The Demonstration...continued

Dear readers, I apologise for my outburst yesterday. My ill temper was not of your doing, but rather caused by inadvertantly knocking my plum with a trowel. This engendered a feeling of discontent which caused me to become sullen and pugnacious and take out my hot passions on you, gentle readers. For this I am sorry. If any readers offended by my comments could send me their address, I will post out a collectable Pog by way of an apology. It may accumulate in value over the coming years.

Back to business: Bossert's demonstration of his so-called 'ultimate puzzle'. The puzzle is not difficult to explain, but I am aware that my readership is mainly made up of gypsies and dullards, so they will find it difficult to understand. Therefore I will explain it in painfully simple terms.

Since 1983, Bossert has devoted himself entirely to the creation of the ultimate puzzle. After he solved the Cube, a feat no one else has since repeated, he sought to design a challenge worthy of him. But how to improve upon the Cube? He threw his life into the task. After many, many years of considering the problem, the schoolboy cubemaster hit upon a design so complex, so incredible, so ultimately evil that creating such a thing would be akin, morally speaking, to coughing up a driblet of phlegm directly onto the baby Christchild.

If we were to place Bossert's ultimate puzzle upon the Satanic Puzzle Spectrum (created by Norris McWhirter) where Diabolical Dingbats TM are rated 3 Beelzebubs and Killer Sudukos TM are rated 6, Bossert's would break the top of the scale, previously reckoned to be 100, and come in at roughly 12 million Beelzebubs.

Bringing such a fiendish and wicked puzzle into the world demands the restoration of moral equilibrium. By the casting of bones and the pricking of thumbs, Bossert found that his puzzle, before it could be created, required the sacrifice of two honest human souls. Playfully making an additional puzzle of this problem, he sought a method to solve it without taking any lives. He contacted a leading paranormal investigator at a Scottish university (whose name he withheld from me) who told him that 10,000 ant souls would happily stand in for one human soul, and that a certain Dundonian man (me, Horton Carew) was possessed of several souls thanks to eating magic mushrooms on the 8th of March, and perhaps one of these spare souls could be taken without ending his life.

And thus he took 10,000 ant souls without mercy, and thus he came to kidnap me and aimed to steal one of my souls. And so I stood before the throng of puzzlers in San Diego, now aware of my fate. Bossert announced that the demonstration of his puzzle would begin as soon as my soul was extracted. He produced a Proton Pack and, without a pause, fired it at me. The pain was indescribable, so I will not attempt to describe it.

The memory of this horrific event has caused my hands to shake and tremble to such an extent that I dounbt I will ber able tocontinue typoing toinight, so I willl end my narratoivee for tonighty.