All head, elbows, fists and crumpets (and crumpet-fists) Crumpet-Hands Man went on smashing the control panel of The Slumberer's control-panel-device-tax-whine-thing. From his nightgown the villain went mental with rage, yelled demands of cessation. Like a gnome from a catapult he dived across the rooftop and attempted to wrestle our hero away from the control panel; but he with the hands of crumpet was too strong for the furious codger in a nightie, and in flat no time (and smashing) our hero had terminated the transmission of anaesthetising whine. Success! The city was at once returned to tranquillity!

  However, against all of Crumpet-Hands Man's expectations and much to his distress, not one citizen on the streets down below awoke from their zombie-like amble; like worker bees drunk on honey – or skiving quail intoxicated on whatever skiving quail happen to sup of an evening to drown their sorrows of the great Thanksgiving shoot – the snoozing citizens only bumbled ever faster towards the city's outer cliff edge.

  But how? Had our hero not killed the music/whine, saved the day? Maniacally, grinning through his tufty beard, The Slumberer chuckled from the floor.

  “As you can see, Crumpet-Hands Man, I have made a few improvements to that tame whining you heard back at my factory. Even when ceased, this whine sticks in one's head like a bad pop song! Let me assure you,” the villain chuckled some more, his victory unpreventable, “there is nothing you can do to awaken these pathetic people from their fate.”

  “I wouldn't be so tasty,” our hero smirked – before noticing his typo. “Hasty! I meant to say hasty, not tasty... Or, perhaps,” he reconsidered, now noticing the terrific heat the tower's radio antenna was radiating, “perhaps I did mean tasty...”

  With that stoic assuredness of a hero who knew exactly what needed be done (kinda) Crumpet-Hands Man put his thumb in his mouth, blew, popped the crumpet earbuds from his ears. (One of them landed in the villain's lap; he was disgusted.) Having pulled a small aerial from the end of his other thumb (the one not in his mouth, which he would shortly go about removing) our hero called into his edible hand-radio, “Detective, have you located the transmitter's power supply?”

  “Almost,” came the somewhat lacking response from many floor down. “It seems that the main terminal is guarded by two heavy-set–”

  “Doors...”

  “Okay, I'm in,” the detective with the shears confirmed sometime later. There came that distinctive sound of sheers being readied, snip snip. “Just give the order and I'll cut the power.”

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  But wait! Our hero had another plan in mind.

  “Detective,” he said, “do not cut the power. Instead, and listen to me very carefully... I want you to turn the transmitter's power up – to maximum!”

  Detective Pilchard gasped. “Maximum? But that'll turn the antenna into a proverbial heat rod. It'll be hotter than a chip-shop saveloy fresh from the fryer!”

  “Indeed,” our hero said, licking his lips. (His.) “And I intend to climb to the very tip of said saveloy and embrace it!”

  In a mocking tone (and a flapping nightgown) The Slumberer enquired as to what futilities our hero planned on doing. Heroically, our hero replied, “I am going to save this city the only way I know how: With the awesome power of crumpets!”

  Thus, with this rather odd profession still hanging in the air, Crumpet-Hands Man took hold of the antenna's base with his fists of floury freedom. Grimacing, he yelled into his radio, “Now, detective!”

  Dutifully, yet with tears of regret in his ears, Detective Pilchard's cranked the radio antenna's power supply up to the very maximum; instantaneously, every erect inch of antenna began to hum, fizz, crackle, spark; the resulting electrostatic built to such a tremendous height that The Slumberer's gnomey beard became a bulge of prickles, fast resembling a hedgehog which had wandered across the third rail.

  And the heat! Good golly! The antenna was so hot it caused those lesser transmitters around it to wilt like overcooked spaghetti! (If it was spaghetti made of metal. Metal pasta. Masta.)

  Yet Crumpet-Hands Man kept his crumpet-hands-hands on the steaming antenna. Despite the ferocious heat and the obvious pain it was inflicting upon his person (and hands) our crumpety hero resolved to cling fast and climb faster up the antenna; and climb he did, shimmying up and up like a crumpet-ape! Soon Crumpet-Hands Man was near the very top – and soon the very air was ripe with the distinctive stank of burning crumpet. From the ground below, yelling up to the rooftop until his voice was hoarse and his ears/eyes goat, Detective Pilchard pleaded with Crumpet-Hands Man, “Please! You'll be burned alive! Relinquish your hold, before it is too late!” But our brave hero would not. Despite the agonising toasting of his crumpet hands he knew that only he could dislodge the city from its slumber. “Because,” he preached as though a crumpet-Moses on the mount, “nothing wakes you up like the smell of a toasted crumpet!”

  Indeed, our hero spoke no lies. With a blackened cloud of toast-crumpet fanning wide across the city, the stunted villain/hedgehog picked himself up and peered down from the rooftop's edge; to his dismay, he did see a sea of people not sidling into the sea as he had foreseen; instead, as the intensifying whiff of burning hero tickled their nostrils, the citizens shook off their malaise, awoke. “Crumpet...” they sighed wantonly as one, hoisting their noses, turning and sniffing longingly toward that rousing aroma of “hot-buttered crumpet.” (The 'hot butter' was actually our hero's sweat catching on the antenna; but it smelt, and combusted, much the same.)

  And so, one by one and not a second to soon, the citizens went on awaking; yet all the while the agonising roasting of Crumpet-Hand Man continued, a painful sight for Detective Pilchard to behold. He begged that our hero, his friend, let go of the antenna; he had saved enough citizens; now he must save himself! “Never!” was our charcoaled hero's terminal cry. Only once every last nose in Trifle City had been unchained from its slumbery prison did he finally relinquish his grip of the antenna; then he fell away. Following a slow, limp, angel-like descension, our hero landed bot-bot-first upon the radio tower's roof with an heroic, albeit lifeless, thud. There he remained, unmoving. Detective Pilchard feared the worst.