Episode 13: Mission Improbable.

Before some of the characters in this story became characters in this story, they had lives. As we know, Discriminant Boy, who spent sixteen years living in a universe with zero spatial dimensions, is not one of those characters. Neither, for the record, are Spike Boy, Mandelbrot, the 70-ft Woman, Sensai Garden Gnome, the Complex Father or The Vampire. Interestingly enough, Win Tin Tin used to be the life of the party, and the nuns had the best lives of all. But we won't go into that here.

Before turning up unexpectedly in a gutter one fine morning (not for the first time, I might add), Hyperbolia worked undercover for Tragic Antagonistic No-hopers Getting Extra Non-taxable Trips. TANGENT was a secret organisation dedicated to overcoming evil in all its forms, mainly at really good parties. Now, as we all know, mathematics is one of the Ultimate Goods (as well as being really addictive and also a religion on the side), so obviously TANGENT had to overcome all threats to this transcendent idol of Greatness. Before she drove her heel into Discriminant Boy's forehead, Hyperbolia had overcome threats to trigonometry, differential calculus and the existence of the imaginary root of a negative number.

Now this was all some time in the past, and Hyperbolia was beginning to forget her life in that twilight zone of Maths, parties and rigid law enforcement. (Unless you had an appropriate bribe... ) She had now travelled down the slippery slope so far she was beginning to tolerate Discriminant Boy's slavish devotion. Living in a sewer is hardly a glamourous job.

Speaking of glamourous jobs... The Vampire and Win Tin Tin were quite enjoying their little stint as Totalitarian Rulers of the World. There's a point where there's just too much of a good thing, and neither of these characters were anywhere near that point. They were living it up. Food-wise, they had more Tim Tams than the 70-ft Woman could have swallowed had she been a black hole. Maths-wise, well, they were doing bugger all. And loving it. Happiness-of-The-World-wise... well two of of three ain't bad.

It came to pass that the world wasn't terribly happy at all, which was nothing new, but no one had known Sensai Garden Gnome was the ruler, and thus The World couldn't do anything about its condition. Now it could. And Sensai Garden Gnome was heading the resistance movement, for, of course, purely selfish reasons.

Now, I can't tell you how, for fear of my life, but Sensai Garden Gnome knew about Hyperbolia's little job on the shadier side of Ultimate Good, and thought she might have the appropriate experience to lead a revolt. So he sent her a message.

Hyperbolia woke up one morning an astonishing earthquake and went outside to receive a small parcel delivered by the 70-ft Woman (at this point, the 800-metre Woman) who had tried her best to be subtle (she was only wearing mildly orange flares).

She opened the parcel. Inside was a small cassette recorder. She yelled for the others to join her outside. Spike Boy and Discriminant Boy crawled out of the sewer. She pressed the PLAY button. Sensai Garden Gnome's voice said "Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take over the world on my behalf. If you use permutations properly, you find you have a 95% chance of success, a 10% chance of being pulverised, a 14% chance of being eaten alive by a rabid goose, and the remainder of just crawling back into your sewer. This tape will self destruct in ten seconds."

After three hours, and the discovery that the tape was one of the most indestructible objects in the known universe, The Intrepid Three set off to re-capture the world, taking the GrumbleBum with them, although they could have travelled faster on a tricycle.

After several times the age of the Universe had passed, they arrived at Borenore, currently the capital of the World, attempted to recapture the World and failed utterly on their first attempt and were eaten alive by a rabid goose, which happened to be in the area.

Fortunately, the goose was an old one, and didn't take too well to having two zeros, a mode of transport and a Super-Zero in its stomach, and it threw them back up. They then made another attempt to recapture the World, this time reaching The Vampire's throne room, slipping in some extraordinarily inconveniently placed blood, and being utterly pulverised.

Or so they thought, until they realised that they hadn't been beaten around the head with a meat axe, it had simply been Win Tin Tin spitting lemon pips at them. So they made a strategic withdrawal and crawled back into their sewer. They would obviously have to acquire weapons, military know-how and low grade intelligence before overcoming this foul tyranny.