ETTING   OME   O   LFANDRA

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Hespa's Story interlude 1 - Missing the Ground

Emerging from thick air into a pleasant if somewhat uninhabited landscape, Hespa looks around for any sign of Alfandrans, or even of where she is.  She slowly becomes aware of a faint noise, like the distant clamour of sirens and bells.  On investigation, however, it seems to be coming not from far away but from the inside of the large mountain which rises up to her left.  Intrigued, she heads that way.

As she draws close, a lone bipedal figure appears out of the mountain, apparently emerging from some cave.  It is human, male, and running.  In attempting to run down the side of the mountain, the man triggers a landslide, and soon he is sliding with it.  The watching dragon sighs, decides she can't let him hurt himself, and swoops down to help him.  However, before she can reach him the man trips, is hurled forward with considerable momentum...

...and misses the ground.

The man floats easily a little way above the hard earth, apparently under his own power.  Hespa is so astonished that she herself nearly loses the power of flight - stalling and dropping a few feet before she catches herself and glides down, staring all the way.  The man starts to waft upwards, not yet noticing the approaching dragon.  As she descends, certain details of the scene come together in her mind - the mountain, the much-battered dressing gown the man is wearing, the small navy-blue holdall on the ground in front of him - and suddenly she realises where she is.

Grinning in mischievous delight, Hespa continues to approach.  The ethics of causing a literary paradox pass briefly through her mind, and and promptly shown the door.  Arriving at the flying man's altitude somewhat behind him, she draws up alongside and calls out cheerfully.

"Hello there!"

The man looks around, and now it is *his* turn to gape with astonishment.  Unlike Hespa, however, his flying does not falter - it occurs to her that the distraction she is causing is probably helping him, in fact.  She smiles brightly at him.

"I say, you haven't seen any other dragons around the place lately, have you?"

"Ha..."

"No?  Any other weird-looking creatures?  Not including the homicidal bug-creature in the mountain who just tried to kill you, of course."

"Wha..."

"Oh well, it was worth a try.  Nice meeting you, have a nice flight!"

As Hespa rolls of to the side and vanishes through a portal, Arthur Dent flounders in the air, having suddenly been reminded of what he is, impossibly, doing.  He remains airborne by ignoring the impossibility of what he is doing and focusing instead on the impossibility of what just happened.  He is so preoccupied by all of this that he completely fails to notice the large and extremely disreputable cocktail party until it hits him in the small of the back.