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The king exploded with anger. The crown he had was very beautiful and shiny, but he was still angry, because the crown was supposed to be made of gold. He suspected that it was actually silver, with a thin layer of gold over it. Of course, a crown made of silver with gold over it was just as nice as a gold crown, but the king of Syracause was angry, because he had supplied the gold! If it was made of silver the craftsman of the mighty crown had taken the gold for himself!

The main force of the king's explosion was directed towards his philospher, Archimedes. Archimedes was very clever and the king had summoned him to figure out if the crown was really gold. Archimedes was pushed back down the stairs by the force of the explosion. He cowered in terror behind a pedestal listening to the king blow up, informing him in anger of the things I said in the previous paragraph. When the explosions calmed down, Archimedes stuck his head up, surveyed the scene of devastation, and told the king that he would of course attempt to figure out a way, before slipping out the window.

Then Archimedes went for a swim at the public pool, because swimming always helped him think about tricky problems like what crowns were made of. He put on his swimming costume and jumped into the pool. Ouch! The water was many thousands of degrees Celcius!!! Archimedes leapt about a foot in the air, shouted “Eureka!” in pain, and ran home, his swimmers dissolving from the heat.

The next day Archimedes put the crown into the pool. It melted, of course, and the king saw the pool fill with silver! He immediately arrested the craftsman, and so Archimedes became the best philospher ever.

A few days later, Archimedes was in the Science room at Syracause. It had sand on the floor for drawing diagrams on. While he was drawimg, the Romans invaded. Archimedes looked up in terror as the door burst open to reveal... a dragon! A huge, green, scaly monstrosity of fiery terror with wings and a tail! What Archimedes did was calmly say, “Romans don't believe in dragons.” This caused the dragon to stare at him in a rather fierce way, and say, “So? They still kill philosophers with them.” Archimedes swore under his breath, realising that this dragon was not stupid. The dragon reared back to kill Archimedes, and from his gaping mouth came... a flamethrower!

Archimedes thought this was very strange of course, so he asked the dragon why, if it could breath fire, it would even bother with a flamethrower. The dragon sighed, set up a digital projecter and found the lamp had blown out. So the dragon used the fiery end of the flamethrower instead. He began a PowerPoint presentation on why dragons used flamethrowers when they could simply breath fire. It was very long, but the gist was that breathing fire gave the dragons a horrendous headache. When the presentation finished, the dragon looked around to see that Archimedes was gone. Damn, thought the dragon. That's the twelfth person who's escaped this week, thought the dragon.

Archimedes had used the revolving wall passage (while the dragon was explaining the flamethrower/breath-fire situation) to escape. All of the rooms in Syracause had one. They led to the Tallest Tower (with capital letters). From there the escaping person was supposed to grapple down the walls. Of course, an escaping person wouldn't have time to get a grappling rope, so they had to wait in the Tallest Tower until the danger decided to pass. Archimedes had been waiting for half an hour, and could still see the danger out the windows, not even thinking about passing. Suddenly the revolving wall passage revolved again, and the dragon leapt through, having figured out that it was the fourth book on the third shelf, not the other way around, that opened the passage. Archimedes swore under his breath again. The dragon had completely trapped him on all sides but the Biggest Window, through which he had observed the danger ignoring his wishes for it to pass. The dragon was approaching, wielding both his flamethrower, and a packet of aspirins. Archimedes obviously needed to escape, and the only path was through the Biggest Window. He wrestled with the Window's latch for a few moments, of course trying to delay the dragon by discussing the price of aspirins these days. Finally he had it open. He grabbed at where there should be some grappling ropes, and found none. He hurled himself out of the Biggest Window of the Tallest Tower, and was impaled on a Roman spear.

The Roman in question did not notice, he was too busy proceeding to the Science room to kill Archimedes. Of course when he got there, Archimedes was gone. He swore, because he was going to get a payrise if he killed Archimedes. He angrily stuck his spear into the sand, and found Archimedes on the end of it. He assumed he'd killed Archimedes and forgotten about it, so he triumphantly proceeded back to the office for his next paycheck.

The king of Syracause exploded, again, but this time literally. The Romans had stuffed him with gunpowder, which is very strange to do, particularly if you didn't even have gunpowder. Then they shot him with a dragon's flamethrower.

The End.

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