Everyone was seated, that is, except for Marvin. It just so happened that there were only seven chairs, and eight people. "Oh, no, don't worry about me. I'll just crawl into that corner over there, no doubt my diodes will get all fired up, but oh no, you all enjoy your chairs." He moved towards the corner with a quiet electronic hum.
"We can't have that." Carter smiled at the robot, he was so fascinating. "You'd be more than welcome to take my chair. She was half-way through getting up when Fenchurch.interrupted her.
"Don't bother." She told Sam. Sam sat back down with a bit of a confused look on her face, these people didn't seem to treat the robot very well. Fenchurch just desperately hoped that these people would be able to help her. "I suppose we should start telling you about ourselves. I'm Fenchur-" she was rudely cut off by Zaphod.
"Don't get me wrong Fenny, you're one froody cat, if you catch my drift. But I think it's me here this lady wants to hear about." Zaphod leaned forward towards Carter, who was opposite him at the table. Now she really wished she had let the android takeher chair. "You see baby, I may have two heads and three arms, but I only have the one heart, and it's all yours. I've been voted worse dressed sentient being a record-breaking eight times in a row. Eccentric Galumbits herself knows that I am the best bang since the big one, but personally I think I got that one beat too. But enough about me, let's hear about you." He gave her a big smile and extended his third hand towards her right hand.
"I-" Carter could only half get the word out before she was interrupted. This man was infuriating!
"Charming." Zaphod began once more. "I'm President of the whole entire Galaxy, but I still manage to find some time to pursue my hobbies. You know, find the ruler of the universe, stop wars that would result in mass destruction and drink five Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters in a single sitting (No one else has ever managed to take three). But hey, for you I'd settle down any time." Zaphod had settled down for a while once with Eccentrica Gallumbits (The triple-breasted whore of Eroticon Six whose erogenous zones extend for four or five miles, depending on your sources)... But after four minutes he was ready to go again.
"Well, er, what amazing adventure are you up to now?" Daniel asked him.
"Oh, nothing. Just trying to dodge the trillion Arcturian dollar bill my psychiatrist dumped on me last month. Twelve years back pay with interest and consultation fees plus expenses. Trying to maintain a low profile, you know? Last week I only went to twenty parties, it was such a bummer." Zaphod had finally said enough about himself for now, and his two heads began some quiet chit-chat amongst themselves. It was hard being the most interesting person in the room, thank goodness for his second head (Each one of them claimed to be the first).
"What is this 'froody' of which he spoke?" Teal'c inquired his team-mates.
"You know what, for once I have no idea buddy." Jack admitted.
"What's the story about the robot?" Carter asked, her curiousity about him had yet to be satisfied.
"Me? You don't want to hear about me, no one really does." Marvin droned.
"No, I really do." Samantha spoke enthusiastically (Scientific studies showed that anyone who spent seventeen minutes or more alone with Marvin was completely drained of all their enthusiasm for the rest of their life, but Carter didn't know this.).
"Well thekind folksat Sirius Cybernetics Corporation thought it would be a brilliant idea to give robots Genuine People Personalities. I'm the prototype. Can't you tell? They hardly unwrapped me before they sent me out into the world to make it on my own, they hated me. Everyone does, I understand." He sighed deeply, a strange sort of mechanical sigh, "Because these people," he gestued to Zaphod and Fenchurch,"think it amusing to send me through time for kicks every now and then I'm thirty-eight times older than the universe. Every part of me has been replaced a dozen times except my lower-left diodes which cause me no end of pain. I hate life. I thought I was a goner once, but some tourists thought it would be a great idea to replace my battery cells, and now I can last another twelve point three quadrillion years. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they still use me to escort people to the bridge..." Marvin mumbled one in his corner to a crowd with only one listener. He was too depressive to maintain the attention of even Teal'c, who had nipped off to a quick bit of Kel'No'Reem until someone else chose to speak.
Carter was still held in awe, though. "Wow. How did they ever build you to last so long? The manufacturing process must be highly advanced, not to mention the programming. It must take an amazingly complex CPU to be capable of emotional responses, and the..." She was very impressed with this robot. Marvin knew she'd hate him soon, just like the rest of them. It was his lot in life to be hated, and he accepted that.
"Don't encourage that thing." Jack ordered Carter. He already had enough problems with technology, he didn't need toasters to start talking to him and venting their sadness over break-ups with blenders.
"You're got the idea." Zaphod agreed with Jack. These guys weren't too bad, but a little slower paced than the crowd he liked. Maybe there were some parties going on over on their planet. Some nice big ones. Yeah.
He was about to go take a shuttle when Fenchurch spoke up. "Well, these two are really just sort of tagging along. What we're after is revenge." She bit off each word of the last sentence, as the thoughts of what those bastards had done came back to her mind.
"What happened?" Daniel asked her, curious.
"Well, I lived on my Earth (No relation to yours, although they're almost identical, the Whole Sort Of General Mish-Mash is always creating confusion like this.) And thought that everything was normal. You know what I mean? Then one day I thought aliens destroyed the Earth, but everything was fine and everyone was alright, and no-one remembered the aliens. Well, I took that in stride. Thought I was just crazy or something. But then this guy came along, and he was amazing." She got a faraway look in her eyes, "He taught me how to fly (You just have to aim at the ground and miss, anyone can do it.), and he took me off planet. Then in some freak accident we were separated in a hyperspace trip to some planet. He was there next to me in the spaceship, and then gone. I tried like mad to find him again, but to no avail. I did waitress work for a bit at the restaurant at the end of the universe, hoping to hear something about what happened to him. I caught word that he had made his way back to the Earth (Not the one I came from, or the one you come from, or the one he came from, but an identical one) so I headed there. And then it happened. The Vogons (Nasty, bureaucratic aliens whose poetry is as mentally damaging as downing twenty Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters in a minute) destroyed the whole Earth, and all Earths (Well, all the ones in our Galaxy and parallel universes thereto anyways, looks like yours is safe.), along with Arthur Dent (The man I love) who was also on the planet at the time. I was outraged. I was halfway through the process of filling out a form to file a request to fill out a form to file a request to fill out a form to file a request to fill out a form to file a complaint when I found out that it was some Psychiatrists that had hired the Vogons to destroy Earth. They thought that we held in our DNA as some part of a ten million long biological computer program The Ultimate Question, and with that in hand and also the Ultimate Answer, the meaning of life, the universe and everything would be known and they would be out of business. So they wiped Earth out totally, and every human in the Galaxy. Their only mistake was that they forgot me, and now I'm out for revenge. I want to see every psychiatrist in my galaxy pay, especially the ones at the top. I took Zaphod along (Ok, maybe he took me along, this is his ship after all. Rightfully stolen.) because of his massive debt to the psychiatrists, and I thought it would be a could idea to get Marvin here some mental help before we wipe them out." She looked expectantly at SG-1.
"Well, what the heck are we supposed to do?" Jack asked her after a brief pause. He thought that maybe it was this woman who needed the psychiatric help. Or maybe all three. He was also beginning to think that his team were in the hands of a madwoman.
"You must be important in some way. The improbability drive our ship operates on choose of all points in the universe to pick you two up. There must be something you can do. We need to find leads on where Zaphod's psychiatrist is, I think he is their top dog. We're taking you back with us to our galaxy." Fenchurd said definitively.
"No, you're not." Jack put his foot down. "We," he gestured to himself and his team, "Need to get going back to our planet. They think we're dead, and would like to know otherwise. Jacob also has places to go." Jack pushed his chair back and got up, and his team followed suit.
"I can't allow that!" Fenchurch shouted and leaped up. "I didn't want to have to take you by force, but so be it. Eddie!" She shouted (Eddie was the name of the ship's computer).
"Whatever will I be oh-so-happy to do for you today?" The over-joyed Eddie asked, he too had a Genuine Person Personality, the polar opposite of Marvin's.
"Teleport the three people we teleported aboard earlier back to where they came from, and activate the improbability drive! Head back to our galaxy!" She was hysterical, nothing would stand between her and her revenge of her lost loved one. Those megalomaniac psychiatrists were high on their own power and they were going to pay! Anyone else who got in her way would pay too!
"Sure thing miss!" The computer oblidged. Before Jack could protest, Sam, Daniel and Jacob were gone and he and Teal'c were on the other side of the universe. He didn't want to know what this insane lady would do when they couldn't do a damn thing to help her.
A note - Ok, I think that chaptermay have beena bit dull to those of you who read THHGTTG (I love that abbreviation), but oh well. I promise it will be more amusing once I get the characters split up to set up some funny new repores, and get the plot proper started. In the unusual event that someone who didn't read the Hitch Hiker's Guide actually read this far, I hope you have a bit of a better idea what the characters I used from it are like. And if not, ah well, I tried.