Having successfully swept away more than a billion individual duck feathers (Crumpet-Hands Man having utilised the chufferage of his billow-like crumpets to funnel said feathers into the corner of the factory floor, while Detective Pilchard, with the aid of a mop, fed them into a conveniently materialised woodchipper) our baddie-vanquishing duo set about investigating The Slumberer's super-secret abode. (Abode/the corner of the factory floor where his stuff just happened to be heaped at random; a slum, basically.)
“I wonder,” Crumpet-Hands Man wondered aloud, contextualising the scene for his and the reader's benefit; but mainly his. “I wonder,” he repeated, “where has The Slumberer scampered away to? And what evil schemes does that little pyjamaed gnome have planned?”
“Who knows. But at least we now know what happened to these,” declared the cock-eared detective, stumbling through, over, and into a stack of boxes containing the bank's missing tax returns. “Look! There are pages upon pages of returns here. The Slumberer must have robbed them from the bank we was at earlier,” he surmised for his and our hero's blah.
Crumpet-Hands Man concurred/retched with the detective summation. He said, climbing in beside the detective, “By my reckoning there are more than a thousand pages of dreary accounting in this here box alone,”
“And it would appear that our nemesis has scanned every page of these tax returns into this here computer,” the detective added, having noticed a folder on the desktop screen labelled: EVERY PAGE OF TAX RETURNS I HAVE SCANNED INTO THIS HERE COMPUTER – (SIGNED) THE SLUMBERER.
Climbing out, utilising all his tech savvy, our hero mashed the keyboard of this here computer with a big 'ol crumpety palm. (Why he did this, we do not know.) Either way, the computer let out a pained buzzing noise as though an electronic hamster were being trodden on by a crumpet-clog. Our hero panicked, mashed the keyboard again and again; how this aided the case, or the story, we do not know.
“Why do you think The Slumberer went to the effort of scanning all these pages of tax return?” Detective Pilchard asked, again stumbling through, over and blah the boxes. Having picked himself up (had Mayor Sperkins been there she would have told him to put him back,) he scrolled through the thousands of files on screen, each a scan of a tax return. “Perhaps he wanted to make copies of these returns? But again, to what purpose? I'll tell you, Crumpet-Hands Man,” the detective admitted, “it's a mystery to me.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
A mystery indeed. Crumpet-Hands Man shook his head; aside from making the detective dizzy this did little to clarify matters. But before our hero could give his sidekick's misshapen noggin another rattle, their attentions were drawn towards an audible yawning in the next room/corner...
Tip-toeing trepidatiously into the semi-darkness of the undiscovered room, the only light being that green glow which flickered from the LCD display of a cheap stereo, our heroes came upon a drooling figure slumped atop a stool; the figure seemed unaware of our heroes' presence, for they were gazing off into the distance with a vacant, comatose expression as though drugged. Detective Pilchard waved a hand in front of the figure's face; there was no response, no signs of life, no batter of an eyelid. (Not even a light tempura.) Refusing to be outwitted, the detective entered into a more sophisticated means of eliciting a response: yelling. Like really loudly; into the figure's ear. Then came the licking, the sneezing, the kicking, jabbing, punching, a friendly elbow thrust up the figure's conk, a bite of their cheek and more licking; alas, the detective's efforts were in vain, the figure still gazing, drooling, dead to the world. In the end, only a steaming crumpet on our hero's part, waggled seductively under the figure's nostrils, produced any signs of enlivenment.
“Yet I fear not enough to unshackle this poor soul from his stupor,” Crumpet-Hands Man sighed, withdrawing said crumpet back into his palm with a thwump. “I reckon we'd need a proverbial mountain of steaming crumpets to bring this poor stupor-ed soul back to the land of the living, detective. A volcanic eruption of bread-lava, no less!”
“No less?”
“Less, no.”
“Is that so?”
Blah blah, etc... Detective Pilchard asked our hero, “Could you actually produce that many crumpets, like a volcano's worth, if you really strained?” Our hero's reply was blunt.
“If I strained that hard, detective, I fear I may fudge my onesie.”
Mid-retch, the detective did well to change the subject. He noticed that the slumped figure was wearing a set of headphones on their head. “Look, they are wearing a set of headphones on their head,” he said for his own blah. The detective could also hear/see a tinny fizzing coming from the headphones, something playing loudly. “It doesn't sound like music,” the detective surmised, moving to remove the headphones from the figure's head, “so I wonder what they're listening to?–”
But when the peripherally challenged detective inevitably tripped and became entangled in the headphones' cable, his query was soon answered...
