Something had gone horribly wrong. Nicklethwart Dime awoke with a rebounding headache, and a few odd sensations. The first was akin to a hangover, a sensation of cotton in his mouth which would not have been altogether unpleasant except for the fact that it tickled a bit. The second sensation was a pressing pain in his back. The third sensation was an odd tingling in his leg, as if it were in an unnatural position. Lastly, it was overwhelmingly dark. Not quite as dark as a black hole, but about as dark as a completely black room with no windows or doors at night.

Listening carefully, he heard no sounds of claws or teeth, which was resoundingly good news. Claws and teeth, and an accompanying sound of drips of fluid were usually associated with a certain beast which was not quite nice. There were no sounds of drips of saliva, but to be safe, he sniffed the air for anything fetid.

There was an air of fetidness. An oddly familiar fetidness. Time stretched, as far as time can possibly stretch under the circumstances of the odd sensations - which amounted to something like thirty seconds, yet which felt like thirty days. Gathering himself up, he took a deep breath.

He opened his eyes, prepared to close them should he see a Ravenous Bugblaater Beast of Traal, which was absent - but he closed them anyway, considering what he had seen in the faint light. He opened them again, and closed them quickly to affirm that he saw what he had seen. A few thoughts danced through his mind like slow moving villi.

Slowly, he pulled his socked foot out of his mouth and sat up, grabbing his satchel from underneath him. All but one odd sensation were now gone, and this odd sensation was the grogginess associated with hypertravel, which was easy to attribute to the hypertravel that had placed him wherever he was. The problem with that was not knowing where wherever was at the present time.

For some strange reason, he felt an awakening. Little did he know that a site, known only as A42, had just been launched using Free Software - namely Drupal - and he felt markedly froodier.

Nick decided after a few microseconds of serious contemplation that he needed a stiff drink. With olives. Olives stuffed with gouda cheese. A meandering thought somewhere within his skull collided with a synapse in what is generally known as a 'T' collision, though which side of the 'T' the thought was on was currently being argued by a nerve bundle attached to his left eyelid. It twitched. 'I have to get to Earth', he thought.

On hearing that, the thought immediately reversed and hit the the synapse again.

'I am on Earth. But where on Earth am I?'

Satisfied that it's work was done, the thought continued meandering erratically in search of olives stuffed with gouda cheese. Nick, on the other hand, decided to get up and have a look around. He'd never gotten the hang of hitchhiking, which was a bit of a problem considering his line of work, but he typically meandered his way around that. And sometimes he got where he was supposed to be. But when the directions were as general as a planet, it was pretty hard to screw up.

Now he had to find a penguin. But finding a penguin would be difficult, considering he didn't know what they looked like, so he whipped out the Guide and looked up 'penguin'. An image of a Blind Moogian in a tuxedo wearing sunglasses appeared.

Fortunately, the Guide had been revamped sometime in the last 10 years, so that it had graphics and therefore the entry on Eccentrica Gallumbits (the triple breasted whore of Eroticon 6) suffered an amount of requests so severe that they considered removing at least one breast from the images so that they would be smaller. Ms. Gallumbutts sent 3 battalions of lawyers to the Guide who created new laws on virtual mastectomy. Therefore, the Guide dedicated a complete server cluster on a moon, simply to host images of Eccentrica Gallumbits. Blind Moogian workers were called in to handle this, and this was good. Unfortunately, part of the contract stipulated that they also would develop servers to handle non-Gallumbutt images.

This would have worked out well, except for the strange vanity of Blind Moogians.

'Damned Blind Moogians are EVERYWHERE', Nick thought.

Seeing that the Guide would get him nowhere, Nick decided to take stock of his vicinity. He looked down, and was pleased to see small granules of what appeared to be silicon oxide beneath him. Actually, he was happy just to have something beneath him; it's a common issue with land-dwelling creatures, much as a fish would be very disturbed if looked up and did not see water.

Carefully removing his Comfort-o-matic running shoes, he ran his toes through the sand. He felt grounded, though 'sanded' might be a better term - and his feet strangely enjoyed the abrasive particles after being released from their comfort-o-matic prisons. These shoes, marketed as the next best thing since MonopolySoft's last version of their operating system, could adjust the comfort level of one's feet simply with a 'comfort-pump'. Nick had found it to be a horrid idea, as there is only so much pleasure one could take. He now had a strange desire to walk on volcanic rock to give his mind some sort of balance.

Having done this - the largely celebrated 'Toe-Running-Through-Something' ceremony as known to the Hitchhiker's throughout the Universe, Nick looked up. A blue sky, with a setting sun. He looked around. He was on a beach, with water frolloping to the North and a bar to the South, with beach to East and West.

A thought meandered, again, across his mind, searching for Olives. And Gouda cheese. And something to put them in. Water? No. Bar? Yes.