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

Main Entry: knob·ker·rie
Pronunciation: 'näb-"ker-E
Function: noun
Etymology: Afrikaans knopkierie, from knop knob + kierie club
: a short wooden club with a knob at one end used as a missile or in close attack especially by Zulus of southern Africa .

The shark works our the distance (in leagues) between McKenzie Castle and Rork's Drift (that explains their reverence for the Welsh fish) and wonders how far the sheep have really traveled in their quest. The lycanthrope shifted shapes just long enough to warn Trout Montague in standard sign language of the peril posed. Hoping that any creature so well versed in words has also studied enough of alternative communication to understand.

Francine led Jazzme and Hypatia to their suite in the West Wing. Neither of them were particularly happy about the move, but since the staff was obviously annoyed that none of the other members of the troop were following directions, they hated to make a fuss.

Trout Montague had vanished somewhere between the dungeon and the living quarters. Maybe Hypatia and Jazzme would finally have a chance to spend some time alone.

It was a nice suite, or had been at one time. There was a comfortable sitting room which included a polished mahogany desk for writing letters and a dining table laid for breakfast, a large bedchamber and two dressing rooms. But the rooms were cold in spite of fires blazing in the grates and dark despite several large windows. Of course the latter could have been because the windowpanes didn't look like they had been washed for 200 years.

Francine was nervous and seemed anxious to leave as did the maids who were hurridly making the rooms liveable. Dixie was putting clean linens on the bed and plumping the pillows, while Dawn opened the draperies, finished the dusting, and placed a vase filled with red and white roses on a small table near the setee.

Hypatia inspected the dressing rooms and noticed that their clothes and other personal items had already been moved from their old room and stored away in their proper places. She returned to the bedchamber to thank the maid Dixie and was greeted by a very peculiar sight.

The maid, as white as the old sheets she had bundled up to take to the laundry, was riveted to the floor, eyes wide, mouth open as if to scream, with the finger on a trembling hand pointing toward the wardrobe closet in the gentleman's dressing room.

"For heaven's sake, woman, what is it?" Hypatia turned in the direction of the dressing room she had just exited and saw absolutely nothing. Hearing a loud thump she whirled around to find the maid Dixie on the floor, her lifeless eyes staring at the ceiling.

Francine ran from the room with Dawn close on her heels. Hypatia reentered the dressing room and opened the wardrobe closets and peered behind the draperies. There was nothing there.

How strange, Something had frightened the poor woman to death, that was clear. But what could it have been?

Jazzme inspected the maid's body. "Hypatia, look at this. It wasn't fright that killed her." He pushed the maid's red hair aside and removed a small dart from behind her ear. "I haven't seen anything like this since my days in the Congo."

Just then they heard the sound of a helicopter approaching the castle and went to the sitting room window to look out. They were mesmerized by the scene that unfolded. As the Scottsman's head rolled from the landing pad toward the life-sized chessboard on the lawn, a kitchen maid named Barb entered carrying a heavy tray.

"Breakfast." Barb saw the dead maid stretched out on the floor, screamed, and dropped the tray which landed on her foot, causing her to lose her balance and propelling her backwards into a dining chair pulled out from the table. She nearly made it, but the chair slipped just as her weight fell into it and she landed heavily on the floor, hitting her head on the corner of the table as she fell. Blood trickled from her open mouth onto the floor.

"Well, my goodness," the dimunitive librarian remarked. "This is certainly an unlucky morning for servants."

Pip, who had left the Trout in disgrace heard out of the corner of his ear a sound. It was certainly familiar to him. It said something like nob-carry. Pip wondered what that was. It was quickly defined for him though, aloud.

Confused, Pip turned to look at the origins of the sounds, and saw his old flock! What luck! What fortune! Pip immediately ran to his flock - forgetting for a moment the type of floor he was on (which was, it turns out, a grave mistake, as he lost vital friction on the linoleum tiles and skidded directly into the ten sheep assembled before the trout - much like as in bowling)

He immediately greeted his old friends (most of which with distinctly un-Welsh names) - though they curiously to him did not seem very enthusiastic to see him again.

"Bo, hello. Lew, nice to see ewe.
Otis, Plop, I see you're well.
Raechel, purrrrr.
Mary, Curly, salutations.
Moe, how're you?
Larry, is the family well?
Dick... you should probably stay away from the Trout."

Pip took his place in the order, with his fellow Sopranos Raechel and Bo. They backed away as he winked and purrrred at them.

Suddenly, they all noticed the black sheep inching ever closer to them. The tension was evident - the black sheep did not belong, and he went to speak with the other various animals.

***

On an ice-floe far far removed from the castellated farce, and not at all entertained by the relentless wind-whipped contemporary ballet being performed all around his bulk by flurries of snow and sleet, the SYWM sipped at yet another clooter. Despite the howling wind, biting cold and erratic narrative, the great bulk felt calm and collected. Cool was certainly not an issue. Only an inebriated and raucous clam, evidently from somewhere near the heartland of Cathcart, disturbed him:

"See yew, ya beg tawsah. Ah cooda toldya. But naw. Yew alwiz naw bear-st. Yer nu'in bu' ah beg slaw-by taws-pawt. Come awn, gev us a nuthah cloot-ah, yah gawb-shyte..."

The SWYM switched aural frequency and tuned instead into the trivial plastic pocket game which he had been using to while away the last few weeks until the forthcoming equinox. He would normal welcome the onset of light, but the thought of another frenchman with an electronic hammond organ belting out snappy tunes for documentaries sent a shiver down his spine. He shook the game once more, causing several minute steel ball-bearings to rattle around inside the garish casing, each one moving independently of all the others until a chance collision would cause it to shoot off in another direction, its destination of no consequence, either to itself or to any of the others. The SWYM snorted at the parallels.

***

Throughout the British Isles autochthonous sheep mustered and marched:

In the depths of Scrubbieshire, in the lee of the Welsh mountains, a small red Nissan rounded the corner to find itself bonnet to nose with a band of dark faced Scrubbieshire sheep. They stretched from hedge to hedge, fifty deep. The car inched forward. The sheep were unmoved, staring blankly down their roman noses. Then they gave way, sifting through the hedge to let the car past. This was not the fight they'd been called to the muster for. Not here, not yet. They regrouped and continued north towards Crewe and the M6.

Around the perimeter of motorway service stations across Southern England sheep gathered during daylight. Come nightfall they infiltrated and insinuated themselves on, under and into every truck and van on the north bound carriageway.

Over on the East coast General Champion Barleythorpe Bouncer led his cohort of Bluefaced Leicesters up the Foss Way and Ermine St.

In Northumberland flock after flock of Herdwickes bought the rail network to a halt as they headed north along the tracks. Neat in their uniform brown coats and white leggings, they sang a medley of "Keep the ho-ome farms bur-rning" and "It's a lo-ong time 'til Tu- upperary."

On the Isle of Barra a flock of autochthonous Hebrideans lay in wait on the outskirts of Castle Bay. Then at 22.10 they formed a solid block of be-horned black wool and charged down the pier. They scattered ferry crew and would be passengers alike into the harbour and poured up the gangways onto the Lord of the Isles. On board they filled every space until only the captain remained. Under threat of a scuppering, muttering "Ye varrmints, ye!" and "Och, aye canna belieevve it" alternately, Captain MacMeldrew weighed anchor and headed east for the mainland.

Over to the North, Captain "Porridge" McKay, growling "Thiss iss no richt, ye ken, no richt at aalll", found himself under similar circumstances heading South from Stromness. Similar except that the woolly rug surrounding him was a pied and flecked mix of fawn, beige, black, brown and off white.

The tide of wool ebbed from England and the outer islands and flowed inexorably toward central Scotland. Toward MacKenzies castle. Toward The Trout.

Orchid stared in dismay at her former allies.

"But we thook on it. I thyaked every one of you."
"Maybe he'th a Ca-hapulet on hith motherth thide?" she said hopefully.

"Or perhapth we could marry him off to a Ca-hapulet?"

----------------------------

Waz returned from her foray for breakfast to find she needn't have gone anywhere at all. A headless flunky, Dixie, Barb, and Matt, Mark, and Mike squashed by the falling towers, were laid out neatly by the skip at the kitchen door. Still, she wasn't comfortable eating creatures she knew the names of.

She flew in through the open wall just in time to catch Orchid's plea.
She landed on the upended table, looked at Ilmer, raised an eyebrow at Pinniped as though sure he was somehow responsible for the general devastation and turned to stare at Trout.

"Orchid's got a point." she said, "unless you know how to turn back the massed flocks of Britain. Because they're on their way here. I saw them this morning, marching from all directions. And it's The Trout they want. Do you know any Capulets?"

"Marry! Him!" Pinniped was scathing. But Bucksheep and the Shark pricked their ears, or equivalent, at what sounded like a business merger; an allegiance of convenience.

And Orchid said "Ohhhh, a wedding! Pleath, yeth. Pleath..." while Pipsqueaksheep, head nodding, sang "...Bo, Lew, Otis, Plop, Raechel, Mary, Curly, Moe, Larry, Dick, Bo, Lew, Otis, Plop, Raechel, Mary, Curly, Moe, Larry, Dick, Bo, Lew, Otis, Plop, Raechel, Mary, Curly, Moe, Larry, Dick..." in the backgound.

Hypatia sat at the desk in her sitting room in McKenzie Castle, looking at the pile of correspondence just delivered by a rather nervous upstairs maid named Delia. At least she thought that was her name. There were too many servants to keep track of, even with the recent spate of unfortunate accidents.

"This is too much, Jazzme." The small librarian was clearly distressed by the morning post. "Complaints. Nothing but complaints."

In her pile were letters threatening legal action from the RSPCA on behalf of Scottish Highland sheep forced from their peaceful pastures into makeshift regiments without proper supervsion and no scheduled tea times; from Greenpeace wanting a large donation to prevent them filing a complaint on behalf of Orchid for forcing her to wear unbecoming tutu's and mental distress over the Montague/Capulet bruhaha; from the Household Servants Local # 2618 complaining about the violation of several OSHA regulations in the castle; and from the SAG Local # 602 stating that Hypatia, a non-union member, was herewith forbidden to write scripts for production anywhere in the realm until she joined the union and paid her annual dues.

"There's one here from SWYM, as well. I'm going to give it to Pinniped. I don't understand a word of it anyway."

"What's in the little powder blue envelope?" Jazzme asked. "It doesn't look threatening."

Hypatia opened the small envelope, took out a single sheet of matching powder blue stationery and read the short message.

"It's from Fiona. She is in disguise somewhere in Pip's flock. She wants us to tell Buck not to trust Pip. He isn't as dumb as he seems."

"Well, dear, he could be smarter than he seems and still be dumb as dirt. He is a sheep, after all."

"Buck is bright for a sheep, don't you think?"

Just then a loud argument could be heard emanating from the chessboard on the lawn. It appeared that Tom and Tina were having a bit of a disagreement over the riding crop.

The albatross doesn't much like being put in charge of placating the Wordsmith, but she's determined to do her best anyway.

Ilmarinen is sitting disconsolately among the remains of the high table, picking out his claws with a dinky silver implement that has something to do with kippers. "There, there", says Alberta, without quite knowing why.

"It's not your fault that you go round beating big holes in people's plotlines", she whispers, as the monstrous brute sheds a sorrowful tear.

It's a curious thing, but it seems that there's either no plot at all, or too many of the damn things. Anyway, the Pier-contingent have resolved to keep quiet for a while.

Pinniped is deep in thought, or at least as deep as he ever gets. If the sheep need a Capulet, perhaps a Shark would make an adequate West-Side substitute?

Orchid somersaults down the hall with a loud ki-ai, before slashing furiously at the standards of a couple of Scottish regiments. Alberta raises a pinion to the tip of her beak : "Sshhhh!" she implores. "Hypatia's in charge for a while. Show some respect..."

The shark balanced the lyrics of Leonard Bernstein against the prose and poetry of William Shakespeare (however he was spelling it this week). As often as he had changed shapes a 15-year-old Eye-tal-ian girl (his grandmother had always pronounced it that way, with a strange sense of superiority the shark had never understood) had never been attempted. The Puerto-Rican was closer to his area of travel and he knew she would have been happier with the title Boriken. Perhaps as the other truly marine creature it would be his duty, sorry but the mammals and avians are not quite the same. Still he would bide his time unless the mantle was thrust upon him.

North



Pinniped

You will know by now that the wordsmith has departed these parts. I could not send Alberta to warn you earlier, and for that I apologise.

Ilmerian is good, but he requires careful handling. His sampo-writer will churn out 250 wpm, but most of it is utterly trite. Expurgate his diatribe, discern the wheat from the chaff, and extract that which is precious from the pyrites. The sampo is a remarkable weapon; words are its ammunition. But if you allow him to fire it indiscriminately, Ilmerian will lose your plot.

It will be light here soon.

SYWM

In the North West of England, a man who shall hence forth be known as John (just to throw another name in the works), was returning home from his once daily association with acadamia, when he noticed a herd of sheep in miltary formation - marching.

This struck him as a little odd. When John saw that the head sheep was baahing out orders, the status of the situation had to be quickly upgraded to "quite odd".

And so being an investigative type, when the sheep started to march (rather quickly for sheep, he thought) he got in his car and slowly followed them to discover what was going on...

A helicopter sat down on the checkerboard landing pad and several black clad government agents disembarked and strode purposefully into the castle. Hypatia, bags packed, was waiting for them in the drawing room.

"I see you received our letter," said the agent who appeared to be in charge.

"Yes, message received and acted upon, " replied the librarian.

Jazzme entered the drawing room as another agent was lifting Hypatia's bags in preparation for departure. "What's going on, here? Hypatia, where are you going?"

She took Jazzme aside and spoke to him gently. "It was in this morning's post. A letter from the Home Secretary. My Visa has expired - actually did some weeks ago - and I've been ordered out of the country."

"But......."

"It will be fine, Jazz dear. I left you a letter in our suite. It has my address and phone numbers. You have an invitation to visit me any time. I think you would enjoy the Ozarks."

Hypatia made the rounds of her fellow travellers, shook each hand, flipper, wing, paw, hoof or fin offered, wished them all well, and presented each one with a crocheted bookmark to remember her by. Then with a government agent firmly attached to each elbow, she boarded the helicopter and began her journey to Heathrow and home.

"Well!" exclaimed the Trout. "Good riddance, if you ask me."

"She was too bossy for my tastes," said the sheep.

"She hath on tathe in clothes," offered Orchid.

"And she complained about the hound all the time," added Pinniped. "He'll be glad to find her gone when he returns."

Waz tried to find something kind to say but ultimately remained quiet.

Speckly and Fattylizzard were too involved in a card game to pay any attention, and the shark, always one for a tidy room, gathered up the discarded bookmarks and threw them into the fire.

And as for Jazzme, he folded up Hypatia's parting letter, placed it in his jacket pocket, then went off to flirt with a lovely young parlormaid named Jana. Life goes on, after all.

Pinniped is in big trouble.

"In five minuteth, I'm going to take thith thtupid PVThee-thing off onthe and for all", snarls Orchid, "but firtht I'm going to make you apologithe". The tip of the katana swishes menancingly among seal-boy's whiskers.

She brandishes the letter. "It'th jutht like Thpeak thaid. And now you've gone and thcared Hypathia away. Hypathia'th worth a dothen of you, you little th-yit. If you don't get her back, I'm going to thlithe you in half".

Orchid has never behaved like this before. Come to think of it, Pinniped has never taken her seriously before. She's serious now though. They all are, standing behind her, staring accusingly.

"I'm sorry", whimpers Pinniped. He means it, for once.

An awkward silence fell round the table. Everyone avoiding meeting eyes. Jazzme returned, sat down and sighed. There was no substitute for his Hypatia.

"Oh come on, who are we kidding!" The Trout eventually blurted out. "We need Hypatia. Are we going to let a jumped up set of Government flunkies just remove her? Come on!"

Pinniped glowered, then thumped the table. "No!" he shouted. He was rather good at getting angry at himself. This time someone else would take the brunt. B****r faceless Government flunkies and their immigration control. "After them" he yelled.

"Yay!"
"What're we waiting for?!"
"Come on"
"For St. Bob and Hypatia!"

It was a general chorus. (Make your own minds who said what.) And they charged, flew, slithered, lumbered and swam out the (now convenient) hole in wall.

Jana, of course, wasnae interested in the ageing sassenach from Geordieland, and he really hadn't much heart in his flirting.
Looking around the assembled company he realised that life, although it goes on, would never be the same.
Much as he had loved the company of this assorted bunch of characters he knew in his heart that he must pursue the lovely Hypatia, and there was no time to waste. He must get to Glasgow airport before the advancing tide of sheep, sweeping forever Northwards, made air travel impossible.
Collecting his things together, and with one sad last look around, he bade farewell to each of his fellow travellers in turn and started out on his quest to find a small library in the middle West of the USA. May all your ventures be enjoyable, and lead to a happy ending - if you ever find an ending.
Follow the yellow brick road, he was singing, and make sure you get a visa before you take off.

"That'th more like it!" sang Orchid with glee, brandishing her sword and giving Pip an unexpected short back and sides.

"Oomph!" she wallowed straight into the back of the group who'd come to an abrupt halt on the pile of rubble outside.

How exactly were they going to catch a helicoptor?

"Hey? Where'th Jathme off to?"
Buck turned, saw Jazzme ziggzagging down the drive, singing 'follow, follow, follow, follow, follow the yellow brick road'. He gave a piercing Jodan style whistle and bellow, well maybe baallow, "Jazzme! Wait up! We're going after her."

Waz looked at Pinniped who looked at Trout who looked at Shark who looked at Buck who looked at Speckly (who'd finished her card game) who looked at Lizard who looked at Pip. That was a mistake. Lizard turned to look at Orchid who looked at Alberta who looked at Ilmarinen who looked at the Ali baba basket which gave the distinct impression it was looking at Pin. Who was looking at Trout who was...

How were they going to catch, and bring down, a helicoptor?

The shark gathers together his notes and books, he had rather thought the Hypatia would help him organize them so he could find them when needed. She seemed good at that. He loved to collect books and notes and maps... Where had he put that map of the Ozarks? It seems it will be most useful should the pinniped fail;

and the shark knew he might well fail.

The Hypatia was standing in the glorious sterility of an international airport check-in, a twilight-zone utterly devoid of any national character or defining features ... the airport, not the Hypatia. It was a world of grey plastic and LCD and the high-pitched 'bing-bong', perhaps ICAO-designed to stave off pre-flight adrenaline-rush. It could have been anywhere. Then again ...

"Dee'ya paak yah bargs yersehll?"

"Huh?

"DEED YEW PAAK YURE BARGS YURE SELF?" repeated the check-in clerk, carefully annunciating ev-er-y syll-a-ble for the benefit of the tear-stained diminutive tweed-clad bookish character that stood before the counter.

Hypatia, choking back an urge to sob, assured that she had. Which indeed she had.

What she didn't know however was that her bag was sitting just where she'd left them, next the dressing table in Mackenzie Castle.

And if Trout Montague and the Jazzme had still been back there, there'd probably be experimenting with her lingerie by now. But they weren't.

The Jazzme to his credit had used his legendary propensity for harnessing the forces of nature for the use and benefit of mankind by sticking out his thumb and hitching a ride to the airport. He was now at the ticket-counter attempting to haggle down the cost of departure tax. Jazzme's head was, figuratively, still in Cairo. This transaction however was in Scotland.

Meanwhile, the salmonid was sandwiched between, among others, the seal and the lammergeyer in a dark confined space, evidently being conveyed along some sort of ... conveyor. Trout Montague would have said that it was uncomfortable, but, for now, being in such close proximity to the smelly salmonid, discomfort was the phocid's pantheon and the lammergeyer's lair. He kept it zipped.

The suitcase then disappeared through a sort of untidy flappy-door thing peculiar to airport baggage facilities and onwards into the bowels of the terminal. When push comes to shove, it's remarkable what one can do with a plasticene whale and a shape-shifting shark.

The Jazzme would perhaps have been less inclined to have taken passage in the car, whose owner had called himself "John", if he had known that the driver was in fact a self-confessed sheep-stalker. Indeed because the moniker 'John, Stalker' had such a familiar peel, the driver also went by the name of Verc, which helpfully hid his heinous habit as an occupational ovine observer. Now, the Verc now stood at the Jazzme's shoulder wondering whether to accompany the septegenarious bon viveur on a flight of fancy, or whether to return to the mundanity of academia that did no more than sustain his futile existence. In reality, there really wasn't a choice to make ...

***

The Hypatia watched her case disappear through the flappy rubber door, somewhat flabbergasted out of her melancholy by the enormity of her excess baggage charge, the shock of which had moreover distracted her from the fact that the vessel was black-and-white herring-bone with ocean-green piping, instead of poohey shades of Louis Vuitton brown.

Thus, significantly financially lighter, she set off through into departures relieved that at least in theory, the next time she'd see her bag would be on a carousel at another anonymous (but bigger, louder, probably better) airport. In all likelihood though, in reality, things would be most different ...

***

Orchid was very excited at the prospect of seeing the Hypatia again.

"Ooh, a carouthel. I jutht love fairth and circuthith."

Indeed, the orca could not contain herself, or indeed the others and in an instant remoulded back into leviathan form. On its own, the lycanthrope could not cope and sharply shape-shifted back into a shark. And although the prospect of the trout getting into Orchid had been a sensitive narrative issue for some weeks now, escape from her claustrophobic confines was relief aplenty. The thought of saying "It's only my fin, a fin dammit" for the next seven hours was already irking.

"I'm out", said Trout Montague, bluntly, "in case anyone asks."

"No you're not", responded Orchid, for once dryly. "You're in. We, and ethpethyally mithter theal-boy here, have thcrewed up good and proper. Now we're going to the United Thtateth to make amendth and to ..."

"... say sorry", continued the sheep, cutting off Orchid before she could bedraggle him any further.

***

There is a quiet "whump" of air in the Ali Baba basket, the lid comes off, and Ben can be seen peering carefully around before clambering out.

"I dunno", she says to herself. "One mention Mac Bloody Beth and all hell breaks loose! And now we've got star crossed bloody love as well. How f**king tactless can you be? And airport scenes. I really don't need any more airports scenes."

She continues muttering as the special effect hits the narrative.

We've all seen it. The background is in black and white, the players are frozen - preferably doing something nice and fluid like pouring themselves a drink or pissing against a wall - and the camera shot appears to pan around their still images while one thing moving at a different speed.

Ben is the one in colour that gets to move around. It's all happening in her bloody User Space, after all. Everyone else is in black and white and frozen mid-frame. She feels rather smug about being able to do this to everyone else, but reminds herself that gloating isn't nice. Freezing claymations mid-frame takes no particular skill, all you need to do is stop them mid stop-motion, but it is trickier with the people and animals, and it is best not to ask what fluid movements the trout is indulging in. Ben has a stronger stomach than most, but even she averts her eyes.

She wanders around the assembled players, frisking them for hidden achohol, ("What have I told you about posting when drunk?" she mutters), and checking their own personal timezones, ("you know you shouldn't post at 3.00am it makes you crotchety"). She can be seen checking hormonal levels with a rather worrying dipstick, and adjusting the colour contrast on the animations.

She looks around them all with considerable exasperation, but cannot help breaking out into a smile. They are a strange menagerie, eliptical, alliteritive, allusive, and now ellusive.

She wonders whether they are going to be able to pick up where they left off, or whether the whole thing is irredemiably damaged.

Red Pill?

Blue Pill?

What the Hell?

She clambers back into the Ali Baba basket and as the soft implosion of air indicates that she has left the story, the scene recolours and reanimates and the narrative begins once again.