With the previous chapter's somewhat baffling witticism still hanging in the air, our hero blasted! at Gumma-Mumma's gum monster two high-pressure jets of water from his crumpets, akin to that steaming gush from two bready fire-hoses. In a desperate attempt to shield itself from said jets (for monsters hate nothing more than getting drip on their drip) the gum monster brought its hands over its eyes, all-the-while lashing out blindly at our squirting, dangling hero. Thankfully Detective Pilchard masterfully manoeuvred the helicopter in avoidance (or to be more accurate, he waggled the flight stick in a feckless panic) until every last drop of water had been expelled from our hero's hands; thus the monster was drenched completely, sodden to the skin – and yet, huh?, completely unharmed. It removed its hands from its face, sneered with malevolent amusement; Gumma-Mumma, ditto.
“Water? Is that all you've got up your somewhat-stale sleeves, Crumpet-Hands Man?” she with the chins taunted. Having regained rein of her monster she licked the water from her lips, chuckled at the impotence of our hero's sally. “It'll take more than a splash of cold salty water to prevent my creation from crushing you and this city to the ground!”
“You are quite right, Gumma-Mumma,” our hero agreed. “But, unfortunately for ye,” he went all bumpkin for no apparent reason, “that not be any mere water I be squirting!”
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An' right proper he was, for he 'ad spoke that dimpsey a truth the villain'd soon come te realise!
When Gumma-Mumma attempted to squelch our heroes with a final thrust of her gum monster's mighty arm, to her astonishment the arm stretched, detached, flobbered away to the ground as though a string of gooey mozzarella. Before long the rest of her monster began to stretch and come apart like the aforementioned and susceptible-to-melting cheez. As Crumpet-Hands Man/Crumpet Squirt-Man and the detective/pilot watched on, so the monster continued to dissolve, melting downer and downer until it was little more than a glob of indistinguishable gumminess upon the city's pavements. Said glob quickly became a puddle, a series of smaller puddles, until all that remained of the once towering beast was a smattering of pale jelly-juice which trickled harmlessly into the gutters.
And as for its master... Well, what a wet and washed-up spectacle she did make, slumped weeping on the kerb in a shudder of weeps. Good. Served her right!
As the last of the gum monster was flushed through the sewer's multitude of pipes and waterways, so went with it the umpteen gallons of salty reservoir water which Crumpet-Hands Man had ejected from his mitts; this water acted like proverbial (and literal) acid upon the villain's gum-dams, cleansing the city's waterways like a laxative of crumpet-senna. Only when our exhausted hero had squeezed every last dribble from his crumpets, which now dangled limply from his wrists like two pairs of overstretched earlobes, did he request that Detective Pilchard bring them in to land; this the detective did with unparalleled finesse, his harmonious control over the helicopter like that of a rider over his faithful steed.
