Jenny Everywhere: The Game
From Barbelith
| Table of contents |
The Story
Introduction
Jenny Everywhere's granny has just died. As a result, she's been feeling really out of sorts and no matter how much she shifts around, she can't get away from the feeling that she didn't really know her as well as she would have liked. While drowning her sorrows in several thousand alternate dimensions at once she finds her conciousness magnetically and intractably drawn to one singular Jenny, standing in the lush, foliage-shrouded garden of an old house, holding an exquisitely-wrapped gift.
Inside the house is a traditional Chinese medicine and herbalists, run by a woman who Jenny recognises as her Granny's best friend. It seems that Granny, as co-owner, has left her share of the business to Jenny and there's lots of work to be done. At the old lady's command, Jenny opens the gift she is holding, a brand new scarf, and steps through the beaded curtain to begin work at the back of the shop.....
Detailed Synopsis
Concepts
Many of these will be linked to from The Pagoda.
- The ba gua, or "eight changes". Could be related to/correspond with the Eight Immortals. These should correspond to the EIGHT DAYS OF JENNY EVERYWHERE.
- The Five Elements -- These correspond to the five steps of Jenny's daily routine. They might also be useful if we want to explore Traditional Chinese Medicine or acupuncture within the game.
- The art of feng shui -- especially as regards dragon energy.
- Maoism, the cult of personality, the hysteria of the Cultural Revolution.
- The history and techniques of kung fu, especially in regards to the Boxer Rebellion and the Heavenly Fist Society.
- The hulijiang or fox spirit, especially as a huxia, or fox-sage.
- Kuan Yin, the white goddess of infinite compassion, a bodhisattva who may or may not be related to Jenny.
Characters
The Set-up
Funeral, scarf, the Old Lady's shop. Jenny can no longer access other personas/dimensions because she is bereft over the death of her grandmother. She inherits a half-share in Granny Everywhere's shop.
The Back of the Shop:
The back of shop is an airy and spacious place. Red brick walls and knee-high oak counters that run the length of the walls. There are windows set in the wall right up at the ceiling, short in height but long in width, through which you can see the greenery in the garden and there's a big old-school iron-doored furnace way in at the back. It's a very homely and magical place, almost as if the shop is there to front the back room, rather than the back room being there to supply the shop.
Worlds Within Game
Let's make it eight worlds to correspond to eight immortals/eight treasures:
- Something all rural/ancient... Jenny World One
- Something imperial, maybe -- Jenny World Two
- Something urban/sci-fi. Either Chinatown... Jenny World Three
- Just for an extra option, something that captured the weird countryside vs. city politics of like 1860-1950.... Jenny World Four
Puzzles:
straight paths are considered demonic. (this turns up in feng shui, too). The noble and virtuous take a zig-zagging route. Stephenson drops that one describing a boardwalk leading to a teahouse. How about a puzzle where Jenny is in a dimension and has a straight path through which she can see where she needs to get. Can't do it though, and she has to shift through other multiple dimensions to get there instead? We can set that up with one of Kuan Yin Lady's introductions so the puzzle isn't too obtuse.
External Resources:
PantyWad page on Chinese Myths (http://www.pantywad.com/index.php/ChineseMyths)
Magic Eight from Chinese Tea Stories (http://firehorseportfolio.com/tea/eight.html)
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