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THE UNDER-DETAILED STORY

Once upon a time, a boy had an adventure, and for a while it looked like things would end really badly, but then he somehow saved the day, and everything turned out okay and he even became a better person.

THE END

THE OVER-DETAILED STORY

The boy put his right hand against the door, which was rectangular (the door, not his hand. His hand was hand-shaped), with the short sides of the rectangle being at the top and bottom of the door, and the long sides of the rectangle being the sides of the door, which made the door look exactly like a normal door that was painted lime green, which is a colour that is a type of green similar to the colour of a lime, which is a fruit.

The boy pushed the door by straightening his arm, and he was able to do that by using the muscles in his arm, which acted on messages his brain sent down to them through his spinal cord, but the boy didn’t think about all that; in fact, he didn’t even know how it all worked, only that he decided to push the door and then he did it.

The door swung open because it was only attached to the wall on one side by two hinges and the clever design of the hinge, which was invented at least 3600 years ago, which we know because ancient hinges were discovered in Hattusa, an ancient city that doesn’t exist anymore but which used to be in Turkey, which is a country, except it wasn’t called Turkey back then, it was called something else. So when the door had force applied to it by the boy, and in particular by his arm, the hinges allowed the door to swing open.

The boy looked into the room by using his eyes, and his eyes widened, or at least they appeared to widen, because his eyelids opened as far as they could and that made his eyes look bigger, but in fact his eyes didn’t actually get bigger and his eyeballs remained exactly the same size.

The reason that the boy’s eyes appeared to widen was that he got a surprise, which is something you get when something weird or unusual happens, and the reason he got a surprise was that in the room, sitting at a table, was a man pointing a gun at a woman, and the woman was the boy’s mother – or at least the boy had always been told that she was his mother, but he didn’t actually know if she was his mother, because he couldn’t remember back to his birth, because no one can remember back that far. But in fact the woman had given birth to the boy and she was his mother.

The man pointed the gun at the boy. ‘You,’ he sneered by using his mouth, vocal cords and throat to make sounds. The man’s brain sent a message to his right index finger to pull against the trigger of the gun. There was a loud ‘gun-going-off’ sound, and a bullet emerged from the end of the gun and proceeded in a southwesterly direction at a rate of 2735 kilometres an hour, fast enough to severely damage the skin, muscle and internal organs of the boy if it made contact with him.

The boy flung himself to his left in a southeasterly direction at 13 kilometres an hour, but did he move quickly enough to avoid the bullet?

We’ll get to that, but first let me use the next 23 pages to describe the table and the chairs and the walls and the floor and the ceiling in the room. The table, like most tables, had four legs, but not legs like a person or a cow or a lion might have because they didn’t have knees. Instead, they