Ok, so Chewbacca and Cookie Monster were cruisin down to Soho to score some soft baked macadamian nut white chocolate chip and as many industrial strength combs as they could get their hands on. Cookie wants to take the subway, but Chewie knows that he really just wants to flirt with and toss silver at this amazon-tall mulatto busker who plays "Happiness is a Warm Gun" on an acoustic guitar and harmonica. Hot stuff, but totally uninterested. Though the savage and sage Wookie would never admit it, unrequited love is fairly high on his list of phobias, two spaces under #1 itself: forced Nair immersion.
Chewie hails a taxi and quickly offers to cover it, a gesture which gives his compadre enough pause for checkered cab to come to a tires-smoking, screeching halt, just like in the movies. He opens the door while Cookie slides in and gives the driver the address of his hookup, just as he had done dozens of times before, but there was something nagging him at the back of his mind. Something was different. Something was... up.
The panoramic blur of city scenery serves as the backdrop to his slight itch of paranoia. The license of the driver is barely legible from behind the God-knows-what-encrusted plastic shield, and reads "Yosef Grybnanizi." The picture matches the face, and one can almost taste the ethnicity eminating from the photograph. Cookie notices the examination and his mouth contorts into what most people wouldn't recognize as a grin. He's probably about to make some kind of lurid pseudoracist comment until one single hairy hand raises as if to say "Wait." The man in the picture is not the man driving the cab. The driver's hair is shock white, opposed to the peppered black-and-grey, visible only as a sideburn in the photo. The accent is all wrong too, Chewie thinks. It's European, true, but more of a German/Austrian than from an untracable region that used to be communist or cartographically invisible. The driver senses the silence in the car and begins to speak in a hypnotic baritone.
"The picture, ya. I knew it would get me in trouble someday. So howizabout the fare's on me and you two cosmopolitan gentlemen can continue on with your night of carousing and the drinking and the buying illegal things of this nature? I will drive for the night until the night is over, yes?"
"Please dispense with the 'Yosef' buisness." he intones, using a few more syllables than necessary. "You may call me Albert Einstiein."
the Wookie sighs as he contemplates being in the immedeate vicinity of a historical interpriter who happens to be not only in complete control of their safety, but also mildly insane. A glance out of the window places them about ten minutes from their destination. A single eyebrow ridge rises. They're making excellent time, and he didn't notice what backroads the nutjob cabbie had used. Damn. Cookie glances wildly over and starts to laugh. That eases the tension. A somewhat uncomfortable silence ensues, to be broken by the driver.
"I really hated myself at one point. I had decided that I would take my own life using the weapon to which I had handmaidened. I drove out to the Trinity site in New Mexico using little more than my prestige and what appeared to me to be a blatant lie. I knew just enough of the mechanical engineering to trigger the nuclear device, but instead of the oblivion I had half-expected, I found myself in a world I could barely understand. At first I thought I was in hell, but there was too much to learn. I have always known my Punishment will be the answer to my last question. I have developed a theory that I had been transported to an alternate, parallell reality via the explosion. I tested my theory by inciting another nuclear reaction at which I was near. I shall not bore you with the intracacies of how I managed to obtain and operate such a device in that alien world. Since then, I have transported myself a number of 9 times. This is my tenth reality. I sometimes think there is no end to them, but I believe that this shall be the one in which I make my grave. The transportation process does have an odd rejuvinating effect, but I am all too mortal, and some atom inside of me knows my age to be inconsistant with nature. I am an abomination of the universe which I once knew, and the universe I know now..." He broke off, and though his eyes gazed towards the windshield, the fuzzy pair can almost feel them bore into the backs of their souls. He again breaks the moment by suddenly slapping his hand upwards, shifting the cab into park. "Anyway, have the good night. Chip in for the tab, Cookie Monster. Nobody likes a mooch."
Cookie Monster slides a healthy bill into his upturned palm, and silently opens the door, stepping out onto the sidewalk in front of the poster advertising Chaplin's latest CGI, wire-fu, smash-a-thon. Chewbacca slides to the middle of the cab and pauses thoughtfully.
"RolrwwwrowlAWARGOLrolw." He says with a shrug.
