The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

''Hmpff...!!'', Maria grunted, her mouth full of peanuts once again. She helped herself to swallow with more whiskey. ''Wait for meeee...!''

The only reason she yelled so was because she noticed that the people inside the store were going out, and -although it was just a simple instinctive response- she did not wish to be left alone, which was a thought that troubled her a lot. However such thought was not having much influence in Maria's mind at exactly one minute and six seconds before the end of her birthplanet. Most conscious human inhabitants in that planet and moment were thinking about how to avoid the end of the world, regretting about past deeds or undone tasks, or simply finding a way to express their personal feelings of panic and confusion. That was not her case.

Besides the sudden alcohol effect, the main issue Maria's mind was trying to deal with at that moment was how to get off the counter. It was a hard task; she was rather unsure of where and how she was supposed to move her body in order to find herself in a walking position once again. She knew she was sitting at some determined point over a counter; she also knew she was meant to be at another determined point, outside of the shop. She ignored how to fill the gap between such points, as she ignored why she was sitting at the counter right then, when she remembered -as clearly as if it had been yesterday- that only seconds ago she had been standing and embracing some male of rather attractive features.

The answers for both of her enigmas were actually quite similar in many aspects, but Maria couldn't work it out. She was busy now trying to find space in her bra to put a bag of peanuts inside. She couldn't find her bra, so she looked around to see if it happened to be tossed around there by chance. That usually worked; this time it didn't, but she was not concerned about it anymore. She was now busy observing how the label in the whiskey bottle had a print that went from blurry to sharp intermittently.

She recognized some graphemes.
Then she did not recognize any of the graphemes out of the blurry image.

She let out a single laugh, the kind of laugh that proved her ape ancestry.
Then the graphemes were recognizable once more.

She lifted her face, and looked forwards. She saw some blurred image that reminded her of people leaving the place, through a door, and gathering in a close group outside. Then she saw some flashing colors, and the image went sharp once again. She recognized that as two men outside, with a towel and a strange device. She couldn't recognize what it was; she made an effort to remember something like it. She remembered that three years ago she had eaten the best slice of apple custard pie in her entire life. She also remembered she was meant to be thinking about something else, and that that something else was how to get off the counter.

She failed at this how; but she decided to try nonetheless, and see what happened.

Maria made an effort and stood up, not noticing how the impact of her fall, face to the ground, had left her nose permanently crooked. She also failed to notice the blood that ran down from it. She did notice the great pain, but joining the group that was gathering outside felt as something more important and far more happier to do than simply cry out of pain because of a broken nose that had no inmediate repair, and it was true, after all. As the Guide states in one of its latest appendix additions, alcohol is also responsible many times of enlightenment of many species' minds, in contrast to the Encyclopedia Galactica's simple statement about its intoxicating effects. No wonder the Guide sells much better.

Maria simply stored the bag of peanuts in her pocket - another example of how alcohol enlightens the mind- and rushed outside, this time effectively avoiding the dog's faeces and clumsily falling over Honda Civic as she reached him.

''Waaaidd, waiiid...!'' she mumbled, lacing one of her arms across his shoulder. She held the bottle of whiskey close to her face as she stared at the flashing light; her mind had just made the connection she needed to understand what it was. Maria pulled out her best grin, wide and cheerful despite blood and a broken tooth product of her recent fall.

''WHISSSSHHKEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY...!'', she said, waiting for the device to take a snapshot.
 
What happened next went very much like this:



Fortunately, the Vogon Constructor Fleet had hired an unruly tribe of gourmands known as the Dentrassi to provide their in-flight catering. The Dentrassi were a wild but pleasant bunch of diminuitive troll-like beings who loved to produce delicious food and infuriated Vogons. Indeed, there was nothing the Dentrassi loved more than the sight of a Vogon getting annoyed. One of them had attempted to cook a Vogon's grandmother once. He was known on Vogsphere as Quaebar the Great Satan, and they still wrote poems about him.

When the Dentrassi staff working in the kitchens of the Vogon Flagship detected two hitchhiker requests from the planet Earth fourty-nine seconds before its destruction, they decided it was time to liven things up a bit. After all, morale had been a little low recently following the latest Vogon open-mike night, and with the latest of seven planetary apocalypse banquets prepared, the Dentrassi didn't see why the Vogons should be having all the fun.

So they locked on to both signals, sending one to the cargo bay of the Vogon Flagship, and another to the personal slime-jacuzzi chamber of Lady Hargleflarstinox VII, a Vogon dignitary of some high renown who had been over-ordering on room service.

This was quintessential Dentrassi humour. And since the second destination is by far the more interesting, we shall forget altogether the mention of that first signal and the rather silly adventures that followed for that pair of hitchhikers. Instead, let us revisit the story of Honda Civic and the handful of ape descendants who had been caught with him in the transference beam.

"HEEEEELP! I'M BEING VIOLATED!!" screamed Lady Hargleflarstinox VII, a Vogon dignitary of some high renown, whose slime-jacuzzi had suddenly become invaded by a group of thrashing hitchhikers. The fat, naked Vogon woman dropped her plate of battered-firebugs and waved her flabby arms around, splashing the walls (and her attackers) with foul-smelling mud. Through the steam she couldn't make out how many of them there were. But she knew for certain that one of them was stuck in her armpit.

"HELP! I'M BEING SUFFOCATED!" cried Honda Civic, whose head was currently stuck between the folds of the woman's flesh.

"AAAAAGH!!"

"AAAAGH!"

"AAAAAAAAGH!!"

"AAAAAAAAGH!"

And so forth.

With her other hand, Lady Hargleflarstinox VII reached over the side of the tub and started pressing the alarm on the nearest wall. But unfortunately, this was only the seventh most important ship in the Vogon Constructor Fleet, so nothing really worked on it. The slime-jacuzzi wasn't even that hot.

"AAAAAGH!!"

"AAAAGH!"

"AAAAAAAAGH!!"

"AAAAAAAAGH!"

And so forth.
 
[size=+1]The experience of passing through space via a transference beam is a rather unique one. Experts have described the sensation as being roughly equivalent to having your body passed swiftly through a Patented Ultra-Crushinator 6000 before being reassembled at the end of the ordeal.

Thus when Anthony Horwitzer, ape-descendant and former resident of Earth, landed in the slime jacuzzi of Lady Hargleflarstinox VII, a Vogon dignitary of some high renown, he was feeling rather worse for wear.

The application of copious amounts of slime and a screaming Vogon dignitary did not help this experience at all.

As a former resident of Earth, Anthony had never knowingly encountered any extra-terrestrial lifeforms before. He had often imagined such an encounter, however, picturing the sort of graceful beings from beyond the starts that he had read about in science-fiction novels or seen in the movies. Lady Hargleflarstinox VII, a Vogon dignitary of some high renown, was not really what he had pictured however.

Howling in some horrible, incomprehensible tongue the alien dignitary splashed mud across the assembled hitchhikers and attempted to reach for an alarm button. The violation that she was objecting to so loudly was in fact Honda Civic, currently trapped in one of the folds of the Vogon’s body.
“HELP! I’M BEING SUFFOCATED!” came the muffled cry from the flap of skin where Anthony hoped his friend’s head was still located. The experience of the transference beam coupled with the shock from seeing a naked alien dignitary writhing around in a pool of slime was having a profound effect upon Anthony, but he none the less decided to leap to his friend’s aid.

He would like to think, after all, that if he was ever trapped within the folds of a terrifying alien she-beast someone would come to his aid too.

Staggering through the slime, Anthony grabbed Honda by the legs and attempted to pull him free from the folds of Lady Hargleflarstinox VII, a Vogon dignitary of some high renown. This was a feat easier said than done, however; the naturally-gripping skin of a Vogon coupled with all the slime that covered everything made it extremely difficult to even get a grip on Honda’s trouser leg, never mind get him out of the Vogon. The Vogon dignitary’s screaming was not helping matters, either.

Gritting his teeth, Anthony pulled with everything he could muster. Somehow this effort was enough; Honda was dragged free from the Vogon’s folds, momentum sending both him and Anthony careering out of the slime-jacuzzi in a confused flurry of limbs, slime and slime-covered peanuts.

“WHAT THE BLOODY HELL IS THAT?!” Anthony immediately demanded of his newly-freed companion whilst pointing a finger at Lady Hargleflarstinox VII, a Vogon dignitary of some high renown, who was still screaming and hammering at the alarm button.

This morning he had woken up with the intention of spending most of the day in the pub with Honda, and maybe exploring New York if he was feeling adventurous.

Now he was wrestling alien monsters in slime-jacuzzis.

This was, perhaps, a little too much adventure for Anthony.[/size]
 
The feeling of being ripped apart atom by atom and reassembles again was frightning enough for a drunk ape descendent but David got the distinct impression he had been reassembled by a clumsy baby and half of his atoms had been substituted for a random mix of drool and macaroni.

"UGH"

"AAAAAGH!!"

"AAAAGH!"

"AAAAAAAAGH!!"

"AAAAAAAAGH!"

"What?"

"AAAAAGH!!"

"AAAAGH!"

"AAAAAAAAGH!!"

"AAAAAAAAGH!"

"Thats what I though you said."

He had ironically landed in a pile of alien towels and not in the tub. This is ironic because the towels were all dirty and covered with a slime that no scientist has ever care to get close enough to to name and far worse smelling that the tub. It was at Anthony's yelling that he sat up to see an obese alien with a pair of legs sticking out of it's armpit. He first he though he was drunk... which he still might be, then he though he should do something... so he did.

The thrown packet of peanuts went wide and bounced off of Anthony's head. With a developing headache and no idea what was going on around him he then walked over to the edge of the pool, grabbed Anthony's shoulders and began to pull. "This is why I don't drink." he muttered a second before he slipped and fell with a yell into the pool.

He wondered, in the brief moment before he hit the surface if the water would stain his clothes and if, anywhere in this dank smelly room there was and Ms. Scumfree's he could soak his shirt in when he clambered out again. It would, and there wasn't but where were three hundred and ninety two ways to remove vogon bathwater stains and according to The Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy all of them involved fire in some way. David however was still ignorant that the wondrous book even existed.

Hitting the water almost on top of one of the females in their group he spluttered and floundered almost losing his glasses before finding Anthony again and repeating the procedure of grabbing and pulling, this time from within the pool as the alien fleet at last liberated from his shoe by the water made it's escape.

 
By the time Maria regained her self-awareness, something truly dramatic happened in the Vogon ship; she ignored what, but that was not the point in any case. It took her some seconds to realize that surrounding her main respiratory orifices there was no breathable oxygen anymore, but a thick watery slime reminiscent of mud and intergalactic dignitary's dirt- a very, very peculiar substance; similar to politician's dirt, yet not quite the same.

Fortunately for Maria some instinctive reflex forced her to seek the surface, where she gasped for air. Had it been on her own ability to realize she should have done so, she would have died thinking. But, since she was still under the alcohol's influence, odds favoured her.

Mud was splashed on her face, once. Then, some more of the strange substance was splashed over her, this time, with the characteristic pattern only a male tailor shop owner can leave as a consequence of splashing mud from falling after pulling somebody else out of an armpit. Maria ignored this; the third time mud splashed her face was because she did so herself, out of pure randomness.

By then, she recognized that there were sounds and yelling around her, which didn't bother her much at all. All she remembered was that she had a whiskey bottle on her hand before the lights flashed, and now she did not.

This upsetted her.

For motives not clear enough, but sufficiently obscure, Maria decided to start looking for it, and she decided to start this search by prying open some of the dignitary's armpit folds and sticking her own arm in, prodding with it in hope of touching the glass bottle. She ignored these were some armpits of some renown importance; in fact, she ignored that she had stuck her arm inside an armpit, just as she ignored if this armpit would feel tickles or not because of her arm, just as she ignored that the Guide existed, but her planet of birth didn't anymore.

''I wannn my whishhhhhkey...Wherrrs mh boddle o' whishhhkhhhey...?'' she said out loud, to anyone in particular.
 
The funny thing was that Ramona knew this was all bound to happen eventually. Unexplained at the most but not taking away from the fact that it was all bound to happen. Things put in place were going to move and moving things were going to move farther along unless tampered with. If so, then they will only move in another direction, but still keep moving, in a sense. We like to call these things 'plots'. The current one made perfect sense to Ramona, making for a horribly written stories. To put it in simple terms, she, being what is known as a protagonist, had forgotten something, went back to retrieve it, was brutally ignored by the clerk, and thus, the world ended.

"Apathetic bloody planet, I've no sympathy
at all. Energize the demolition beams."


"Well that's just wrong." Ramona replied, pushing her glasses farther on her nose. If the world was going to end, she might as well had a good view of it. That was when perceptions started to come into play, advancing through the plot. How did the others she was with handle what had just been said? The world...a vast wonderland of water and...land...was not about to be catastrophically doomed for a simple express route. The clerk would have no job or money. That lady with the fliers would not sell her products or make money. That crazy guy with the suit that called her a 'friend' would not find a buddy to shmoose off of and make money, and the man with the towels would eventually lose them and can never buy more, probably for lack of money. And, worse of all, Ramona's receipt paper would be instantly and inexplicably disintegrated into ash. Making it null and void and heeding absolutely no money.

It had came to her attention that there was whiskey involved in the matter and suddenly, life necessities didn't seem so drastic anymore. Ramona, deflated and defeated, gave into her cold ambitions and sucked in a tiny bit of air, making a sqquee! voice with her throat, as her bottom lip trembled; the symptoms of an oncoming cry.

"No one even offered me some..."she pouted.

And then the world ended.

Whatever had happened between that last pathetic second of her Earth life and the beginning of her new, mud filled life could not have been described in words. If they did, then Ramona Tarp did not have the words and would probably plagiarize them from another source, merely to get her point across. She mist have felt the same as all of her other 'companions' maybe even worse so, for when she finally realized what was going on, she was bawling and covered in mud, a similar nostalgic scenario.

"It...heek!....It's all heek! over me!"she hiccuped. Honda Civic was doing some bonding ritual or something to a strange thing that was apparently disturbed. She was thoroughly disturbed that whatever was being done before Earth had been obliterated was now disturbed by the group of hitchhikers. However, Ramona was sober, so...

"Stop COMPLAINING!"she screeched through sobs, hiccups, and stray peanuts.
 
The Babel fish is a small, yellow, leech-like and profoundly remarkable creature that would have made this whole scene much less confusing. An event such as the demolition of one's home planet should, at the very least, serve as a unifying experience for the handful of post-Apocalyptic survivors produced by it; and if there is one thing said group can do without, it's language barriers.

Suffice to say, the only creature currently inside the slime spa in possession of a Babel fish was Honda Civic. As such, it fell to him to sort out this mess.

This will be a recurring theme.

"TA-DAAAAA!" declared Honda as he was pulled triumphantly from the Vogon's armpit. He stood up in the jacuzzi and performed exagerrated jazz-hands (which splattered further slime over the dishevelled bunch of humans in the tub behind him).

"WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?!" cried Lady Hargleflarstinox VII, who seemed unable to get up and thus resorted to covering her genitalia with her hands. This is a difficult thing to do, since Vogons have precisely twelve genitalia.

"In-flight entertainment, Maam. Captain's orders."

"Entertainment?! While I'm taking a bath?!"

"Best time, Maam. The more relaxed you are, the funnier things appear."

"Shouldn't comedians be literally funny - not apparently funny?"

"There's nothing literal about humour, Maam."

"Well, I'll tell you what IS literal, young man! The fact that I'M GOING TO HAVE YOU THROWN OUT OF THE AIRLOCK!!"

"No need, Maam. We're just about to do that ourselves."

"You're going to throw YOURSELVES out of the airlock?!"

"Yes Maam. It's the finale to our act. There's a thin line between comedy and tragedy, and we intend to cross it."

"Well I'm NOT getting out of this slime spa to come watch you commit suicide."

"No need, Maam. You just stay here while we do all the work. We'll be out of everyone's hair in less than a jiffy."

"You're going to kill yourselves whilst no one's looking? That seems very unprofessional. Shouldn't I at least send my manservant with you or something?"

"No no, that would ruin the effect. The best comedy is when the audience imagines the punchline. It's called inference, Maam."

"I didn't realise the Dentrassi were so well-versed in comic theory."

"Not Dentrassi, Maam. Humans. In the latest intergalactic contest we were awarded silver in the category of species who die in the most humorous ways - beaten only the Exploding Arse-Roaches of Catilon IX."

"So what now? I have to sit here and visualize you all throwing yourselves out of the airlock?!"

"If you would do us the honour, Maam. We'd hate to think we were dying in vain."

"Well, alright. But I'm not going to put much effort into it."

"As you wish, Maam. Now, the show must go on, as they say. Thank you for your time and enjoy this complimentary bag of peanuts."

"Vogons are anaphylactics!"

"Of course you are. I was just trying to encourage audience participation."

There was an awkward pause and Honda Civic turned to his friends, who were currently holding their hands over their ears, having been deafened by the chorus of shrieks, howls and gargles which they heard from Lady Hargleflarstinox VII. He started ushering everyone out of the jacuzzi with shoves and meaningful glares. The band of survivors slurped over the edge of the pool and across the steamy room, trailing towels, whiskey bottles and peanut bags. Honda Civic kept them moving, ignoring their complaints and questions whilst singing at the top of the voice. "AND NOW...THE END IS NEAR... AND WE HAVE REACHED...THE FINAL CURTAIN...!"

Suffice to say, to those without a Babel fish, the previous conversation sounded very odd indeed.
 
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