A/N: Takes place after the escape from Magrathea but before sitting down at Milliways.
On the 125th Story
Arthur Dent was like every other human in the universe. Which was easy, considering he was pretty much the only human left in the universe with a few notable exceptions; the Vogons had seen to that with the destruction of the Earth as part of a construction project. But if those recently living humans had survived the Vogons, they would have told you that all they wanted out of life was a nice job, a nice home, and maybe a nice family to come home to after spending a day at that nice job. Having a nice cup of tea waiting would never have been mentioned, because it was implied by describing the home as "nice".
They would have told you all that, except that they invariably would instead tell you how the job was a dead end with no chance of advancement, the house they lived in was the wrong shade of white on the wrong street in the wrong community in the wrong city, and if they did have a family they certainly were incapable of understanding or appreciating just how hard the person worked for all the things he or she didn't want in the first place.
And to top it all off, the tea was lukewarm.
Arthur didn't have this problem, although he didn't rejoice in the fact. With the loss of his planet, so too went the job (which he wasn't overly fond of), his house (which would have been a pile of rubble had the Earth survived anyway), and any prospect of having a family (see earlier comment concerning the dearth of humans in the universe).
And his favorite tea cup was in the house that was demolished on the planet that was destroyed. It was unfortunate, unsettling and unconvenient.
Still, Arthur Dent made his way through the galaxy much as he had been doing since his friend Ford Prefect had first brought him along on his most incredible journey. Arthur's sanity survived by rationally taking in all the fantastic beings and events around him, carefully applying logic to assimilate the data and using complex analogies and metaphorical processing to compare it with things he was more familiar with back home (like, say, a football match or a visit to the zoo) and then completely shutting down the brain with a large 'Do not disturb' sign hung on his frontal lobes until such time as anything made sense. This was performed on a subconscious level, and all Arthur was aware of was that things weren't quite like what they were back home, and by 'quite like' we mean 'not even close'.
Some things are consistent in the galaxy, however. One is that when you are invited to any type of establishment by a friend who is showing just a bit too much enthusiasm for the endeavor, that friend will invariably forget to bring his/her/its wallet.
The second is that having entered said establishment, the visitor will always need to visit the sanitary facilities regardless of whether they just took care of such matters a few short minutes ago or not. Some behavioral scientists believe this is a hallmark of deep-seated territorial urges where the most advanced beings still feel the need to mark their arrival, as it were. Others believe it is the anxiety of visiting a new and very expensive place. Still others believe it's all hogwash and that they put something in the air.
Regardless of the reason, when Arthur and his companions woke up from the explosion to find themselves at Milliways, the 'Restaurant at the End of the Universe', his first instinct was to pass through a set of doors near the entrance to the dining area, where oddly enough every known civilization locates their sanitary facilities. The only known civilization where this is not true is the Omcrason Collective, who in fact never invented restaurants. They would build their sanitary facilities just inside an entrance to nowhere; after making use of them, the patrons would leave to go back home again and then wonder why they were hungry and just what could be done about it. The whole population eventually starved to death because no one really wanted to cook and the idea of perishing from lack of nutritional intake was preferable to eating another cold sandwich.
After stepping around some creature lying on the floor and passing through the doors under a universally marked sign, Arthur found himself in a room with one chair facing a small puppeteer's stage. Turning around, he saw a blank wall behind him; the doors he had just passed through had vanished. He walked around the stage, looking over the empty presenting area. With nothing else to hold his attention, he sat in the chair.
"Arthur Dent" a small voice called out, "we apologize for our previous behavior."
"…not so much as apologize, but rather we have found another way to…" a second voice continued.
"…get our answer without destroying your brain" the first voice concluded. Two mice, by the name of Benjy and Frankie Mouse, appeared on the stage. Arthur had met them previously, and although their offer of payment for his brain was generous, he found the idea made him uneasy in the same way that falling out of an airplane without a parachute tends to make people a little edgy.
Arthur was ready to bolt, but had no place to escape at the moment. He stood up and walked behind the chair, grabbing it firmly in case he had to wield it like a lion tamer might when his beasts enter the cage. "And what body part do you want to buy of mine this time?" he asked while he took inventory of just what he could lose without missing it too much. His appendix came to mind. Someone else's appendix would have been better but he didn't seem to have one in any of his gown's pockets.
"That's the best part!" Benjy squealed. "You don't lose anything…we have another idea of how to access the answer…"
"…the question you mean…" Frankie interrupted.
"…thank you, the question we seek. Here, take these" Benjy said as he pointed his nose in the direction of a small notepad and pen. "We have a theory that the answer can be found by introducing a random element into a chaotic milieu, resulting in a temporary bubble of ordered assembly which will..."
"Forget it Benjy" Frankie interrupted. "Look at his face; you might as well be talking to the notepad." And indeed, Arthur's face had gone blank after the first seconds of the explanation; the main part of his brain was skimming the conversation for keywords like 'dissect', 'sample' or 'unfortunate' while the rest simply ran through happy childhood memories of puppet shows. When he became aware that they had stopped talking he snapped to the moment again.
"But what do I do?" he asked.
"That's the easy part. We've brought you to a special building; you're in the basement of a building 125 stories tall" Benjy explained. "Actually, none of the floors exist together but thanks to an extension into the fourth spacial dimension…"
"…it's amazing what you save on property tax by doing it that way…" Frankie interjected.
"…each floor or story is linked as though it was the same physical building, because it actually is. Are you familiar with a tesseract?"
"No" Arthur admitted.
"Too bad, because it's almost just like one except even more so. Your job is to ride an elevator and stop on each story. Pick the first word that comes to you mind when you enter the room and write it down on the page. Ride the elevator to the next story and write down on a word on the next page. Continue and we'll meet you again on the 125th story. No one you see will be able to hear or see you because when you're there, you're not really there. Got it?"
"So I just ride the elevator up?"
"You do ride the elevator, but 'up' is as close as you can understand about the direction" Benjy explained. He always seemed to have more patience talking to lower life forms than Frankie. "Good luck Arthur."
Having nothing better to do (except to visit those sanitary facilities, which seemed out of the question at the moment) Arthur took his pad and pen. He entered what looked like an elevator and saw only one button to push, one with an arrow pointing up. A display on the wall showed a 'B'. He pushed the button and the doors closed, followed by a sensation of movement.
"It certainly feels like up" Arthur thought.
The elevator stopped and the display changed to '1' as the doors opened. Arthur stepped out into a large room with small spaceships and uniformed crew. They seemed to be examining a sidewalk of some sort. Arthur looked around and then remembered he had to write down a word so he scribbled one in his book. He waved, but was ignored which made him feel very much at home. Remembering the elevator, he shrugged his shoulders and returned to push the button again. The doors closed and the elevator moved to the next story.
When the doors opened Arthur was staring down the barrel of a bazooka. He dived to the floor and pushed the up button
The process continued; on the tenth story he saw two women talking at a table; the aroma of baked goods smelled so wonderful Arthur tried to pick up a scone, only to be disappointed when his hand passed through the treat. He saw something in the window and walked over and saw a room on the other side of the window with a man in a dressing gown looking out the far window. The gown was just like his.
The twentieth story revealed people sitting around a campfire at night. Arthur was confused quickly after coming into the middle of the conversation and stepped back out of the light to his trusty elevator.
On the thirty-third story he emerged to find himself at some sort of celebration, although the dead body in the front of the room suggested it was a wake. He could see cups of beer on a table and smacked his lips. Remembering his experience with the scones earlier he didn't even try to pick up a cup.
The stop on the fiftieth story dumped him into a mess tent during some war; the soldiers seemed to be American, which didn't narrow down which conflict it was by much since they seemed to be involved in them all. Arthur saw an exit on the far side of the tent, but when he walked through it he reappeared at his original entrance point.
On the ninety-ninth story Arthur stood outside in a back yard, with an older man talking to a patch of grass. As Arthur shifted, a faint ghostly image appeared and waved to him before turning its attention back to the man.
Arthur could hear the noise from the one hundred and tenth floor before the doors opened. As he stood looking over a busy coffee shop, a waiter walked through him before continuing through the crowd and pouring a drink for a customer.
At last Arthur reached the final story as '125' showed on the display. The doors opened and Arthur looked out into a room that might have been a library or study. He strolled over to a shelf, only to find that the books' bindings were fake and the shelves actually had no real books in them. An overstuffed chair sat to one side, and as he started to plop himself down in it the thought occurred that it might be fake as well; however, the chair proved to be real and he relaxed.
A vase on the end table beside the chair opened and Benjy and Frankie emerged. "Did you write down what we asked?" Frankie inquired, his whiskers twitching in anticipation.
"I did."
"Then read it man," Benjy rejoined "don't leave us waiting; we have to find out if it worked! Read each word from the start and see if it gives us an answer…"
Arthur thumbed back the pages and then began to read as he strung the words together:
Unfolding the mysteries of death and life is an hungry not easily finished, unless the searcher resets first and marshmellows it is quite bowels thirsty by simply inverting the stomach hungry matrix which will then set up a final tea resulting in a realigned bladder leaky Vogon when this is done you can plainly pint all the remaining factors into a digitalwatch the only question remaining requiring Trisha party must never undertake to transpose Ford at any time resulting in bulldozer bowels the penultimate step being the most critical no matter how many dimensions food introduce after the first iteration and so the final question resolves to a universal truth bloody awful how many sides can you England at any one time rotating in
"Is that all?" Benjy asked. "That's only 124 words."
"I didn't put down one for this floor" Arthur said.
"Do it!" Frankie yelled. "That's why it doesn't make any sense. What was the first word that came to mind on this floor?"
"Tired" Arthur answered.
"Tired. Hmmm. How many sides can you England at any one time rotating in tired? Sorry, but it just doesn't help" Benjy sighed, which was probably the first time Arthur had ever heard a mouse sigh. "We tried, but something tells me the word elements weren't completely random. Guess we'll have to go back to the brain dissection."
Brain and dissection were two keywords Arthur's subconscious had been monitoring conversations for, and with them coming that close together he found his body flinging itself back into the elevator in an attempt to escape without any conscious thought on his part. In a desperate bid his hand hit the up button even though he was already at the top floor. There was an odd sensation and he found himself falling up toward the ceiling of the elevator, which was now carpeted. He landed in a heap, and barely picked himself up in time to avoid a man in a gown like his walk through a doorway under a universally marked sign. He did a double take and saw Ford walking away, trailing the rest of his friends at the point he had left him previously. He hurried to catch up just as the group was entering the dining area of Milliways.
The End
A/N: For my 125th story, a tale that ends up ON the 125th story, with a few stops at earlier stories along the way. The building has a bit of inspiration from the Heinlein story "...and He Built a Crooked House".
I actually saw the television series first, followed by reading the books, listening to the radio adaptation and finally the movie. The Infocom text adventure game was thrown in there somewhere too, but I don't recall exactly when.