Post by Harlot Bronte on Nov 5, 2015 21:14:18 GMT
CHAPTER ONE.
Arthur Dent yawned as he swung his legs over the windowsill of his office high atop the Rimmer Building (Chicago). he gazed down longingly at the pavements and pyramids below, and yearned to fling himself down, down ever downwards to mortify his body against the grey and end his existence. He heard a cry.
'Yo!'
He turned and glanced askance over his bathrobe-clad shoulder, breathing in the mothball fustiness, as Water Bird stood in the centre of the office glaring at him. He was wearing no trousers and throbbed angrily.
'Where did you come from?' asked Arthur with a weary voice that sounded like the rustling of a thousand brown leaves by the first gust of October.
'I came,' said Water Bird, idly scratching the back of one suntanned leg with the other foot, 'from my own private Idaho.'
Their gazes met like water on fire.
'Say my name,' pleaded Arthur, 'the sun shines through the rain. And smells like petrichor.'
'Wait, what?'
Too late came the cry, as Arthur flung himself out into the void and plummeted like a diving swallow, or more appropriately a dying swan in a swan dive from 1000 feet, towards the uncaring earth below. His gown billowed out around him like a vampire's cloak as he vainly tried to fire a web towards the building that flashed by storey by storey before his eyes, until he realised that he wasn't wearing web-shooters (and that 'organic' ones weren't canon) and that he wasn't Spider-Man.
Then head met cement with the sound of a thousand ripe pumpkins being cleft in twain.
'Shaving foam', murmured the Queen of Zimbabwe.
Meanwhile, through that strange entanglement (such an entanglement) of time and space known to the Ancients as the Space / Time vortex a Cameron Mackintosh Police Box spun (span? Spon? Spen?). Within its unassuming exterior was a vast time-space vehicle known as Tardis, piloted by none other than that dauntless knight errant of the planet Jewel, the outer space crime fighter known as Dr Who. His hair was a vivid grey, his moustache neat and trimmed, and his corduroy coat a chocolate brown. He looked up from the flashing knobs of Tardis' hexagonal control console as his companion, a jerboa named Jerboa, asked him another probing question.
'Dr Who?', squeaked Jerboa. 'Do you like my hat?'
Dr Who narrowed his keen eyes as he focused all of his attention on the headgear sported by the rodent.
'Fezes aren't cool, Jerboa,' he finally decided, waving his hand dismissively in an abstract fashion. 'I used to think so, but no. Turkish hats are not cool.'
He gave a sudden start. He wheeled around to gaze upon the offending milliner's missive once more.
'I've seen that hat before!' he cried, snatching it from the cowering jerboa's hairy head. 'But the last time i saw it... it was... different...'
The picture began to blur and wave, signalling to the audience that this was going to be a flashback sequence. Monochrome telesnaps from the William Hartnell story 'The Savages' began to appear sequentially, in a very unsatisfying slideshow that would have been much better done with animation had the cost not been prohibitive.
Dr Who reeled and clutched his temples.
'Now i remember! But back then... the Turkish hat was webbed!' He threw his bottle of wine into the fireplace in disgust. 'This is HATE about continuity!' The three-bar fire sparked and hissed in a pleasing manner as the Beaujolais evaporated, much like Dr Who's wrathful ire evaporated just then, as a chiming sound from the inner clockwork workings of Tardis' console signaled that they had materialised.
'Where have you brought me to this time, old girl?' laughed Dr Who as he gave the console's plinth a savage kick. 'Come on, Jerboa, put on your unwebbed hat and we'll see what we can see.'
They stepped out of the blue wooden doors (with correctly sized windows) onto a wide plaza.
'Is this the Plaza of the Daders on the planet Alderaan?' asked Jerboa, wide eyed with wonder.
'No,' said Dr Who, 'We're in Chicago. Look - proof, if proof be need be.' He pointed skywards, and Jerboa craned his / her tiny neck and looked aloft (like a pig can't) and perceived that high above them in one of the many high buildings three faces - those of Ferris Bueller, Sloane Peterson and Cameron Frye - were looking down at them with heads pressed against the glass of the window.
'Now what caused all this mess?' asked Dr Who, now turning to the matter in hand - or, at least, at foot. Jerboa lifted its gender-undetermined hairy feet with a sticky slurping sound, for they were standing in guts. All around them upon the cruel concrete were the crimson entrails of a man. 'I would venture,' said Dr Who, as icily incisive as Sherlock Holmes (one of the good ones, not the crap that gets on television), 'to say that we are standing in the remnants of the late Dent. Arthur Dent.'
'How can you tell?' squeaked Jerboa.
'This is his dressing gown.' sighed Dr Who, kneeling in the human detritus and cradling the bloodied garment to his cheek as he wept salt tears for another life gone.
'LOL RIP the late Dentarthurdent.' deadpanned Jerboa.
Then something quite strange occurred. Dr Who's bitter tears dripped from his craggy cheeks onto the browning ground (for the oxidisation was turning the blood the colour of rust - the kind of rust you find on an old Raleigh Chopper when you get it out of the shed) and began to sparkle like magic.
'Could it be?' asked Dr Who in a mawkish and sentimental tone, 'Just this once, somebody lives?'
But it wasn't that predictable. The magic sparkle swept along the ground until it came to Jerboa, and then there was a puff of smoke and Jerboa was suddenly transformed into a beautiful naked woman, with red hair and ice-blue eyes and a mocking curve to her smile and a cracking backside.
'Zut alors!' said Dr Who. 'Gott in Himmel!'
And Jerboa smiled a seductive smile.
'You know,' said Dr Who, as he hammered a makeshift wooden cross - emblazoned with the words 'LOL RIP ARTHUR DENT: FOOD FOR WORMS' - into the ground, 'I never asked you your second name.'
'Jerboa', said Jerboa.
'Oh. Your first, then?'
'Jerboa.'
'You mean your name is-'
'Jerboa Jerboa.' confirmed Jerboa Jerboa.
They laughed like characters at the end of a crap sitcom, or the end of a Scooby Doo.
Dr Who and Jerboa linked arms and strolled back through the trail of entwined intestines towards Tardis.
'My dear,' he said, 'There are worlds out there where the sky is burning. Where river poets search naivete. People made of coriander stem and rose of hay, and cities made of bergamot and vetiver. i think we should get drunk and see what happens. Come on, Jerboa, we've got work to do!'
And then the camera pulls back to reveal that this has all been playing on a television set in a metatextual kind of way, and that i am sitting in a comfy chair smoking a fat chronic blunt. Chewbacca is behind me, and i am happy.
Arthur Dent yawned as he swung his legs over the windowsill of his office high atop the Rimmer Building (Chicago). he gazed down longingly at the pavements and pyramids below, and yearned to fling himself down, down ever downwards to mortify his body against the grey and end his existence. He heard a cry.
'Yo!'
He turned and glanced askance over his bathrobe-clad shoulder, breathing in the mothball fustiness, as Water Bird stood in the centre of the office glaring at him. He was wearing no trousers and throbbed angrily.
'Where did you come from?' asked Arthur with a weary voice that sounded like the rustling of a thousand brown leaves by the first gust of October.
'I came,' said Water Bird, idly scratching the back of one suntanned leg with the other foot, 'from my own private Idaho.'
Their gazes met like water on fire.
'Say my name,' pleaded Arthur, 'the sun shines through the rain. And smells like petrichor.'
'Wait, what?'
Too late came the cry, as Arthur flung himself out into the void and plummeted like a diving swallow, or more appropriately a dying swan in a swan dive from 1000 feet, towards the uncaring earth below. His gown billowed out around him like a vampire's cloak as he vainly tried to fire a web towards the building that flashed by storey by storey before his eyes, until he realised that he wasn't wearing web-shooters (and that 'organic' ones weren't canon) and that he wasn't Spider-Man.
Then head met cement with the sound of a thousand ripe pumpkins being cleft in twain.
'Shaving foam', murmured the Queen of Zimbabwe.
Meanwhile, through that strange entanglement (such an entanglement) of time and space known to the Ancients as the Space / Time vortex a Cameron Mackintosh Police Box spun (span? Spon? Spen?). Within its unassuming exterior was a vast time-space vehicle known as Tardis, piloted by none other than that dauntless knight errant of the planet Jewel, the outer space crime fighter known as Dr Who. His hair was a vivid grey, his moustache neat and trimmed, and his corduroy coat a chocolate brown. He looked up from the flashing knobs of Tardis' hexagonal control console as his companion, a jerboa named Jerboa, asked him another probing question.
'Dr Who?', squeaked Jerboa. 'Do you like my hat?'
Dr Who narrowed his keen eyes as he focused all of his attention on the headgear sported by the rodent.
'Fezes aren't cool, Jerboa,' he finally decided, waving his hand dismissively in an abstract fashion. 'I used to think so, but no. Turkish hats are not cool.'
He gave a sudden start. He wheeled around to gaze upon the offending milliner's missive once more.
'I've seen that hat before!' he cried, snatching it from the cowering jerboa's hairy head. 'But the last time i saw it... it was... different...'
The picture began to blur and wave, signalling to the audience that this was going to be a flashback sequence. Monochrome telesnaps from the William Hartnell story 'The Savages' began to appear sequentially, in a very unsatisfying slideshow that would have been much better done with animation had the cost not been prohibitive.
Dr Who reeled and clutched his temples.
'Now i remember! But back then... the Turkish hat was webbed!' He threw his bottle of wine into the fireplace in disgust. 'This is HATE about continuity!' The three-bar fire sparked and hissed in a pleasing manner as the Beaujolais evaporated, much like Dr Who's wrathful ire evaporated just then, as a chiming sound from the inner clockwork workings of Tardis' console signaled that they had materialised.
'Where have you brought me to this time, old girl?' laughed Dr Who as he gave the console's plinth a savage kick. 'Come on, Jerboa, put on your unwebbed hat and we'll see what we can see.'
They stepped out of the blue wooden doors (with correctly sized windows) onto a wide plaza.
'Is this the Plaza of the Daders on the planet Alderaan?' asked Jerboa, wide eyed with wonder.
'No,' said Dr Who, 'We're in Chicago. Look - proof, if proof be need be.' He pointed skywards, and Jerboa craned his / her tiny neck and looked aloft (like a pig can't) and perceived that high above them in one of the many high buildings three faces - those of Ferris Bueller, Sloane Peterson and Cameron Frye - were looking down at them with heads pressed against the glass of the window.
'Now what caused all this mess?' asked Dr Who, now turning to the matter in hand - or, at least, at foot. Jerboa lifted its gender-undetermined hairy feet with a sticky slurping sound, for they were standing in guts. All around them upon the cruel concrete were the crimson entrails of a man. 'I would venture,' said Dr Who, as icily incisive as Sherlock Holmes (one of the good ones, not the crap that gets on television), 'to say that we are standing in the remnants of the late Dent. Arthur Dent.'
'How can you tell?' squeaked Jerboa.
'This is his dressing gown.' sighed Dr Who, kneeling in the human detritus and cradling the bloodied garment to his cheek as he wept salt tears for another life gone.
'LOL RIP the late Dentarthurdent.' deadpanned Jerboa.
Then something quite strange occurred. Dr Who's bitter tears dripped from his craggy cheeks onto the browning ground (for the oxidisation was turning the blood the colour of rust - the kind of rust you find on an old Raleigh Chopper when you get it out of the shed) and began to sparkle like magic.
'Could it be?' asked Dr Who in a mawkish and sentimental tone, 'Just this once, somebody lives?'
But it wasn't that predictable. The magic sparkle swept along the ground until it came to Jerboa, and then there was a puff of smoke and Jerboa was suddenly transformed into a beautiful naked woman, with red hair and ice-blue eyes and a mocking curve to her smile and a cracking backside.
'Zut alors!' said Dr Who. 'Gott in Himmel!'
And Jerboa smiled a seductive smile.
'You know,' said Dr Who, as he hammered a makeshift wooden cross - emblazoned with the words 'LOL RIP ARTHUR DENT: FOOD FOR WORMS' - into the ground, 'I never asked you your second name.'
'Jerboa', said Jerboa.
'Oh. Your first, then?'
'Jerboa.'
'You mean your name is-'
'Jerboa Jerboa.' confirmed Jerboa Jerboa.
They laughed like characters at the end of a crap sitcom, or the end of a Scooby Doo.
Dr Who and Jerboa linked arms and strolled back through the trail of entwined intestines towards Tardis.
'My dear,' he said, 'There are worlds out there where the sky is burning. Where river poets search naivete. People made of coriander stem and rose of hay, and cities made of bergamot and vetiver. i think we should get drunk and see what happens. Come on, Jerboa, we've got work to do!'
And then the camera pulls back to reveal that this has all been playing on a television set in a metatextual kind of way, and that i am sitting in a comfy chair smoking a fat chronic blunt. Chewbacca is behind me, and i am happy.