Authors: Colin Thompson
Floods 9
Some Little Known Floods Facts and Secrets
FLOODS
9
Who Wants To Be A
Billionaire?
Colin Thompson
illustrations by the author
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian
Copyright Act 1968
), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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The Floods 9: Who Wants To Be A Billionaire?
ePub ISBN 9781864715651
Kindle ISBN 9781864717068
Original Print Edition
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This work is fictitious. Any resemblance to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental except for my brother Spruce who is an even bigger idiot than my cousin Crawford.
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A Random House book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060
www.randomhouse.com.au
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First published by Random House Australia in 2010
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Copyright © Colin Thompson 2010
http://www.colinthompson.com
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The moral right of the author has been asserted.
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian
Copyright Act 1968
), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.
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Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.com.au/offices.
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
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Author: Thompson, Colin (Colin Edward)
Title: Who wants to be a billionaire / Colin Thompson
ISBN: 978 1 86471 945 1 (pbk.)
Series: Thompson, Colin (Colin Edward) Floods; 9
Target Audience: For primary school age
Dewey Number: A823.3
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Design, illustration and typesetting by Colin Thompson
Additional typesetting by Anna Warren, Warren Ventures Pty Ltd
Prologues are bits at the beginning of a book that tell you what happened in the earlier books in a series.
They are nearly always very boring and statistics show that only 1.37 per cent of people ever read them. So if you think I'm going to go through the eight books before this one and write a summary of all the incredible things that happened for 1.37 per cent of you, then you've got another thought coming, and that thought should be,
Ooh, I must rush out straight away and get all the other Floods books that I have been too much of a loser to read before.
But there are two pages here for a prologue so here is a pro log.
And here is an amateur log.
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Now read on . . .
The trouble with living happily ever after is that it can get pretty boring, and for witches and wizards it can get ten times more boring than it does for ordinary people because they are ten times more intelligent than ordinary people.
Ordinary people who are older than about twenty are quite often already on the slippery slope downhill to a life of total boredom, but they pretend they're not by gardening or going on holiday or restoring rusty old cars until they are shining like new, but just as rubbish as they were when they were new because they were rubbish cars in the first place.
Ordinary people who are younger than about
twenty, and know in their hearts that it's only a matter of time until they pass twenty and their lives become boring too, try to pretend it's not happening by sitting in dark places sending hundred of text messages to people who are sitting in a different dark place sending hundreds of text messages all of which say nothing at all, lol, thnx, omg, booms.
1
There are millions of things humans can do to stop being bored â the trouble is that most of them are even more boring than being bored.
Witches and wizards can do all that stuff in the blink of an eye and a lot more besides. They are too intelligent to spend months putting a cheap, rubbish car back together. All they have to do is a couple of quick spells and what was once a pile of rusty old tin cans in a puddle is suddenly three 1961 Ferrari 250 GT SWB California Spyders.
2
Even simple distractions can be boring. If a wizard want a Cornetto, he doesn't have to drive down to the shops in one of his 1961 Ferrari 250 GT SWB California Spyders. He just clicks his fingers and there's chocolate running down his fingers before you can say, âI wonder if it's raining in Belgium?'
If a wizard is sitting by a lovely lake and watching the flying jellyfish splattering themselves against the rocks has got boring, he can create an instant island with trees and purple grass and Belgian nudists
getting attacked by man-eating thistles. Nerlin Flood, the King of Transylvania Waters, has created seventeen of these islands, though he did make the grass a different colour and the nudists a different nationality on each one. His wife, the sensationally irresistible Queen Mordonna, also created seventeen islands, but hers floated fifty metres above the ground and the nudists all wore clothes so as not to frighten little children as they drifted over their school playgrounds.
3
Of course, it's hard to imagine that anyone living in a country as staggeringly beautiful as Transylvania Waters, with its exciting furniture-rotting dampness, gorgeous baby-eating plants and vampire kittens, could ever be bored. Most people would give their right arms to live there and in fact
many people have.
4
There is a small village on the far side of Lake Tarnish where everyone living there has done that, and hidden behind the village in the Big Forest is a colony of immigrants who have sacrificed their eye-teeth too.
