Chapter 5 – The secret laboratory

Cuddles didn’t seem to notice the secret door, which led through to the elevator. The man pressed a button on the panel, which had the floor number crossed out and “laboratory” written in marker next to it. Cuddles had never really gotten the hang of travelling in elevators and couldn’t tell whether they were travelling up or down. The elevator stopped sharply as it reached its chosen floor. In Cuddles long life, he’d seen a whole lot of science fiction TV shows while sitting on the couch with dad and thought he’d had a good idea of how hidden laboratory should look (most of the shows he’d watched, depicted them as clean, white and bright places with lots of machines beeping, buzzing and sloshing, kind of like a futuristic hospital). Cuddles hadn’t been disappointed, he’d been devastated because he couldn’t see a single beeping machine or clean white wall. All of the walls in this place weren’t even painted, although they did have a nice green fungus life growing through the brick work. The man holding Cuddles walked through the large damp smelling laboratory towards the only area of the room with lights switched on. In the shadows next to the lit area, was a silhouette of a hunched backed figure. Who stood next to a chalk board scratching away at its enormously round head facing the board in the dark and summarising new equations. The figure stopped and acknowledge the man standing only a few feet away looking rather sheepish.
The man’s gaze became erratic, looking from one direction too another being very careful to avoid glancing into the shadowy figures eyes. The silhouette stepped out from the shadows and into the dim light of the room. Cuddles could now see the person’s features and he noticed that the hump on its back wasn’t a hunch, created from years of bad posture. But was in fact a rucksack with hundreds of wires streaming out from it which connected into a skull cap helmet, which had a strip of rainbow coloured dimly flashing lights, dotted a cross it’s front.

The man wearing the rucksack and helmet removed them, revealing his true characteristics. He was quite a plain, short, middle aged man with wild wave grey hair, large milk bottle thick glasses which covered his eyes and dressed almost entirely in an off white colour lab coat that had a badge with “Professor Warkin” written on to it. The professor walked over to his assistant, clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth (making a tutting sound) and shaking his head from side to side. Standing directly in front of his assistant he had to arch his neck backwards and almost look straight up to see into his rather tall assistant’s eyes. Cuddles’ first impressions of professor were that he seemed a man of few spoken words, but whom could let his expression communicate loudly of his inner thoughts. The silent body language of the professor had become so expressive, that about ninety-nine percent of intelligent life on the planet would understand him (but most animals and even some plants wouldn’t be too concerned about the views of a geeky short scientist). His lab assistant, on the other hand seemed to be a member of the one percent who didn’t understand. He seemed so bad at reading body language that you could have placed a rabid wolverine in front of him and he’d probably say who’s a pretty boy then stroke it vigorously hard so it could feel it.
The professor spoke to his assistant “where are the Antique’s I sent you for, boy?” which he said in a certainly fake think German accent. At this his assistant began to stutter while trying to answer him, but was only able to squeeze out “the, the, the they were, were shut for lu, lun, lun… dinner “. The professor interrupted him and said without the accent this time “It looks to me like they weren’t the only ones at lunch! You really need to learn how to use a napkin in future, it looks like most of your food is still stuck to your face”. It was spoken in a commanding voice while he marched back and forth in front of his timid assistant. The professor then stopped marching and asked his assistant “well, did you bring me