Clocks and Boxes

Book excerpt: The future is now, but also was then, and may still be happening at the same time. South Hertling is no stranger to weirdness. Evil hardware stores, aliens, supervillains, talking cats... the little Australian suburb has seen them all, and more. Now there's a spooky Pyramid, and it spreads its shadow across the South Hertling Super Centre every day. It falls to Alfred Pilbrook to do something about it, which is a little unfair because he just runs a watch shop. Fighting anomalous monuments isn't really his thing. But Emma Crispin from the storage accessories shops is quite keen on tidying the Pyramid away and Alfred is quite keen on Emma so... Yeah, it's looking like it's Alfred's problem however you slice it. Fortunately, the shopkeepers have help in the form of the time-lost steampunk engineer Fanaka and the deeply unammused Donna Coheco. Can this colorful quartet save the day and defeat the ill-defined but probably evil forces behind the Pyramid? Or can they fail to do that? Those are really the only options, here. AI content free.