Note: Once again, thanks to those who've dropped me reviews. And Marcus Lazarus, I'd just like to take this note to say that I totally agree with you about the Rachel-Chandler interaction. Their relationship is, to me, possibly the most interesting one on the show. It's not straightforwardly romantic; it's a friendship with a kind of subtlety to it. And I think it's best summed up by Chandler's remark, "I'm not very good with advice. Can I interest you in a sarcastic comment?"

Chapter 4: Through the Looking Glass...er, Secret Closet

Chandler and Rachel stepped through the portal and instantly found themselves in a dimly-lit storage space. Hanging fluorescent lamps provided minimal illumination, and metal shelves ran parallel to each other throughout the room. Boxes and packing crates comprised most of the décor, along with strange-looking shelved machinery. "Hey, where's Joey?" Rachel remarked, suddenly realizing that he hadn't come through the portal yet.

Just then, Joey emerged behind them. "I brought some towels from the bathroom," he explained, showing them a pair of towels. "You know, in case we need towels for anything."

"Not going to ask," Chandler said, "not going to ask."

Joey reached back through the portal and shut the closet door behind them. It looked rather strange, with a doorknob poking out of the plane of swirling colors.

"So, how about all of these boxes?"

The three of them began examining one of the piles of crates. Rachel bent over to have a closer look at a box at chest level.

"There's writing on the side! It looks like Hebrew."

"How do you know?"

She looked up at the two men. "Come on, that doesn't look like Hebrew to you?"

"Sure," Joey agreed with a shrug. "I mean, that's how Hebrew would look to me if I didn't know Hebrew. Um, which I don't, but still."

"Well, I'm so glad I was a Jewish Studies major," Chandler quipped. "Oh my God! Monica's supplying Middle Eastern terrorists with contraband arms! I can't believe I never figured it out!" He put a hand on his hip. "Believe me, that's not Hebrew. That's not even Arabic."

"Point taken," said Rachel, a little disappointed. "So what language do you think it is, Smarty Smarterson?

"Meh, hmbuffuw nyeb," Chandler shrugged.

"What do you say we take a look inside?" Joey suggested.

The box (indeed, like all the other boxes) was metal, with a hinged top, locked with some unfamiliar integral device. An LCD display on the side reminded them, in so many words, that they didn't know the language.

The three continued looking around the room. On one of the shelves, Joey found a small device that looked like a motor with several unlit lights and tubes…and a tiny mechanical leg. He pocketed it: you know, in case he ever needed a flashlight/motor with one leg.

"What I'm wondering is, what is a dimensional portal doing in Monica's secret closet?" Rachel mused.

Joey shrugged. "Maybe it came with the apartment?"

"And she never told me?" Chandler said with feigned indignation. "The nerve of that woman!"

There was another moment of silence as the group resumed combing the rows of shelves.

"You know, I'm beginning to think that Monica doesn't know about all this back here."

"Joey, it's a dimensional portal. How could she not know?" Seeing Joey immediately start thinking, Chandler cut him off. "It wasn't a serious question. That was sarcasm."

"Hey, found a door," Joey said. "Two of 'em!"

The double doors were heavy, solid, and entirely willing to slide open upon detecting motion nearby. As the group passed through, they emitted a series of unusual sounds.

"Whoa," Joey remarked. "Electronic doors aren't supposed to sound like that." He knew the thought didn't make much sense, but the noises had somehow struck him as…grateful.

Beyond the doors was a narrow hallway that hooked to the left, where the passageway t-boned into a much wider and longer hallway. A hallway full of, apparently, people.

And full of the incomprehensible babbling gurgle of a busy crowd.

"It looks like a mall or something!" Rachel said. She paused and observed the clientele, not all of which were humanoid. "But with…robots. And ugh, what's that thing?"

It looked to be six-footed, six-foot-tall hamster whose head had been shaved and stripped of all facial features except the mouth. Joey and Chandler cringed.

"Now th-that's something you don't see every day, even in New York," Rachel observed, her voice a touch shaky.

"Um, what do you say we go back to the apartment?"

"And lock the door firmly behind us," Joey added.

Chandler hesitated. A purple thing with leathery skin and face-tentacles ambled by, followed by an amoeboid blob with robots sticking out of it, and then something that defied description entirely.

"Sure, I've seen enough," he said, turning to go. But a hand took him by the shoulder.

Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged consulted his digital clipboard. He compared the pseudo-3D photographic representation provided by his ship's computer with the flesh-and-blood Earth person some twenty feet in front of him and confirmed it as the next on his perpetual itinerary. He strode purposefully through the crowd and clapped a spindly-fingered hand on the being's shoulder as it was about to depart down the hall.
Chandler turned to face the hand's owner. Well, his face, the hand's owner's chest: the alien was a good head or two taller than him. It had a long, flattened head with two jet-black slits for eyes, and grey-green skin that, for appearing so alien, was exceptionally glossy. In the way of clothing, it wore extravagantly draped golden robes with a clearly extraterrestrial collar design.

Rachel covered her mouth with her hands and made a quiet gasping noise. Joey resisted the urge to pat her shoulder reassuringly…for about two seconds.

"You must be Chandler Muriel Bing," the alien said by way of greeting.

Chandler glanced back at his two friends, who were staring bug-eyed at the conversation taking place before them. "I'm sorry, you must have mistaken me for some other Chandler Bing," he tried to explain. "One whose middle name is Muriel."

However, it was looking back at its clipboard now. "No, that's you. You're a spineless pansy who hides behind a façade of jokes," it told him decisively. "You have no backbone."

The three humans stared back at it, stunned.

It looked up from its clipboard, squinted at the object of its insults, and pronounced as an afterthought, "And you have an ugly vest." Removing a stylus from the side of the clipboard, it made a tic on the red plastic board's surface. With that, it turned and re-entered the crowds passing through the hallway.

There was a moment of bewildered silence. And then: "I do not have an ugly vest!"

Chandler fumed, oblivious to the fact that Joey and Rachel were for some reason trying very hard to remain composed. "That's the last straw! I don't care if he's president of the galaxy, he has no right to insult me like that! I mean, who is he to talk? He's got an ugly robe! You two stay right there; I'm going to give that jerk a piece of my mind!" And with that, he took off into the crowd.

Joey and Rachel exploded into laughter, clutching their sides. "Muriel!" Rachel exclaimed through giggles. "Chandler M. Bing!"

"Muriel?" Joey hooted.

"Oh my goodness…oh…" The two collected themselves as the laughter died out. "Wow. Do you think we should go after him?"

Joey almost agreed, but thoughts of the hairless-headed hamster compelled him to hesitate. "Uh, I dunno, it's kind of a strange place and we don't really know our way around…"

"And neither does Chandler! All the more reason we should follow him!"

"Okay, yeah, this could be trouble," Joey conceded. He and Rachel stepped out into the main passage, passing a handful of labor robots. "You got to wonder, though…where's this guy know him from?"

As Joey, along with Rachel, hustled along the corridor through the crowd, he accidentally bumped squarely into one of its constituents. "Excuse me," he told the being, and almost hurried along without a thought, except that he hesitated.

"Hey, have you seen a guy with a vest come through here? Looks kinda like us, kinda brown hair, tan pants…"

Speaking, the alien failed to explain something, due to the fact that its words were utter gibberish to them. Reading the incomprehension on their blank faces, it gave an exasperated sigh, made another remark, and slapped something into Joey's ear.

"Hey, whoa now! What the…?"

Rachel had caught sight of the object in the thing's hand. A fish!

The thing stepped forward, unfastening a hip pouch and reaching into it. Rachel held up her hands and backed away.

"N-no, no thanks, I'm, um, allergic to fish in my ear." She shook her head emphatically. "No thanks."

The alien rolled its eyes: two in one direction, three in the other. "Morons. Out traveling, and not a one of them with a Babel fish. I don't care if the circular-stomached one is allergic, there's just no excuse." As it spoke, Joey's mouth opened in amazement. "Now the vest man with the hair: yes, I just passed him as he was turning to the left two hallways down. You've got that? Two hallways down, on the left. It's the Zone 9-Zeta docking bays."

It walked away, muttering things that Joey was astonished to be able to understand.

"Dude, did you hear that?"

"Hear what?" Rachel asked.

"He just told me where Chandler was! You mean you didn't catch that?" Joey asked. Rachel shook her head. "Weird. Hey—I'll bet it's whatever he did to my ear! So I speak his language now! How cool is that?"

"Pretty cool," Rachel said with a touch of trepidation, as they continued in pursuit of their friend.

Eventually, the two of them caught up to Chandler, finding him in the middle of another branch corridor, in front of a sliding metal door that was in fact refusing to slide. "He went through this door," he explained, still breathing somewhat heavily. "And locked it behind him."

Large obvious numbers on the front of the door read "9Z31."

Rachel took a moment to catch her breath before offering to help. "Want me to try it with the hairpin again? I am batting a thousand today." She allowed herself a slight smirk.

"Yeah, just stick the pin right in the retina scanner and see if you can get anywhere with it," Chandler retorted, storming back and forth in front of the door, which did not seem to like the prospect of having a hairpin rammed into its retina scanner. "I was this close to catching that creep! What I wouldn't give for a crowbar right now…"

"They have retina scanners, why stop at a crowbar? Why not wish for a disintegrator ray?" Joey suggested.

"If wishes were horses…" Rachel remarked. There was a moment's silence.

"If wishes were horses, what? Don't leave us in suspense! And besides, what do we need horses for?"

"Kick down the door?" She shrugged, smiling.

She's got a really pretty smile! Shut up, Joey!

"You know, I really don't like the way this conversation is going," remarked the door.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the door, Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was re-entering his spaceship. The ramp retracted behind him, the hatch closed, and the ship began to hum quietly. As its long legs left the ground, elegantly and smoothly returning into the silver carapace, the ship continued to hover in the docking bay. Wowbagger had named his ship the Perpetual Motion, as kind of an ironic way of rubbing the ship's computer's nose in it. After all, it was the craft's owner and not the craft itself that was immortal.

The ship's computer had been recently outfitted with a Sirius Cybernetics Genuine People Personality Module so that it would actually care about this fact.

You could say a lot about Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, and many did, at considerable length, but no one could accuse him of being a vitalist. Whether carbon based, ether based, cybernetic or anything else, if it had feelings, Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was willing to insult it.

"Computer, next destination, please," he said, powering up the hyperspace drive. The docking bay hatch began sliding open.

"Next on your itinerary is the planet Urnarnu. You are scheduled to insult the planet's monarch, Chand Lermu Riel Binhaba, whom you have decided to call 'a complete blithering idiot.'"

"Good, I've never met him but I'm sure he deserves it. What network channels will we be passing through?"

"Teletheater and Penumbra Networks. They aren't showing any movies you haven't seen at least four thousand times, though Teletheater does have a re-release of 'Overdrive' with additional scenes. You've only seen that six hundred twenty-nine times, though you've seen the original five thousand eight hundred ninety-six."

"You know I hate action movies. Screw it, I'm going to take a dip in the hot tub. ...filled with Old Janx Spirit. Get to it."

"You've already done that, actually. Two hundred ten times. You had quite a run of it during space-year 9968-92."

"I have a finite memory, okay? I may be immortal," he emphasized the word with slow, deliberate precision, "but I can't remember every trivial detail that I come across in my limitless travels. And I'd think even you would identify with that, as even you will eventually become obsolete. Now fill the hot tub with Old Janx Spirit and don't talk to me until we arrive!"

"…Any chance you've reconsidered about renaming the ship, sir?"

"Did you hear a word I just said? Hot tub, Old Janx Spirit, now!"

Joey, as the only one who could understand the languages in its speech database, was having a protracted argument with the door. In New York, one hears one's share of strange arguments, but Joey's side of things was definitely one of the weirder ones that the other two had ever heard.

"…I mean, this perfect stranger insults him and just runs off like that. How would you like it if some loser said, I dunno, you were no good at shutting? …I don't care if you're just doing your job! …Programmed? You mean they made you so you can talk with people, but I can't even convince you of stuff? Geez, what's the point of that?"

Chandler sighed and crossed his arms, leaning against the door.

"Dude, forget this guy," Joey suggested to him. "What does he know about good taste in vests? He's obviously a complete weirdo. You don't need to let him get to you like this! Come on, let's check this place out and meet some people…things…people."

"You know, you're right. There's plenty more to see. Let's go."

"Rach, you okay back there?" Joey asked, as they began to leave. Rachel had an uncomfortable expression on her face.

"Guys. Guys, something's happening, I feel really weird. I don't—whoa!" She flinched.

"Are you all right?" Chandler asked.

"Oh hey, hey—don't worry, you'll be fine," Joey leaped in with the reassurances. "I'm sure it's—"

"Oo! Oof…hnff!" Rachel interrupted, holding her belly.

"Oh God, she's doing baby stuff!"

"Don't panic!" Chandler advised agitatedly. "Just don't panic! We've got to get her back through the gate." He and Joey moved to support her. "Come on, here we go." Behind her back, the two guys shared a look that said: we are so screwed.