A conspiracy was afoot.

In The Pencil Box, a coup was forming.  The Staplers, a sect of the Stationeries, have been the prevalent political party and their merciful political power is regulated only by their hats.  Without their hats, they are naked — exposed.

The Staplers use a valuable resource known as staples.  In the staple mines of Swingline Town, the ever-important node of the staple commodity, a nuclear bomb was set off by a renegade faction of pens called the Terrorist Pens.  This had effectively wiped out 34% of the total staple industry in The Pencil Box, resulting in a diminished power in the Staplers.  A staple drought was declared as Staplers went through the dredges of the Office Desk Canyons of The Pencil Box trying to find new suitable mines to replace what had been lost.

It was during this strategic opportunity in which the Stapler population was spread thin that the Terrorist Pens struck again — this time with a large wind burst that blew off all of the Stapler’s hats.  The Stapler’s hats is the prominent difference that Staplers have from one another.  Now they are all the same, and equal.  But that’s not how society works, so in one fell swoop the Staplers started to kill each other for no reason other than the fact that they all looked the same and it freaked each other out.

One spiritual Stapler by the name of John Stapler found himself in lonely cave, away from the ones he loved.  He yearned back for the days (sometime last week) where there was order in The Pencil Box, and it hadn’t been shaken up due to terrible design of its compartments.  It was then that John Stapler had realized he was not actually in a lonely cave, but the holiest and most important of locations to the Staplers in all of The Pencil Box, rediscovered only by John Stapler in a time of need.  John Stapler went deeper into the cave and found a monument that had the following words inscribed:

“In a time of need

You shall see

Not what is important, such as individuality

But what isn’t important, such as unique hats that set a fashion trend no one cares about”

The words meant something, I’m not exactly sure what since I’m not a Stapler, to John Stapler.  As he read the inscription on the monument, it began to glow, and time was reset to before the nuclear bomb in Swingline Town.

John Stapler had been given a chance to set things right before they go wrong!  Not only that, but he had a cool new hat that made him ultra-powerful.  Don’t ask me how, but Swingline Town was saved!  The Terrorist Pens had their nuclear bomb blow up in their faces, if you can call them faces, and the Terrorist Pens were no more, as their base of operations, a chemical plant in the Ink Hills, turned into a crater.

Anarchy would avoid The Pencil Box…

at least for now.