Agrajag

Name: Agrajag

AKA: Bowl of Petunias, Rabbit, Fish, Old Man with a weak heart, Fly, Newt, Flea, Innocent Bystander, among others

Location: Cathedral of Hate

Novel: Life, the Universe, and Everything

Author: Douglas Adams



Natural History:
Agrajag was a victim of coincidence and reincarnation. He was a mad fat bat that was black, bloated, wrinkled, and leathery. Small, only about three-quarters the size of a human, and cranky.

His bat wings were broken and floundering, giving him a rather frightful appearance. He also had the most astounding collection of teeth. Each tooth looked as if it came from a different animal and stuck out at bizarre angles. It seemed that if Agrajag tried to chew anything he would lacerate half his own face. Quite often he did just that, covering those lacerations with small, ragged, black band-aids. He had three small eyes that gave him a look of intensity and insanity.

He lived in a place called the Cathedral of Hate - a location he created just to destroy Arthur Dent, the human responsible for killing every reincarnation of Agrajag, just by coincidence. The inside of the Cathedral was dark, but not just black - it contained more horrific colors like Ultra Violent, Infra Dead, Liver Purple, Loathsome Lilac, Matter Yellow, Burnt Hombre, and Gan Green. Gargoyles looked inward from pillars towards a great statue. The walls were covered with engraved stone tablets, commemorating those that had fallen under Arthur Dent. The statue in the center was of Arthur Dent in a monstrous, over-exaggerated, ravenous, evil form with thirty arms, each destroying some poor animal, and many feet that were stamping mostly ants.

The Cathedral of Hate was clearly created by a creature that had reached a level of annoyance the like of which had never been seen in the Universe. It was an annoyance of epic proportions, a burning, searing flame of annoyance, an annoyance that had spanned the whole of time and space in its infinite umbrage.

It was not clear if this reincarnation was his last, as we would unfortunately meet Arthur Dent again on Stavromula Beta.

"Seems a strange way to relate to somebody you've got nothing against, killing them all the time. Very curious piece of social interaction, I would call it." -Agrajag

Zem

Name: Zem

AKA: Unknown

Location: Sqornshellous Zeta

Novel: Life, the Universe, and Everything

Author: Douglas Adams





Natural History:
Zem was a mattresses from the planet Sqornshellous Zeta in the Sqornshellous System.

No one really manufactures mattresses, so instead they are caught, slaughtered, dried out, shipped out and slept on. The mattresses do not seem to mind and all of them are called Zem. Mattresses are by nature large, friendly, pocket-sprung creatures that live quiet lives in the marshes of Sqornshellous Zeta.

There is a whole group of words that apply only to living mattresses that live in swamps and marshes of Sqornshellous Zeta. These words include: flollop, floopy, globber (a sound made when mattresses are feeling deeply moved by a story of personal tragedy),  vollue (for the meaning of this word buy a copy of Sqornshellous Swamptalk at any bookstore), voon, flurble, willomy, gup, glurry, flodge, quirrel, flur, glur, wurf, and lurgle. Etymologists are particularly fond of visiting Sqornshellous Zeta.

Mattresses rarely bother rearing themselves up. This takes a tremendous amount of energy and strength, and can only be done for a few seconds. There is not much to see except swamp for miles anyway.

One particular Zem, who was large and probably of high-quality, though of little brains, had once struck up a conversation with Marvin the Paranoid Android, who happened to be stuck on Sqornshellous Zeta after giving a poorly received speech during the opening of a bridge, which folded up and sank into the mire, taking all of those on the bridge with it, after Marvin plugged himself into the opening circuits. The conversation did not last long, as near the end a team of white robots took Marvin's leg and then came back to take Marvin. The poor mattress was left alone and almost lurgled in fear.

The fate of Zem was unknown, though someone is probably sleeping comfortably on him right now.

"You should be more mattresslike. We live quiet retired lives in the swamp, where we are content to flollop and vollue and regard the wetness in a fairly floopy manner." -Zem

Babel Fish

Name: Babel fish

AKA: Clinching proof of the nonexistence of God

Location: Ear

Novel: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Author: Douglas Adams




Natural History:
I will not try to explain this mind-boggling bizarre creature, but instead use the entry from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -

The Babel fish is small, yellow, and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all of this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God.

The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed at the next zebra crossing.

Most leading theologians claim that his argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book, Well That about Wraps It Up for God.

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

"What's this fish doing in my ear?" -Arthur Dent

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