The planet Tatooine hung in space, orbiting around it´s twin suns as it had been doing for a billion or so years, yet not getting ripped apart by the two separate gravity sources as it had also been doing for a billion or so years. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a ship pulled out of hyperspace not too far away.
Onboard the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 A, (I sure hope I got that all right,) the ship jolted violently as it suddenly went from warp 10 to orbiting speed around the planet. Everyone on the bridge flew in different directions. Captain James Tiberius Kirk (AKA Captain Jirk) (and isn´t it pitiful that I know his middle name? Waaaay too many episodes of Star Trek) looked around. He yelled.
“All… right… all right! Spock… I want you to… tell… ME! If the… ship just suddenly… stopped… in WHAT… direction should… we all fall?”
His first officer thought for a second.
“Forward, I believe, Captain,” he replied.
“Hear that everybody?! When we come out of warp drive unexpectedly, we all need to fall forward, so enough with this overacting!”
Everyone else coughed into their hands. Kirk ignored them and turned on his communicator. A voice from the other end said, “Engineering.”
“Scotty… I want you to… turn the ship… AROUND… and try that… over… again.”
“Yessir.”
Kirk turned and addressed the bridge crew. “Okay, everybody! This time… I want a group… effort… to OBEY… the laws of physics!”
“Ay ay, Captain,” everyone else replied.
Two minutes later, the ship came out of warp drive a second time, and everyone went flying forward in unison. They slowly got to their feet.
“How´s that, Captain?” Uhura asked.
“Much…” Kirk started. The crew waited expectantly as their commanding officer went into a longer one of his damn dramatic pauses.
“……………BETTER!” Kirk finished. “Now… onto more… pressing… issues. Spock! What´s our… STATUS?!”
“We seem to have gone into one of our regular, yet totally unexpected, space/time warps, Captain, and for the first time in Starfleet history we have not been taken to 20th century Earth. We are now in unknown space,” Spock replied after glancing into that box he´s always looking into.
“Hmm…” Kirk said, squinting dramatically at nothing in particular.
Suddenly, his tricorder beeped. He picked it up.
“Bridge!” he exclaimed with unnecessary drama.
“Sir, we seem to be having a problem with the transporter! It´s malfunctioning! Beaming people around like crazy!” came a voice from the other end.
“Well… see… what you can… DO!”
Before anyone could do or say anything else, a red-shirted ensign who happened to be standing off to one side of the bridge was engulfed in a storm of glitter and annoying sound effects. Kirk´s tricorder beeped again. He activated it once more.
“Sir, sir, this is the engine room! An ensign just got beamed into the antimatter chamber!”
The voice of Scotty could be heard in the background. “(Censored)! This´ll take me days to repair!”
Kirk flipped off his tricorder and stared dramatically into space.
“Let us all… take a moment of… silence,” he said soberly, “in… memory of the dearly… departed… Ensign…”
He stopped. “Hey… does… ANYBODY… know his… name?”
Everyone shrugged.
“Well…” Kirk continued, “We… shall call him… Ensign Joe. Let us… remember… the good times. Ensign… Joe would have… wanted that…”
Before he could continue, however, the transporter malfunctioned again and he and Spock were engulfed in a frenzy of glitter and annoying sound effects.
The next thing they knew, they were sitting on the floor of a sleazy bar down on the planet. They looked at their surroundings. Unfamiliar aliens of a hundred species occupied the place, and they were all dead smashed. Out of nowhere came a guy with two heads and three arms. He tripped over them and, grinning drunkly, exclaimed, “Excuse me, ladies, I didn´t see you sidding dere on the floor!”
The guy stumbled over to the bar. “Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters for everybody! Put it on my (hiccup) tab!”
The angry-looking bartender sneered at him but did as he requested. The guy grabbed three of them and handed one each to Kirk and Spock, who were still looking about, extremely confused.
“Here, drink (hiccup) these!” the guy said.
Fifteen minutes later, Kirk, Spock, and the guy, who had introduced himself as Zaphod Beeblebrox, were sitting at a table. They were all apparently smashed. A crowd had gathered around to listen to their conversation.
“…So anyway!” Spock exclaimed, in between quaffs of his Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster and fits of laughter, “there was Tribbles everywhere! I mean, Tribbles up the wazoo!” He waved his hands about expressively just to get his point across, whatever the point was that he was trying to make. “So Jim here walks into the storage area, and opens up one of the bins, and all these Tribbles fall on top of him! And he´s sitting there, covered in Tribbles!”
The crowd of drunken people all went into fits of hysteria over this newest development in the load of nothing they had been hearing about from this total stranger over the past ten minutes. Suddenly, they were interrupted when across the room, there was a shining blue light. They all turned to look across the cantina.
“Oh, look!” Zaphod exclaimed. “It´s a (hiccup) giant Jawa with a shiny blue fluorescent light bulb!”
Everyone nodded as the figure across the cantina proceeded to slice the arm off of some thug. Excited murmurs ran through the crowd.
“Yep!” Zaphod continued, “It´s a combination fluorescent light bulb and (hiccup) exact-o knife! Now how much would you pay for one of these amazing products?”
“A hundred?” Spock asked.
“More than that!” some girl in the crowd joined in.
“A… thousand?” Kirk asked.
“Oh, no, much more!” the girl continued.
“How about your first-born male child?” some Rodian piped up. (There goes my plug for Whose Line is it Anyway?)
“Pocket change!” the girl exclaimed.
“Excuse me,” came a nasally voice from behind them. Everyone turned around in unison. Behind them stood several plastoid-clad stormtroopers holding blaster rifles.
“I think you all have had enough. You´re making quite a bit of noise, and several patrons have been complaining.
“And what (hiccup) are you gonna do about it?” Zaphod slurred at the officer. The crowd of people laughed.
“Excuse me, sir, but I believe I am the one with a gun.” The stormtrooper looked around at his comrades and they laughed at their own hypothetical cleverness.
“Oooh, nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah, I have a guuuuun!” Zaphod mocked, waving his hands about. The stormtrooper clicked the safety off on his blaster.
“One more time, buddy, and I´ll…”
“What? Shoot me? I´d love to see you try!”
“Okay!” the stormtrooper retorted, obviously pissed off. He leveled his gun at the ex-president´s chest and fired. The blast headed straight for him, then suddenly stopped about two inches from him and took a detour over his head and into the wall behind him.
“D´oh!”
The officers decided it best that they leave and left to investigate those two guys who had lopped the guys arm off earlier.
The occupants of the table all laughed, got up, and headed for the door.
A couple of minutes later, the drunk people from the bar were standing in the street outside the Cantina, having nothing to do. They leaned against the wall of a building, looking around. All of a sudden, from the midst of the crowded street, emerged three figures, headed for them at a hurried pace.
“Hey!” one of them called at Zaphod. “Where have you been?”
“Ford! Trillian! Monkeyman!” Zaphod yelled back. “At a bar, where else? And look, I met a lot of (hiccup) nice people!”
“He´s smashed,” the one he had addressed as Monkeyman observed.
“Well thank you, Arthur, I´m glad you´re here to tell us these things!” the one called Ford said in a sarcastic tone.
“LANDSPEEDER FOR SALE! YES, ONE LANDSPEEDER FOR SALE!” Some kid was standing across the street alongside a beat up old hunk of junk, yelling at the crowd. An old guy in a brown robe was sitting off to the side, head in his hands, looking extremely embarrassed.
“Come with me, I said,” the old guy said to himself. “Learn the ways of the Force, I said. What was I thinking? Gotta stop picking up these pathetic lifeforms…”
Two droids also stood nearby.
“Oh, goodness!” the first droid said. “There goes Master Luke, making an ass of himself again!”
The second droid, a small blue astromech, beeped a reply but nobody could understand it. The group got up and walked over to them.
“NOW HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY FOR THIS FINE VEHICLE?” the kid bellowed, “ONE THOUSAND? ONE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED?”
“How about my first-born son?” one of the drunken ladies in the group called out.
“No, very sorry madam, but we only accept credits at this time!”
“Well,” the lady said as she tripped over her own foot. She pressed a couple of thousand credits into the kid´s hand. “I´ll take it!”
“SOLD!” the kid yelled. He and the old man walked off. The old guy looked extremely relieved that the kid was finally going to shut up. As they walked off, the kid audibly complained about the amount they had gotten for it and something about landspeeders being “not in demand.” A group of Jawas came to inspect the newly-purchased landspeeder. Kirk proceeded to drunkenly kick them away from the vehicle.
“This was a highly illogical purchase,” Spock observed. “What are we going to do with a landspeeder?”
“I have an idea!” Zaphod Beeblebrox yelled. “Let´s drive to Coruscant!”
Everyone shouted their agreements and hopped in.
12 weeks later…
A landspeeder sped down the main street of Mos Eisley spaceport, Tatooine. It pulled to a stop in front of Chalmun´s Cantina.
“Is this Coruscant?” Spock asked nobody in particular.
“Looks different than it did in the brochures,” Zaphod observed.
“Are you guys sober yet?” Trillian asked with a roll of her eyes as everyone jumped out of the landspeeder.
Arthur agreed. “You guys, we´ve been driving around this God-forsaken planet for months!”
"Hey!” a Rodian in the crowd called, “A cantina! Let´s get something to drink!”
Meanwhile, aboard the Enterprise…
Dr. Leonard McCoy stormed into the transporter room. Scotty looked up from the console he was working on.
“Have you gotten that damn transporter working yet?!” McCoy stormed at the head engineer.
“Ay, boot I still canna find the Captain or Mistair Spock!”
“Well, don´t just stand there, do something!” McCoy yelled.
“I canna change the laws of physics! Why doon´t you come over here oond try?!”
“Dammit, Spock, I´m a doctor, not an engineer!”
The End… or is it?