CHAPTER 25f: This was actually written before ever reading anything by Douglas Adams, if you can believe it.

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Wally wasn’t having the best of days.  It’s been mentioned before, and really, his day wasn’t going any worse than anyone else’s.  But Wally had always been the fragile sort.  To be whisked away, not only from his semi-comfortable  (if uncelebrated) mediocrity, chased completely off his planet, and now, to have his own DNA seemingly plotting against him, was, to scale, more traumatic for him, than for the others; whom had been going through equally stressful times, but, perhaps, due to their own, more erratic lifestyles, had, like someone who works in janitorial services, verses living in an antiseptic environment, built up their proverbial immune systems for this type of thing. 

Using his newfound abilities, he observed his crewmembers.  Amber, looking lovely as ever, toppling over from the attacks, somehow gracefully and seductively; Steve, doing his best to seize control and mount a counterattack with nonexistent technology, and Ronald, cool as ever, appeared to be finishing off a half eaten chicken salad sandwich he’d extracted from his bag of crap.

He had to admire that.  It reminded him of a proverb he didn’t really know, but his subconscious had paid attention to all on its own.  Something about strawberries and tigers, he thought.  Odd, how it always came back to strawberries for him.

Huddled in the corner, panicking quietly to themselves, were the lesser characters.  The expendable extras Groink had brought along with him, Fred-The-Terrorist, Splatch, and Groink himself. 

The odds of getting out of this situation, Wally figured, were pretty much a million to one.  They had a trained space pilot shooting at them, they had very little idea as to how to defend themselves, and their most competent member was likely a toss up between a gesticulatingly evil pig, and a smelly sandwich-eating homeless man.

“I don’t suppose we have any weapons on this ship!?” Steve yelped at the computer.

The computer paused, attempting to compute if this was a statement, or question; and, if it was just a statement, which grammar would suggest, what sort of response it was supposed to muster.  (It did what all computers did when they needed to stall) “[PROCESSING]” it said.

EDITOR’S NOTE: It should be mentioned, that, in reality, the odds of them getting out of their current situation, alive, in the manner that was to follow, was closer to one hundred trillion to the 14^th power, to one.