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

Orchid, are you interested in taking elocution lessons?

Boots, I have never conversed with any other whale than Orchid. Perhaps it is a matter of physiology. Is it possible that all whales lisp? We do need to do something about her fashion sense. And certainly about her taste in men.

Pin, it's always hard to watch your children grow up. But we have to do it. We have to let them become their own...erm...people. And I don't like to criticize, but Trout isn't the best of role models for a young girl. It's no wonder she is already thinking about inter-species humpty bumpty.

Well you got the Trout bit right, Prez.

As for Orchid, she was a disappointment from the start, remember?

Some lame Nemesis she's turned out to be...

So yeah, go on, 'improve' her - anyone who wants to try.

If you do, you'd better watch out for Speak, though. He's the protective one, and he's a big bugger. Come to think of it, he's probably the one who needs the bath too...

'Hypatia, should we pay this Speak character a visit?
What's his interest in the blubber child anyway? Does he have some kind of hold over the seal? Oh Orchid don't scowl it really doesn't suit you. She has quite nice eyes, Hypatia, but you're right about the dress sense and her taste in men.
Alas I also have little experience of cross species conversation, but legions of teenage angst experience...surely it can't be so different, whatever the species?

As for Trout, I've met his type before. A fish of many hobbies who likes to swim in all the ponds. A challenge though and he does keep the Phoc on his tail.

Right, Hypatia, do we crawl back to the comfort zone we knew despite risking rejection? Or do we dare explore the pain that is the present in the hopes of realising a future?'

'Hear that, Trout?' The seal slapped a flipper firmly across Fish boys gawping mouth.

'The b****y dog wants to play for real!'

'Only if Hypatia is happy with that,' said Boots 'She's in the darkest zone. We have to take care of her.'

Trout sidled across the space they called the bus. The temptation to 'take care' of Hypatia as he understood it proving almost irresistable - almost but not quite, as the dog barred her teeth (perfectly even and so so white)and snarled, he came to a halt, well most of him did, and the others chose to ignore his prematurity.

'Right, who's in?'

Pay Speak a visit? Oh dear, Boots, I certainly hope not. You see, Speak is not one of my admirers. For some reason he insists on treating me like some silly middle-aged librarian. I mean, how rude is that?

But I have noticed, to his credit, that he is fond of Orchid. Waz and Alberta both tolerate him. And the seal is buddy buddy with him. So perhaps I have misjudged him. Perhaps he isn't a pompous, arrogant windbag after all. Perhaps underneath all that bluster he just wants to be loved like everyone else.

My God, I can't believe I just said that. *pours herself another glass of ruby zinfandel*

Orchid, dear, we must get you to a dressmaker. That pink organza has to go. I didn't want to say anything earlier, but pink really isn't your color. The holidays are coming up. We need to dress you in red and gold for the holidays. Yes, definitely red. Red always makes a statement.

Comfort zone I think Boots. It doesn't actually comfort me, but it seems to make everyone else feel better. No one wants to see pain, or hear it. We'll just pretend it doesn't exist. Because if I acknowledge it, then the rest of you will have to as well. If you ever want to end a conversation in a hurry, just tell the truth about how you feel.

This interspecies relating is hard enough as it is. My God! is uncomfortable when I tell him to eat his vegetables. The badgeboy can't deal with tomato bisque! Imagine his reaction to death. Baseball is a much safer topic.

You did the smart thing, Boots. You just took off. I should have done that.

Trout rolled his eyes and yawned. "Boring!" he offered. "Let's talk about me and the odds of my getting laid before the stupid librarian talks us to death. Where's the Russian broad? She has nice breasts. I'm in for her."

"I may be in, or I may not," the seal scowled. "Not if we're going to wind up in some bloody cave again talking about baseball. I'm only comfortable on the ice and at the Pier."

"I'm in!" Orchid lisped. "Thealboy, you thit! You thaid I looked pretty in pink. I want a red dreth. But I'm not going to dithcuth batheball. I hate batheball. And the theep is a pithant thit!"

'OK a few ground rules.
No caves - unless they hold dark secrets of the mind.
No baseball - except when bat is being used to lash out in frustration
Ice has to be more than Ice (as an accompaniment to drinks being the exception)
The Pier is only a Pitt stop not a destination.
The comfort zone belongs to Hypatia who may choose to share the blanket on occasion.

The rest is up to you.'

The suddenly grown up and somewhat autocratic dog stretched her legs,
flicked her perfectly groomed tail and strolled around the space.

'For what it's worth,' she threw at them, 'I have always craved applause. How shallow is that and where does it come from?'

The Seal smirked and remembered an erstwhile conversation about another sixties child, smacking his flippers in satisfaction. He loved to be right.

'Not so fast Seal Boy!'
Trout was a little more understanding and could even be less judemental - well with his history he could hardly be else.

'What brings you here then, mate? If you didn't also crave applause and adulation, why do you post? It's all relative innit?'

Appalled by the lowering of his grammatical standards, Fish boy shut himself up.

Count me in.

Speak treats everybody like middle-aged librarians. He had to be right eventually.

And I never said the whale looks good in pink. I'm pretty sure I never said the whale looks good, period.

We don't have to do the Pier, 'course not. I hate the place, and it's more or less permanently occupied by a thing with a hammer these days.

I guess the promise you need is that I won't boss it. So I won't. You'll have worked out, though, that albatross and the SYWM are going to invite themselves now and again.

Yeah, where did the Russian bint go? She was quite an eyeful. Not that I've ever indulged in this cross-species stuff, mind...

Shades of A695469 The shark waits at the stop for the red Roadmaster, or whatever alternate form of transport, to arrive.

Was it the red pill or the white pill?

F S

Blue pill

She approached the quivering trout.

"I am not Russian," she crooned, "but I think I can keep you amused until she returns."

The seabird is looking mournful.
Pinniped is at it again, and Alberta’s fragile world hovers somewhere between acute embarrassment and apocalypse.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

‘Please come out of there, Pinniped’, she begs.

A whiskery snout emerges from the array of furs, followed closely by a familiar glare.

‘I didn’t start it’, Pinniped hisses. ‘This is going to happen anyway’.

‘It doesn’t matter’. A tear drips from the tip of the albatross’s bill. ‘They’ll still blame us. They don’t understand the way that stories grow’.

The seal merely growls, and clambers back into Orchid’s wardrobe.

‘I think the hound does’. She turns in surprise, and there is the Speak-Your-Weight-Machine. He looks almost kindly in a stern sort of way. For once.

‘I can climb right through the back of here, y’know’, comes a muffled cry. ‘It opens out into a fantastic landscape of snow and ice’.

‘Well it would, wouldn’t it, you idiot?’ snarls Speak.

The snout and glare reappear, trying to look taller this time.

‘But that’s not all’, sneers Pinniped. ‘I saw the vulture-bird, and she was talking to a goat-thing, only it smelt of fish’.

‘Faun’, announces Speak superciliously. ‘And Trout Montague would be the faun, naturally, through the association with priapic ritual’.

Pinniped looks blank.

‘A faun is a kind of mythological sex-pest’, explains the elephant seal, wearily.

‘Oh, right. Yeah, that would be Trout OK. So what about the lammer-wotsit?’

‘Who’s name is...?’ Speak waits for the penny to drop. The albatross gets it first.

‘Oh, Pinniped’, she pleads. ‘Even you must know this story! Is that who the Enchantress is? Please, stop it - I'm frightened...'

The SYWM concurs. 'Let’s leave this one alone’.

The blotchy one is thinking about Turkish Delight, though he can’t quite work out why.

‘I might not want to leave it alone’, he says, slowly, as if in a trance. ‘Why shouldn’t I just walk out through there and let it all happen?’

Speak and Alberta exchange a look of quiet despair.

‘It’s got a Lion in it, for a start’, murmurs Speak, but he has a nasty feeling that the spell has already been cast.

The cranky librarian is mildly interested in something besides herself for the first time in months. She didn't realize that Orchid had that kind of wardrobe.

She approaches SYWM with a somewhat chagrined look on her face. "It appears we got off to a bad start in Paris or Crete or wherever it was. I'm....erm....willing to try a bit of peaceful coexistence if you are."

She waits for what seems an eternity for a reply then stomps off, mumbling to herself. "It must be humans that SYWM doesn't like. Or it could be jealousy because I get all of the bestsellers first."

Boots, I'm not sure this is going to work.

That's good.

We don't have to hurry. In fact we really should wait for Fish boy.

The Speak is worried Hypatia, not superior. The Pier is like an onion. Layer upon layer of frozen realities, peeping out ocassionally in costumes of every facet that makes up its cast.

Don't worry, Alberta. You are all safe. This is not a journey of destruction, but rather of discovery. We are what we are. Realising the truth will make it all sit more comfotably. I suggest a shopping trip for cushions; the Seal will appreciate them.

Your costumes are in the library, Hypatia, and the audition cue goes way around the block. Truly an epic cast. Time perhaps to apportion roles to the key players? Perhaps not, only you know the answer.

But you are still both searching for the truth.

A journey into Narnia will not be safe, or pain free, but it could be the mirror we need to look into to know ourselves.

'Of course we have to have a Russian!' Screamed the fish tailed faun.
'it's winter, it's North. If I am to be a sex machine on a tail, I need at least one Russion spy in my stable! And you?'

He attemtps a suave wave in the direction of the enchantress and merely succeeds in thwacking Orchid round the mouth, much to her delight, it is the closest thing to a sexual encounter she's had all morning.

'Meeeee?' Purs the enchantress.

'Yes you.' Trout has seen her type before and is not going to fall under her spell. He did wish the throbbing would go away though. Extraordinary place to get a migraine.
'Don't think you can barge in here and seduce everyone, with your soft voice and your shapely curves and your come to bed eyes........'

'Exactly!' The Seal wasn't exactly sure what 'excatly' meant but he could see the fish was floundering. Not as in 'playing with flounders' - Oh for heaven's sake it always got complicated when words got involved. No wonder Speak hated librarians, far too clever for him by half.

'We have History, you see!' Declared Pinniped, finding a word that would do for the time being.

He basked in the applause that followed while Hypatia set about looking for suitable sled material. It seemed they were off.

Trout Montague was miffed somewhat to be described as mythological. He was real all right. And he’d been described as part-horse. Still, the move from RouteMaster to Root-Master couldn’t be all bad, he thought, as he set his engine to idle and throbbed along to the thought of the Solnushkan embonpoint. Fawn, though? Buff? Of course, as often as possible. Manilla? Parts of it were all right. But fawn. It was only one slight Centaurian step away from beige. Fawn. It just wouldn’t do.

As if to appear authoritative, the sheep enters with a train of servants and bleats commands at them - the tasks bleated being of course the sole ones for which each servant was hired. However, it did make him feel powerful to tell the wool fluffing boy to fluff and the stock ticker carrying man servant to carry and tick.

Bemusedly, the Hypatia looked up from the bestsellers and observed that the sheep didn't always remember he was Vice Vice President. Nor did the Jodan always notice the tiny negative six point Times New Ohioan Font 'vice' printed on the sixth title line on his business cards.

The sheep seems to suddenly notice the gathering before him.
"What? Hasn't the sheep roasting begun? No? It seems all too often to me that these sorts of functions inevitably turn to attaching insults and innuendo the fairer species. I must applaud your relative restraint so far. What Lincoln called the 'mystic chor-'"
With characteristic slowness, the sheep just noticed something under his hastily constructed podium. The shark, with a Zippo, was carefully singeing the steel wool of the sheep. Without looking over, it was made obvious to the sheep that the man-servant charged with carrying the podium and shooing away arsonists it was more interested in Russian women than podiums. The sheep was able to divine this after distinctly hearing "In Soviet Russia, podium carries you!"

"Yes, well, good to see you anyways." the sheep shrugged. "I'm off to see a Jodan about a horse."

'Surely Fawn is appropriate?'

The hound threw the question out casually, not really expecting a response, except perhaps from the librarian, who understood how words worked and who certainly knew how the Trout's mind worked.

'Hmm let me see...' Hypatia ran the idea through her encyclopaedic word bank...'Could work for you Boots "Of animal, esp dog - show affection by tail wagging, grovelling etc" Hold on a second this is more like it "Of person and possibly fish - behave servilely, cringe"
Not sure I've ever seen the Fish boy cringe though.'

'It's Faun, not fawn!' The sheep was just a little put out that no one had attempted to insult him.
'"Latin rural deity with horns and tail". How can a fish be a rural deity? When did the ocean suddenly sprout pastures and paintings by Constable?'

'Who rattled his cage?' The Seal was beginning to enjoy himself. This was more like it.

'"Sprout pastures" Now there's an interesting concept'

Trout had decided that nothing beige was worth discussing, but pastures of sprouts, that was something else. 'Fields' of sprouts would have to be planted in an ordered fashion, neat rows with enough space between to harvest. Sprout pastures conjured up a much wilder picture.

'Imagine a meadow randomly populated with clumps of sprouts, leading down to a stream.'

'You did thay populated, Fith boy, didn't you?' Orchid half hoped she had misheard.

Pinniped was getting impatient.
'What have sprouts got to do with the mirror of Narnia?' he snapped.
Well perhaps 'snapped' was a bit excessive.

'Sprout - "Begin to grow, shoot forth, put forth shoots, spring up, grow to a height." Hypatia volunteered.

Silence. Trout and Pin exchanged an alpha moment.

Where had the Russian got to?

The lammer-wotsit was miffed somewhat to hear itself described as a wotsit just because the seal didn't know how many i's and e's came in which order. It circled overhead, watching the gathering and wondering how deep the water was and what comfort zones were. But on the other hand, how could you not go through the back of a wardrobe when it opened in front of you, wherever it might lead? You'd never know what might have been.

Ahem...

...indecisive creatures, birds, don't you find?

Pinniped scowls at the speck in the sky, and then at the fretful albatross a little way off.

OK, so non-starting is some kind of tradition, but the seal will never get used to it.

Lammergeiers can spot a scowl on a seal even when it's just a tiny grey smudge. She folded her wings and dropped, faster than free fall, because she could and it was fun.

Pulling up just short of the ice she landed with a rattle of feathers, scowled back, because lamergeiers can scowl good, better than any limp-eyed seal, and because that was fun too, and went to say hello to the Gathering.

The librarian was relieved to see the lammergeier, even if the seal couldn't spell it.

So, is this the embarkation point? Are we leaving or waiting for everyone to show up first? And how are we going to get the bus into the wardrobe?

‘Give all these alpha glancing males a spanner each, H', the lammergeier was grinning. 'They could have that bus dismantled, through the wardrobe and reassembled before you could say Routemaster.‘

The librarian looked doubtful.

‘Ok. A few hours, then.’

The librarian continued to look doubtful.

‘Orchid could have a lesson in looking ornamentally non-mechanically minded and suitably impressed.’ continued the vulture. ‘A valuable life skill.’

The librarian still continued looking doubtful.

‘Whether it’d ever resemble a bus again is a different matter,' the vulture spoke more slowly. 'The old deconstructed, stripped back to basic nuts and bolts, and something new built...would it be the same? Would one choose to have the same?' She shook herself and grinned again. 'It would keep them busy though.'