Early Readers

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This woman is a dentist, so we cannot show you her face.

The Early Readers are a small but devoted order of book lovers that will wake at extremely early hours of the morning in order to read. Despite spousal protest the order continues to grow in number, with outposts soon to open in Norway and Western Australia.

History

• 38 000 BC A group of cavemen found the order after discovering the joys of examining rock carvings at daybreak.
• 38 000 BC This same group of cavemen are eaten later that day.
• 1801 AD Oscar Wilde stuns the world by inventing the light bulb, allowing the Early Readers to flourish after the majority of previous members fell prey to blindness/bears.
• 1993 AD Famous dyslexic, Tom Cruise, takes over at the helm, temporarily renaming the order of Real Yeaders and relocating their central headquarters to Planet Yead of the Thetan V galaxy.
• 1994 AD NASA (North American Senter for Academia) launches a one-off space exploration program with the aim of recovering the usurped headquarters. The program is a success, though continues operations for several successive decades for no particular reason.
• 2005 AD The release of Satan’s novel The Da Vinci Code prompts a near tripling in the size of the order’s membership. Scholars attribute this to the fact that the hours between 2 and 5 AM are the only times that the human brain functions at a level low enough to find the novel entertaining.

Lawsuit

The greatest threat to the order’s viability came in 1998 when Sandra Williams lodged a multi-million-dollar lawsuit against Stephen Hawking: member and then husband. Of the claims lodged, including those of the wilful destruction of linen through coffee stains and the robbery of sleep, Hawking only responded to the assertion that he sat down to urinate, pointedly querying jurors as to how else he was meant to stay in Middle-Earth while he was on the john. After many delayed hearings and several water-damaged copies of The Fellowship of the Ring, the court ultimately refused to rule on the case, reaching the historical consensus that metaphysical products could not be stolen.

Aftermath

Rock band Limp Bizkit, then facing a class-action lawsuit from the entire country of America for theft of dignity, welcomed the decision, though Williams was less receptive, later divorcing Hawking and claiming most of his possessions along with his larynx and 99% of his gross motor functions as part of the prenuptial settlement. Hawking admitted that the ruling did bring him some relief, though refused to comment on leaked papers indicating that the order may have been forced to change its name to The If Not Early Then At Least Inconsiderately Timed Readers.