Note: Special Thanks to everyone who's dropped a review for me so far. Glad to hear that you're all enjoying the story. The pacing's been a little slow so far, but this is where things start gettin' good. Your patience shall be rewarded!
All right. Enough talk; let's rock.

Chapter 3: The Tao of Rachel

"Hurry, hurry, hurry," Chandler muttered, wrestling once again with the bobby pin in the lock. "At this rate, we're never going to get my credit card back before Monica gets home. I have no idea what I'm doing here."

"You're so nervous, you're trying too hard. Why not let me try?" Rachel asked.

Chandler and Joey looked at each other. "You've got some practice with this?" Chandler inquired.

"Not really, but I managed to get my dorm room open with a hairpin once when I locked myself out. So I just figure I'm more qualified…"

Chandler stood up, gestured with open hands toward the door.

"All right." Rachel knelt down, started working with the hairpin, and after a few patient moments, there was the familiar click of the door unlocking. "Yes! Score one for the pregnant woman!"

"Hold on, what was that?" Chandler held up a palm and waited as if listening intently. "Oh. I just felt my masculinity get a little smaller."

Rachel stood up, getting a hand from her friends. "Well, let's see what Monica's hidden secret is." She opened the door.

"Holy crap," Joey asked slowly, face contorted in bafflement, "what is that?"

The doorway swirled with a flat plane of colors, like the sheen of oil on water. The whole spectrum of visible light rippled from edge to edge of the door frame.

"So do you think Monica knows that this"—Chandler gestured at the psychedelic doorway—"is back here?"

"It must be what she was hiding," Joey pronounced. "There's no telling what could come through that thing if you didn't keep it locked up!"

"You think it's a portal?" Rachel asked.

"I know it's a portal! I've seen enough bad sci-fi to know a portal when I see one!"

"I can't believe what I'm seeing," Rachel breathed.

The three of them stared at the doorway. Clearly, the two men were having trouble believing what they were seeing as well.

"So it's a portal, huh?" Chandler asked.

"Yup," Joey affirmed.

Chandler stuck his hand into the plane of swirling colors and almost immediately jerked it back in pain. "Ow! Oh, my hand! Son of a…!" He hunched over and cradled his arm. "It disintegrated my hand! Ooh—ow, ow…"

He paused, looking up at Rachel and Joey, who frowned back at him as if to say, "We are neither fooled nor amused by your irrelevant antics." Although this would be taking some licenses with Joey's vocabulary, who would more likely use the word "extraneous."

Chandler stood up and held out his quite-intact hand as if to shake. "Hi, I'm Chandler Bing. I'm very good at sarcasm, but physical humor still eludes me." He paused. "Well, now that I've confirmed that it's safe to pass through, I'll just stick my head through and have a look around…"

"Yeah, we wouldn't want to lose our heads or anything," Joey remarked, as Chandler disappeared from the neck up into the portal.

"Ha ha," said Rachel.

"What?" Joey asked, staring at her, puzzled.

"'Lose our heads,'" she explained. It dawned on her that he hadn't meant for it to be funny. "Oh, I'm sorry—I thought you were making a bad pun."

"Oh, that's all right," he replied, grinning. "Come on: Joey and puns? Joey and puns go together like, I dunno, a sandwich and…and…um, and…"

Rachel was smiling and waiting, with that pregnant-person glow, eager to hear the analogy completed. Try as he might, Joey could not think of anything that would not go with some sort of sandwich. He shrugged it off. "Doesn't really matter, either way it's not gonna happen, Joey and puns. Hey, what do you think he's seeing back there?"

Chandler pulled his head back through to the apartment side. "Apparently some sort of back-room for storage, that's what. And it's a hell of a lot bigger than that closet ought to be, unless say the apartment next door is nothing but storage room." He held up a familiar plastic rectangle and waved it back and forth, grinning widely. "Found my credit card."

"So what do we do now?" Rachel asked, staring at the doorway, hand on one hip.

"Close it up, obviously." Joey gesticulated for emphasis.

"Hey, now. If we close the door back, we'll never be able to find out what's back there, and good luck getting it back open. I'm feeling a little adventurous!"

Rachel thought for a moment. "You know, so am I! We got that closet open, now let's treat ourselves to a little look inside! It'd just be selfish for Monica to keep the other dimension all to herself!"

"Rachel, you can't go through there!" protested Joey, who frankly was more than a little frightened that at any second, endless hordes of flesh-eating bugs were going to stream out of the portal and devour them all. "You're pregnant!"

"Yes, and my baby and I should be just fine with two capable men to protect me from any bogeymen lurking in the closet."

There was a pause. "Go ahead and say it," Chandler remarked. "I know you're thinking, 'okay, one capable man between the two of you.'"

Joey searched for another good reason not to investigate the secret closet. As much as he would enjoy an adventure with Rachel (and Chandler, who only merited a parenthetical mention in his thinking, assuming Joey knew what parentheses were), he wanted to be careful. After all, he'd never actually been through a dimensional portal before. "Well, I'm just thinking, what if we're on the other side, and Monica comes back, and sees her secret closet with the door wide open? We'd all catch it from her! And I don't want either of you guys to get in trouble with Monica."

Rachel looked at the inside door handle. "It locks from the inside, so we can just pull it shut behind us, and open it back up when we're ready to head back. No problem!"

Joey still appeared concerned, so she kept talking. "Joey, it means a lot to me that you're worried about the baby. That's really, really sweet of you. But you heard Chandler, it's a storage room! We'll all be fine! Really, we will. It'll be fun."

"And sanitized beyond all reason," Chandler added, "given whose closet we're talking about here."

"Oh, okay," Joey said, relieved. "Yeah, it'll be fun! I mean, nothing like this has ever happened to me before! It's exciting, right?" He hesitated. "But listen, at the first sign of flesh-eating bugs, we're heading back."

"Flesh-eating bugs?"