The Three Cardinal Rules of Drinking Hot Tea

Follow the Rules

The Three Cardinal Rules of Drinking Hot Tea are as follows:

1. Take a conventional teacup filled with scalding tea and smash it over your head. Drink the drops of tea rolling down your face. If you taste something metallic and salty that may or may not have a shade of crimson, that's an extra bonus.

2. Gargle the tea in your mouth to wash away any dirty particles that may be detrimental to your job interview.

3. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO DRINK TEA ABOVE 212 DEGREES FAHRENHEIT. This is the optimal temperature to kill all bacteria in your body.

Which was how Reginald Marlin found himself embroiled in a multi-dimensional hypno-orgy with punch-drunk, chainsaw-headed umbrellas, running from an umbrella ska band/thrash metal/girl group swinging their teacups at him, trying to beat his brains into smashed potatoes, on a planet that was actually an escaped semi-sentient, GMO all-you-can-eat buffet.

Even when running for his life, Reginald did it abysmally and utterly incorrectly. There were those who argued that there was no correct way to run for your life—– there was, however, an inter-dimensional consensus on the incorrect way to run for your life. The incorrect way to run for your life was to move at a fast pace–– that is, to run. It was in times like these that dimensional grammaticists argued about the inaccuracies of language, and how "running for your life" should instead be termed "walking for your life". There was a well-known (and multiversally supported) law devised by the Tyronian philosopher Aliuette the Great which stated, "Any situation from which you cannot extricate yourself by walking away at a leisurely pace should be taken out in the street and publicly executed for bothering all of existence with its meaningless trouble." It was helpful to note that the Tyronians were a species of five-legged, sentient four-poster beds with narcissistic, sentient digestive systems, well-known for being possibly the laziest species in the multiverse.

But of course, Reginald Marlin, being a human (a species widely considered to be hardly sentient or even living at all), did not know of Aliuette the Great's universally revered and worshipped law, and as such, did what any other stupid, bipedal, mostly hairless ape would do in a similar situation.

He ran for his life.

And, much like any other stupid, bipedal, mostly hairless ape, he began to consider exactly what led up to this moment, in a manner which would have easily invalidated him from being considered a sentient being. 

***

It is important to consider that the story of Reginald Marlin is a story which has been told for countless eons across the history of the multiverse: a stupid, bi- pedal organism, blissfully unaware of the fact that its species is not the only species in the multiverse roughly considered "sentient", is kidnapped by a civilization much more technologically and sociopolitically advanced than its own pitiful civilization. Eventually, this stupid, bipedal organism becomes accustomed to this new multiverse and integrates itself usefully into society–– without, however, taking the trouble to truly improve itself and cure itself of the stupidity and deplorable social norms of its own civilization.

In most stories, this is treated in a very cursory fashion, while in others the matter is disregarded completely. The result of this is a truly deplorable series of events that would easily have destroyed the multiverse–– and it almost did. With every new species admitted to the multiversal community, the community had to tole- rate their social norms–– something which was, truly, very distasteful and disgusting to many of the original species. That was evidenced in 55,871 A.D. with the discovery of the Huzan race. A Huzan can best be described as a hybrid between a cloud of sentient smoke, a pregnant hippo, and a particularly obese hurricane that needs to forgive itself. That was the adult stage. The larval stage, meanwhile, was completely different: a larval Huzan has been most aptly described as Marilyn Monroe if Marilyn Monroe used a beauty filter turned up to eleven. In the eyes of the Huzan, however, the larval stage was the ugliest and most deplorable part of their life cycle, and as such, covered their faces and bodies in the larval stage accordingly with thick layers of nihilosilk, which basically made all of them invisible due to the fabric's light-bending properties. A law was put into place mandating nihilosilk coverings at the larval stage; the penalty for violation was nothing short of death.