Read Online Crap Kingdom by D. C. Pierson - Free Book Online

were from a hot place they’d be grateful just to get to go to a place where it snowed, and if they were from a place where it snowed, they’d be grateful for a place with a beach. Here he was in the midst of this other universe no one on Earth had any idea existed and all he could think of was how it was mostly made of junk from Earth and how much that sucked.
    So: he wouldn’t do it. If his task was to be the most miserable person among the most miserable people, he wouldn’t do his task. He would do something else. He would find the beauty in this world. He would fulfill the prophecy in his own way and be his own kind of hero. He would do it for Pira, even if she didn’t understand why he was doing it and would have thought he was perfectly heroic just for making fun of stuff, which is pretty much all he did back home.
    Suddenly the king and Gark burst in. Or rather, the king entered normally and Gark burst in. It seemed like it was maybe the only way he was capable of entering a room.
    “We’ve got it! We’ve got it,” Gark said. “We have reached,” he said, drawing himself up in an attempt to look important, “a
compromise.
”
    “Yes,” the king said, “that is what you might call it, if a compromise was an agreement between two parties where one of the parties holds all the power but is merely making concessions to the other party so the other party will stop annoying him.”
    “Here it is!” Gark said. “Here is our compromise plan for how you may remain here and be our Chosen One and fulfill the prophecy that foretold your coming.”
    “Though it is my desire to see you fail spectacularly for reasons I explained to you in private,” the king said, “it is also my concern that any attempt at heroics on your part might inspire certain segments of the populace, and this would be a very bad thing, as heroics have been tried before in the service of the kingdom of Chhhhdddrrrdd, and they were a heartbreaking failure. In fact, it is what inspired my policy of reduced expectations, and I do not wish to see that work undone. That is why, if you are to be our Chosen One, you will do so in a limited capacity, in a preexisting role here in the kingdom. I am prepared to offer you the title of Executive Assistant to the Undersecretary in Charge of the Royal Rat-Snottery.”
    “Rat-Snottery?”
    “There are these big rats we get in the fields around Grrrhhetphtpp,” Pira chimed in, “but they like, have this condition where their noses get so filled up with snot they die before they’re big enough to eat.”
    “Precisely,” said the king. “So it is the task of the Rat-Snottery to clear said snot from their noses and bottle it. It is quite versatile. Used for a variety of things.”
    “It’s actually not so bad with the technology they have now,” Gark said. “You don’t even have to do it with your mouth anymore.”

7
    “YOU SHOULD REALLY check out the Rat-Snottery,” Gark said. “I’ll take you by there. Come on.”
    And then they were out in the street, or whatever they called the endless tangle of dodgy spaces between countless blanket forts and lean-tos and half structures. Tom was speechless. His “destiny” was a job. His mom was already pestering him to get a job in the real world. And he’d been dreading it and avoiding it, but he might have embraced it and gotten a job at Kmart if he knew that waiting on the other side of a portal in a clothes Dumpster in the parking lot was a gateway to a world in which he was a hero. He didn’t think he’d feel the same way if he knew that, waiting on the other side, was just another job, especially a job as assistant to the guy in charge of rat-snot.
    As they walked, he tried to distract himself by looking at the garbage around him. He stepped over a cereal box with a soccer player’s picture on it. He didn’t recognize the player or the brand of cereal.
Is this British garbage?
He looked up from the cereal box and he saw something