Snickerscat woke the next morning with an awful headache.
She soon found that this was because she'd fallen asleep on her keyboard, and
the spacebar was pressing rather uncomfortably into her forehead. Funny,
thought the mutant Buzz, I'm still at work… She glanced around the
Times office building with a sleepy yawn. The sun was just rising over the horizon,
and her co-worker, Sventhor, hadn't come in yet. His terminal sat, blank and
waiting for him to arrive and turn it on.
She tried to recall the events of last evening,
and how they had lead to her being face down on the keyboard this morning. The
last thing she could clearly remember was Sventhor telling her she needed a
vacation, and then, her walking into Mister Shankly's office to ask for time
off. After that, it became sort of a blur. There was something about poetry--bloody
awful poetry, in fact. But whenever she tried to focus on that, a sharp
pain started to make her head throb most uncomfortably. Snickerscat figured
something must have happened... something very wrong. That crafty Shankly must
have tricked her somehow into agreeing to work overtime! Surely that must be
why she had been in the office so late... what else could it be?
She glanced up at the screen, which was playing
a screensaver over and over. The funny thing was, it wasn't her screensaver.
It was a marquee that scrolled and bounced all over the place. The words it
said were odd, too. "Must Find Dung... Must Find Dung…" she read. "Huh. Someone
must be playing a joke on me." With a resigned sigh and shrug, she wiggled the
mouse until the screensaver stopped.
"Might as well get some work done…" she said,
and began to sort through her inbox for a likely series or two. This week's
section was still not shaping up right. Shankly was bound to be on the warpath
if he found out that she'd slept all night instead of finding good series. Angry
Shankly was not a sight she wanted to see. For the next two hours, she sorted,
and finally, found a series or two that wouldn't make the collective populous
of Neopia wince and run screaming from their papers in horror.
"Whew," said Snickerscat, wiping a bit of sweat
from her brow.
The office was starting to spring into life,
as the rest of the Time's submission reading crew got settled into their cubicles
for another hard day of sorting through the best of the best and the worst of
the worst. Sventhor took his seat at the terminal beside Snickerscat, waving
his blue wing absently. "Hey, there- you're in early!"
"I, uh... couldn't sleep," she muttered lamely,
glancing over at her friend the Bruce. It wasn't easy to hide things from a
close friend, but she couldn't for the life of her manage to speak about what
had happened yesterday.
"You really do need that vacation," Sventhor
said, not glancing up from the computer he was kicking into life, "definitely."
"Well…"
Sventhor glanced over and blinked slightly.
"Been eating chocolate?"
"Huh?" Snickerscat blinked back, confused by
the question.
"Look at your keyboard. It's all over your hands
and face, too…" Sventhor said, pointing out the brown streaks that marred her
keys and the mouse.
"I… I guess…" Snickerscat stammered, looking
down at her hands. They were covered in a brown residue. She lifted them up
to take a sniff, and nearly fell over. That definitely wasn't chocolate on her
hands. "Dung…" she gasped, disgusted.
"Oh, you heard about that too? It's all over
the News, so I guess you would have. Isn't that sick? I mean, who would want
nasty, smelly dung. They say it must have been the work of some obsessive compulsive
collector," Sventhor said absently, getting down to work.
"Dung… collector?" Snickerscat gasped, remembering
the words that had been on her screensaver, and the uncomfortable hole in her
memories. That, along with what was all over her hands, lead up to a pretty
disturbing conclusion.
"Yeah, supposedly, this Dung Collector breaks
into the homes of the rich and famous and steals their dung. Rare Tyrannian
dung furnishings, dung shields, chewing dung, dung slushies, piles of dung -
you name it, this creep's stolen it!" Sventhor said cheerfully.
"I… uh… have to go wash up…" stammered Snickerscat,
running towards the bathroom.
"Huh." Sventhor scratched his head. His friend
was acting rather odd this morning.
In the bathroom, the mutant Buzz scrubbed her
hands and face furiously, trying to rid herself of every last trace. After three
washings, she still didn't feel quite clean inside. She knew, deep down, that
she must be the dung collector- and somehow, she'd figure out how and why. "If
I return all the dung, maybe no one will be angry. I can claim its work related
stress... that must be it anyhow."
Snickerscat started out of the washroom, and
began to head back towards her terminal. She froze in her tracks, however, when
she saw the Chia police coming in the door. Oh, no! she thought, they've
found me out! The desperate urge to hide came over her, and she ducked
into the first door she came to- Shankly's office. After all, Mister Shankly
was the last person to have seen her last night, anyhow. Maybe he would be able
to help….
But something was different about Shankly's
office today. For one, he wasn't sitting behind his desk making his amazing
tower of paper-clips, writing a poem, or staring at his Vanja poster. Everyone
knew that through some strange employment deal, Shankly never left his desk.
Sventhor had speculated that he was either chained to it or super glued in place.
Whatever the case, he was gone now. The office didn't even have its familiar
smell of Stunt Studio Hair Gel. Snickerscat was becoming quite alarmed. Outside,
she could hear the police searching the office- it was only a matter of time
until they came to her terminal. She decided to crawl under the desk to hide….
Much to her surprise, however, an open trap
door was under the desk. She descended the ladder that was beneath cautiously,
and found herself in the fabled basement of the Times. It was rumoured that
horrible stuff was found here- stuff so hideous that it had to be locked away
for all time. The thought was frightening, considering the dubious quality of
some of the submissions they'd received. Over time, all those horrible things
could have collected and amassed a sort of primitive intellect, bent on horror
and destruction. Or there could just be bunches of old back issues that never
sold well. Snickerscat was hoping for the latter.
From somewhere within the basement, with all
its strange boxes and shadows, she could hear evil laughter. The sound was hauntingly
familiar, and she tugged at the corners of her memory to find out why. "Shankly…"
she gasped, remembering. "He laughed like that yesterday… right after reading
me that awful poem!"
"Bloody awful, wasn't it?" sneered Mister Shankly,
stepping out of the shadows. In his left hand he held a dung slushie, and in
his right, an Alien Aisha Ray Gun. "Welcome to my secret lair, little buzz.
I do hope you'll stay for… refreshments?"
"Shankly!" she cried, "It was you! You're the
Dung Collector!"
"Why yes," he said, striking a villainous pose.
"Yes, I am."
"But why Mister Shankly? Why?"
"Do you think you're the only one who needed
a vacation?" he snapped, eyes brimming with a dangerous madness as he closed
in with the ray gun. "Day in, day out of sorting through the dung heap that
is my inbox…do you know how many people forget to include their username with
their submissions?"
"A lot?" she gasped, backing up.
"Their username!" he cried in frustration. "The
most basic of all basics! 60%!"
"I, uh…" Snickerscat backed up further, into
a box.
"And then, there's the little poems I get--like
we're the poetry contest, or something! So I started collecting those poems…
such bloody awful poems… and learning their hideous secrets. Along with a bit
of help from the occasional dark faerie quest and Stunt Studio Hair Gel, they
helped me create the ultimate spell book! With it, I can control the mind of
any Neopet--including you!" He began to laugh again, a horrible sound.
"That don't make sense," she cried.
"Doesn't! Doesn't!" Shankly corrected. "And
that's another thing--is good grammar too much to ask for? Or proper spelling?
Or paragraphs, for crying out loud!"
"But… why steal dung?" she asked, curious, despite
the danger.
"A fitting irony, don't you think, that after
years of being forced to deal with dung in such conditions that I shall make
my fortune in the dung industry? I'm going to corner the dung market, run away
with Vanja, and enjoy my retirement on a small but pleasantly unnamed on the
main world map island where native pets will do my evil bidding and bring me
those adorable little drinks with the paper umbrellas and plenty of Stunt Studio
Hair Gel…"
"…Isn't that a run-on sentence?"
"Silence, pet!" boomed Shankly. "Take the slushie.
You're about to turn yourself in to the cops, and tell them you returned the
rest of the dung to the wild plains of Tyrannia as part of the radical Save
The Dung group you're heading."
"I will not!" Snickerscat gasped.
"Oh, but you will…" Shankly said, with a charming
yet evil smile, "Because I've got just the poem for you…."
The End
Author's Note: This rather short, dungtastic, and hopefully amusing series,
is in no way meant to depict the real and actual Mister Shankly or the Neopian
Times itself. Vanja is a character in the comic The
Eye of Evil, Sventhor and Snickerscat are pets I know. As always, feel
free to Neomail
me with your comments, questions, complaints, or dung. | 
