David and the Manhole Cover

One day, David was walking down the street. He encountered a manhole cover. It was the most offensive manhole cover he’d ever seen! It was flaunting its manliness—its hard, polished steel, with strategically-placed ridges for stability. But while David could appreciate and respect the strength of another man(-), he took offense at the fact that it took advantage of a pun in such an undignified manner.

He approached it and accosted it, and demanded of it: “You wanna brawl?” The manhole cover replied in the affirmative, and they brawled. With a power level much higher than that of the manhole cover, he came out victorious!

He was left with a dilemma. however. A manhole lay agape, a gap in the middle of the road, and its plug lay disheveled, shriveled, bedraggled, a rag compared to its former self! Sixteen million tons’ worth of cars would pass over the same spot every day! He had to find a replacement!

Thankfully, he was a swordsmith’s son, and he inherited the family business, and he had all of his mother’s discipline and technique and patience and all the required traits needed to conform to Cumberland’s Swordsmithing Guidelines. He traveled all across the countryside, searching for fine materials, out of which he crafted sixteen swords—the noblest swords Cumberland had and has ever known! He arranged these swords into an irregular octacontagon, as round as any group of sixteen swords can be, and pounded them into an even surface, then watched all day as sixteen million tons’ worth of cars passed over it. It was pretty good.