Everyone loves a robot and we have all enjoyed countless stories about impressive-sounding robots with wonderful names, all shiny and chrome and quick with witty one-liners and other typical science-fiction adventure banter designed to make everyone love the ‘mechanical friend’ forever more.

These are the kinds of robots in those kinds of stories that make their traveling companions laugh by making funny observations about whatever situation, sticky or otherwise, they find themselves in.

Along the way and in between the witty words, these kinds of robots are also able to solve a crisis or two. Put two robots together in the same story and you can also spend hours reveling in the robotic rhythms of their witty robotic repartee.

However, as Pearly Loses the Plot, Or Does She? demonstrates to us all, the relationship between humans and robots is not always a smooth and mutually progressive one.

A misguided investigation initiated by Pearly and the Interesting Twins leads to ninety-three employees of the First Fallstown Beneficial & Mutual Bank being mistakenly convicted of embezzling pension funds and imprisoned in the Fallstown Correctional Facility. It takes a lengthy legal campaign to get the convictions overturned and as a result of these hearings, Pearly is banned from ever investigating again.

‘You need to go back to school like every other child your age,’ says the presiding magistrate, the Right Honourable Judge Lambert Johnstone-Drury. ‘Your investigating days are well and truly over.’

And seemingly they are. The Interesting Twins are separated and sent to three different foster homes. Pearly Stockwell becomes the latest and most unwilling boarder at the Fallstown Academy for Troublesome Children.

Everything they had worked so hard to achieve now appears to be over, but as luck would have it or, indeed, as is essential for any story to resolve the issues that it contains, or just so the writers can add excitement to an episode that is seemingly going nowhere, it just so happens that Fallstown suddenly becomes the focus of a visitation from outer space.

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He will be thrilled if you follow him on Twitter! Falcon Boy @PBoyProductions #afairlyhopelesshero

She couldn’t care less if you follow her on Twitter! Pearly Stockwell @PearlyStockwell

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