Gentle Reader,

Whilst researching our current story, The Paris Awakening, we have come across a startling fact. It seems that the fiendish swine at the heart of the story, Messers Clackprattle and Pook, have had an alternate career before their appearance in these pages. Why,  the scurrilous swine had been busy bamboozling the good and honest folk of the British press. Can you imagine!

Their modus operandi was to invent some fictitious, scandalous tale regarding a famous personage. They would then contact members of the journalistic profession with aforementioned stories and attempt to extract money from these poor deluded souls. The details that these devils supplied were naturally as lurid as possible in order to extract the maximum payment possible. Luckily we have been able to uncover this practice and find the tool they used to perpetrate this fraud. We present it below. By choosing a sequence of random numbers one can quickly generate some fictitious “news” stories.

We can only thank the good editing principles of the more moral periodicals and hope that such a swindle isn’t visited upon other more modern forms of communication. For how would an honest chap know what was real and what was not?

Yours – in shock and horror

Mr Michael and Miss Pichette