h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

(It seems we've made a slight continuity disrupting symlpost, which involved your double post. Shall we use your post(s), mine, or a completely new one?)

let's go with yours:

They bent a wire clothes hanger into a hook and tried to get lucky out. No luck. So they....

...got incredibly frustrated until they realized that they were looking for a *lucky* penny. So all they had to do was find out who originally picked him up and then get them to search the couch with their intensified luck. Unfortunately, the beers had begun to work by then so everyone's short-term memory was a bit off. Which was unfortunate, because...

...got incredibly frustrated until they realized that they were looking for a *lucky* penny. So all they had to do was find out who originally picked him up and then get them to search the couch with their intensified luck. Unfortunately, the beers had begun to work by then so everyone's short-term memory was a bit off. Which was unfortunate, because...

...they forgot that the fire was still blazing all around them. As the fire crept closer, Lucy...

...started looking for old posts to figure out what was going on. She remembered something about firery barnies. Unfortunately the current researcher needed to get to a movie and left the next post to someone else.

As our heroes were talking about what was going on, not noticing the fire that was approaching them, a shadowy figure looked at them from behind a tree, muttering under his breath. He deserved revenge. But not now. No, not now. He had one more sinister act to perform, that would once again remove him from the story for quite some time before he came back. Until then, he wouldn't come back to the story.

As the shadowy figure flitted away from our group, Lucy managed to find the lucky penny, who pointed out that the fire was nearly all around them. They looked, but there was no means of escape. No means, that is, until Merlin (Merlin's still here, right?) accidently pushed a hidden lever on the side of the couch.

For a few brief moments, they were nowhere. When our heroes, the lucky penny (sorry, can't remember his name for some reason), and the couch all reappeared, they were...

(yeah merlin is still in the story, arthur is dead, arnold the dinosaur left to run a country, cinderella the gnat also died)
... in the same exact spot they had been in before. Except that it was 500 years in the future. They looked around to see that they were in a vacant lot where the old building had formally been. Merlin examined the side of the sofa and read off the label (remember that the sofa just conveniently appeared earlier in the story, it was placed by the current researcher). It said "The Aurora: Rated best Time Machine/Sofa Bed by Popular Mechanics. Made by the good people at Shiny Things Inc., Copyright 2500 A.D."
Yes it seems that the couch had appeared in our story from the future, which of course meant that someone from the future was now in the past wondering what the hell happened to his time machine/sofa bed.

Five miles away, in a city made of spires and domes that looked not so much built as grown, a young man landed his aircar. The left side of the car flowed outward like a living thing and the man got out. He walked to the shiftpad and keyed in his destination while the car resealed itself, leaving no sign to show that there had ever been a hole in that seamless surface. He saw the air shimmer and grow bright, then dim back to a reasonable level, and he was standing in his apartment.He walked into the kitchen to get a cup of stimcaf. Something nagged at him. He ignored it and sipped his stimcaf. It nagged at him harder, and he went to go watch the 3D. It nagged him still harder, and he decided to give in before it gave him a headache. So he searched throughout his abode for the thing that was nagging him, and suddenly he had it. "Where's my ChronoSofa Deluxe?!"

He glanced about his apartment for signs of what had happened to it. His eyes traced along the curved and almost metallic walls, which glistened and lit up as they sensed his interest in them. As he bristly walked around, he suddenly bumped into a small blinking hologram labeled "Read This!"
In a familiar motion he raised his hand and tapped the airborn button. Electricity swirled about in a beautiful pattern until it had reformed into a floating text message. The message read "Hey Cousin! Sorry but I borrowed your Aurora Time Machine/Sofa Bed. I'll return it next time I see you."

Lucy, meanwhile, disconnected the powercord to the couch and mumbled something about not quite remembering which story this was. She plugged the computer into the now-vacant outlet and sent off an email to Arnold asking him for a brief summary of the story so far.

Soon, Arnold's email arrived, saying "Icarus killed Arthur 3 times (he kept being resurrected) for a story arc, which failed to materialize due to the story taking off in a really odd direction involving pokemon and a crazy man named Phrank who is obsessed with old Infocom games. It doesn't really matter what happened because in a universe as chronically unstable as this one, time lines can be changed with a few keystrokes."

(basically, a whole bunch of stuff happened and then the story died. Go ahead and resurrect Arthur or whatever, because nobody remembers what happened anyway. -Icarus)

Meanwhile, the cloaked figure was approaching the place where he had left our heroes previously. He kept wondering why he expected to find them in the same exact spot they had been, before. It wasn't *his* fault that his evil deed had taken around five-hundred years to finish. But when he rounded the corner, he was amazingly surprised to see that the people were still there.

The hooded figure walked over to them, and threw off its cloak, revealing the Three Blind Mice!

"We've finally caught up with you," one of the mice said.

"And now that we discovered how to make the elixir of life over the past five hundred years, we can't be killed, or even injured! Wel, not for the next ten minutes, anyway." said a second.

"Now, where is that crate of chocolate fruit you owe us?" asked the third one.

The heroes were about to reply, but just then, a giant war machine rose in the distance. It circled over where the characters of our story were located, and a megaphone chimed in.

"I AM THE RULER OF THIS PLANET, AND YOU STOLE MY TIME TRAVELING SOFA! YOU WILL ALL PAY DEARLY!!!"

"Oh, drat," Merlin said. "Why on Earth did I ever get involved with a kid who was crying over his dad changing his name to Talulah? My life would've been so much simpler otherwise."

Back in the apartment, the man began a battle. His brilliant and logical side knew that nothing would be accomplished by him getting angry and smashing his beautiful appartment. His more emotional side took this time of reflection to begin smashing things and screaming while his other side wasn't look. What his emotional side neglected to remember was that everything in the apartment was made of incredibly advanced alloys and he had just dislocated his shoulder trying to smash a napkin holder. After running around in pain for several minutes he finally decided to call an ambulance, as soon as he decided the nano chips in the base of his skull sent a message to his refrigerator, which then sent a message to his desk, which then sent a message to the 3d-view-phone which in turn promptly exploded.

(Damn, looks like we posted at the same time, okay, this can work. Just mentally place my post before afgnaacp's. That way the guy can still show up and be ruler of the world, he just happned to have a dislocated shoulder at the moment.)

*Good idea. We're still assuming that 'this planet' refers to Earth, right?

(I think it's Earth. It's just a ChronoSofa Deluxe, not a TeleChronoSofa Deluxe. Those cost way too much money.)

(I didn't know it was earth to start with.. even back with the kid crying in the park.)

Lucy, now at least confident in which story she was currently in (have to duck into the other one day), quickly put away the pictures of the frog moving the stone. She looked around the room and finally realized there was a war machine flitting about screaming through a megaphone. "Oh my," she said, "I hope that thing doesn't carry a water pistol.. I don't think they've as yet figured out a way to keep h20 from interacting with electronics.. Though I could be wrong, of course, but I'd still rather not find out." She quickly grabbed an umbrella and secured it over the computer.

A line from Arnold's email kept nagging softly at the back of her mind, but since she'd been ignoring it, the line decided to blast at her... "Resurrect Authur!" .. "Oh!" she thought... "Hrm... now how will I do that.. I suppose I could wake from a dream.. a very long dream... Gee.. what shall I do?"

About that time another voice boomed down from the ship. "I -am- Authur you silly twit!"

"You can't be Arthur!" yelled Lucy. "He's been killed at least three times that I know of!" Besides, thought Lucy, this is five hundred years in the future. Even if Arthur didn't die from bursting into flames or having all of his cellular walls burst or turning into methane gas and exploding, he'd be really old by now. If the man who claimed to be ruler of the world really were Arthur, he'd have to be a brain in a jar or a robotic duplicate or something. Anyway- A voice from the megaphone brought her out of her reverie. "Stop thinking you twit!" That clinched it. Arthur never called her a twit.

"Damn" thought the man in the giant robotic war machine. He started to lift his hand to smash it against the console but he suddenly realized it was broken when a sharp stinging pain caused him to have a very minor seizure. When he looked back out on his screen, the group was suddenly gone, or so it seemed.