This is a story I have been working on for the past 7 days (inaccuracy: + or - 7 days). I wrote it partially because I was a big Douglas Adams fan and partially because I was spurred on by his 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' trilogy of four (which has 5 books). I'm not entirely clear as to what my story is. A parody of Douglas Adams' work or just a 'general mish mash' of stolen things. You decide. Hint: Read the Hitchhiker's trilogy first. Get ready...

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the JJ2 Galaxy

Chapter 1

Some called it the paradise for Jazzers. Others called it a utopia and that it couldn’t fit the game of JJ2 any better. There were a few who thought that it was the fifth eternal city of the world. The sensible and down-to-earth, however, simply called it ‘Jazz2City’. This city was a huge fish in a tiny pond. To put it more accurately, it was a big city about a small game. Some people would argue that for a game to be small its original contents should take up no more than 50mb of hard drive space. Although they are right, those people don’t realize that JJ2 is not only small in size but also that it is just…a small game.
One of the 35, 507 people (which is pretty much the whole JJ2 galaxy – except that perhaps the population doesn’t include ex-Jazzers who left the game before year 2000) who were oblivious to the fact that JJ2 is a small game goes by the name of Stuart Black. Stuart was a simple rabbit. He lives on 13th Tileset Street in the general neighbourhood of Downloads in a nice (opinions differ about this part), little (everyone unanimously agree on this part) house he called Mez04. Why 04? Because it was the 4th house he lived in. Numbers 1 to 3 were simply too large and too complicated but since Mez04 only has 9 tiles; Stuart was easily able to build and furnish himself a more or less uncomfortable abode. He worked a few blocks away on 67th Tileset Avenue, at the factory of Submit Tileset. Stuart was a tileset masker. Contrary to popular belief, it was not the author of the tileset in J2C that masked his tileset. It was Stuart.

In order to minimize the shock and confusion the reader will surely feel when he continues down the chapters of this book, the author has decided to mention a few basic facts about the JJ2 galaxy:
1. If it doesn’t make sense, it will probably never make sense.
2. If you would like to disobey fact 1, and I mean REALLY want to, then you can always buy a Molecular Omni-Rearranging Pedagogic Hammer machine (aka a JCS morph). Use it to turn yourself into a rabbit. See the non-existant footnote for the possible side effects of this machine.
3. Strange things can happen in a computer-game universe closed off from reality. Research is underway by top rabbit scientists to find out why this is the case. A plausible conclusion (as opposed to the previous several hundred un-plausible ones) is expected when Hell melts again. Meanwhile, be a friend and stay patient.
4. As mentioned in fact 1, a lot of things here won’t make sense. If you definitely cannot possibly conceive and/or comprehend any of the events in this story, tough luck. Get a more advanced brain. (Preferably above mammalian level 17, class: primate).
5. Rabbits, unlike humans, have mastered space travel, eating pasta in space, fighting in space and, therefore, know quite a lot about space. Prepare yourself for a lot of interstellar action.

As the city got more and more popular, hundreds upon hundreds of tilesets poured in and Stuart helped to properly mask them all. He used so much of those black tiles that for some reason, he thought he should change his surname to ‘Black’. He did. His real surname is actually ‘White’.
Of course, he wasn’t the only tileset masker in town. The snobbish guys at 69th Tileset Avenue, who worked in the better factory with the oddly familiar name of Submit Tileset, were serious rivals of Stuart.
Stuart was all hard-work and liked, especially when he was drunk and began to fade in and out of consciousness, to get down-and-dirty. He took pride in being the winner of the 1999 Best Masked Tileset award. Unfortunately, Stuart shared the prize with the author, who decided to give the poor rabbit a serious bashing using one of the sharper pieces of masked tiles. Stuart, in the far future, tried to get his revenge by again working on the same author’s new tileset. He began his scheme of vengeance by masking the air and unmasking the ground but that only led to the author of the tileset getting praised for creating a seriously original tileset. Stuart was seriously annoyed. Anyway, Stuart and the guys at 69, who I have yet to name, wanted to head their very own factory. This was a problem for Stuart more than the guys at 69, because they already owned factory number 69 while Stuart was still slaving away with old, rusty tools like Paint when masking his tilesets while the guys at 69 had access to the slightly better Paint 2. Paint 2 is better because not only does it allow its user to save 0.45 milliseconds faster, thus improving efficiency, but it also had on it large friendly letters saying ‘Double-click here to open’.
The snobbish guys at number 69, however, were more business-like than the Steven Wakeman when he judged uploads. Those people would bribe, blackmail, bomb, send insults to their rivals’ mothers and, on top of that, not bother with any paper work (yeah, this was normal business in J2C). Stuart considered these perfectly clean tricks to be dirty (unbeknownst to him, Stuart was capable of believing in two opposite things at the same time – this would have been seen as a great advantage in some Douglas Adams books…but serves no useful purpose here). So, by staying away from the tactics used by the snobbish guys at 69, who I will now give the uninspired name of ‘The Maskers’, the Maskers managed to gain a sizable proportion of the tileset masking company they worked for. The company, not wanting to give up too much power, decided to hand over the rather obscure factory at 67th Tileset Avenue. This led to Stuart’s job being pretty much in the control of the Maskers.
Stuart thought that if they had gotten so far, they would surely see that enough was enough and stop their competition with Stuart. After 4 hours of deep thinking, Stuart decided he should not at all be worried and that the Maskers were actually perfectly nice people. After 5 hours, Stuart was fired.

Chapter 2

Of the several tens of workers in the factory Stuart was working in, only two were fired. And one of them was actually a faulty 56k modem that accidentally strayed into the path of the lag-hating mayor of the city: DethMan. The modem, Unigma, couldn’t help feeling sorry for Stuart, so he (yeah, the modem was sentient and very, very self-conscious) invited Stuart over for a cup of carrotea.
‘You know, my home compromises of just one 15x28x19 cm³ drawer with a telephone line’, said the modem rather hesitantly. It wasn’t used to guests and had therefore not bothered to make his room about 500 times larger.
Stuart thought for a moment. ‘Ok…’ He paused ‘Well, why don’t you go and buy some carrotea, get yourself some of…er…whatever it is your drink during teatime and come over to my place?’
Unigma promptly agreed but was rather surprised by the fact that Stuart needed such a huge house (ok, so it WASN’T unanimously agreed) when he could do with just a 40x50x60 cm³ cubicle.
Masking tilesets is a precision-job. It involves producing work with stunning accuracy and the most delicate handle of the black (colour). Some professionals, in their strive for precision and perfection, even go as far as to take a giant toothbrush, dip it in black paint and scrub stuff in the general direction of where the tile is supposed to be. A tileset masker, therefore, is generally seen as a neat person.
Stuart was, in reality, a very messy person and the only time he made an exception was when he was masking tilesets. Fortunately, it’s darn hard to be messy when your house is only made up of 9 tiles. Stuart’s house was a prime example of what is now known as ‘miscellaneous domestic neatness’. The vines, spikes and coloured rocks were all arranged symmetrically, at 90 degrees angles at all places where this was possible, and in some places where it was not. Unfortunately, it’s also darn hard to conceal your ‘miscellaneous domestic pig-sty-ness’ when you are drinking carrotea with a newly found friend.
The modem didn’t particularly mind this. Nevertheless, Unigma was always under threat from short-circuiting, electrocuting Stuart and, basically, become even more malfunctioning than he already was.

The author would like to mention, before continuing with this fascinating saga, something that would’ve cheered Stuart up a lot. Basically, failed attempts can succeed by themselves. Sometimes. This was one of those times. In the far, far future, the author of the “wrongly� masked tileset accidentally created an inter-dimensional port into the world of JJ2 whilst typing in some obscure formula into his pocket calculator. He fell right into his own tileset and, in his confusion, mistook the ground as being solid. He fell straight through the ground into the sky and the author of the seriously original tileset suddenly became seriously dead.

Meanwhile, several years before the fortunate incident of Disguise’s death, Stuart and Unigma were talking about their future careers, their hatred of the Maskers that burned like one third of a supernova and, this was a favourite, their personal interests and hobbies. This was, above all, a unique opportunity for both friends to have a conversation because life in the masking factory was usually very quiet. (They had invented silent modems in J2C).
‘It’s going to be pretty hard for me to find another masking job now that my reputation is in tatters,’ said Stuart. ‘But you, you’re fortunate. A couple of upgrades, some new wiring, and you can continue sending and receiving the wrong data, like you did before.’
Unigma looked sad. ‘Nah, absolutely not. The mayor of the city has decided that Lag is Deth. He’s even made a tileset about it. I don’t think this city is small enough for both of us, Stuart.’
‘So, in your view, there are really no second chances for us?’ sighed Stuart. Suddenly, he spilled his tea all over the floor. But before that, he came up with a brilliant idea.
‘I heard that they are opening up all of these new towns and cities! It’s part of some sort of…er…government expansion plan. There’s Universal Jazz, the Unofficial Daily Carrot and Jazz2Stuff! And, and, I heard about the newest one, which, if rumours are true, must be perfect for us: Jazz2Online.’ Stuart’s mind was not used to this much thinking and his head crinkled like paper every time he said a two-syllable word.
‘Wow! Not only have you given us hope, but you have also proved to me that the data I receive and send are definitely wrong, because I haven’t heard a peep from anyone about this!’ said Unigma enthusiastically.
Later on in the evening, Stuart was trying to explain to Unigma why he thought cactuses were so irritating. Unigma, being a modem, couldn’t really fathom Stuart’s arguments, but it had something to do with the cactuses’ spikes, and that they had a tendency to hurt people when they were touched.

‘You’re what?!’ said a voice in a tone similar to the tone a bride would use when she replied to her husband after he told her about the second time he accidentally had sex with someone else’
‘I’m going to J2o’, answered Stuart. Standing in front of him was his fridge.
‘But what about meeeEEE?’ whined the fridge in that pathetic fridgey way only fridges can master. Stuart’s “intelligent� fridge was yet another ghastly invention of ML, inc (Mystic Legends). ‘I hope they all get eaten…or at least be slapped by trout indefinitely’, muttered Stuart just before he was going to humour his fridge and tell him that he was going straight back to the ML main office building and that he, Stuart, was going to J2o to preach for the fridges of ML.
‘…and that’s why I must leave,’ concluded Stuart. ‘Have a fun time getting melted and turning into a tileset masker’s toothbrush,’ Stuart secretly added.
The fridge, satisfied by Stuart’s excuse, went back to cooling food using quasi-frozen lava straight from the room named ‘Toilets’ in the ML headquarters.
‘Ok,’ said Stuart as he looked at his list of people to tell about his move to J2o, ‘only two people left…and I’m lucky because they happen to live together.’

‘Oh great! Sounds fabulous, that place!’ said a voice in a tone similar to the tone a stone would use when it replied to the stone next to it that it was very interested indeed in finding out about the latest tax reduction in the country of Lower Honduras.
‘Well, see you later then?’ said Stuart and started all of a sudden to become very, very wary. He didn’t quite realize that his parents cared so little about him. He had spent a lot of time away from his parents. Masking school, tileset college, Battle 1 university (Stuart was among the last few hundred scholars of that university before the government shut it down, on the grounds that Battle2 and Battle 3 were being neglected) had all taken heavy tolls on his parents. In the end, they just decided to stop caring. And, later on, they decided to not care. Even later on, they decided to continue not caring. So, here they were, in their relaxing countryside cottage (which was engulfed by J2C two weeks ago, which was an event that led not only to the loss of regional wildlife but also of a very, very angry phone-call to the J2C council hall about the unscheduled, unexplained, impromptu swallowing of the previously mentioned cottage. You can guess who the callers were) not caring at all.
‘Yeah, yeah, see you later,’ Stuart’s dad said.
‘And don’t forget to not come back,’ added Stuart’s mom.
As Stuart walked out of the cottage into the newly ruined countryside, he was not only saddened at his parent’s neglect of him, but also of the fact that he simply was not smart enough to call everyone instead of visiting them personally. With a shrug, he walked home and started packing.

Stuart and his modem left town a few weeks later, which was really good luck because 12 seconds after they lost sight of J2C on the long road to J2o, events of cataclysmically small consequences that would have made cowardly rabbits brave happened. And it happened even before lunchtime. What happened? J2C disappeared. It got pre-maturely eaten by a giant white rabbit.

Chapter 3

All authors know that all events that have ‘cataclysmically’ in front of them deserve special detail and a whole truckload of honouring. The author of this story, however, is pretty darned angry at this so-called “tradition� and has decided not to give any details at all.
On second thoughts, the thoughts having been catalysed into the author’s head thanks to several machineguns wielded by other outraged authors in the same room and pointed at very much the wrong direction (in other words, at THIS author’s hapless head), a detailed (summary!) will be given after all.
As the giant white rabbit approached the highly elite, highly trained, highly mobile, and all sorts of ‘highly’ military stuff one can think of, army of J2C, it paused. The army waited patiently. It was led by Field marshal Shadow of the GpW clan. He was widely regarded as the best economist the JJ2 world had to offer and he, above all things, knew that declaring war on giant white rabbits was not only annoyingly cheap (and therefore irritatingly expensive) but that the paperwork involved would be so easy and so light that every single secretary in J2C would die of laughter and relief the moment their work was carried in by their already dead under-secretaries, who, undoubtedly, would have been supported by hospital staff. This was the reason the army was waiting patiently.
The eerie morning mist drifted across the silent, black asphalt plains of Jazz2City. The two formidable forces faced each other eyeball to eyeball. The less formidable of the two began to speak.
‘Er…I think I got the wrong address. Sorry to bother you guys. I’ll be on my way now, so…so long,’ said the giant white rabbit. The whole army was startled but, for the most part, also extremely relieved.
Nevertheless, some of the more trigger-happy soldiers were NOT happy. They weren’t contented, not even satisfied, and definitely not happy. All that time running around in Battle 1 seemed to be worth it when they were called in to fight a giant rabbit, but now that it seems as if their honour and glory would be gone, that their chests would remain un-blood-spattered and that not a single person here would die of asphyxiation from inhaling all the smoke coming from the nastier weapons employed by the nastier soldiers, those trigger-happy foos were deeply disappointed. Two of the most trigger-happy foos were the little, grey-red dizzy rabbit and, er, his trigger-happy foo-pal Syntax. Together, these two had stirred up quite a lot of trouble, mostly due to their strange CoC 3 tournament, but that’s not of importance in this story. The dizzy rabbit was also known as Bobby, but we’ll call him ‘Bob’ just to show our informality and that he shouldn’t take any of this seriously.
‘If I shoot now, before that fat thing shows us its butt, I can hit it in the eye and knock it down,’ bragged the dizzy rabbit.
‘And, I,’ said Syntax, ‘will hop on top of it while it’s confused and finish the job by pretending to have finger cramp and empty my magazines into its brain.’ The dizzy one nodded, in a rather dizzying sort of way, appreciatively.
‘Boy, are we subtle! We’ll get the ‘Can’t-Leave-Community and Be-Forced-to-stay-Perpetually Medal‘ for sure!’ Bob was obviously referring to the highest award the J2C army, or any JJ2 army for that matter, could reward because the community liked keeping the best of the best part of itself whether those involved liked it or not.

And so it started. Bob aimed, realized that he was not usually this dizzy, because he didn’t usually drink so much wine from the officers’ quarters before battle, and therefore failed to not miss but also miss at the same time. This had 3 effects: 1. Bob and Syntax’s plan had failed straight from the start, so J2C was eventually eaten. 2. Bob had to spend a lot of time building up his shattered reputation. He should be finished at about Christmas 2001. 3. The bullets that didn’t hit the rabbit, which were an awful lot, sent 16 unfortunate oxygen molecules deep into outer space, where they, thanks to the mysterious effects of solar wind, travelled to another planet with extremely low oxygen levels, allowed a dying plant to respire aerobically, recover and able to photosynthesise, create more oxygen and, ultimately, provide oxygen for all kinds of life forms that would breed, evolve and populate the whole planet.
The bullets that struck the giant white rabbit made it pretty angry, and Bob’s superiors (in rank, that is) very white in the face. That’s it, Shadow thought. Better call my under-under-secretary and tell her to start hiring more staff. That’s it, thought Syntax. Let’s go kick some butt.
A lot of butts were kicked that day. Syntax ran up to the giant white rabbit, which had fallen over because of pure surprise and not because it was severely crippled, and as he ran, he had a finger cramp.
‘Aaaaaargh! Ouch, ouch, ouch!’ screamed Syntax, but nobody could hear him because of all the bullets he was putting into the white rabbit. Unfortunately for Syntax, giant organisms tend to have above-average thick skin, so the bullets kept bouncing off, doing only moderate harm to the white rabbit.
That’s it, thought the white rabbit testily, and ate Syntax. It then moved on to Bob. How Bob and Syntax got through alive out of this mess, no one knows, but recent scientific studies claim that they ‘did it with difficulty’.
The white rabbit, relieved that his first two assailants were safely eaten, moved on to disintegrate a couple of tanks, smash a couple of helicopters, eat the infantry whilst routing the rag-tag remains of the army. It then saw J2C, the source of all its troubles.
‘Mmmm….Jazz2City. I could do with a bite.’ This was bad news for DethMan, because the white rabbit was feeling particularly hungry that morning.

Chapter 4

‘This isn’t remotely fun anymore!’ cried Stuart. ‘In fact, I estimate that we are currently 5 light-years away from Planet Fun’ continued Stuart.
In the distance he could see a big, green sign with ‘Level 16’ written with big, red letters. Directly in front of him, he could see a mass of menacing, grey tiles. He was starting to dislike the smell of the place; the sweat; blood; tears and decomposing bodies of those who had failed the level 15 too much and died of grief. Every time Stuart made a sprint for the narrow opening of grey tiles, wind rushed past his face, briefly blowing away all of the pungent stenches of the level. It didn’t help him to complete the level, though. Unigma, despite his inability to use copter ears, run and jump, was waiting in the winner’s area (beyond level 16).
Unigma could just about give a reply. ‘The trick is to NOT hold down shift when you’re at the last diagonal bottom tile!’ he shouted. Stuart flashed him a ‘you’re paying for the entrance fees’ look. Stuart was not in the mood for these “hints� and could only think of writing a book named ’999 ways to kill Black Ninja slowly’. Unigma respectfully disagreed when Stuart told him about his idea, but that only made Stuart slightly redder in the face.
Stuart’s molecules had been broken down, re-arranged, broken down again and re-arranged again. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore and typed ‘jjfly’ followed by ‘jjnowall’ in his mind. The Wind Meister park attendants had made sure that cheating would not be possible, so the moment Stuart got his airboard, he got kicked out of the park. Unigma took his prize, a 6-metre long scale model of a sperm cell, and followed Stuart while humming a cheerful modem-tune.
‘No detours anymore,’ snapped Stuart, before Unigma could suggest a detour to Wind Meister 3 Park some 50 metres to the east.

The pair, safely out of the ugly, urbanized reach of the J2C conurbation, hitched a ride (does this feel familiar to anyone?) to Jazz2Online. On their way across the beautiful, green and carrot-farm dotted Carrotus landscape, they encountered a turnip-farm, which was rather unusual, a live turtle, which got shot by Stuart, and two very slimy, very obnoxious and smelly rabbits. They each had the ‘Medal of Get-outta-this-community-ASAP’ on their chests. The smell and unsightly presence of these two ex-J2C citizens helped to speed up Stuart and Unigma’s journey to J2o by at least 4 days.

The car stopped at Arjan’s Alco-Mobile for some alcohol. Stuart and Unigma were told that the driver was heading off to some place called Lori Central. Apparently, the women there were nice. A sleek, modern and brand-new sign gleamed at Unigma for attention. It read: J2o – South - 5 kilometres.
Stuart was gently tapped on the shoulder. How, he didn’t know because modems don’t have fingers.
‘We can walk to J2o now. And, considering how many of Arjan’s Hifat-Burgerbars you’ve eaten, you need the exercise anyway.
‘Well? Why not,’ said Stuart. ‘The sun is shining, birds are chirping…hey is that a hip-hop bird…oh, never mind, and the fresh fragrance of the burnt turtle is still in the air. Let’s go!’
Stuart finished his Arjan’s Lo-yield Ammonia muffin, picked up Unigma and headed south. Before long, however, he found another brand-new, modern, gleaming sign, which read: J2o spaceport – West – 1 kilometre. Stuart’s head wrinkled again.
‘I’d really like to go to J2o as fast as is rabbitly possible, but that spaceport is more than interesting… I have to see it!’ Stuart looked expectantly at Unigma.
‘Well, ok, but while we’re there, steal me two Arjan’s Supah-capacity modem-cables and one of those new Arjan’s Blind-o-shine metal cases.’
‘Deal.’

Due to the unfortunate incompatibility between JCF and Microsoft Word, I am unable to provide my story with proper paragraphs. *eats the JCF and Word* I don't have a solution to this problem either....so...well, what are you gonna do?

haha. A fun read. Shame what happend to bob though ;p.

Thanks. Btw, I'm currently writing new chapters. I should be finished with the whole story within 6 days, but I'll probably move the ultimate, typo-free version to the TF website because JCF isn't being friendly to me. Anyway, keep on sending your comments because I could do with some friendly input.

I like this a lot. My theory is that non-rabbits can't warp, so Unigma just moved through all the tests and was unaffected. Of course, if he/it turns into a rabbit later...
Meanwhile, amusing. I doubt I got all of the references but I liked what I did understand. Obviously it doesn't really work chronologically speaking, but who cares?

This is awesome, WR. Make sure you finish it, okay?

Now that, guys, is what makes my face hurt with...er...stupid grins. *grins...hence the smiley* Two new chapters should come before the clock here strikes 22.30.

Chapter 5

It turned out that the spaceport was more heavily guarded than Flash’s private mansion (which takes up 7% of the Dutch military budget). Unigma approached a morose-looking guard while Stuart tried a much more direct approach, that is, climbing over the fence, and ended up getting tasered. While Stuart was busy being in paralysing pain, Unigma asked the morose guard why all these defences were needed.
‘Our commander-in-chief received an emergency signal from Jazz2City,’ began the guard, but he was interrupted when Stuart regained consciousness and began to wail pitifully and then scream more like a man. ‘Apparently the crème de la crème of the rabbit army stationed at J2C got a severe beating from some kinda of mutant giant, white rabbit. We were still confirming the sighting of the giant white rabbit when the emergency signal started telling us that J2C was beginning to get eaten. A whole division of Mystic Legend’s Surgi-accura-strike rocket fighters, stationed here, were sent in, but they fell apart in the middle of the journey to J2C. Now that the eating of J2C is complete, and we know it is complete because the signals ceased to come right after we heard a big sloshing, crashing and swallowing noise, so the government of Carrotus has decided to put all interstellar space stations on high alert, just in case we need to do something drastic.’
‘And that is…’, inquired Unigma.
‘Classified,’ said the guard, who decided to finish Unigma’s sentence for him.
At this moment, an enormous tank slowly rolled past the fence, as if showing off its 50 cm Mega-kaboom-cannon and its Polymorph-deflect-o-armour shields. Strangely enough, it had a license plate at the back, which read: ‘556A – 1st Tank Battalion - J2LC Corps.’. Tank 556A was programmed to guard the perimeter so all it did was go round in circles around the spaceport.
Unigma glanced at the scene behind the fence. He didn’t really understand what was going on, but he did see all the rabbits in radiation suits carrying Geiger counters and running around as if it was April. He also noticed the sirens that suddenly begun to activate throughout the perimeters, as if they were saying ‘please panic because there is no reason for you not to do so’. Looking even further, Unigma spotted a monstrous concrete silo. A hatch was beginning to open with a whirr and allowed a smooth, shiny nuclear-tipped missile, with a big ‘Happy New Year 1998!’ sign written on the side. The missile’s firework-role had obviously been badly neglected.
Somebody, somewhere, had turned a key and pressed a medium-sized red button. The missile began to rumble and its rockets ignited. It took off with the grace of an ascending angel but it would soon begin to descend and propel itself to the ground with the deadliness of an ICBM, which it was.
All the noise was beginning to attract the guard’s attention and he spun round. This was odd, he thought. The classified material had suddenly launched itself into the sky.
‘Well? Now that the missile launch is over, which I assume was the classified event, can you let us in now?’
The guard looked back at Unigma. He glanced at the sky for a moment, as if he was expecting red ICBMs with ‘Happy May Day 1999!’ to rain down from the skies at any moment, but then he realized that most of the former USSR was too busy pulling their hair off at the loss of the Cold War.
Unigma also glanced at the sky, expecting to see a lot of dirt thrown into the air by the nuclear explosion, which happened about now.
The guard’s judgement was put off guard by the shockwave, which was just strong enough and far away enough to reach hurricane level 0.
‘I’m going to have to talk to my superiors first,’ said the guard. Unigma waited patiently while the guard went into the guard booth and picked up the phone.

Chapter 6

Stuart had stopped trying to ruin his voice and break his windpipe. He was feeling numb all over his body and he couldn’t smell anything, no matter how much he sniffed. He did hear the falling dirt, however, and that woke him up.
‘It’s ok, the guard’s in his booth and he’s going to let us in’ answered Unigma to a question he knew Stuart was bound to ask.
‘What’s going on? Is the guard going to shoot us? Are we going in?’ asked Stuart.
Unigma, if he could, would roll his eyes and think that the author must have accidentally switched questions and answers around.
Stuart got up and looked at the thick, steel gate. The guards stepped out of his booth, opened the gate with a clang and closed it with a bang only to see the gate open with a clang, let a giant, horrible-looking and horribly well-armed robot through, and then close with a bang.
Stuart looked up and all of a sudden began to realize that his brains was probably about to be blasted to smithereens if he didn’t say anything and say it quickly.
In a typical, almost human-like, way almost any organism would respond to the threat of the robot, all Stuart could mutter was a few ‘Um…’s and a couple of ‘Er…’s.
The robot began to speak. ‘Welcome to Spaceport Zero-one-one Omega, part of the now non-existant Mystic Legends, inc. I am model 3C, the latest version of the ML Ph34r-m3 battle-droid. We are currently undergoing a business-exchange with J2LC and we are having troubles agreeing to the buying/selling prices. We are sorry for the inconvenience. Please come back later, when the new owner, J2LC, decides to open the spaceport, if at all. Thank you.’ The voice was impersonal, unfriendly and scarily artificial. If this was the robot’s way of acting nicely and respectfully, Stuart would’ve been much more comfortable if it said ‘I am going to pull these triggers and yes, you are right, blast your brains to smithereens’.
‘Er…?’ was all Stuart could think of. Later on, he regretted saying this, thinking that an ‘I see, well, thanks. We’ll be going on and never returning, bye bye!’ would suit the situation much better.
‘I’ll take care of this, Stuart,’ said Unigma and walked, as best as he could, up to the robot. 556A rolled past the fence now and Unigma did his best to point at it.
‘You see that giant tank? That tank is not made by Mystic Legends, but by J2LC corporations. I may not know what J2LC, but what I do know is that that tank is a heck of a lot better fighting machine than you are.’
At this stage, the battle-droid decided to arm its guns, which took a while because he had a lot of them. Its eyes went crimson.
‘We are sorry for the inconvenience. Please come back later, when the new owner, J2LC, decides to open the spaceport, if at all. Thank you,’ the robot repeated. Stuart realized, however, that ML would have no choice in being bought and swallowed by whatever J2LC was. It was either that or…go bankrupt and disappear off the scene.
‘Believe me when I say this: you will get replaced by that tank the instant J2LC takes over and they’ll probably just use reverse engineering on you and turn you into fridges.’ The robot made the mistake of panicking. 15 seconds later, the gate, this time with a robot-shaped hole in it, opened with a clang, let out 556A, closely followed by the guard, and closed with a bang.
It looked at Stuart and Unigma while the guard tiptoed back into his booth.
‘GET THE …BEEP…OUTTA MY SIGHT AND DON’T YOU …BEEP… DARE TO COME BACK!!!’ it said in the nicest, friendliest voice a tank could use. Unigma got blasted off into the distance due to the sheer force of the tank’s sonic powers.
Geez, this tank can roar louder than the Queen, thought Stuart. He decided that he should take care of the tank before looking for Unigma.
‘Er…can we have a look inside the spaceport? We’ve already talked to the guard and he didn’t seem to mind.’
556A’s turret swivelled to the guard booth briefly and then turned back.
‘LISTEN TO ME, YOU …BEEP… PUNY …BEEP… LAGOMORPHIC ORGANISM! I DON’T CARE WHAT THAT OTHER…BEEP… PUNY LAGOMORPHIC GUARD SAID, I’M NOT LETTING YOU IN!’ the tank roared back.
‘We will not leave unless you tell us what is keeping you from letting us, or anyone else, in. This is not a military installation, or at least it’s no longer a military installation now that the missile’s gone, and I know the law for free access to public areas, the law against the law for free access to public areas and the law against the law against the law for free access to public areas.’ Stuart’s legs were about as stable as a dilapidated matchstick model of the Eiffel Tower.
556A let off some steam, which is what usually happened when he needed his 50 zettahertz CPU to go above 5 megahertz. Without a word, unless you count the numerous unprintable phrases he muttered under his breath, he went back into the spaceport. The guard searched the area for any other killer-tanks and went out to explain to Stuart that the tank had only gone in to discuss matters with his superiors (in rank, at least).
The wind, not to be outdone by the tank, roared and blew Unigma back to the spaceport.

The conference hall was totally quiet and only the rustling of paperwork could be heard. The main table, which looked like every other conference hall table, was long, oval and of black mahogany. A few drinks, coffee mugs and snacks were left half-drunk or half-eaten on the table. A few people started to rise and leave while others conversed quietly.
For J2LC, the transaction was barely worth it. 50, 000 gold coins just for a few eaten level-makers, 15, 000 gold coins for the ML factories outside J2C, 7800 coins for control over ML’s huge music storage facilities and 2000 for the ML logo designers who would, they claimed, revamp J2LC’s logo that no other company banner would be able to match it for the next 45 weeks.
Frank Quist leaned back on his chair and relaxed: a brave, zen-like effort, which failed. He had great plans for his company: the Jazz 2 Level Creators but buying the company’s biggest competitor, or ex-competitor, had proved extremely costly and took big chunks off his company’s budget.
‘Mr. Quist? Sir? The giant white rabbit is heading directly towards our position so we better disassemble the port and leave. Do you want to take the remaining equipment or use them to build more Guides?’ asked his assistant.
Frank hated giant things, especially those that threatened his property. ‘Can’t we just order some Zap-Zoom-fighters to distract that thing?’
‘It survived the nuclear explosion. I think it’ll survive a few laser shots.’
Fquist refrained from telling his assistant that the rabbit was probably weakened by the missile so much that all it took to kill it off was a few well-aimed laser shots.
‘No.’
‘I’m sorry, sir?’
‘No. We won’t disassemble this port. If we let the giant white rabbit to destroy it, we’ll get insurance compensation. There’s, of course, also the chance that it will decide to not destroy this place after all, which would leave us with a spaceport very close to J2o. And good communications is always good.’
‘Of course, sir. The spaceport of Zero-one-one Omega will not be demolished…at least not by us, sir.’ Fquist’s assistant paused, before continuing. Frank just knew that this was going to be bad news of cataclysmically small proportions. ‘Er…sir?’
‘Yes?’ said Frank expectantly.
‘We have used all of ML’s now obsolete battle-droids and guard-droids for fridges, except one. One of our men has reported that the missing droid has ran away. Shall I order 556A to go in pursuit?’
Frank just wanted to leave this place and remembered that he wanted to pay a visit to Lori Central. Some driver he met on the road claimed that the women there were quite nice.
‘Can’t you take any decisions for yourself? Do what you think is fit. I’m leaving.’
‘Yes sir,’ said Fquist’s assistant. ‘Er, sir? 556A is coming.’
The door leading into the conference room wasn’t wide enough to fit the tank, so 556A just stood outside, handbrake on, and told Fquist about the two visitors outside the gates.
‘Are they willing to pay?’ inquired Frank.
‘HEY, YOU…BEEP…!! ARE YOU WILLING TO PAY FOR ENTRANCE???!!’
Only the tank and Fquist heard what the reply was, but the author can tell his readers that the reply went somewhere along the lines of ‘go stick your cannon in your fuselage’.
Fquist frowned. This wasn’t some kind of airport. It was a spaceport. His spaceport. Then he had an idea. The best way to deal with these obsessed freaks, he thought, was to let them into a spaceport that was most probably doomed to get squashed by a giant white rabbit. So he let them in.

Chapter 5 and 6 finished. We're half-way through the story guys! (Aiming for 12 chapters).

EDIT: Below is chapter 7 and half of chapter 8.

Chapter 7

Throughout his life, Stuart had seen some pretty awesome stuff. They ranged from a real-life sighting of Douglas Adams to a tour of Cyberspaz Tilesetv2, which he had the honour of masking (did you think it was auto-masked? Wrong!). Stuart has also seen some awesomely weird things too and sightings ranged from a Spaz Jackrabbit from JJ1 to jungle cactuses. The latest thing he saw, a wild Fquist, demanded to be put into the ‘weird’ category simply because Fquists weren’t supposed to live on Carrotus, but it also demanded to be put into the ‘awesome’ category because meeting the founder of J2LC was not something you did every day (easy access to #jj2 was not easy back in those days).
Unigma had also seen some weird and awesome things in his lifetime, but since he got them from the Internet, most, if not all, are not appropriate to be described in this story.
Fquist felt ill at ease when he realized that he was being referred to as Frank, Fquist and Frank Quist for no readily apparent reason. Despite this, he welcomed the two visitors in that ‘wild Fquist’ way he learnt to do while still living in the harsh jungles of the Low Countries.

The door opened soundlessly, but crashed shut the moment they stepped in. The door was suddenly locked itself. Unigma didn’t like this one bit. He was surrounded by darkness when the lights turned off. He was subjected to the heat of the mid-August sun when the air conditioning stopped working. He was very aware of the slight rumbling of the ground every few seconds.
‘Now what?’ asked Unigma.
‘We can start by switching on the lights,’ said Stuart, so he did.
There was just one rocket still inside the spaceport. The pair was disappointed. They were, however, instantly cheered up by the fact that the rocket was attached, if in a rather strange way, to the back of a spaceship. It was by no means an ugly spaceship. Some people, mainly humans, would’ve even thought it as beautiful but in the eyes of rabbits and faulty modems the spaceship looked as good as a Ford Taurus (which is a very average car).

Author’s note: For more information on the average car of Ford Taurus, visit: http://www.mensetmanus.net/average-car/ Thank you.

Fortunately for the two friends in the spaceport hangar, ML did not design the spaceship. If you want to know why this was fortunate, what a non-ML spaceship was doing in a ML hangar and who exactly made the ship, scroll way down. For more patient readers, just keep reading normally.
The smell of newly perfumed liquid oxygen was thick. The ship was actually quite amazing. It had some shark-like fins at the back, a beautifully smooth, curved and pointy nose, some ridiculously over-sized engines at the two sides and the rockets, or rocket exhausts, were placed on the fins. These made the fins look rather fat in the middle and very thin at the top and bottom ends, which was why this good-looking spaceship was downgraded to bad looking. On further inspection, the ship was upgraded to average looking because the turquoise colour fitted its body perfectly while the fins were of a lightly shaded teal, which disappeared into the turquoise colour with a gentle gradient.

The giant white rabbit shrugged off a couple billion gamma rays and a few hundred million alpha particles. Not being familiar with nuclear physics and being far too stupid to comprehend it, the scientific laws of the Universe decided to give the giant white rabbit a brake, make an exception, and turn its whole body into an impermeable shell of anti-radiation. The rabbit did, however, understand the meaning of indigestion, because it often had indigestion.
The best way a giant white rabbit relieves its indigestion is a complicated process although it almost always starts with one simple thing: eat a lot and eat it fast. The next two steps are a bit more complex: the rabbit has to burp. If it doesn’t burp, it should pat its stomach gently until it does. Giant white rabbits tend to do things human biologists thought was biologically impossible, so I would like to say, very respectfully, ‘Go roast yourselves’ to every single one of them. After releasing its sizeable quantity of methane, the digestion of food starts. As everyone knows, indigestion is caused by ‘gaps’ in the stomach’s layer of mucus and can be worsened by heavy meals. In order to ‘repair’ those gaps, the rabbit needs to eat some dirt, chew it in a manner which human physicists thought was physically impossible and swallow it. The dirt will stick to the stomach walls and block off the stomach tissues from harmful acid. Dirt, however, causes abnormally, or alarmingly, high rates of digestion and absorption of food (see the second non-existant footnote as to why this is so). This, naturally, makes the giant white rabbit hungry, which it uses as en excuse to eat yet another major city, which causes indigestion, which then prompts the rabbit to eat dirt, and so on.
It was the hunger that caused the occasional rumbling of the ground and the reason why trees sometimes fell down in the area of the rumbling. By the way, the weak earthquakes and the tree felling were hurtling towards Zero-one-one Omega.

Chapter 8

Stuart gave up trying to open the door and instead operated the nearest ML No-time-for-Stalin vending machine. The machine explained that it was still in the process of switching ownership, couldn’t perform its usual functions and wished Stuart a nice day.
The control panel of one of the hangar’s landing pads began to flash and caught Unigma’s interest. Before Stuart could respond, a Nil-cal turtsandwich popped out of the vending machine and landed neatly into his hands.
‘Unigma, do you want me to plug you into the control panel?’ asked Stuart while chewing on a mouthful of disgusting ML sandwich. ‘And while I’m at it, I should plug myself into the vending machine and beat it up.’
‘It’s ok. There’s nothing you or I can’t see directly. A ship is just about to land.’
Stuart spat out his turtsandwich, not because of what Unigma just said (although he was surprised by a strange ship landing here), but because he just couldn’t take the taste anymore. The sandwich started to work its way into the nervous system. Stuart picked up a Concise Carrot-o-xford Letnian Dictionary just for fun and put it in his satchel. Oh, did the author not mention that Stuart had with him a satchel? Never mind. ‘Can you find any information about the ship?’
‘Nope. There seems to be something that causes the system to malfunction. The computer tells me that ‘seismic tremours’ are disturbing its wires.’ Stuart could indeed feel a lot of tremours at this point.
He glanced at the screen. ‘The ship has slowed down a lot. How high up is it?’
‘500 metres.’
‘That leaves us 90 seconds to prepare an appropriate welcome ceremony.’ They decided to spend those valuable seconds wandering around.
While Stuart tried his luck at getting on of those yummy-looking Multipotent-Chinese-newspaper doughnuts, Unigma went in search for an Arjan’s Supah-capacity modem-cable and one of the new Arjan’s Blind-o-shine metal cases. Failing that, he looked at himself using the reflective metal of a wheat barrel, which was next to the wooden one with nuclear waste.
Unigma was covered with black plastic. He was standing on 4 little legs, each with 3 tiny toes, which were suitable for walking to the battery re-charger but not over any long distances. He was a bit thin, had a rectangular shape when looked from the side and a trapezium shape when looked from the front. Basically, Unigma’s top was thinner than his bottom. Closer examinations revealed 5 lights on his case, of which only 1 was on. That was the ‘Power’ indicator. 4 lights were labelled ‘Connection’, ‘Connection’ and ‘Data’, which kept flashing on and off despite the fact that there was no connection with (…). There was no connection with (…) either. The fifth button was not, and had not ever been, on. It was unlabelled. Unigma thought about this and his ‘Data’ light flashed faster, which made him hot, but his case was completely solid. Unigma had no openings whatsoever, except for his speaker and power cable and telephone cable connection points. The lack of proper ventilation would cause numerous heating problems, especially when the air conditioning was turned off. Last time Unigma went to the Bahamas, he needed 5 doctors to peel the plastic off his internal circuits. Basically, Unigma couldn’t go very far, had unknown uses for his lights, couldn’t handle heat and, adding to his faults, he got kicked by DethMan once. It turns out that Unigma was a ML Alwa-y-sa-wrong Modem, which also explains the presence of the ‘Mystic Legends, Inc’ logo on Unigma’s right side.
The machine had finished switching owernship and now sold mainly Gorbu-chews (if you ever have the pleasure of tasting it, make sure that you do not chew). ‘Sorry. This J2LC Time-for-Gorbachev vending machine does not accept notes,’ the replied after Stuart tried putting in some silver coins.
‘Please make sure that you only pay with the appropriate type of cash. The new Time-for-Gorbachev vending machines, however, also accept spent RF fuel.’ Stuart started to put in gold coins now, with the result of never seeing those coins again and listening to the message of ‘Thank you for your most welcome donation to J2LC. May I interest you in actually buying something this time?’

There are some inconsitencies, inaccuracies and uninentional mistakes in my post above. Ignore them. ;P

‘Argh! That was not a donation! I wanted that yummy-looking Multipotent-Chinese-newspaper doughnut!’ shouted Stuart and pounded the vending machine. The Multipotent-Chinese-newspaper doughnuts started to slide away and be replaced by Gorbu-chews.
‘We at J2LC are, of course, very grateful for your charitable donation,’ the machine went on, completely ignoring Stuart. ‘We are not like the greedy, money-driven pigs of ML and reward those who help us. Please accept a free copy of the latest version of our Guide.’ A free copy of the latest version of their Guide popped out.
‘Hey, what’s this?’ wondered Stuart.
‘Hey, what’s THAT?!’ wondered Unigma as he witnessed two simultaneous events: the sudden demise of most of the hangar wall and the arrival of the long-awaited spaceship.
The wall shuddered, shrank and crashed down in a heap of rubble and dust. The chaos and mayhem revealed a giant white rabbit, which was violently gulping down various bits of concrete and steel. Its action-movie entrance made the T-Rex scene of Jurassic Park look like a puppy dog show but Unigma didn’t have time to muse over that.
The ceiling cracked, creating an upside-down earthquake and collapsed over the landing area. Sunlight burst in with the force of a cavalry charge and revealed a green-black spaceship. It was much bigger than the turquoise one and had a pair of Arjan’s Allurnothing-ship-pincers hanging on its underside.
‘What’s it doing?’ asked Stuart as he put the Guide into his satchel.
‘Towing our ship.’
‘What?! Oh. Oh! Er…? Our ship?’
‘Well, it’s not legally ours but it should be, if we want to escape from this place without getting eaten,’ answered Unigma.
The giant white rabbit swallowed the central computer, which made a feeble protest and claimed that a team of lawyers was being sent here in order to sue the white rabbit. The green-black ship opened its pincers and descended upon the turquoise ship.
Stuart looked at the ship, then at the rabbit. He looked up, then right. He noticed that his ship was still connected to a minor docking computer, specifically designed to minimize hassle for spaceships that did not belong to ML, ran up to its control panel and opened his ship’s main hatchway.
Unigma was almost halfway up the hatch by the time Stuart finished marvelling at his ingenuity under pressure. With a startled look at his surroundings, he hurried aboard as well. The hatch closed itself when the big, green-black ship tightened its pincers and started its ascent. The white rabbit, having eaten the whole hangar, looked at the rising spaceship and made a very clear, very simple calculation in its head., It decided that the closer something was, the quicker it could be eaten. It made a titanic effort, jumped up and put its teeth into the turquoise spaceship. Stuart and Unigma got knocked out at this stage. Fortunately, the ship wasn’t constructed by ML and was smooth and slippery enough to not give the giant rabbit a proper hold. Frustrated, the white rabbit moved on eating the rest of the spaceport and unintentionally handed J2LC quite a fat insurance compensation.

(Chapter 9 will come later!)

Chapter 9

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the JJ2 Galaxy has this to say about itself:

Following the advent of mass-publishing (see page 4543, sub-title 44A, chapter 6, paragraph , line 56 for more information about this) the main executives of J2LC, headed by the company’s CEO, Frank Quist, thought that it would be advantageous for the company if they started to make something that would end the dominance of Arjan’s Book shops and their monopoly over the market. They needed something that was better than the Encyclopaedia Erotica. A ‘Do not disturb’ sign was subsequently hanged on an inconspicuous door that would lead to the main brainstorm room.
All sorts of ideas were born, inspected and thrown away in the single biggest J2LC operation in history. It turns out that most of those ideas involved taking the concepts of Encyclopaedia Erotica and just making them ten times more explicit, with pictures added. While everyone agreed that this would undoubtedly help to sell the finished product, Frank made a very good point about the brainstorm project (aka Project Brainstorm) and its purposes:
‘We are locked semi-permanently in this room not to encourage and/or stimulate the growth of the rabbit population but to simply provide light-hearted adult entertainment.’ And so, they all went on wrinkling their heads.

Five thousand J2LC Elephan-tus-refresher drinks and 5000 hours of light-hearted adult entertainment later, ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the JJ2 Galaxy’ saw the light of day. It rivalled the Encyclopaedia Erotica in every way, except one, which was that it couldn’t provide any form of entertainment at all. The number of pages fitted neatly into a 20-figure standard form number and a sophisticated sensory panel/keyboard enabled users to type in anything they wanted in a flash. The Guide’s purpose? It enables hitchhiker’s to get lost in ways they previously thought wasn’t possible and, perhaps, find a little bit of information about the place they are stranded at.
Being still in its infancy, ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ is still undergoing the centralization of its headquarters, stationed on planet Middleius-of-Galaxius, and the wiring of irrationally placed J2LC Tach-y-y-on-speed Signal Transmitters throughout the galaxy in order to ensure that every Guide has reasonable unreliable accessibility to information updates that may or may not be more inaccurate than the information replaced.
So far, J2LC has not lost a single lawsuit caused by angry users of the Guide who, one way or another, have suffered as a result of its inconsistencies.

Chapter 10

Stuart turned the Guide off. His first time with it was quite an unusual experience and for a few seconds he just gazed into somebody’s pair of eyes.
‘Argh!’ was all Stuart could shout out as he jumped back 5 metres. The other person did the same thing.
‘Argh!’
‘Eek!’
‘No!’
‘Aaaahh!’
‘Oh noes!’
The two frightened rabbits stopped screaming just enough to get some precious gulps of air and resumed their high-pitched symphony of panic.
It turns out that their panic was completely and utterly un-founded and that the real, proper Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy would have prevented this awful and abusive use of time due to its ‘Don’t panic’ sign, which is written on the front in large, friendly letters. Suddenly, Stuart got tasered again.
‘Please, Martin, that was not necessary.’
‘Q made me do it.’ The robot replied flatly.
‘Don’t look at me,’ said Q innocently, ‘Martin made me make him not make me not make him do it!’
‘Huh?’
‘Tsk, tsk. Your brain cells need topping up. What Q was saying, was that…’
‘Martin, just go do the washing up. And put down that Ouch-a-lot taser!’
‘I have deduced from my inter-universal sensors and the data from my quantum-mechanical socks that somewhere out there is a robot that is as intelligent as me and suffering from the same cruel fate of having to do these mind-bogglingly stupid household tasks,’ the robot grumbled.
Martin, however, was not aware of the fact that somewhere out there the robot he was referring to was having as much fun as Martin was only it was divided by –3x10^56000. Martin did, however, have a brain the size of a giant moon and was able to re-calculate his sensory information, correct his mistake of thinking he could find a friend, as well as solving 15, 000 virtual Rubik’s cubes simultaneously before struggling into the kitchen.
Dasel-pots’ fingers did a little tap-dance on the keyboard. Q got bored.
‘Did you know that if you turned the reflective keyboard 15 degrees laterally, swung that lamp so that it would face the keyboard, found the angle of incidence between the light beam and the normal, added it to a table showing the number of scales for 6 coelacanths, calculated the standard deviation of the numbers in the table and cubed the final result you would get the exact number of ants that perished with spaceport Zero-one-one Omega when it got eaten by the giant white rabbit?’ Q said proudly.
Dasel-pots fingers now began to do a fast-paced flamenco. She was getting impatient with Q, the shipboard computer, who, it seemed, had a knack for being unhelpfully helpful with his constant chattering and mentioning of unnecessary facts.
She wore tough, elastic socks, which she insisted was actually a pair of Arjan’s Elasti-purpose-stretchi-fashion boots. Her hair was brown, long and had to be done into a ponytail. Dasel-pots kept flicking it out of the way and although she would like to feel comfortable at the back of her head, the hair, as always, turns out to be an asset in the strangest of situations. Dasel-pots had grey-red fur, which many people associated with the infamous Bob, who almost single-handedly caused the destruction of Jazz2City. I should get it dyed some day, she thought, just to avoid getting stared at. But then again, few people in the empty depths of space would have been available for staring, even if she tried to hire professional stares, available from the gargoyles of Medivo.
She put her hair into a sink, opened the tap, and started slapping Stuart with the wet hair. If you consulted ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the JJ2 Galaxy’, you would have known that wet hair tied into a ponytail is very hard and a potent weapon against doofus guards, telephone salesmen and unconscious taser victims.
‘Wakey, wakey!’ she said to Stuart.

Martin looked up from his tedious chore and spotted Unigma. The modem was happily connected into the ship’s biotic hospital and recovery centre, which, as is typical of hyper-advanced biotic facilities, had a window that allowed everyone to peer in.
‘Bah! Here I am, brain the size of a giant moon, with none of my negative temperature coefficient thermistors working properly. Stupid modem…why should it get such good treatment when I obviously deserve…’ a titanium shield slammed down, blocking off the window. There was a little picture of a sleeping modem on it.
‘Oops, sorry,’ said Niklas, who almost reeled from the full blow of Martin’s annoyed, deep blue eyes. ‘I didn’t know you were watching that,’ he said apologetically.
He flicked a switch up but not before Martin smiled. It wasn’t a friendly ‘that’s fine’ smile, but more of a ‘that’s fine but I’m still gonna do something nasty’ kind of smile. Add to that a fundamental inability for robots to properly show facial emotions, and you have a scary combination. Niklas hurried out of the kitchen.
‘Darn robot…wait…that’s it! I’m no longer going to allow Martin to stand between me and my turtsandwiches!’ He walked back to the kitchen with a determined stride, stopped at the threshold, and went to Dasel-pots for help.
‘No, I own Martin! I can do whatever I want to him! He is my robot. Or, at least, Dasel-pot’s robot. Erm…’ mumbled Stuart indecisively. Martin had by this time finished and went back to his quarters.
‘Thank heavens!’ said a relived Stuart and rushed into the kitchen for another one of those increasingly rare ML Nil-cal turtsandwiches.
As he munched on the sandwich, he formulated a plan to teach that J2LC FOO (Frighten Own Owner) android a lesson. Cleary, the abbreviation FOO was exceeding its limits because Niklas wasn’t legally the owner of Martin. He opened his copy of the Guide.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the JJ2 Galaxy has this to say about FOO androids:

These all-purpose, all-environment robots have been described by the Why Bother? magazine as …‘the pinnacle of cybernetic intelligence and usefulness. We’d give it 9.2/10 but due to the frightening nature of our example robot, we were forced to rate J2LC’s FOO android 10/10 – A Must Buy!’ The FOO stands for Frighten Own Owner and is specifically designed to target people with weak states of mind and make sure that they behave in a socially correct manner. (For more information about social behaviour, look at page 677, 000 under the heading of Treasure Chambers). The android is less effective at dealing with courageous people or those with suicidal personalities, and it will show its dissatisfaction with regular complaints, grumbling and optimistic pessimism.
The latest version of J2LC’s FOO androids has only ever been manufactured once, and is named ‘Martin’ after the mythical android ‘Marvin’ of the mythical ship 'The Golden Heart' with the mythical Infinity Probability Drive of the mythical Douglas Adams universe. Martin is currently serving aboard the state-of-the-art spaceship ‘Nietzsche’s Shoe’. The reason for Martin’s uniqueness is his extraordinary processing power, his brain (which has a size roughly equivlanet to a giant moon), his incredible array of tools (including a built-in J2LC Ouch-a-lot taser) and his ability to FOO people that are not actually his owner. While this is seen as a bad move by J2LC’s many critics, those critics have been frightened into submission by Martin, so there’s no need to worry about that unique piece of cybernetics at all.
If you own a FOO android and are finding it too hard to deal with, please don’t hesitate to call yourself a loser and/or get a brave friend, preferably a war hero (like Bobby and Syntax of the famous massacre at J2C), give them ownership and watch the clash of the titans unfold! (Note: this doesn’t work with Martin).

Niklas groaned but he kept his hopes up by imagining that somewhere out there must be a hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy that was as reliable and as helpful as the one he was holding in his hands.

[Please continue giving comments, suggestions for improvements and fat bribes to me ]

Chapter 10

Stuart turned the Guide off. His first time with it was quite an unusual experience and for a few seconds he just gazed into somebody’s pair of eyes.
‘Argh!’ was all Stuart could shout out as he jumped back 5 metres. The other person did the same thing.
‘Argh!’
‘Eek!’
‘No!’
‘Aaaahh!’
‘Oh noes!’
The two frightened rabbits stopped screaming just enough to get some precious gulps of air and resumed their high-pitched symphony of panic.
It turns out that their panic was completely and utterly un-founded and that the real, proper Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy would have prevented this awful and abusive use of time due to its ‘Don’t panic’ sign, which is written on the front in large, friendly letters. Suddenly, Stuart got tasered again.
‘Please, Martin, that was not necessary.’
‘Q made me do it.’ The robot replied flatly.
‘Don’t look at me,’ said Q innocently, ‘Martin made me make him not make me not make him do it!’
‘Huh?’
‘Tsk, tsk. Your brain cells need topping up. What Q was saying, was that…’
‘Martin, just go do the washing up. And put down that Ouch-a-lot taser!’
‘I have deduced from my inter-universal sensors and the data from my quantum-mechanical socks that somewhere out there is a robot that is as intelligent as me and suffering from the same cruel fate of having to do these mind-bogglingly stupid household tasks,’ the robot grumbled.
Martin, however, was not aware of the fact that somewhere out there the robot he was referring to was having as much fun as Martin was only it was divided by –3x10^56000. Martin did, however, have a brain the size of a giant moon and was able to re-calculate his sensory information, correct his mistake of thinking he could find a friend, as well as solving 15, 000 virtual Rubik’s cubes simultaneously before struggling into the kitchen.
Dasel-pots’ fingers did a little tap-dance on the keyboard. Q got bored.
‘Did you know that if you turned the reflective keyboard 15 degrees laterally, swung that lamp so that it would face the keyboard, found the angle of incidence between the light beam and the normal, added it to a table showing the number of scales for 6 coelacanths, calculated the standard deviation of the numbers in the table and cubed the final result you would get the exact number of ants that perished with spaceport Zero-one-one Omega when it got eaten by the giant white rabbit?’ Q said proudly.
Dasel-pots’ fingers now began to do a fast-paced flamenco. She was getting impatient with Q, the shipboard computer, who, it seemed, had a knack for being unhelpfully helpful with his constant chattering and mentioning of unnecessary facts.
She wore tough, elastic socks, which she insisted was actually a pair of Arjan’s Elasti-purpose-stretchi-fashion boots. Her hair was brown, long and had to be done into a ponytail. Dasel-pots kept flicking it out of the way and although she would like to feel comfortable at the back of her head and cut it all short, the hair, as always, turns out to be an asset in the strangest of situations. Dasel-pots had grey-red fur, which many people associated with the infamous Bob, who almost single-handedly caused the destruction of Jazz2City. I should get it dyed some day, she thought, just to avoid getting stared at. But then again, few people in the empty depths of space would have been available for staring, even if she tried to hire professional ‘starers’, available from the gargoyles of Medivo.
She put her hair into a sink, opened the tap, and started slapping Stuart with the wet hair. If you consulted ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the JJ2 Galaxy’, you would have known that wet hair tied into a ponytail is very hard and a potent weapon against doofus guards, telephone salesmen and unconscious taser victims.
‘Wakey, wakey!’ she said to Stuart.

Martin looked up from his tedious chore and spotted Unigma. The modem was happily connected into the ship’s biotic hospital and recovery centre, which, as is typical of hyper-advanced biotic facilities, had a window that allowed everyone to peer in.
‘Bah! Here I am, brain the size of a giant moon, with none of my negative temperature coefficient thermistors working properly. Stupid modem…why should it get such good treatment when I obviously deserve…’ a titanium shield slammed down, blocking off the window. There was a little picture of a sleeping modem on it.
‘Oops, sorry,’ said Niklas, who almost reeled from the full blow of Martin’s annoyed, deep blue eyes. ‘I didn’t know you were watching that,’ he said apologetically.
He flicked a switch up but not before Martin smiled. It wasn’t a friendly ‘that’s fine’ smile, but more of a ‘that’s fine but I’m still gonna do something nasty’ kind of smile. Add to that a fundamental inability for robots to properly show facial emotions, and you have a scary combination. Niklas hurried out of the kitchen.
‘Darn robot…wait…that’s it! I’m no longer going to allow Martin to stand between me and my turtsandwiches!’ He walked back to the kitchen with a determined stride, stopped at the threshold, and went to Dasel-pots for help.
‘No, I own Martin! I can do whatever I want to him! He is my robot. Or, at least, Dasel-pot’s robot. Erm…’ mumbled Stuart indecisively. Martin had by this time finished and went back to his quarters.
‘Thank heavens!’ said a relived Stuart and rushed into the kitchen for another one of those increasingly rare ML Nil-cal turtsandwiches.
As he munched on the sandwich, he formulated a plan to teach that J2LC FOO (Frighten Own Owner) android a lesson. Cleary, the abbreviation FOO was exceeding its limits because Niklas wasn’t legally the owner of Martin. He opened his copy of the Guide.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the JJ2 Galaxy has this to say about FOO androids:

These all-purpose, all-environment have been described by the Why Bother? Magazine as …‘the pinnacle of cybernetic intelligence and usefulness. We’d give it 9.2/10 but due to the frightening nature of our example robot, we were forced to rate J2LC’s FOO android 10/10 – A Must Buy!’ The FOO stands for Frighten Own Owner and is specifically designed to target people with weak states of mind and make sure that they behave in a socially correct manner. (For more information about social behaviour, look at page 677, 000 under the heading of Treasure Chambers). The android is less effective at dealing with courageous people or those with suicidal personalities, and it will show its dissatisfaction with regular complaints, grumbling and optimistic pessimism.
The latest version of J2LC’s FOO androids has only ever been manufactured once, and is named ‘Martin’ after the mythical android ‘Marvin’ of the mythical ship with the mythical Infinity Probability Drive of the mythical Douglas Adams universe. Martin is currently serving aboard the state-of-the-art spaceship ‘Nietzsche’s Shoe’. The reason for Martin’s uniqueness is his extraordinary processing power, his brain (which has a size roughly equivalent to a giant moon), his incredible array of tools (including a built-in J2LC Ouch-a-lot taser) and his ability to FOO people that are not actually his owner. While this is seen as a bad move by J2LC’s many critics, those critics have been frightened into submission by Martin, so there’s no need to worry about that unique piece of cybernetics at all.
If you own a FOO android and are finding it too hard to deal with, please don’t hesitate to call yourself a loser and/or get a brave friend, preferably a war hero (like Bobby and Syntax of the famous massacre at J2C), give them ownership and watch the clash of the titans unfold! (Note: this doesn’t work with Martin).

Niklas groaned but he kept his hopes up by imagining that somewhere out there must be a hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy that was as reliable and as helpful as the one he was holding in his hands.

[Second part of chapter 10]

'I’ve got some ice for your,’ Dasel-pots hesitated, ’…your satchel area.’
Stuart took the cold bag and put it on his butt. ‘Thanks a lot! Sorry for that little misunderstanding. But that sure is one vicious robot you got there.’
Dasel-pots gave genuine ‘that’s fine’ smile.
‘Thanks for picking up my ship slowly enough for us to get aboard in time,’ Stuart said rather cynically.
‘What, wait, that was your ship? But my instructions here claim that the ship was the property of XLM. Unless I’m greatly mistaken, its name is ‘Nietzsche’s Sock’. It landed on Carrotus for flight tests under gravity, but its crew disappeared after reporting a giant white thing on the horizon. That’s why we’re here to tow it back to Orbitus.’
‘Xtreme Level Makers? I’ve never heard of them. Who…’ gasped Stuart.
‘Who are they? They’re nothing but the XLM,’ replied Dasel-pots with a ‘don’t worry’ smile and a wink. ‘Why do you say that it’s your ship? Are you one of the crew? Because if you are, I’m going to have to fire you.’
‘No, I’m not. I just happened to be in the general vicinity of the ship when the giant white rabbit came. I didn’t have much choice.’
‘Are you wondering why we’re going to Orbitus?’
‘More than I wonder about life, the universe and everything.’
‘Times have changed since Jazz Jackrabbit graced that planet. In the end, its natural gravitational fields just couldn’t keep the core of the planet from expanding outwards. In fact, I think it’s because of its gravitational fields that the planet is slowly expanding and dissolving into space. We’ve stopped that, but there’s absolutely no way to shrink Orbitus back into its original size.’
‘So now the very low gravity of the planet gives ideal spaceship construction environment! But what about the beholders?’
‘They beheld our coming. That’s it. They beheld our coming, realized that we were here to help and have agreed to leave us alone if we leave them alone.’
Stuart found the idea of a purple-silver kaleidoscope welcoming a fleet of Anti-Gravito-Gravy suckertubes rather amusing. He, despite only having his Guide for less than an hour, instinctively looked up ‘XLM’.
‘Put that down. J2LC has decided to only make bad information about their competitors available on their silly guides,’ said Dasel-pots and decided that it would be more helpful to reassure Stuart of Unigma’s safety, because Stuart hadn’t thought about Unigma at all, and tell him all about XLM, it’s history and it’s recent move to Orbitus.

G_G =D
Really great story.

Chapter 11

Unbeknownst to the Galactic Rabbits, their galaxy is just one of billions upon billions in their Universe. All kinds of worlds exist and all manner of species, creatures and civilizations can be found scattered throughout the empty depths of space. The Galactic Rabbits were at first not aware of this and thought their galaxy as the only one. When they first set foot on the moon, which turned out to be made of cheese after all, they were surprised that their world was so much larger than everyone had previously thought. When they first colonized the outer planets, they found themselves gawping at the immensity of their galaxy. When the Galactic Rabbits first ventured away from that spiral of light they called ‘Home’ and explored other neighbouring galaxies, they went back and told tales of the likes no one had ever, ever heard of; tales of marvel; tales eclipsing even the tales of the local War Tavern.
They were not welcomed, however. The Galactic Rabbits could ultimately not cope with the idea that they weren’t and couldn’t be at the centre of the universe, which is unusual for a species that have invented FOO androids and turtsandwiches, they simply started believe that they were, in fact, at the centre. Using sheer will power, the Galactic Rabbits merged every, single thing in the universe together, to create one ‘super-galaxy’. All the interesting places, all the beautiful nebulas, all of the very, very annoyed turtles were sucked inwards until they were part of the same galactic area as the rabbits. One unfortunate consequence of this kind of mass movement of stellar bodies is Orbitus.
The dark-blue, and rather cloudy with swirls of mist, planet was too unstable and fragile to be moved over long distances (i.e. exceeding 50, 000 astronomical units). The Beholders, the dominant species of the planet, weren’t particularly happy about the move because they had beheld a starry sky for millennia but it was now all jumbled up. To add insult to injury, the rabbits hadn’t even bothered to put a ‘this way up’ sign on the planet. This, Jazz Jackrabbit, should explain why those peaceful Beholders kept attacking you when you were “on visit�. Next time, apologize first, and they are sure to forgive you, because the Beholders are a naturally peaceful race.

A small, silver beholder bobbed gently in planetary orbit. He was still an undergraduate in his city’s ‘prophecy college’ and was thus inclined to take a break from his studies, even though his teachers kept telling him that he was too inexperienced when it came to beholding and that he had better pull himself together and start beholding his butt off. But everyone needs rest, especially silver Beholders.
It kept bobbing gently, but this time, it sensed that something was behind it. Probably just more stardust, it thought. It started to behold the deep-blue, misty planet in all its glory. It beheld majestic spaceports, not the ugly ones the rabbits set up but the wondrous, tasteful, architectural ones the Beholders built for themselves. Those were the ones driven by their mysterious ‘I-see-you Engine’, which was fuelled by a team of elite, purple Beholders who had special telescopes aimed at the planet’s nearest sun. The bobbing Beholder, who was now starting to drift gently now, as if something was pulling it away, beheld the Grand University of Beholders, the Oracle of the Past, with its purple-silver blended domes and concentric pillars. It, again, sensed that something was behind it. The Beholder had just taken a cup of Extra-strong-and-concentrated Future-leaf Tea and just wanted to relax and behold its girlfriend having a bath. It sensed something behind it, but this time, the feeling was strong. It spun round quickly. Nothing. Well, that’s that sorted out, it thought, and returned to beholding its girlfriend putting on extra-glistening bath oils.
As fate would have it, Nietzsche’s Shoe was actually coming from the flank, not behind, and too late did the inexperienced silver Beholder realize its mistake. Behold! My death will come right n… splat.

Orbitus is to XLM what Portsmouth was to the Royal Navy. Years of illegal casino-running, J2C-style business and selling Christmas cards had paid of for the extreme level makers, because they were finally able to buy themselves the, potentionally, largest, most productive spaceship-yard in the galaxy. Unlike all other major companies, XLM was banned from Carrotus. The reasons, causes, consequences and the post-banning flamewar (aka the Gingerbread Campaign) will not be discussed in this story because the author is fearful of a Cornbread Campaign, which is the codename for XLM’s invasion plan of Carrotus (oops, shouldn’t have mentioned that!).
Anyway, XLM is not using Orbitus to build themselves a fleet of super-carriers nor a fleet of reality-skewing laser-beam equipped destroyers. If you have to know, they’re actually using their excellent facilities to construct useless, flashy spaceships for the really rich in order to pay for their horribly well-armed star-destroying battleships Ã(-) la those giant, flying pieces of Imperial junk in Star Wars. It would take them many years, however, before they could build up a starfleet large enough to provide a satisfactory supply of muffins for everyone in the universe, so for now, the employees of XLM were contented to call themselves the ‘most flexible trans-planetary-corporation in the galaxy’.
They were cut off from the market off Carrotus and had neither a home planet, nor a main company office building. Instead, the CEO, ChippieBW, spread his company out like a huge spider web over all of the known worlds and planets. XLM constructed ships at Orbitus, had all of its immense wealth stored on the bank planet of Crysillis, Technoir was its research and development centre, Diamondus its time-warp gem provider, Exoticus the official company holiday destination (Holidaius for winter), Scraparap for when the company was low on funds, Letni its testing and calculations facility, Lagunicus the employees’ supply planet, where they would take thousands of crabs, water and melons aboard their gigantic spaceships, and Nippius their source for cold fusion and ‘cold logic’ headquarters.

Q sent a little electric buzz across its components, which triggered the heating of a cup of bad coffee and also the accidental sealing of all fire doors in the ship.
‘Ouch! What was that?’ Stuart said. Thud. ‘Hey, stop it!’ Thud. ‘It would be helpful if you realized that an obstacle was in your way! Stupid door…’ Thud. The door was coming down harder now so Stuart took the opportunity of just putting his coffee down on the very expensive mat and walked away. Thud. Crack. Splash. Apparently, the door wasn’t afraid of giving Martin another cleaning task to do.
‘This whole ship is crazy! I only wanted some tea…’ growled Stuart as he headed off to the bridge, where Niklas was fervently negotiating with another fire door to let him in. Q, realizing that the coffee was too hot for the mat, turned on the sprinklers briefly before finally reverting the ship’s fire-control systems to normal.
‘Gah!’ shouted someone from within. The door opened and a very wet, very furious Dasel-pots stepped out.
‘Who activated the drinks machine?’ Niklas immediately pointed at Stuart.
‘Er…what’s wrong with the machine?’
‘The ship’s just a prototype. Hardly any un-essential services here work properly. Some parts of the ship’s tileset aren’t even masked properly,’ Dasel-pots said, feeling the un-even walls. ‘Just don’t touch anything until we’ve landed and the maintenance crew comes, ok?’
‘Wait, I could mask this ship.’
‘Hmm? What do you mean? Are you a tileset masker or something? I thought all tileset maskers were employed in Jazz2City, which got eaten by a giant white rabbit…’
‘Exactly. I’ve done a great deal of masking. Even changed my surname to ‘Black’ from ‘White’. I should tell you about the amazing stuff I’ve done! I’ve even won an award, but this guy bashed me on…’ Everything dawned upon Stuart,
‘What got eaten?’
‘J2C.’
‘What got eaten…?’
‘J2C.’
‘That’s impossible! How? Why? And when?! I’ve barely been away from the city for 24 hours and suddenly it gets…what happened to it?’ Stuart blurted out.
‘It got eaten.’
‘What got eaten……?’
’J2C.’
’I...’ began Stuart.
‘I honestly don’t know how you made it out but you’re certainly a very lucky person. You and your modem friend, of course.’
‘And here he comes,’ added Niklas.
‘Unigma, did you know that J2C got eaten?’
‘Why, yes. I talked to the guard and he told me everything about it. Didn’t you hear him?’
‘No, I was unconscious,’ said Stuart in a rather stupid tone.
‘Always making excuses,’ Unigma muttered. ‘Oh, yes! Right, by the way, sorry I didn’t tell you about it when clearly I should’ve realized something was wrong when you were lying on the ground sleeping peacefully when the guard was talking about the destruction of everything you’ve known and loved in your life.’
‘Everything,’ said Stuart softly. ‘Everything…’ He thought for a moment. ‘Now what?’
‘You can either follow us,’ said Niklas, ‘or try your luck hitchhiking back to Carrotus using whatever advice that guide of yours has to offer. I suggest that you stay here because you’ll most likely end up on some horrid, stinking mud-hole with names like ‘Ulaanbaatar’ or ‘Upper Honduras’.
Stuart looked out of the window and saw the Orbitus wasn’t such a bad place. But nothing, and here’s where the Galactic Rabbit’s willpower comes into play, could compare with Carrotus. Carrotus was his home. Jazz2City was his home. I want to go back, he thought.
‘Niklas is right, Stuart’, said Dasel-pots reassuringly. ‘Jazz2City wasn’t such a nice place. Believe me, you would be quite surprised at its appearance from the air.’

[End of chapter 11]

Stuart glared at everyone in the room. Everyone here seemed against the idea of going back to Carrotus. Except perhaps Unigma, whose 5th light was blinking for the first time ever.
‘I want to go back,’ Stuart sighed. ‘But why can’t you take me there? Why hitchhike? I mean, you went back there once, to pick up your ship. And you also said that XLM was banned from Carrotus.’
‘Well, ML has always been the kind of firm that does crooked business deals. They allowed us safe passage to and from one of their spaceports. Now that ML is gone, no one on Carrotus will accept us. If you leave us, Stuart, you’re on your own,’ explained Dasel-pots.
There didn’t seem much hope left for Stuart and he looked to Unigma for conciliation. His 5th light had stopped blinking.
Unigma didn’t bother explaining what the 5th light was about but instead went straight to the point.
‘I don’t want to go to J2o, nor anywhere else on Carrotus. Since I got properly repaired in this ship, my 5th button enabled me to send and receive accurate and correct data for the first time in my life. I…’ he paused. ‘I’ve found out that the giant white rabbit is bent upon eating everything on the planet. Universal Jazz is gone and the planet is without a single major city. J2o, according to military experts, is next. It’s way safer here. Sorry, Stuart.’

[Chapter 12 coming soon! It will end the story...hopefully conclusively ;P]

Orbitus is good. More people should write about Orbitus.

Chapter 12

Sonyk sat down on his leather-chair and looked around his office, like he did every morning. It was usually a room chock-full of dilapidated drawers, mountains of half-read readme files and several folders crammed with blueprints for the spaceship-yard were lying on the floor. Work had been slow at first. Plans kept disappearing, odd men in black kept prowling around the site, sabotaging the workers’ lunchboxes and, once, an Orbitus SilverSnake fell down from the sky, killing 20 (1 died as a result of being uncomfortably crushed, 3 were eaten and the rest panicked and kept smashing into each other).
Sonyk’s office was now empty. He was packing up all of his stuff because of he was fired. An investigation team found out that it was he who had set up the delay of XLM’s spaceship-yards because he was particularly angry at XLM’s easy escape after the Gingerbread Campaign. Sonyk had decided to blow up the whole planet and cripple XLM financially forever as a means of revenge. He had just set off his bomb, but it turned out that it was on the wrong planet and had instead blown up the newly found planet of Cheesius and all of the planet’s colonists. The chances of him getting shot at, even just a little bit, were quite high. The chances of him returning to Carrotus where so low that not even a mythical Improbability Drive could save him. Sonyk knew that his death was near because XLM would not treat ex-employees nicely, especially not those that had tried to blow up vital company property. Fortunately, he had a trump card. Sonyk took out a shrunk cage. He pressed a button, which enlarged it. It was jammed with purple and silver Beholders, and not just any Beholder, but the elder Beholders of the old days. The Beholders Jazz Jackrabbit had to deal with, the Beholders that would cause the rest of the beholding population to rise up against the intrusive galactic rabbits and destroy them utterly. But that could wait, he thought, and tried to take a nap before letting the carnage proceed.
The door flung open and whiffs of cheese scents flew in. Sonyk opened his eyes and looked up. Standing before him was a dark shadow, surrounded by a thin, yellow mist. If Sonyk had been even a little bit familiar with cheese mongering, he would’ve been amazed that the unknown rabbit in his ex-office wore a black coat smelling of Europan blue cheese, a fresh, bodily odour of French Neufchâtel and was shielded by bad-smelling Deserto Gruyere. The unknown rabbit walked out the shadows and became violet. Sonyk just turned a generic cheese-yellow.
The unknown rabbit did not spare Sonyk his breath.
‘You will not escape us this time,’ he muttered but then Sonyk passed out from the smell and the violet rabbit was unable to respond to this because he simply wasn’t prepared for it. He just stood there, the cheese mist wafting around the room. Oh great, he thought.
‘2 years hitchhiking around in space with that useless J2LC Guide and now that I’ve finally found him he passes away?’ he said to himself. ‘No, this won’t do. They wouldn’t let me back unless I brought proof of at least a bit of torturing.’ He then realized that he was in a room with a cage full of angry Beholders and was taken aback by that. He inspected the cage and its contents.
‘What’s this then? Seems as if I caught you in the middle of destroying another planet.’ The unknown rabbit took out his taser, which he bought from a seemingly very tired, very depressed FOO android.
By the time Sonyk woke up, he found every single muscle in his body aching from contraction. He also found that he was upside down with a painfully swelling head.
‘We are not very happy with your behaviour, Sonyk,’ a voice said. Sonyk tried to spin around but he only managed to wiggle slightly, much like a caterpillar when it spins its cocoon.
‘I…’ choked Sonyk, ‘…thought you were all dead? I mean, come on! It was an accident and I’m sorry, but it’s really no good apologizing to the dead.’
‘We didn’t all die!’ bellowed the unknown rabbit. He walked into view now and held his taser menacingly. ‘We don’t care about whether you intended to blow up Orbitus, Cheesius or any other planet for that matter. We don’t really care that we all live on top of a plateau on Muckamok either. What we do want, more than anything else,’ he continued quietly, ‘is to make sure that every single little bone in your pathetic, fat body gets turned into flesh-eating worms and devours you from the inside out!’ he finished in a roaring crescendo.
Sonyk whimpered. ‘Listen, this, er, this (-)(-)(-)-for-tat vengeance business…isn’t it a bit, you know, childish?’
‘Oh, so wanting to detonate a whole planet of innocent beings just ruin a company’s business, a company which only accidentally spilled a truckload of radioactive spam all over the JCF, isn’t childish? JCF has more spam anyway than the Amazon River could possibly handle!’
‘What river?’ asked Sonyk hesitantly. He needed more time. If he could only reach that cage button all would be over.
The unknown rabbit didn’t bother mentioning the fact that the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the JJ2 Galaxy had taken him to very strange places, including the previously unknown galactic sector of ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha. Instead, he just took out the jar of flesh-eating worms and an old, rusty ML Event-Replacer knife.
‘Er… I thought that when you said my bones were going to be replaced by flesh-eating worms, you were only trying to frighten me?’
‘Of course I was. And it worked. But now I’m going to do it for real,’ the unknown rabbit said. The 4 years wandering around in the galaxy would finally pay off. The unknown rabbit cut loose the rope and began to activate the Event-Replacer. His plan would eventually work, but not in the way he expected because at that moment, a pair of XLM medium interceptor ships flew past the windows, dived sharply, and hugged the ground in what was considered as that week’s most outrageous act of joy flying. The violet rabbit was distracted and looked out. Sonyk seized his chance and tackled his captor, smashing him to the ground and watched as the Event-Replacer rolled safely away. He quickly went to the cage and pressed the button. The elder Beholders, according to their ancient JJ1 scripts, attacked the closest target. Sonyk tried to flee but was sent flying straight onto the floor. In his confusion, or, more accurately, because of his fatness, he rolled over the jar and crushed it, releasing the worms and got eaten from the outside in.
The unknown rabbit made the perfectly sensible decision of not panicking. He tried to shout for help but he was far too high up. He threw a pencil case down, in the hope that it would hit someone. The crosswinds blew it away. He looked behind him. The elder Beholders were starting to encircle him. Only one solution left, he thought. If this doesn’t work, I’ll curse the Guide for the rest of eternity. The unknown rabbit grabbed a towel, wrapped it around another pencil case and swung the towel like a sling. It worked. The pencil case caused a serious head concussion on the rabbit it hit, but the rest looked up and saw all those Beholders. Help would come soon, but whether it would come after his death or before, the violet rabbit didn’t know. He swung his coat around, in the hope that the cheese smell would distract the Beholders, dodge the streak of silver, and made a dash for the door. 3 Beholders immediately blocked it off.
The purple ones beheld their fellow Beholders outside, called out, realized that they were too high up, took a second towel, wrapped a pencil case, and sent it out the window.
‘That’s the last time you guys ever get to learn anything from me,’ said the unknown rabbit and took out a gun. Outside, chaos erupted and the Beholders started to attack. The pair of interceptors was still flying too low, rapidly melted away under the unforgiving army of Beholders and became giant balls of fire.
A column of Devour-astor main battle tanks rolled up the main road and opened fire on anything that had less than two legs. Some office buildings promptly dematerialised into dust and excessively loud noise. Behind the tank column marched in the finest XLM had to offer: the BWHippie-Chippers assault force.
The unknown rabbit aimed at the Beholder and, because he was afraid he was going to miss, missed. The bullet hit a drawer, ignited the inflammable turtsandwich sauce, which exploded and sent rabbit and Beholders out the window. Fortunately, the unknown rabbit managed to get hold on a third towel before he fell out and used it to hold on to a descending Beholder. A division of interceptors flew above the skies and played 70’s Grove on their Gra-Mod-Phones.
The unknown rabbit hit the ground running and headed for the only place he knew on Orbitus: back to Nietzsche’s Shoe where he bought the taser. He looked behind him and, to his horror, the Beholders who survived the fall were still on his tail. He zigzagged through tanks and rubble and jumped behind some assault troops who blasted the pursuing Beholders to smithereens. The violet rabbit gave a quick ‘thanks’ and ran as far as he could to the star port. It was too late. The ship was already heading up to the stratosphere. All hope seemed to be lost. All hope, except the Guide.

[EDIT: looks like JCF censored a word, which wasn't really fair ]

The computer screen flashed a little signal. Dasel-pots went over and read it. ‘Hitchhiker asking for permission to board ship. Accept? Y/N.’ She didn’t recall leaving anyone behind, except perhaps Martin. Dasel-pots would’ve denied the hitchhiking request if it weren’t for Martin, who was not left behind.
‘Wait, I know him. He comes from planet Cheesius. Violet, black coat, has a strong odour of various sorts of cheese. I’ve done business with him. Trust me, he’s perfectly safe.’
Dasel-pots didn’t trust Martin at all, but she let the hitchhiker in anyway. A dull bang came from the inside of the cargo bay. Stuart heard it, walked up the stairs and quickly ran down again, nauseated from the smell. He passed out before even catching sight of the unknown hitchhiker. Niklas also heard the bang, walked up, collapsed and then rolled down the stairs. Dasel-pots started to walk up but spotted the two bodies. She ran back to the bridge to fetch Martin’s taser, which was, of course, gone. Martin went up the stairs with a newly XLM Cloak-all-Smells smell-cloak and helped Dasel-pots to drag the bodies back to the bridge. The unknown rabbit walked down, rubbing his head.
‘Tea?’ asked Dasel-pots to the hitchhiker.
‘Erm.. no thanks. It’s not really my cup of tea.’ But the unknown rabbit had a very painful headache. ‘Actually, I would like a cup of tea, please. Pun not intended,’ he added with a weak smile.

Down on the ground, the commander-in-chief of XLM’s spaceship-yards tried frantically to send all sorts of emergency signals, but there were no responses. Finally, he decided that paying a hefty sum for some mercenaries would be much better than to lose Orbitus, so he sent an emergency signal to every single major ice-cream vendor company in the galaxy, describing the most depressing lack of ice-cream on the planet and that the Beholders hated all things vanilla.
Soon enough, a dozen ice-cream capital ships turned up and bean their advance on Orbitus. After a receiving a brief volley of heavy chocolate-shells, the Beholders regrouped. Fighters came screaming out of the capital ships in their thousands while the Beholders clustered together in swarms and mingled with the fighters. The ensuing battle would be ranked by the standard, official inter-galactic Destruct-o-meter as ‘high-medium’. Ever so often, in the sphere of gunfire and earth-shattering explosions, burning metal, big panic-stricken eyes, or roasted pieces of body part, fell from the skies.
Nietzsche’s Shoe was quickly singled out as a weak target and was immediately being chased by about a hundred angry Beholders. The ship did some weak evasive manoeuvres but even a sprinting turtle would have looked more graceful. Inside the ship, people were starting to dehydrate due to cold sweat.
Dasel-pots looked over the data for both engines. ‘Something’s seriously wrong with the engines. Why aren’t the engines fully charged?’
‘The helium-3 batteries were all used up on our journey to Orbitus,’ said Niklas.
‘What about the spare-batteries?’ inquired Dasel-pots.
‘Didn’t you use up the spare-batteries for tea from the drinks machine?’ answered Unigma.
Dasel-pots looked dumbstruck. ‘Martin, taser the hitchhiker.’
Martin’s eyes shone with malice. ‘Hey, you, I’ll buy my taser back for 5 gold coins.’
‘No, I’ll keep it, but thanks for the offer,’ said the unknown rabbit.
Martin’s eyes turned red and the unknown rabbit did a little thinking. ‘All right, er, give me the money.’
‘Thanks. Nice doing business with you.’ Zap. Thud.
‘Ok, now we need spare-spare-batteries, or we’re done for. Where are those spare-batteries? Don’t stand there and shrug! Niklas? Q! Why are there no spare-spare-batteries?!’
‘There are plenty of spare-spare-batteries for the engines,’ replied Q proudly.
‘Argh! Then why haven’t you loaded them? Do I have to do everything manually these days?’
‘Sorry, but I can’t find them. I know they’re in the ship, but someone must’ve taken them and used them for some other purposes.’ Before Q could finish, the ship shook and rumbled. Its shields were losing power and they wouldn’t run for much longer. Q sighed. ‘Didn’t I warn you about the lax security around here? I listed 15, 000 ways of how to get a grip on safety issues in a ship, but you only allowed me to reach number 54 before rudely interrupting me. That’s it, I’ve had enough of rabbit incompetence! I’m switching the engines over to the spare-spare-spare-spare batteries because someone used the spare-spare-spare-batteries to operate the drinks machine. Again.’ At that moment, the bridge-door opened and Stuart entered with a cup of hot tea in his hands. Due to the tea’s extraordinarily good taste, he ignored the cold looks everyone gave him. ‘Hmm,’ he said as he sipped his tea, ‘I think we need to switch on the smell-cloak again.’

Nietzsche’s Shoe’s booster fuel was soon pumped through its inner fuselages like adrenaline-saturated blood. The lurched forward like a rhinoceros but soon picked up great speed and easily flew away from the battle scene. After its close escape from the Beholders of Orbitus, the ship flew away towards Holidaius because the captain, Dasel-pots, felt that she needed a break. After a brief pause to dump off the unknown rabbit on the planet of Muckamok, Nietzsche’s Shoe continued its silent journey into space

[Ok, that's that finished. The "finished" version will be posted somewhere at www.totalfreaks.com so check it out sometime in the future ]

That's it! I've finished everything! I added new chapters, new ways of making you laugh and fixed a lot of typos/inconsitencies and filled some story-holes. I'm giving my story to Unhit/Flash/Dopeh ASAP so they can put it on the TF site.

Remember: www.totalfreaks.com and forums.totalfreaks.com

And I thought I had a lot of time on my hands :P

Lol @ Gry

Nice work White Rabbit. You fulfilled my dreams!

...and what's that?

You wrote a THHGTTG as a JJ2 version. And THHGTTG ROCKS!

Ok, thanks.

Oh God. The hilarity. This is the best weeks work you've ever done.

This is the only work I've posted on JCF. Thanks! If I could just whip my lazy clanleader/viceclanleader into action and make them post the finished version...

Unless you're being sarcastic....! No, of course you're not sarcastic. *is naive*

www.totalfreaks.com
"Account has been suspended." rofl

Nightmare: I would shut up if I were you. I'm paying half of the domain.

White Rabbit: What Nightmare said. Besides, it was an accident...Acenet, inc thought that some kind of mysterious perl script slowed down their servers, but the whole TF site is php. I blame Acenet, inc. They're worse than ML, inc. And don't get me started on J2LC and XLM corps.