Well, it’s sort of a corgi. It’s actually Daedalus, but we’ll get to that.
This chunky debut issues works like a charm. Dudley is a brainy high school kid, who has a special engineering display night for inventors coming up at his school. His proud dad wishes to attend but he’s ill and Dudley doesn’t want him going. Dad’s got a ticket anyway.
The event is a special night and Dudley has invented a way to use some type of cabling to create fabric that can change shape and look depending on what you wish, rather unimaginatively named Duds. His tutor, Dr Shae, owns the dog Daedalus, and dog doesn't like Dudley. On the night of the big event, with Dudley already dismayed to receive a text from his dad saying he was taken ill while trying to get there, Daedalus actually sabotages Dudley’s outfit, causing him to be revealed in just his underpants.
There had been a brief interruption where a prime bad guy instructs underlings to retrieve a special watch, so it’s no surprise when armed chaps turn up at the event, and Dr Shae is killed, but not before giving Dudley a watch to safeguard. Aha! Daedalus mentions Shae was the best student he’d had in a hundred years, and a real warrior, but now she’s dead they need to run. Dudley doesn’t question that the corgi is talking, and off they go but inevitably there is more fighting, both of them pit,ted against the bad guys and they triumph.
Dudley then gets taken to the Stateside home of the Chymical Society, which honours all past famous inventors, and filled in on what’s happening, and how Daedalus really is Daedalus, and how he invented a perpetual motion machine, the Forever Machine in the title. When originally turned on it opened a portal through which the Prometheans came a calling, some of which were fighting them earlier.
The machine still exists, operated by the watch (designed by Archimedes, built by Hypatia). Daedalus invented an automaton, in animal form (so it would go unnoticed) which contained his thoughts and aims and would thereby watch over the … watch after he died. Through the centuries various inventors had improved the design, and so here’s the latest version, in cute corgi form.
Daedalus explains Dudley needn’t worry, he’s a temporary custodian and a new warrior will be meeting them there and Dudley can leave. He also tells him he’s a crap inventor because he isn’t thinking big enough. At which point the new warrior turns up but something has gone wrong as it’s the bad guy we saw earlier, in golden armour, and it becomes clear he and Daedalus have met before.
It’s pretty impressive and I will be following this, if only because … well, corgi!