Nice meeting you guys.”
“So long,” Sophie said warmly, while Herbie only nodded.
Eric was walking off with David toward the door when he heard Sophie call, “Hey, Eric?”
He looked back, seeing Sophie watching him speculatively. Herbie had unwrapped a lollipop and looked disinterested in the world. Sophie was looking at him and that seemed much more important.
“It was nice to meet you,” Sophie said with a smile. “If you can figure out how, it’s okay to call me sometime.”
“I don’t have your number,” he pointed out.
“No. But I figure a smart boy could find out.” She gave him a challenging look that did funny things to his emotions.
“He’ll work on it, I’m sure,” David said. “Come along, now.”
Eric followed him out to the car, thinking.
Outside he asked, “They seemed nice. Do you know how I could reach Herbie later?”
“Ah, sorry, no,” David admitted. “I see Herbie around once in a while, but I don’t think I ever knew how to find him.”
“Too bad. It was worth a try.”
“And I know you were asking for the girl. Her I don’t know. Her I’ve never seen before.”
“Ah,” Eric said noncommittally.
He settled into silence, running over what he knew so far. She’d said a smart boy could find her. He was smart; if he kept trying, it was only a matter of time.
As they drove home in David’s Beetle, Eric noticed he was grinning stupidly and made two resolutions. Obviously, he’d have to stop that before he got home. In the longer run, he’d have to talk to people – someone, somewhere, would know how to find a girl with blue dreadlocks.
High among windswept mountains perched a white-walled temple complex, as if inviting a Chinese landscape painter to pass by and be inspired to create a masterpiece.
Within one of its open gardens, a woman wearing a daishō and an elaborately printed scarf bowed respectfully to another wearing a blindfold over her eyes, turned, and walked away down the gravel path. She walked purposefully to a moon gate through which could be seen a koi pond, but as she stepped through the opening it flared with a rippling rainbow light and she disappeared.
The oracle stood silently for a few moments, with a faint smile on her lips.
“I’m alone now,” she said to the otherwise empty garden. “You may as well come out and talk.”
Spacetime rippled further along the garden path and a blue haired girl stepped into the universe. She wasn’t the only visitor to arrive that way, but most of the others wore scarves and goggles.
She cleared her throat and said, “Greetings, Oracle. I am honored to meet Cha Ni, She Who Sees Everywhere. Did, uh, did I do that right?”
“Just fine, Sophie. It’s nice to meet you, too.”
Sophie scratched her cheek, her hair writhing awkwardly, and asked, “Was I supposed to introduce myself before you knew who I am?”
“You may if you wish.” Cha Ni shrugged. “But you don’t have to. It’s just us.”
“Oh, yeah, fair enough. So, hi, I’m Sophie, which you already know; you’re Cha Ni, which I already know… And lot of this talking is probably awkward but if we don’t do it we won’t already remember it.”
“Precisely so, young lady,” the oracle confirmed.
“I mean, I like this but it’s also going to be weird getting used to talking to another human-ish person this way.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Cha Ni assured her.
“I know. So anyway, it’s my first visit here, at last. I’ve been looking forward to it. I even brought you some of that tea you’re going to like,” Sophie said.
“Thank you, Sophie. I asked the monks to make the bread cakes you like, and they should be ready soon. And there are some biscuits for the dogs.”
“Dogs?”
“You can’t see the dogs yet? That’s not surprising, they’re small and they keep moving.”
“Yeah, the future is really tangled up right here with both of us together.”
“In more ways than one,” the oracle agreed. “It’s hard to see anything in detail when we’re together.”
“Yeah, I noticed. Time is funny around here, anyway.” Sophie looked away into the distance, where a snow-capped mountain rose above the others. It stirred a dim memory from years to come. She added, “And space, too. Like, that’s not really Mount Penglai over there, is it?”
“Really?” Cha Ni shrugged. “Categories like real and not real can be very arbitrary and blurry for people like us.”
“Well, yeah… Some of my dad’s relatives say stuff like that.”
“They would, I’d expect. And not explain it very well, either.”
“Will you?”
“Probably not in any way that will help you,” Cha Ni admitted. “I’m already too close to being one of the big sisters to explain everything I know to mes like your mother.”
“The regular Jenny Everywheres, you mean.”
“As much as any of me are typical of anything, yes. On the other hand, I’m not ready to completely leave the universes and join the big sisters yet, either.”
“Good,” Sophie declared.
“Besides, I want to be around for a few years while you’re growing up. Somebody should teach children things their parents won’t. Life skills, and perspective, but also family stories your parents won’t tell you, like the time your mother flashed the Knights of the Round Table.”
“What?” she gasped in scandalized amusement. “No!”
“Oh, yes,” Cha Ni assured her, grinning widely. “Your mom shifted into Camelot and landed right in the middle of the Round Table, for everyone in the room to see. And see her they did!”
“No way!”, Sophie demanded, leaning forward.
“Right there in front of everyone, barefoot all the way up to her goggles!”
Sophie laughed in delight.
An abrupt yipping erupted out of a far corner of the garden, disturbing the peace of the temple complex. A corgi wearing a tartan scarf bounded along the gravel path toward them, followed by a shih tzu. Both ran up to Cha Ni and bounced up and down, tails wagging frantically.
“Hello, girls,” Cha Ni said, smiling serenely amid the chaos.
The dogs ran in circles around her feet, yapping wildly, until the shih tzu took off at top speed toward the outer wall, its pink scarf waving behind it, and the corgi took off in pursuit. They disappeared into a stand of bamboo and the garden was suddenly silent again.
“They didn’t even stay for the dog biscuits,” Sophie observed.
“They’ll be back,” Cha Ni said philosophically.
Sophie nodded.
Sophie smiled at the older woman and confessed, “I like you. This you, I mean. She feels like my mum but talks like my dad. And we don’t have to pretend there’s just one direction of time.”
“The universe is a lot simpler when you only remember things in one direction,” Cha Ni observed.
“Maybe, but wow,” Sophie sighed. “Only remembering the past just seems so weird.”
I think this is enough for now, lest I drive the trope into the ground. Four short scenes seem good; I hope you liked them.
More stories here
The character of Sophie Everytime, created by Aristide Twain, is available for use by anyone. All rights reversed.
Gosh, who is this mysterious girl we've never seen before?
How Jenny First Met...
by Scott Sanford; April 2023
...Laura Drake?
...Lord Grallyx?
...Professor Awesome?
...Sophie?
How Jenny First Met...
Laura Drake
Laura Drake was head down in her paperwork when she became aware there was another person in the office.
“Hi,” said a chipper young voice. “I came to talk to you but you look busy.”
“Yes. I’m in a bit of a hurry, young lady,” Laura said, not fully keeping the impatience out of her voice. “I have a report to finish and not much time to do it.”
“Oh! In that case, yes you do,” said the visitor. “I’ll give you some time. You finish up what you’re doing and we can talk after that.”
Laura glanced up and saw a civilian girl considerably younger than she was, oddly dressed. The girl sat down in a nearby chair and pulled out a book, apparently ignoring her. Laura saw that the office was empty except for the two of them, but she had things to do so she returned to her labors.
After a while she finished and stripped the last page out of the typewriter. Hoping she wasn’t late she checked the clock on the wall, which didn’t seem to have moved a bit; she still had more time than she’d hoped.
The visiting girl lifted her head out of her book and Laura told her, “I have to turn this in. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
The girl nodded and went back to her book. Wary but in a hurry, Laura stapled her report together and left the girl where she was.
When she returned it was as if the girl hadn’t moved an inch.
“So what brings you by, young lady?”, she asked once she was back at her desk. Now that she had a chance to think about it she was sure her visitor wasn’t any normal inhabitant of the office. She was a teenager who should probably still be in school, with dark skin and strikingly blue eyes, her hair hidden by an unconvincing wig. It was a good question how she’d even gotten into the office; it was supposed to be a secure facility, yet the girl was here...
“My dad said I was going to talk to a bunch of people about, um, somebody we know.” She fixed Laura with a preternaturally blue gaze and said, “I’m Sophie. You’re Laura. You know Jenny.”
“Oh. Of course this is about Jenny.” She considered the unearthly child at her desk. Her unusual appearance and inexplicable presence were still unexplained, but Jenny Cornelius was the common thread linking every bizarrely dressed eccentric she met. “You know that there’s a lot that I can’t tell you or anyone about a lot of things–”
“𝒮𝔭𝔢𝔞kᵏ”
Laura froze momentarily, her train of thought derailed.
“Sorry,” Sophie said. “I mean, um, how did you two meet?”
“Oh! Ah, we’ve known each other for years,” Laura found herself saying. “I suppose we must have run into each other at something, early on. We saw each other off and on for a while. She’s a cheeky girl, you know. Completely outrageous. And one day she took it into her head that we needed to go somewhere together...”
“How about a marathon ride on the Tube?”, Jenny Cornelius offered. “That would be a doddle, we hop aboard and we’re away. We could meet at Leicester Square and then ride the whole Piccadilly Line, from Uxbridge to [bleep]fosters and back.”
“What was that noise?”, Laura asked.
“What noise?”
“Never mind. I’ve ridden the Tube, it’s hardly exotic.”
“Good point. We should take my car,” Jenny said, shifting gears as smoothly as a well maintained transmission. “We could drive into the countryside, see parts of England that city dwellers only pass through on the train.”
“No thank you,” Laura said with a smile. “Really, cows and such?”
“Or not to the depths of ruralshire!” Jenny grinned at her with a wild expression. “What if we drove to far-away, fantastical lands, wondrous imaginary places only found in the wildest fantasies? Neverland! Tir na Nog! Oz! France!”
“No?”, Laura snickered. Offhand she thought that if anyone could drive to those places it would be Jenny, but that was a silly idea.
“Oh!”, Jenny gasped in delight, a sudden realization evident on her face. “I know where to take you! Never you mind where now, it’s going to be a surprise.”
Laura trailed off, looking into the distance.
“What happened?”
“Oh, a few days later she banged us into the car and off we went into the wilderness. That was her old car, the Mini, not the E-Type she’s got now, so we weren’t even making very good speed.
“It was insane. She drove for hours, and we were somewhere out near Birmingham when she finally told me we were going up to see some silly teenage boys who had a band. Really! We’re going halfway to Scotland for this? Yes, apparently we are.”
“Some boys with a band?”, Sophie giggled lightly. “That sounds… so like her.”
Laura nodded, remembering.
“That must have been about ‘58 or so and she drove us all the way over to the west coast. And once we got to Liverpool we did indeed see some boys playing music.” She sighed and shook her head wryly. “I will never know how anyone in London could have heard of the Quarrymen...”
How Jenny First Met...
Lord Grallyx
Far out in the Oort Cloud, thousands of times farther from the sun than Earth’s warm lands, the space is dark, cold, and empty. Space doesn’t get much more outer than this until the abysses between galaxies. Millions of years will pass without anything happening, barring encounters with the wrong rock.
Against the infinite blackness a bright blue light moved, closing in at a tenth of lightspeed, headed straight for the Wrong Rock.
It didn’t get there. When it was still light-seconds out a lethal flash of gamma radiation exploded across the star field, spreading destruction in all directions.
Several hundred seconds before the antimatter mine exploded, the blue spark hung motionless in space.
“Hmph,” the spark pouted, watching the megatons of radioactive hell in the prospective future fade out now that she wasn’t going to detonate the mine. “I guess they can’t just put up a ‘No Visitors’ sign out here. Not that I’d listen anyway.”
She surveyed the region in ways difficult to explain to humans, or anyone else trapped in a mere three contiguous dimensions and sequential time.
She’d already seen the antimatter bombs. Farther in there were X-ray lasers, focused-gravity matter disruptors, anti-ship missiles, and a navy’s worth of other destructive weaponry.
It all looked much too dramatic so she side stepped all of it and re-appeared floating a hundred meters from the surface of the comet that was not actually like a billion other comets. Once oriented she moved forward, passing down into the body of the comet, ghosting untouched through ice, rock, armored panels – even, she noted, magical wards to stop actual ghosts.
A mile down she entered a large chamber fit for visitors, provided with human compatible air and temperature. A vast window occupied one entire wall, overlooking the much bigger cavern within where the rock’s single resident whiled away the centuries.
She unfolded a pocket of space and brought out her humanoid body from where she kept it when she didn’t need it.
Alarms blared around her but she moved to a clearly marked control panel and entered the code that her father had told her that she had told him would work. The alarm fell silent.
“Who dares disturb me?”, demanded a booming voice from beyond the barrier.
“I do. I have come to speak with you, Lord Grallyx.”
“Why do you disturb me? And why should I care?”
“How many visitors do you get here?”, she retorted. “I have come a long way for you to speak with me.”
The imprisoned demon hissed at her in frustration. Or perhaps it was hatred, or contempt, or some other emotion she didn’t care about. She stood unimpressed.
“I have come to hear your story of how you came to be bound here,” she told him.
“The Band of the Scarlet Scarf? Can this not be history?”
“As if. I can read books. I want to hear it from you.”
“Do you think the great Lord Grallix is a storyteller to children? I have ruled nations! I have burned nations! You are nothing to me!”
“I have asked nicely,” Sophie pointed out. “𝕴 cͨoͦuͧldͩ 𝖆𝖘𝓴 𝕒𝖌𝖆𝖎n͛.”
Grallyx shrieked as the sound of her voice echoed through the nearby worlds.
“What are you?”, he wailed.
“I’m the one willing to ask nicely.” Sophie crossed her arms and glared. “I can give you a century off of your imprisonment, if I like what I hear. Or I can draw out your waiting by a millennium if I do not.”
“Will you free me from this place?”
“I will not do that,” she told him. “I also will not tell you when or how you leave this place. But I can change the time you will wait.”
“You must already know the story of my imprisonment,” seethed the demon lord skeptically. “You seek some knowledge of the Band of the Scarlet Scarf that is not common knowledge.”
“I’m guessing the Scarlet Scarf people got their name from Jenny Everywhere.”
“The Everywhere!”, bellowed Grallyx, rearing up in outrage. “Of course it did! I could have defeated them all, save for the Everywhere!”
“Yeah, heard that one before,” Sophie said quietly to herself. She rolled her eyes, as teenagers often do when adults state the obvious.
But she didn’t need to prompt him again. Grallyx was just getting warmed up, this clearly being a topic of great interest to him. She stood in the reception hall as Grallyx held forth about politics and battles and a war she had no interest in following. She already knew how it had turned out.
Occasionally he did mention the mysterious leader of the opposition, who seemed to know everything and be everywhere. She listened to those bits and mostly tuned out the rest. Fortunately he liked hearing himself talk; once he got going he didn’t need much prompting.
“And they imprisoned me here! For centuries! Surely someone tracks these otherwise uncounted years. Do you know how long I have already been held here, away from the living universe?”
Sophie only shrugged.
“It must not continue thus forever,” he proclaimed. “I have no subjects, no enemies, no prey – there is only the great Lord Grallyx and a swarm of mindless robots.”
“Dude,” Sophie said dismissively, rolling her eyes. “Do not get me started on being surrounded by robots. I know all about weird annoying robots.”
“I have ruled armies and I am now in a hole inside a miserable rock! Beyond this there is a galaxy that awaits my conquest!”
“You know what, that’s good enough. You talked to me, I’m going to keep up my end of the deal.” Sophie turned her blue eyes upon his many yellow ones and looked past his physical flesh to the spacetime it occupied. The rest was simple, for someone like her or her father. Below her Lord Grallyx was still speaking, though she was done listening, and his voice dropped to a basso-profundo drawl. Sophie carefully checked the small footnote to reality that she had added, making sure that it would expire harmlessly in two hundred years of outside time.
If anyone wanted to talk to him before then, well, they could just live with him going half as fast as the rest of the universe.
She saw that it was good. Sophie folded space around herself and left.
How Sophie First Met...
Professor Awesome
Eric felt awkward.
Lots of kids his age felt awkward a lot of the time, which Eric was aware of and which he’d wished adults would shut up about, but right now he was feeling left out because he didn’t know most of the people here and felt out of place.
He didn’t blame his mom or David, who were adults themselves and adults telling kids “you need to get out and meet kids your own age” was normal. He wasn’t entirely sure how that had led to “go eat dinner” and “get some exposure to new things” but he’d found himself in David’s car getting a long explanation about a holiday that wasn’t new at all and something about branches and citrus fruit.
So here he was downtown at the Emanuel temple and not sure what to think of all the stalls they’d set up. The booths were important for some historical reason he hadn’t gotten straight. The roofs were of open branches or something and the mad scientist parts of his mind wanted to redo those and make them more watertight but apparently it was Tradition or something.
David had brought him for a dinner thing they were doing, which had been nice since he could just sit next to David and follow along with everyone else, but now he’d wandered off somewhere to talk to people he knew, leaving Eric without anyone he knew.
He felt bored.
“You. You’re new here.”
Eric turned to see a kid about his age with a really unflattering bowl haircut looking at him coolly.
“Yeah,” he acknowledged. “You’re around here a lot, huh?”
“Around a lot of places,” the other boy confirmed.
“Hi, I’m Eric.”
“Herbie.”The other boy blinked owlishly at him from behind his thick glasses. “Saw you with Lowe earlier.”
“Yeah, I came over with him; we live in the same building.”
“Good to have neighbors.”
Eric was wondering what this kid was up to, and if this was going to be weird, when someone walked up to them and said, “Hey, Herbie.”
Eric looked over to see a girl maybe a year or two older than he was with the most amazing blue dreadlocks. It crossed his mind that she couldn’t have been around earlier; there were lots of people he hadn’t met but there was no way he wouldn’t have spotted her hair at a distance. And he’d have remembered a cute girl if he’d noticed her.
“Sophie,” Herbie said blandly.
“I didn’t know you cared about Sukkot week,” she said.
“Don’t. Saw someone I knew. Stopped to talk.”
“Oh.” She looked over Eric and said with more warmth than Herbie, “Hi, I’m Sophie.”
“Hi, Sophie, I’m Eric.” A twinge of honesty made him add, “I think Herbie stopped to talk to the guy I came here with, though.”
“Whatever.” It didn’t seem to concern her.
“So I guess you know each other,” he ventured.
“Yeah, we get candy at the same place; we run into each other there a lot.”
“Lollipops,” Herbie confirmed.
“Uh-huh,” Eric grunted, distracted. He’d noticed Sophie had a skin tone much like his but intensely blue eyes. The color didn’t quite match her hair but he appreciated her attention to detail; most girls would never have thought to find colored contacts.
For some reason he thought that was very interesting.
“Why are you here?”, Herbie asked without any evident interest.
“Oh, my dad’s got me going around talking to people about my mom. I was passing by, noticed that my mom is around here somewhere, and stopped to see if I could spot anyone I recognized. And then I saw you over here.”
“Yes. I am here.”
“Did you see my mom?”, Sophie asked, looking around idly. “I think she’s somewhere in the city, probably.”
“Haven’t seen her,” Herbie said.
“Well, she could always look different, but you’d probably recognize her.” Sophie gazed off vaguely then suddenly focused again on Eric, making him suddenly very interested in return.
“You’ve probably met some interesting people, right, Eric?”, she asked after a moment.
“Yeah, a few,” he agreed quickly, trying to figure out who he could tell her about. “There are lots of interesting people where I live.”
“Yeah, I know how that goes,” Sophie said. She gave a little laugh and told him, “Sometimes it’s nothing but weird and interesting people where me and my parents live.”
“Where is that?”, he asked.
“Ah, there you are,” said a familiar voice. Eric turned and saw his neighbor David had shown up. “I think I’m about done here, how about you?”
“I guess so,” Eric said. “I can be, anyway.”
“And you’ve met Herbie, I see. You boys getting along?” David smiled at the young men.
“No problems,” Herbie said “Good to see you again”
“This guy’s your ride home?”, Sophie asked, her contacts glinting strangely in the light.
“Yeah. Uh, this is David Lowe, we live in the same building. David, this is Sophie.”
“Hello…” greeted David, who noticed Sophie and looked as if he wasn’t expecting to see her. “Nice to meet you, young lady?”
“Um, hi.” Sophie looked up at David curiously and asked, “So, uh, you know Herbie?
Eric thought that there was a subtext he was missing. They knew Herbie but they didn’t know each other, did they?
“Oh, for a while,” he allowed. “You know Herbie too, yes?”
“Everybody knows Herbie,” she said.
“Ah, yes, so they do. Quite a few people, I’ve noticed.” He chuckled quietly and asked Eric, “So, you good to say goodnight?”
“Sure,” Eric said, taking the hint. He told the others, “Nice meeting you guys.”
“So long,” Sophie said warmly, while Herbie only nodded.
Eric was walking off with David toward the door when he heard Sophie call, “Hey, Eric?”
He looked back, seeing Sophie watching him speculatively. Herbie had unwrapped a lollipop and looked disinterested in the world. Sophie was looking at him and that seemed much more important.
“It was nice to meet you,” Sophie said with a smile. “If you can figure out how, it’s okay to call me sometime.”
“I don’t have your number,” he pointed out.
“No. But I figure a smart boy could find out.” She gave him a challenging look that did funny things to his emotions.
“He’ll work on it, I’m sure,” David said. “Come along, now.”
Eric followed him out to the car, thinking.
Outside he asked, “They seemed nice. Do you know how I could reach Herbie later?”
“Ah, sorry, no,” David admitted. “I see Herbie around once in a while, but I don’t think I ever knew how to find him.”
“Too bad. It was worth a try.”
“And I know you were asking for the girl. Her I don’t know. Her I’ve never seen before.”
“Ah,” Eric said noncommittally.
He settled into silence, running over what he knew so far. She’d said a smart boy could find her. He was smart; if he kept trying, it was only a matter of time.
As they drove home in David’s Beetle, Eric noticed he was grinning stupidly and made two resolutions. Obviously, he’d have to stop that before he got home. In the longer run, he’d have to talk to people – someone, somewhere, would know how to find a girl with blue dreadlocks.
How Cha Ni First Met...
Sophie Everytime
High among windswept mountains perched a white-walled temple complex, as if inviting a Chinese landscape painter to pass by and be inspired to create a masterpiece.
Within one of its open gardens, a woman wearing a daishō and an elaborately printed scarf bowed respectfully to another wearing a blindfold over her eyes, turned, and walked away down the gravel path. She walked purposefully to a moon gate through which could be seen a koi pond, but as she stepped through the opening it flared with a rippling rainbow light and she disappeared.
The oracle stood silently for a few moments, with a faint smile on her lips.
“I’m alone now,” she said to the otherwise empty garden. “You may as well come out and talk.”
Spacetime rippled further along the garden path and a blue haired girl stepped into the universe. She wasn’t the only visitor to arrive that way, but most of the others wore scarves and goggles.
She cleared her throat and said, “Greetings, Oracle. I am honored to meet Cha Ni, She Who Sees Everywhere. Did, uh, did I do that right?”
“Just fine, Sophie. It’s nice to meet you, too.”
Sophie scratched her cheek, her hair writhing awkwardly, and asked, “Was I supposed to introduce myself before you knew who I am?”
“You may if you wish.” Cha Ni shrugged. “But you don’t have to. It’s just us.”
“Oh, yeah, fair enough. So, hi, I’m Sophie, which you already know; you’re Cha Ni, which I already know… And lot of this talking is probably awkward but if we don’t do it we won’t already remember it.”
“Precisely so, young lady,” the oracle confirmed.
“I mean, I like this but it’s also going to be weird getting used to talking to another human-ish person this way.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Cha Ni assured her.
“I know. So anyway, it’s my first visit here, at last. I’ve been looking forward to it. I even brought you some of that tea you’re going to like,” Sophie said.
“Thank you, Sophie. I asked the monks to make the bread cakes you like, and they should be ready soon. And there are some biscuits for the dogs.”
“Dogs?”
“You can’t see the dogs yet? That’s not surprising, they’re small and they keep moving.”
“Yeah, the future is really tangled up right here with both of us together.”
“In more ways than one,” the oracle agreed. “It’s hard to see anything in detail when we’re together.”
“Yeah, I noticed. Time is funny around here, anyway.” Sophie looked away into the distance, where a snow-capped mountain rose above the others. It stirred a dim memory from years to come. She added, “And space, too. Like, that’s not really Mount Penglai over there, is it?”
“Really?” Cha Ni shrugged. “Categories like real and not real can be very arbitrary and blurry for people like us.”
“Well, yeah… Some of my dad’s relatives say stuff like that.”
“They would, I’d expect. And not explain it very well, either.”
“Will you?”
“Probably not in any way that will help you,” Cha Ni admitted. “I’m already too close to being one of the big sisters to explain everything I know to mes like your mother.”
“The regular Jenny Everywheres, you mean.”
“As much as any of me are typical of anything, yes. On the other hand, I’m not ready to completely leave the universes and join the big sisters yet, either.”
“Good,” Sophie declared.
“Besides, I want to be around for a few years while you’re growing up. Somebody should teach children things their parents won’t. Life skills, and perspective, but also family stories your parents won’t tell you, like the time your mother flashed the Knights of the Round Table.”
“What?” she gasped in scandalized amusement. “No!”
“Oh, yes,” Cha Ni assured her, grinning widely. “Your mom shifted into Camelot and landed right in the middle of the Round Table, for everyone in the room to see. And see her they did!”
“No way!”, Sophie demanded, leaning forward.
“Right there in front of everyone, barefoot all the way up to her goggles!”
Sophie laughed in delight.
An abrupt yipping erupted out of a far corner of the garden, disturbing the peace of the temple complex. A corgi wearing a tartan scarf bounded along the gravel path toward them, followed by a shih tzu. Both ran up to Cha Ni and bounced up and down, tails wagging frantically.
“Hello, girls,” Cha Ni said, smiling serenely amid the chaos.
The dogs ran in circles around her feet, yapping wildly, until the shih tzu took off at top speed toward the outer wall, its pink scarf waving behind it, and the corgi took off in pursuit. They disappeared into a stand of bamboo and the garden was suddenly silent again.
“They didn’t even stay for the dog biscuits,” Sophie observed.
“They’ll be back,” Cha Ni said philosophically.
Sophie nodded.
Sophie smiled at the older woman and confessed, “I like you. This you, I mean. She feels like my mum but talks like my dad. And we don’t have to pretend there’s just one direction of time.”
“The universe is a lot simpler when you only remember things in one direction,” Cha Ni observed.
“Maybe, but wow,” Sophie sighed. “Only remembering the past just seems so weird.”
I think this is enough for now, lest I drive the trope into the ground. Four short scenes seem good; I hope you liked them.
The Sophiad:
0) How Sophie Met Professor Awesome → 1) Preludes & Knick-Knacks → 2) The Doll’s Source → 3) Treat Counting → 4) Session of Mystics → 5) A Game of Two → omake
0) How Sophie Met Professor Awesome → 1) Preludes & Knick-Knacks → 2) The Doll’s Source → 3) Treat Counting → 4) Session of Mystics → 5) A Game of Two → omake
The character of Laura Drake was created by Jeanne Morningstar and is available for use by anyone.
The character of Lord Grallyx was created by Lupan Evezan and is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Lord Grallyx in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed.
Eric, Professor Awesome, was created by Scott Sanford. Other authors are welcome to use the character but please don’t break the original's continuity.
Herbie Popnecker was created by Richard E. Hughes and Ogden Whitney and is in the public domain.
The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed.
