A/N: With what I've got of this fic so far, I wrote most of it in a flurry of inspiration a month or two ago. I've since run out of steam, and furthermore I have a bunch of schoolwork and stuff to focus on; consequently, I'll be putting this aside indefinitely until the steam builds up and breaks forth in a scalding geyser of wossname. Creative thinger. You know what I mean.

Chapter 6: Xenophilia/Xenophobia

Joey passed through the crowd of strangers. By human standards, it was a far stranger crowd than most.

He scanned the clientele for an adequate being to ask for information. And normally Joey was an outgoing guy, but then again, he was accustomed to social interactions with groups of people who, on average, shared the same number of appendages as him.

He definitely felt out of his league here. Hands in his coat pockets, he kept an eye out for any being appearing official and not especially threatening.

Suddenly, something familiar in the crowd caught his attention, and he acted almost instinctively. Pushing past a robot and its reptilian owner, he intercepted the sexy redhead with a tap on her bare shoulder.

He sized her up: blue tube top and shiny black pants hugging her shapely physique.

Human, and exceptionally female.

"How you doin'?"

She tossed her hair and walked past.

"Hey! Hey, that's really rude!" Joey kept walking after her. "I'm just asking how you're doin', and you won't even talk to me?"

"You're being rude," the woman retaliated, eyes dead ahead.

"How am I being rude? Look, we're both humans in a strange place, and I was thinking we could help each other out—"

The woman spun around, venom sacs expanding in her cheeks as she spat at his face. Reflexively, Joey shielded himself with one bare forearm.

"Geez, fine! You just OW! My arm!" He furiously rubbed his arm on his pants leg, wiping off the spit, and in a few moments the burning subsided. He shuddered. That obviously wasn't a human being, and he'd have to think twice before hitting on aliens again.

Well, unless they were really, really hot.

"I'm worried," Rachel said.

"Why?" Chandler asked. "We're stranded in an utterly unknown dimension without any supplies, and you're pregnant. What's there to worry about?"

"I think you hit it right on the head." She sighed. "I'm just worried that we'll never get home."

"You want to tell me about it? I mean, I can do sympathy. It should be fine as long as I don't open my mouth…"

"Thanks, Chandler." She smiled sadly. "But it all being gone forever, I honestly don't think I could deal with that. New York's home for me. My job's there, my friends are there. We'd never see Ross and Monica and Phoebe again. That's where my life is, and I just couldn't I have to believe there's some way we can get back, even if there's not."

"I know I couldn't bear never seeing Monica again."

Rachel made a sympathetic murmuring noise and patted his knee. Lying down on the floor, she couldn't well reach his shoulder.

"But you know what?" he continued, after a moment's pause. "Honestly, I don't think we're stranded here forever."

"Really?"

"Sure. I mean, you've seen the technology all over this place. The aliens have got to have some kind of dimensional teleporter that can get us back to New York City, or a high-tech key that'll open up the portal we went through. They're advanced, enlightened beings; they'll be glad to help us out, just as soon as Joey finds one that can tell us something about dimensional travel. There's probably just been an equipment failure for whatever keeps this portal open. Nothing they can't fix."

"That makes sense. When you put it that way, I'm surprised we aren't home already!"

"Yeah…me too, actually."

There was a moment of moderately uneasy silence.

"Tell me a joke," Rachel requested. Chandler hesitated, wracking his brains. "Come on. Make it a funny one."

"Give me a sec." He frowned. "You know, I don't think you want to hear any of the jokes coming to mind."

"Now why do guys always assume that women don't want to hear dirty jokes? That is such an unfair stereotype!"

"Fine," he replied sarcastically, "do you want to hear the one about statutory rape, pedophilia, or rednecks and inbreeding? Or blonde jokes, I know you'd love those. Okay, I think I've thought of a joke that's not too offensive. It's pretty awful, though."

"Okay, shoot," Rachel jumped in quickly.

"What's worse than finding a worm in your apple?"

She thought for a moment. "I give up. What?"

"The holocaust."

"Chandler, that is…horrible! I-I really shouldn't be laughing," Rachel said, laughing.

"You think you can do better?" he asked with a grin. "Come on, hit me with your best shot."

"Okay." She searched for a joke. "How many New Yorkers does it take to change a lightbulb?"

"How many?"

"Fifty."

There was a pause, and when no explanation was forthcoming, Chandler asked, "…Fifty?"

"Yeah, fifty, it's in the contract," Rachel quickly shot back.

His chuckle hung in the silence of the storage room. "I miss New York," Rachel finally said, sadly. And then she panicked.

"My job! With Ralph Lauren! I'm going to lose my job! When I don't come in to work in the morning, or the next morning, or—"

"Rach, calm down!"

"But it's my job! What will I do if I come back and I've lost my position? My career is over—anyone I go to interview with will call Ralph Lauren and hear just how unreliable I am! And the baby! Just when I was starting to feel successful and stand on my own two feet…"

"If you're trying to be Monica so that I won't miss her as much, it's not working," Chandler noted dryly. "First of all, less worrying and more panic. Also, she's a little more self-assured than that: you deserve to keep that position, and none of this is your fault. As it is, you're way too insecure."

"But there's nothing I can do…" she protested weakly.

"Listen, then. We've already assumed they know how to travel across dimensions. Time is a dimension. So they must have time travel, and we can come back to the moment we left. Problem solved, nothing to worry about!"

"But what if they don't? You're just assuming!"

"It makes sense to assume. I mean, they've got talking doors." He paused. "Wait, what's wrong here? I'm being optimistic!"

Rachel looked down at the doorknob and took another moment to regain composure. "No, you're right," she sighed; "I don't know why I'm being so panicky. It's probably just the hormones."

At this moment, humanoid figures in imposing suits of body armor and carrying jet-black combat rifles stormed into the storage room, quickly located the two Terrans, and surrounded them.

"Wow, those hormones are really something," Chandler remarked unsteadily. Some jokes are intended to be funny. Others are made not so much for their humor value as simply a way of dealing with the onset of fear or anxiety. This joke of Chandler's, then, was the sort of remark intended to be so unfunny that you didn't wet your pants.

Entering the apartment, Monica almost announced her presence out of habit, but stopped herself. Hesitating for a split-second, she noticed her husband's absence from the living room, or anywhere else visible from the doorway. She rushed to the bathroom hall, and, finding no sign of her husband fiddling disobediently with the lock, turned around with the expectation that he would emerge as if from nowhere, saying, "Hah! You don't trust me!" But he didn't.

"Chandler! I'm back!" she announced. She looked into the bedroom, finding no sign of him. So she knocked on the bathroom door. "Are you in there?"

But the apartment was pretty clearly empty.

"Damn!" she said. If you second-guessed someone else, then you pretty clearly won; if someone else second-guessed you, you lost; but what happened if you were second-guessed twice by no one at all? The empty apartment felt strange—perhaps just because she had been looking forward to coming home and seeing Chandler again and maybe even catching him at the closet so that she could win, but it felt like he ought to be here. It was hard to say whether she would've preferred losing over a surprise like this, and for Monica that was saying a lot.

She decided to check the closet anyway, just to see if it had been unlocked. The doorknob turned easily, and when she pulled on it, it came out.

"Aah!" she exclaimed, and her mouth tightened as she started fuming. He had seen inside her closet! And he had ruined the doorknob entirely! She got angry, and then got even angrier at him for not being there to get angry at.

She hooked her finger in the empty doorknob-hole and pulled the door open.

The giant pile of junk remained inside, in just the state she'd left it. "Thank God," she told herself, "at least he didn't mess anything up.

"But ooh…he looked in my closet after I told him not to! And When He Gets Home…"

The final "m" stretched itself out into the silence and became a syllable.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy observes the tendency of certain sentient races, including humans, to display varying degrees of predilection for sameness. Such races prefer the company of those similar to themselves in appearance, mannerisms, thought, and above all else preferred brand of cola. This tendency is in fact indirectly responsible for the Guide's entry on Earth as "Mostly Harmless": Earthlings are generally content to keep to themselves and, when faced with a strange or problematic situation, will generally choose to ignore it.

The Guide also notes the opposite tendency, that of xenophilia. Some races possess an innate fondness for variety and difference, to degrees varying from healthy to that of the Allelosians of Voonmog-7. The Allelosians have such a partiality for beings unlike themselves that they actively seek out entities that do not even exist, on the grounds that could be no more different an entity. As a result, there has historically been a proliferation of Allelosian philosophers, and the number of recognized religions on Voonmog-7 exceeds the population four-to-one.

Never having read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Joey Tribbiani considered himself a fairly open-minded individual, by human standards. He had friends of various ethnicities, and living in New York had given him a good perspective of the physical diversity of the human race. Unconsciously, though, as he asked the space station's other visitors for information, he displayed a clear aversion for anything non-humanoid.

And to an extent, this made sense. A human might well have quite legitimate doubts about whether he can meaningfully communicate with a being that does not have a mouth, or to what degree he has any common ground with an apparently sexless arm-covered orb whose body refracts the visible spectrum of light. (Joey wasn't aware of this phenomenon, of course; all he knew was that staring at the damn thing made his head hurt because its body parts kept disappearing behind objects in the background.)

At any rate, when he spotted an individual whose physical peculiarity stopped at his attire, Joey immediately moved to intercept him.

"Hey," he said, getting the man's attention with a tap on the shoulder and holding out a hand to shake. He smiled. "I'm kind of lost, and I was wondering if you could tell me where this place is?"

The man stared at Joey's hand. "Well, this is the stopover's main hallway. Information Services might be able to help you if you've forgotten which sector you parked in."

"No, no." Joey shook his head, casually bringing his handshake-hand up to the side of his forehead. "I mean, I didn't come here by spaceship or anything. My friends and me pretty much came by accident through a space portal. And it's closed. Do you think you could just tell me where Earth is from here, and how many light-years it would take to get there?"

"The Earth?" the man asked, raising one eyebrow.

"Yeah. Big green-and-blue planet, in between Mercury and Venus, got people that look like you and me?"

"I know the Earth. Thing is, you're standing where it used to be."

Joey looked down at his feet. He looked around at the metal corridors, the hallways and docking-bay doors and side-shops. He looked at the crowds.

"Here?"

"Right. Ten years ago, the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council arranged to have the planet demolished. Now the area is a hyperspace bypass. They had this stopover built as a site for interplanetary travelers to refuel, take a breather, buy food and souvenirs. It's a pretty backwater arm of the galaxy, so facilities like this are pretty far between…"

"Ten years ago? The Earth? But I was just there!"

The man nodded. "You must've come from a parallel universe where the Earth wasn't blown up. You said you came through a portal?"

"Right. My friends are back there waiting. I mean, where the portal used to be. On our side. You know anything about portals?"

"No, but this might." He held up a device the size of handheld gaming system with the words 'DON'T PANIC' on the front in big friendly letters. "Oh, by the way, I'm Lorz Bavglew, owner of the starship Luigi's."

"Joey Tribbiani." Joey smiled broadly and held out his hand again, and when Lorz failed to shake it, he grasped Lorz's hand firmly. "Nice to meet you. Here, I'll take you to meet my friends and we'll see about getting that portal open.

"Right." Brow furrowed anxiously, Lorz looked like Joey had just asked him to be the Best Man in his wedding. Or at least the ringbearer. "Oh, um…and by the way…you might want to get a new pair of pants at the gift shop. Those look fit for incineration."

Joey looked down at his pants. The front of the right leg was eaten all to pieces, as if it had been dissolved.