Real World – H2G2 Deleted Scenes

Written by Anakin McFly

(This standalone H2G2 portion of my crossover fic 'Real World' got cut out because it broke the pace of the main narrative. So here are the scenes in question, where Ford and Arthur find themselves zapped into our universe...)

Meanwhile, unnoticed by everyone else, two visitors had suddenly appeared in this white room where Ted and Keith had been just moments before. They were Arthur Philip Dent, the supposed sole human survivor of the destroyed planet Earth, and Ford Prefect, an alien researcher for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. They had arrived in this dimension by virtue of the Improbability Drive – possibly the only way such a thing could have happened considering that the chances of the both of them spontaneously ending up in a dimension in which they were fictional were one zillion, two quadrillion, seven billion, three million, five hundred thousand and six to one against.

"Where are we?" Arthur asked, blinking blearily at his surroundings.

"Good question," Ford replied, walking towards the door and opening it as the ripple of coloured light over their heads faded away.

“How did we get here?” Arthur asked.

“The Improbability Drive, I suppose.” Ford looked out at the corridor. No one there.

“You don’t sound very worried.”

“We’ll get back, don’t worry. It’s just a matter of time.” Ford glanced back at his friend. “Come on. We might just as well find out where we are.”

Uncertainly, Arthur followed Ford out the door.

They took the lift down to the ground floor of the hotel and went outside. From what Arthur could see of his surroundings, the place looked a lot like Earth. Perhaps slightly different that what he remembered, but still almost definitely Earth.

Arthur was now feeling very confused, and the feeling was growing with each passing second. Hadn’t Earth been blown up by the Vogons to make way for an interstellar bypass? If so, then where were they?

“I think we’re somewhere on Earth,” Ford commented casually. “It looks like Los Angeles to me.”

“What?” Arthur shouted in his British accent. Shouting made him feel more in control and less confused. “I thought Earth was destroyed! You said so yourself!”

Several passers-by gave Arthur strange looks. It wasn’t every day that they got to see a British guy wearing a mud-caked night robe and standing in the middle of the street exclaiming that he thought Earth had been destroyed.

“Stop panicking, Arthur,” Ford said calmly. “There’s nothing wrong.” He paused. “I think.”

“You think?” Arthur muttered. “Sorry, but that’s just not very comforting at the moment.” Arthur spotted a McDonald’s across the street. He remembered feeling a great sense of despair some time ago upon realising that he’d never get to eat another McDonald’s burger again, but the fast food restaurant was plainly in his sights now. “Look, and there’s a McDonald’s there too,” he added lamely.

“Right then, we can go there first if you want. Are you hungry? ”

Arthur mumbled something about wanting a cup of nice, hot tea because it might make everything make more sense.

The two inter-dimensional hitchhikers set off across the road, where Arthur then realised that he had no money to pay for his tea after standing in line for two minutes. Apologising, he told the person behind the counter that she would have to take it back.

“Oh, and by the way,” he asked, “what planet is this?”

The McDonald’s girl, Jessica, arched an eyebrow. “Earth,” she said, wondering who this weirdo was who had just ordered tea he didn’t have money to pay for and was now asking a question no person in their right mind would ask.

“Ah. Thanks.”

“Are you one of those Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy nuts or something?” Jessica asked as she took back the cup of tea.

Arthur blinked. She knew about the Guide? He was getting more and more confused by the second. “What?”

“Going around in a night robe like that and asking for tea… who d’you think you are, Arthur Dent? I suppose you carry a towel everywhere too, huh?”

“Um…”

“Well, whatever it is, if you’re not ordering anything, can you please move aside? You’re holding up the line.”

Arthur opened his mouth to tell her that she was the one who had started talking to him, not the other way around, but decided it was pointless and shut his mouth. Completely befuddled, he left the counter and returned to the table where Ford was sitting and fiddling with his electronic thumb as he tried to flag down a passing spaceship. For some reason, it didn’t seem to be working.

“You think the Improbability Drive brought us here?” Arthur asked.

“Most likely.”

“But… what are the chances that it would dump us on an exact replica of the Earth – which, by the way, happens to have been destroyed – where a McDonald’s worker knows my name and the Guide and asks me about towels? It’s impossible!”

“Not impossible. Improbable.” Ford wondered why there didn’t seem to be any spaceships around the area, then decided that it didn’t matter because even if there was one, there was no need to board it. If the Improbability Drive had brought them here, it could very well bring them back. “Maybe all this is just an illusion that the Improbability Drive created. Or maybe,” he added as an afterthought, “it just sent us back in time again.”

Arthur thought that was a possibility, though if it were up to him to say so, what little of this place he had seen so far seemed to be more like the future than the past to him. Then again, if Ford was right, this was America and things were strange in America.

Arthur went to stand in line again. When Jessica saw him again, she sighed. “How may I help you?”

“Excuse me… what year is this?”

#

“2004?” Arthur Dent mumbled dazedly as he put the newspaper back down. Jessica hadn’t been too helpful when he’d asked about the year, so he and Ford had had to find it out for themselves. “How can we be in the future?”

“Why not?” Ford replied. “It’s as good a time as any.”

“And how do you propose we get back?”

Ford thought for a moment. “The same way we got here, I suppose. The Improbability Drive.”

“Nothing’s happening,” Arthur remarked dryly.

“Maybe that’s because it’s too probable that we might just get whisked back home while we’re standing here.” Ford paused. “Do something improbable,” he suggested.

“What?”

“Climb up that lamppost and sing nursery rhymes backwards out of tune. In your underwear,” he added as an afterthought.

“What?”

“Think about it. What are the chances that doing that would get us back home?”

“Not much.”

“Precisely.”

Arthur just couldn’t argue with that kind of logic.

Arthur Dent had no idea as to why he was actually doing what Ford had suggested. He had no idea if Ford was even being serious. All he knew was that he had stripped down to his underwear, and was now climbing up a lamppost singing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ backwards and out of tune.

Frankly speaking, the out of tune part was not a problem at all, considering that Arthur had never been a very musical person and did not know the tune of the song in reverse. As a matter of fact, not many people do.

“Snow… as… white… was… fleece,” Arthur sang pathetically, as his alien friend stood at the bottom of the lamppost guarding his clothes.

“Lamb… little… lamb little, lamb little…”

People were starting to stare. Ford waved at them and smiled.

Halfway up the lamppost, Arthur was starting to feel cold.

“Lamb little… a… had… Mary,” he sang, finishing the song. He waited for several seconds, then turned to look down at Ford. “I don’t think it’s working!” Arthur yelled, before noticing the crowd surrounding them. He gave a sheepish smile.

A man pulled out his phone and called the police.

“Try another song!” Ford shouted up.

Arthur had begun to shiver from the cold and was contemplating getting back down and asking Ford to do it instead. What difference did it make, anyway? However, Arthur had by then reached the stage where he didn’t really care any more. There was a wild sense of release to it – here he was, up a lamppost in nothing but his underwear, singing nursery rhymes back-to-front…

“After… tumbling… came… Jill,” he started, with a little more enthusiasm than before.

#

Arthur Philip Dent was, to put it simply, having a rather bad day. That was not much of a surprise, considering the circumstances. He had climbed up a lamppost in nothing but his underwear to sing nursery rhymes backwards, all for nothing save the rotten tomato that some well-meaning person had thrown at him. Then the sound of a police siren had been heard, and Ford had made him climb back down, get back into his clothes, and squeeze through their audience to safety.

And he still had no idea as to what was going on.

“Ford,” he asked, “are you sure we’re ever going to get back?”

His Betelgeusian friend pondered the question. “I think so. The Improbability Drive would have to return to normalcy sooner or later.

“What if it doesn’t?”

“It will,” Ford replied, although he sounded less certain than before.

“Is there any possibility that it won’t?” Arthur pressed on.

“Well… I suppose so, but that would be too…” Ford hesitated.

“Improbable?” Arthur finished for him.

Ford looked vaguely uncomfortable. “If you put it that way…”

The arrived at a bench and sat down.

“We’re not getting back, are we?” Arthur asked quietly.

“You can’t know that for sure.”

Silence passed between them for a while as they watched passersby pass by.

“I wonder if anything happened to Zaphod and Trillian. And Marvin,” Arthur added, somewhat wistfully, staring into space. “Has anything like this happened before?”

“What?”

“People getting… transported fully out of the ship, into another world…”

“There’s always a first time.”

Several minutes went by without conversation.

“Are we just going to sit here until something happens?” Arthur asked.

“Do you have any better ideas?”

Arthur thought about this for a while. “No,” he admitted, and went back to silently watching the world go by. Ford dug into his satchel and produced The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the words ‘Don’t Panic!’ clearly visible in large friendly letters on the cover. He stared at it for a while, as though to let the words sink in, then he opened the Guide and looked up the entry on ‘boredom’.

The Guide has this to say about boredom:

“Boredom,” it says, “is boring. Like quicksand, movie remakes of The Brady Bunch and Christmas work parties, it is something that should be generally avoided whenever possible. Unless, of course, you are a member of the Derehan species on Wrodir Kemima IV, who consider boredom a highly enlightened state of mind.

“Most other beings define boredom as the state of being bored and doing nothing, with possible dangerous results. Take, for example, the tale of the well-respected sandwich maker, Zadurfod the Cheesweich. Bored with the unending routine of making the same old sandwiches everyday, his mind soon snapped and he resorted to staring at his pet Barnepin¹ for the rest of his natural life.

¹Like terrapins, only purple and with a tendency to sing.

“If you are reading this entry now, you’re probably bored too. Don’t panic! Instead, go read the entry about the demise of a fan fiction writer on Ancholus II. Having devoted her life to writing stories based on the award-winning time travel holo-book trilogy Sideways to the Present, she perished at the tender age of two hundred and nineteen². The story of her unfitting death by mousetrap will cheer you up.”³

²A very young age, considering that people on Ancholus II have an average lifespan of one thousand and forty-two years.

³This Guide entry was jointly written by my brother and me.

Having nothing better to do, Ford Prefect checked out that story and random other entries in the Guide. It was while he was reading the entry on slacking (The Guide has this to say on the subject of slacking: This is it.) that he heard Arthur shout something unintelligible, and he looked up to see what – or who – had caused that outburst of sound.

Luke Skywalker wasn’t too comfortable with Arthur’s open-mouthed stare, and so chose to address Ford instead. “Excuse me, but could you tell me what planet this is?” he asked. “I think I’m lost.”

Arthur’s gaze settled on the lightsaber hanging by Luke’s side, and his mouth dropped even further open.

“Actually, we’re kind of lost too,” Ford replied, ignoring Arthur. “I think this is the Earth, although I seem to remember it being blown up. So we’re planning to just sit here until something happens.”

Luke blinked. “Blown up? Like Alderaan? Did the Empire do it, too?”

“No, it was the Vogons.”

“Vogons?”

“They’re these big green fellows who write really bad poetry. They blew up the Earth to make was for an interstellar bypass, but I’m not too sure about at the moment because this place here looks a zarking lot like Earth to me.” Ford glanced around.

“You’ve been here before?” Luke asked.

“I was stranded here fifteen years before I finally managed to hitch a ride off. If this really is Earth, that is.”

“Any idea where the nearest spaceport is?”

“Um, there aren’t any spaceports on this pl… Arthur, why are you staring at him like that?”

“He’s Luke Skywalker!” Arthur gasped.

Luke stared at him suspiciously. “How’d you know my name?”

“I…” Arthur started to say something, then stopped. He started to say something else, and stopped that too. Then he stopped starting to say things and just shut up.

“Is he always like that?” Luke asked Ford, gesturing at Arthur.

Ford pondered the question. “Pretty much so, yeah.”

Luke sat down on the bench. “So if you didn’t arrive on a ship, how did you get here?”

“Well,” Ford started, “there’s this thing called the Infinite Improbability Drive…”

#