Hello, readers This is my first attempt at any H²G² or DW fan fiction. This first chapter is centred around Arthur Dent, and subsequently we will meet the Doctor. It's just a bit of entertaining procrastination: enjoy...
I obviously do not own anything to do with any of these characters, ergo... don't sue!
That's just not Cricket.
The planet of Krikkit, with its fertile soils and vast effervescent landscape is an idyllic haven to all those who have the pleasure to perambulate across it, or soar through the air above it. This, at least, is the view that has spread like an intergalactic Chinese-whisper wildfire across the universe. The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy (though its authority is somewhat spurious) claims that since peace once again fell upon this planet (in a rather improbable manner), the inhabitants of said place have happily, and contentedly, roamed the land staring into the newly re-established lack of sky with a re-affirmed sense of comfort, and the knowledge that they needn't bother about the knowledge that they did, didn't, or do possess. In actual fact, those whose feet were indeed considered lucky enough to tread upon the dewy grass and earthy ground found that spending such an extended period of time staring into the air above them inevitably led to them landing in shit.
Arthur Dent was one such inhabitant. After establishing that his practice of throwing himself at the ground and missing was a rather impractical one, he resolved to plant his aforementioned feet permanently on the horizontal. With the wind no longer in his hair, and his dressing gown no longer billowing out behind him like a grubby flannel cape, he took a second to breath in the air particles floating nearest his nasal cavity. Much to his distaste his sensory centres encountered the heady stench of excrement. He decided to sniff again: still there, almost definitely not absent. He allowed his eyes to trail down the fabric of his attire until they encountered his left slipper. There smiling back as if to say "Hey, made ya' look" was a profoundly dispersed pile of unidentified animal faeces. This is when Arthur decided that this place just wasn't Cricket.
Arthur had spent a substantial amount of time on this pretty little lump of rock, but he was not a native; yet neither did he consider himself an alien. As it was he was proud to be one of the only two surviving Homo sapiens within this time zone and since his unexpected departure from his mother Earth he had made a deliberate effort not to get over it; thus, he saw the entirety of non-Earth specimens to be the aliens. This of course seems farcical in the sense of proportionality: two members of one species versus the entirety of creation? This matter however did not faze Arthur in the slightest; after all, he had long since given up rational thinking. The time at which rational thinking was abandoned by this earth-man is an interesting one; and, as has been the course of his life thus far, a rather improbable time. . .
Following his encounter with a large, and not terribly dense, pile of animal faeces Arthur decided to evaluate his life. Stepping as conspicuously as possible out of his defiled slipper so as to draw attention to his distaste, and to amplify the poignant nature of what he thought he was about to do, Arthur headed over to a large rock upon which he sat. He sat, and thought. At first it was rather strained as this was an activity that he hadn't regarded too highly recently, but after a while the cogs were back in motion and his mind seemed encouraged enough to formulate something significant-ish. He thought about the profit that Paul McCartney could have made if only he had been able to plagiarise some of the ditties from Krikkit; he thought of how he had come to treasure his bottle of Greek Olive Oil; eventually, he thought of the earth woman Trisha Macmillan: Trillian. He contemplated what life would have been like if he hadn't failed so miserably at get off with her in an Islington flat many moons ago, and he thought about where she might be now. They were the last of their kind, didn't they have some sort of obligation to keep the human race going? Build an empire? Perhaps this is his destiny, the only thing that had been keeping him alive for so long against some seriously insane odds of probability. He sighed, his head lolling dejectedly in his weary hands.
Then he saw it. A swift glance and then it was gone. He shook his head, and felt a disturbing movement in his inner ear. It had been a while since he was last aware of the extraordinary creature situated somewhere within his head, but its frantic movements alerted him to its presence quite lucidly. What occurred next is not only incredibly bizarre, but also incredibly unlikely. In fact, the next event is so unlikely that it's improbability figures are so astronomically high that in order to write it down without use of complex logarithms it would require ninety-eight percent of the universe's area, in several dimensions, simply to hold the paper required for it to be written on.
Within Arthur Dent's ear was a Babel Fish. The Babel Fish feeds on the energy from a nearby source of communication and excretes a translation in the form of brainwave patterns. The Babel Fish within Arthur Dent's ear had sensed a phenomenal amount of artron energy in a very close proximity; this energy essentially could perform the same task as the fish itself. In order for the fish to survive it was essential that it escaped the confines of Arthurs head and prevented itself from becoming redundant. Redundant in this sense meaning dead. The small creature in a bid for its life propelled itself through the ear canal and shot off through the air towards the ground.
Arthur cried out in unexpected shock and clasped his hand to the side of his head. Once again he saw something out of the corner of his eye. Meanwhile, the fish's attention was distracted seconds before impact by a large blue box and it by chance managed to miss the ground.
Blinking rapidly Arthur tried to see what he thought he had just seen. However, what he had thought that he had just seen seemed . . . absurdly preposterous.