There sits a man, a young man at that, with the power of suns at his command. He could do all sorts of things right now, many of them quite useful, but instead he sleeps. Quite a regular at it too, has been sleeping most nights for years now, though this is a relatively new setting for the sleep. He is Duke Smith, a researcher hoping for an exciting discovery to make his doctorate worth it, (I know brackets conventionally contain additional information, but I have none to add at this point, I just like putting them in where possible) thus making him satisfied that he has �made a difference� and all that time, money and oxygen he has been using at the taxpayers� expense for his education has not been wasted. The pencil teetering half over the edge of his desk vibrates as a particularly powerful snore sets it quivering, but it does not fall yet. Duke�s cheek is slowly picking up most of the days news from the newspaper it is lying on, providing a mobile information source for those willing to read backwards off of his face. Whilst he�s asleep I�ll talk about his name for a bit, it�s not like he can object at the moment.
Duke was named not out of pretension or family inheritance, but because his parents used to own a dog named Duke, a particularly loyal bloodhound which they loved dearly. Unfortunately Duke (the dog, not the chap currently sleeping) died during Duke�s (this one is the currently sleeping Duke, see how useful these brackets can be?) conception, leaping out of a window onto a hard concrete surface below. The Smith�s lived in a bungalow, so the height wasn�t the problem; it was the herd of cows stampeding past that got him. The parent Smiths were devastated and assumed that Duke had seen them in the bedroom, and out of angst at his owners committing such an act on each other, finally despaired of living and took his own life. They therefore took a vow of celibacy from that day onwards (which they have upheld), and when Freida was found to be with child (the parent Smiths were called Haberdashery and Freida by the way) they pledged to name the child Duke out of reverence for the deceased hound. Luckily the child was a boy; otherwise the jokes would have been even crueller.
So here sat / lay Duke now, oblivious to all but the rather strange dream currently occupying him. Dreams are a very personal thing, however, so we won�t be going there. I mentioned above that he has the power of suns at his command, and that was a purposefully obtuse way of stating the facts, to provide interest. He is sat very near a particle accelerator, which can provide the power of suns in that it can accelerate particles faster than they move in the majority of suns. He was collecting data on the collisions of various exotic particles which he wasn�t even sure really existed, though rather inefficiently considering he was sleeping. I�ll wake him.
�Bleurgh? Ruorwa?� he said, confused at being woken in such an odd manner. Carefully unsticking the newspaper from his cheek, he realised where he was and stared at the clock, which was unhelpfully out of focus. Then he noticed the newspaper headline: �Gnome Thief Caught�, and promptly ignored it. This was unsurprising, as this was a local newspaper from Lonsworth, some considerable distance from where he is now. Quite why he had a Lonsworthian newspaper even he doesn�t know, but it is probably irrelevant. Having now fully woken up, Duke went back to what he should have been doing � analysing particle accelerator data. While he�s doing this (it�s rather tedious) you should notice that he has no wedding ring on his finger (or any of his fingers for that matter), nor a picture of a loved one in his wallet. That is because he is single. He also has uncombed hair, though that isn�t saying much, as any hair is uncombed to a certain degree. This is because, once combing is finished, the hair is open to the elements and thus is ruffled at least to some degree, until it is combed again. This makes even the most well groomed person on average still a couple of hours uncombed. Duke was about ten hours uncombed, as he was a moderately groomed person.
Anyhow, in the meantime Duke has found quite an interesting event in his data. The details are quite silly, so I�ll ignore them, but Duke found it exciting, and so he stabbed at his calculator with renewed vigour and found that �Error� was the answer. Taking his time a bit more, Duke tried again and once more found his surprising result. It seemed that he had discovered a new particle, and this seemed to excite him, to such an extent that he demolished a large section of the desk in standing up rather too vigorously, and now is stood in the wreckage of wood and paper, feeling rather foolish. Desks are not usually demolished very casually, and this one was no exception, and Duke was left with rather a sizeable area of considerable pain on his left knee. The repair job then made on the desk should be put down with Arthur�s roundtable in the legendary furniture department. Staples (from a normal stapler, not even an industrial beast) loiter on joints, sellotape makes a wide-ranging and varied appearance, cementing it�s claim as office-adhesive of the century and there is more than a little of Duke�s blood giving it a deep mahogany appearance in places (from a splinter, or two). The effect is somewhat akin to a Gaudi creation, and looked quite unsuitable for standing up, let alone working on. We�ll leave Duke for a while now, as he is frantically writing up his discovery and he gets fidgety if he is watched while he writes.
In a pub, about a mile away from Duke, his friend Bobby was sitting down with a drink in his hand.
Unfortunately we can�t expand much on that topic, for at that moment Duke walked in, looking agitated. You may have noticed that time slipped a bit there, but it�s my memory so I�ll skip time if I want. The bits I missed out weren�t very exciting, so count yourself lucky. Duke had written his findings up now, and had even left his supervisor a note to try and get a meeting to present the findings to him. Bobby called his greetings:
�Hey, Duke, what�s new?�
Duke responded by very excitedly telling Bobby of his discovery, but it made very little sense to Bobby (who had very little interest in Physics) so I shouldn�t imagine it would make much more sense to you. Duke was a bit over-excited you see, and had a tendency to butt words together as he said them, or in some cases miss the words out altogether; such was his rush to get the information out. Instead, I�ll take you on a tour of the pub while they finish.
The pub was called �The Head�. This was mainly due to a rather lazy yet royalist old owner, who had got rather tired of changing the pub�s name every time the monarch changed sex (that is, when a new monarch was of a different sex to the old, not that the monarch had a sex change, that would be silly) and yet he didn�t want his pub to be out of date, and so there is now a gender ambiguous head with a crown upon it on the sign, with �The Head� written in flowery golden letters above. Inside, it is a very traditional pub, meaning it�s really smelly and sticky and has an innate suspicion of anyone from more than five miles away. (It�s very precise about this actually, and once got in a very long argument about where the five miles was measured from, as a bloke who lived under five miles from the car park, but more than five miles from the beer taps tried to get a drink. It ended with ordnance survey map drawing types being called in at ridiculous expense to decree that the man was in...