A/n- I was very, very inspired to write more.  Because my lovely friends stoked my ego.  *cough,* Emily, Tuna, and probably Chasity too.  I was told that I even sounded like Douglas Adams!  Which, you know, might not be true, but sounds very nice.  So I like it.  Here's a bit more.  I fear this is becoming a fic, rather than a ficlet.  Oh well.

A/n 2- Rachel was indeed right.  Vogon, not Vorgon.

And I don't own this stuff.

~*~

It has been said that if one is very aware, very astute, and really very smart, they will find the Universe to overall be an interesting yet dizzying experience, complete with sudden waves of nausea.

Luckily, Harry didn't have this problem. Not to say that he wasn't a smart boy. No, in fact, he did have a bit of brains behind the thick, protective layer of skull that evolved from his ape-like ancestors. On Earth, before it had been destroyed, that is, anthropologists, biologists and astrologists all wondered at the form the human body had eventually taken. If they had been given the opportunity to go back in time, to the earliest days of mankind's history, they would have been most surprised. It seemed that the thick nature of a human skull was because of a curious game human ancestors used to play involving running head first into each other. Eventually, of course, human beings outgrew this behavior and turned to new, even more vile forms of sport such as cricket and even football, which interestingly enough, was quite similar to the game primitive humans used to play. Harry himself could even make a case out of his personal pastime, Quidditch, if he had been given the time or need. But none of this concerned Harry, because of his major problem.

Harry was confused. And when Harry was confused, he would often make assumptions that were incorrect, such as eating an innocent cream and turning into a canary, or drinking a potion that would turn him and his friends into Slytherins, and interrogating another albeit, evil, but innocent boy named Malfoy.

Not that it really mattered anymore. Slytherin was gone, and so was Malfoy.  Vaporized into thin air, along with everyone else Harry had ever known. This would have caused Harry extreme emotional distress, had he known at the time. But he didn't.

Harry let out a long sigh. "I'm confused."

"8 to one against," the computer reminded him.

"Merlin's beard, shut up." He angrily walked out of the room, stopping for a minute to appreciate the polite manner of the door.

As it had been said before, Harry wasn't too dumb, and he knew that someone in this place could give him some answers. As long as it wasn't the man with two heads, he said firmly to himself.

Coincidentally, the first person that Harry ran into was that strange man who had asked for tea. The man was standing by a machine impatiently strumming his fingers against the metallic surface. Harry cleared his throat.

"Oh, it's the improbable boy," Arthur remarked to the machine, which was whirring and beeping. He turned to the boy. "What is it?"

"Oh!" Harry exclaimed, "I was hoping you could explain this to me."

"This what?" he asked, pulling at his ragged dressing robe. Harry hadn't seemed to mind, because he was wearing something rather similar, though much less dirty and more formal, with what looked like a school crest on one side.

Harry grumbled. "This place! Where am I? How did I get here? And are you trying to kill me?"

The machine in front of Arthur suddenly became silent, and a cup of a brown liquid came out. "Share and enjoy," it chirped,*.  Arthur took a sip, made a face and passed it to Harry. Harry wisely declined. "Honestly, you damn machine, I already told you how to make tea! Don't you remember?"

"Share and enjoy!"

He turned around and surveyed Harry, who was still eyeing him warily. "First off, I don't think I'm trying to kill you. But you never do know what'll happen, so watch out. And the answer to all your other questions is the Infinite Improbability Drive."

"Well that's nice and vague!" Harry sputtered.

"No," Arthur corrected, "it's not very vague at all. I'll leave you to work it all out yourself." Arthur trudged out the door, holding his hands over his ears. In all honesty, he was still rather bitter about the boy not having any tea.

Harry, however, was not so hypersensitive to see that not having any tea could be such an affront to the man. Surely he was just insane. That was the explanation.  He was insane, and in insanity, this all made perfect sense.

Now that he stopped to think about it, how unusual was it for people to just appear and disappear? It happened all the time, in fact. Even if Harry had no choice in the matter; one minute he had been walking out of Herbology, and the next minute he had fallen onto that large computer, and this building with all of its strange inhabitants; especially the man with two heads.

He sighed and followed the path the angry man had taken. It led him into a dense, humid room full of vines and trees. Over in one corner was the woman from the other room. She made a stray glance at Harry and put the book in her hand on the soft dirt of the rainforest. Its battered copy had a gleaming red Hogwarts Express on it.  The man in the robe was no where to be found.

"Hello?" Harry asked tentatively. She looked over at him and stood up, grasping the thick trunk of the tree behind her. Harry had to admit that she was rather striking, though not in the way that could be described as beautiful. She couldn't be described as "pretty" either, which was what that Harry had thought of Cho, before she couldn't be near him without crying. She seemed to be very comfortable in the area around her, and she looked exceptionally calm, considering that Harry had just appeared on top of a computer in the same room as her ten minutes before hand.  But she was too old for him, he reminded himself. Even if she did have very nice brown eyes.

"You're Harry, right?" she pointed to the book still lying on the ground. "I hope you don't mind me reading. It's just a highly improbable book."

There was that word again. Improbable. "Oh, it's fine, I suppose. Is that book about me?"

She nodded politely. "You seem to have taken the concept fairly well."

Harry shrugged.  "I'm used to it.  So, what's your name?" he asked, sitting down on the floor of the room. He was surprised to feel the dampness of wet soil through his pants and robe.

"Trillian. Sorry I didn't say that before." She sat down across from him, and sighed.  "You must be rather confused."

Harry's eyes lit up. "Yes, Trillian!" he paused after he said her name. It sounded strange coming out of his mouth. "I don't know how I got here, I don't know where here is, and the man in the robe seemed angry at me."

"I think Arthur was just disappointed that you didn't have any tea leaves or bags. He can't get the machine to make tea for him again. I haven't told him that Zaphod reprogrammed the machine so that it can't make tea. The last time it did, we almost were destroyed by a Vogon fleet."

Harry picked serenely at the ground. "A Vogon fleet? Is that some kind of insect infestation?"

She laughed. Harry thought Trilllian had a nice laugh. For a woman who was too many years older than him, most of his brain reminded itself. The other remaining part of his brain told the rest of his brain to shove off.

"Insects? Well, no, they're very vile creatures from Vogsphere."

"Where's Vogsphere?"

"Oh, a few light years away. A while ago some Vogons were back over by Earth, blowing it up." Trillian gazed at the ground, digging up the soil.

Harry stopped pulling plants from the ground. "Wuh," was the only thing he could say. His face went slack, and it left more of his brain able to process some of the new data Trillian had given him: 1) Vogons would not be polite guests. 2) They were light years away, so there was no worry of meeting one on the street. 3) They blew up the Earth, so there were no streets left to meet one on.

Considering the severity of these facts, Harry's fainting was a rather small matter. When he woke up, Trillian was standing over him, holding an empty plastic cup with Mickey Mouse on it. His face was covered in apple juice. "Wuh?" he repeated again.

"You fainted," she said matter-of-factly. She sat down again.

"Yes," he said irritably wiping his face with a corner of his robe. "I was processing."

Trillian made a slight noise of agreement.

"But," he paused. "If the Vogons blew up Earth," he paused again, unsure of the motive, "where are we?"

"We're on the Heart of Gold, jumping improbable distances across the universe because of the Infinite Improbability Drive." Trillian said it so securely that it took Harry a minute to remember that he had no idea what she was talking about.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," he confided to her.

"Ah," she said eloquently. "The Infinite Improbability Drive uses the power of improbability to help it travel over far distances across the Galaxy. That's how this room is here. Very improbable to find a rainforest in a spaceship, right?"

Harry gawked at Trillian for a minute. "We're in space?!"

"Well, where else would we be? Sometimes we land on a planet, but right now we're in space, yes."

"You know," Harry stood up and wiped the back of his pants, "this is one of the stranger things that's ever happened to me."

Trillian began to push herself up, too. Harry held out a hand, and he helped her up. "With the Improbability Drive, you have to count on these things.  I must say, you're taking these new ideas fairly well."

Harry set his face straight.  "I've had practice," he said grimly.

* Page 9 and 10 "Restaurant at the of the Universe"