The Beginning - The Vogon Constructor Ship
"Get off my shoe!"
"I'm not on your shoe!" Ford replies, in his usual sarcastic scorn.
"Then what's that?!" Whatever it is, it scuttles off out of sight under a large crate marked 'Do not feed the sheep!'. You grope around in the darkness for your copy of The Guide and mash at the keypad until the backlit screen flickers into life. The screen illuminates the entire cargo hold, casting eerie Bugblatter-beast-of-Traal-shaped shadows on the far wall. It was during the course of research on the planet of Flacktooine, renowned for its spectacularly pitch-black sunrises and equally marvellously black sunsets; well, it's 26 and three quarter hours long and entirely pitch-black days in fact, anyway, this was the point at which the research team realised that much of the universe is, in fact, very, very black, and decided that a torch should be incorporated into the design. In deciding how bright to make this new torch, they, in their wisdom, decided to use Flacktooine as a testing ground, and as this is in fact the darkest place in the entire universe, wherever else the torch is used, it is blindingly bright. Literally. In fact, most hitchhikers now use this torch as a weapon for melting the infamous ice monsters of Frupptax VII, rather than using it to look for their contact lenses in the dark and so forth.
Well, that was an AWFULLY long paragraph, so now back to our story.
You are in the cargo hold of a Vogon Constructor ship, a fact which you may already have gathered from the title of this chapter - The Vogon Constructor Ship.
"Wait - what's that?" your companion whispers. It seems that several heavily armed Vogon guards are heading in your direction. There is a large red lever located somewhere near your left ear, lit up in the darkness by your Infamous-Ice-Monster-of-Frupptax-VII-melting device. Maybe now would be a good time to pull it? Act fast, Vogons are known around the galaxy for their unsavoury methods of torture - death by poetry, of course...
No - You really should wait and ask the Vogons what it does first, before using it to kill them