The Last to Comment Wins

Shiriru_B

Shiriru_B

Book binge in progress.
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Nov 1, 2020
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Tempokai

Tempokai

The Overworked One
Joined
Nov 16, 2021
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I'm winning currently forcing The Butler to do this:
The letter arrived on a Tuesday, which is the universe’s preferred day for administrative cruelty. The envelope was thick, parchmenty, and smug, sealed with a blot of wax that looked like it had been pressed by a thumb belonging to an owl with tenure. The address was written in ink so pretentious it practically cleared its throat before every letter.


MR. DARREN WICK
CUPBOARD ADJACENT TO THE BOILER
NO. 11, NEARLY-RESPECTABLE CLOSE


Darren stared at it the way a man stares at a miracle, which is to say with the suspicion of someone who has been repeatedly lied to by supermarket “family packs” and motivational posters. He didn’t have a cupboard under the stairs—he had something worse, a boiler closet that screamed softly at night and smelled like boiled pennies—but the letter had chosen its own truth. Letters like that always do.


His hands shook as he cracked the seal.


We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts.
Click to expand...

He reread it six times, because that’s what humans do when offered escape: they panic, they doubt, they reread, they imagine themselves wearing robes that billow in the wind rather than wearing jeans that whisper, “You gave up.”


There were more pages: lists of supplies, directions, a note about “appropriate handling equipment,” and a cheerful paragraph insisting that “the work will be challenging, occasionally damp, and profoundly character-building.” Darren skimmed past the part where it mentioned “biohazard protocols” because his brain had already started building a new identity: Darren Wick, Wizard, Person of Importance, Owner of a Cloak That Flows For No Reason.


He told nobody. Not out of secrecy, but because nobody would have believed him, and also because he’d tried telling people exciting things before and learned that human beings respond to wonder the same way they respond to vegetables: with polite suspicion and a quick glance toward the door.


That night he packed a suitcase with the solemn intensity of a monk preparing for enlightenment. He added socks. He added toiletries. He added a notebook in which he planned to record spells like Transfigure Your Miserable Life Into Something That Doesn’t Reek of Rent. He took a kitchen knife too, not because he was brave, but because he had watched enough documentaries to understand that fate is just a word people use to avoid admitting they are walking directly into a trap.


The next morning, he went to the station listed in the letter: Platform Nine and Three-Quarters.


He found Platform Nine. He found Platform Ten. He found a vending machine that sold “artisan” water for the price of a kidney. And there, between them, was a sign newly bolted to a pillar in a font that tried very hard to look ancient while still obeying modern safety regulations:


PLATFORM 9¾ — HOGWARTS INTAKE


A few other people stood nearby, clutching suitcases, looking like they’d been personally chosen by the universe and didn’t yet understand that the universe’s taste is tragicomic at best.


Darren approached the barrier, took a breath, and did what the letter instructed: he walked at it briskly, without hesitation, like a man charging into his own legend.


The wall rippled.


He passed through.


On the other side, there was indeed a train, and for one tender second Darren’s heart lifted like a balloon freed from the sweaty grip of reality. It was long and dark, belching steam, with iron wheels and an aura of “this will be uncomfortable, but in a whimsical way.”


Then he saw the side of it, painted in crisp white letters:


HOG WARTS
DERMAL HARVESTING & SORTING DIVISION
EMPLOYEE TRANSPORT


Darren blinked. Blinked again. The words remained, stubborn and unmagical, like a bill.


A man in a reflective vest stood beside the door. He had a clipboard and the kind of face that had never been kissed by wonder, only by fluorescent lighting.


“Name?” the man said.


“Darren Wick,” Darren replied, because his mouth was still clinging to the old reality where names mattered.


“Ah. New intake.” The man made a tick on the clipboard. “Any allergies? Latex? Disinfectant? Pig dander?”


Darren’s balloon-heart made a small, confused squeak. “Pig… what?”


The man sighed the sigh of someone paid to shepherd dreams into paperwork. “Right, yeah, this happens every term. Look, mate, Hogwarts. Hog Warts. The spacing is… historically inconsistent. You’re on the roster, you’re on the train. Grab a seat. Gloves are under the bench. Try not to touch your face.”


Darren looked around for hidden cameras, because modern life has trained everyone to interpret humiliation as content. But there were no cameras. There was only the train, the clipboard, and the slow dawning horror that he might have been accepted into… employment.


He boarded anyway, because even betrayal has momentum.


Inside, the compartments weren’t lined with velvet or warmed by enchantments. They were lined with plastic sheeting. A poster showed a smiling cartoon pig with a speech bubble that read:


REMEMBER: WARTS DON’T COLLECT THEMSELVES!


The train lurched forward.


The countryside slid past in a smear of damp green, like nature itself was trying to look away.


Across from Darren sat a woman about his age wearing thick rubber gloves already, like a person who had learned. She caught his expression and offered the tired sympathy of someone who’d once believed in magic too.


“First time?” she asked.


“I thought—” Darren began, and then stopped, because saying “I thought I was special” out loud felt like giving the universe a weapon.


She nodded. “Same. I thought there’d be spells. A castle. A hat. But it’s mostly… lesions.”


Darren stared at her. “Lesions.”


“Yep.” She patted her bag. It clinked with the sound of jars. “Welcome to Hog Warts.”


The train rolled on, dragging him deeper into a reality that smelled faintly of antiseptic and existential punishment.


When they arrived, there was no castle on a cliff, no turrets clawing at the sky, no lake with mysterious creatures waiting to sell merchandising rights. There was a complex of low buildings surrounded by fencing and warning signs, all of it tucked into a foggy valley like a secret nobody wanted.


A sign over the main gate read:


HOGWARTS RESEARCH FACILITY
BIOLOGICAL ACQUISITION & RENEWABLE ODDITIES
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY


Darren’s hope tried to re-inflate for half a second. Research facility. That sounded… important. That sounded… like science, which is basically magic that went to school and learned to write grant proposals.


They were herded into a room that looked like a lecture hall designed by a prison architect. At the front stood a tall figure in a lab coat that had once been white but was now the color of defeat. His hair was wild, not in a “mad genius” way, but in a “has lost three battles with his own comb” way. His eyes glittered with the febrile cheer of someone whose sanity had been audited and found technically compliant.


“Ah!” he boomed. “Fresh hands! Fresh backs! Fresh naïveté! Wonderful.”


He threw his arms wide like a stage magician about to pull a rabbit out of a hat, except his hat was a biohazard bin and the rabbit was, statistically, a fungus.


“I am Doctor Ambrose Porcineaux,” he announced, “Head of Applied Swine Dermatology, Acting Deputy Chair of Wart Energetics, and—on paper only—not insane.”


A ripple of nervous laughter moved through the room, because people laugh when authority gives them permission, even if the joke is “we are all going to die in a pig shed.”


Doctor Porcineaux leaned forward, eyes shining. “You are here because you have been chosen.”


Darren felt his chest tighten, that old warmth trying to return.


“You have been chosen,” the doctor continued, “because the world needs warts.”


The warmth died like a candle in a damp basement.


Doctor Porcineaux clicked a remote. A screen descended behind him, showing a magnified photograph of a wart. It was enormous, cratered, and frankly more intimate than Darren wanted his morning to be.


“These,” the doctor said reverently, “are the future.”


A hand raised timidly. “Sir… why?”


Porcineaux’s smile twitched. “An excellent question, asked with the adorable innocence of someone who still believes the universe runs on reasons. Listen carefully. Warts are resilient. Warts are stubborn. Warts are the middle finger of biology to aesthetics. They are little fortresses of misbehaving cells, and inside them—inside them—are compounds of extraordinary potential.”


He clicked again. The slide changed to a diagram labeled WART-BASED POWER GENERATION: THEORY. It included arrows, squiggles, and the kind of math that looked like it had been done during a fever dream.


“With the right extraction protocols,” Porcineaux said, voice rising, “wart keratin can be catalyzed into a bioelectric slurry. A renewable energy source! A medical miracle! Possibly a weapon, depending on funding!”


He slapped the podium. “But we need raw material. And nature, as usual, refuses to produce it conveniently in jars.”


Another click. A photo of a pig appeared—large, pink, and covered in warts like it had lost a bar fight with a cauliflower.


“These are our donors,” he said, tender as a man showing baby pictures. “They are aggressive, unhappy, and inexplicably fertile. Much like the average academic department. Your job is to collect the warts, sort them by size, shape, and philosophical ugliness, and deliver them to the lab. In exchange, you will receive a modest salary, a free tetanus shot, and the dignity of contributing to progress.”


Darren sat very still, as if movement might alert the nightmare.


The doctor clapped his hands. “Orientation complete! Now: to the barns!”


Outside, the air was wet with fog and pig breath. The barns loomed like industrial cathedrals dedicated to the worship of inconvenience. Inside the first one, the noise hit Darren like a physical shove: grunts, squeals, the metallic clatter of gates, and the constant, damp chorus of a thousand lives expressing their grievances through the universal language of filth.


A supervisor handed him a kit. It contained rubber gloves, a scraping tool that looked like a medieval instrument of persuasion, a jar of disinfectant, and a laminated card that read:


HOG WARTS COLLECTION
STEP 1: APPROACH DONOR WITH CONFIDENCE
STEP 2: AVOID TEETH
STEP 3: REMOVE WART
STEP 4: DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, BECOME EMOTIONALLY ATTACHED


“This is… insane,” Darren muttered.


The supervisor shrugged. “We prefer ‘innovative.’ You’ll get used to it.”


Then a pig the size of a fridge lurched toward Darren, snorting like a demon with asthma. Its skin was pebbled with warts, each one glistening faintly, like biology had decided to decorate itself with shame.


Darren swallowed. He thought of the letter, of the elegant script, of the promise of towers and spells. He thought of how desperately he’d wanted to be whisked away from his boiler closet life. And here he was, whisked away indeed, straight into a barn where his destiny involved scraping growths off a furious meat wall.


He stepped forward anyway, because even crushed dreams must pay rent.


The first attempt went badly. Darren approached with “confidence,” as instructed, which lasted until the pig swung its head and nearly introduced his kneecaps to the afterlife. He yelped, stumbled, and dropped the scraper. The pig snorted triumphantly, like it had just won a debate.


“Use the gate!” the woman from the train called over, already elbow-deep in wart collection like she was harvesting apples. “And don’t stand in front of it. They hate being perceived.”


Darren repositioned, using a metal gate to wedge the pig into place. The animal fought, but the facility had been designed by people who understood that all living things eventually meet a stronger rectangle of steel.


With shaking hands, Darren pressed the scraper to the largest wart on the pig’s flank. The wart resisted, because of course it did. Warts were not the kind of thing that politely surrendered. He applied pressure. There was a wet sound that made his soul try to exit through his ears.


The wart came off in one glistening piece, plopping into his gloved palm like a grotesque truffle.


He stared at it.


It stared back, spiritually.


A laugh bubbled up in his throat, not because it was funny, but because the alternative was screaming. “I’m… I’m collecting hog warts,” he whispered.


“Yes,” the woman said, dropping three more into her jar with brisk efficiency. “Welcome to adulthood. It’s mostly this, just with different jars.”


Hours passed. The work was vile, repetitive, and faintly hypnotic, like a ritual designed to strip a person down to their essential acceptance of grossness. Darren’s back ached. His gloves were smeared with disinfectant and pig residue. His jar filled with warts of varying sizes, each one a tiny monument to cellular rebellion.


And somewhere in the middle of it, something in Darren’s mind clicked—not into happiness, because that would be too generous, but into a bleak clarity.


This was magic, in a way. Not the kind with wands and fireworks, but the kind humans actually build: systems that transform confusion into procedure, misery into employment, hope into a badge clipped to your shirt.


Later, in the lab, Doctor Porcineaux hovered over the day’s haul like a dragon over treasure. He peered at Darren’s jar and made a pleased noise.


“Ahhh,” he breathed. “Fine specimens. Look at that marbling. Look at the thickness. You’ve got a natural touch.”


Darren stared at him, exhausted. “Are you… actually going to save the world with these?”


Porcineaux paused, as if considering which truth to serve. Then he smiled, sharp and bright. “Save? No. Improve? Perhaps. Make it stranger? Absolutely. The world is already doomed in all the boring ways. My mission is to doom it in interesting ones.”


He lifted a wart with tweezers and held it up to the light like a jeweler admiring a flawed gem. “Besides,” he added, voice softening into something almost kind, “you came here because you wanted to be part of something bigger than yourself.”


Darren looked down at his hands. At the disinfectant. At the smear of pig life under his nails. At the jar of fleshy lumps that would become, apparently, bioelectric slurry or a weapon or a grant proposal.


He exhaled, a long breath that tasted like surrender.


“Yeah,” Darren said. “Bigger. That’s one word for it.”


Porcineaux clapped him on the shoulder with a gloved hand. “Excellent. Report at dawn. We have a new litter coming in, and I’ve secured a shipment of unusually warty boars from Belgium. Their lesions are—how shall I put it—ambitious.”


Darren walked out of the lab into the foggy yard, the barns looming, the night thick with pig noise and distant, indifferent stars. He should have been devastated. He should have been furious. He should have marched back through whatever wall he’d come through and demanded his fantasy back like a refund.


Instead, he found himself laughing again, quiet and hollow, because the universe had played its joke and he was, against all sense, still standing in the punchline.


A dude accepted to Hogwarts.


Turned out it was Hog Warts.


And now he had a job, a jar, and a front-row seat to the almost-mad scientist’s magnificent project: turning the world’s most humiliating skin condition into the next great leap forward, because why should progress ever be dignified when it can be damp, grotesque, and faintly radioactive?


Darren tightened his coat against the cold and trudged toward the employee dorms, already smelling tomorrow.


Somewhere behind him, a pig squealed with the righteous outrage of a creature who had no idea it was powering humanity’s future—one scraped-off lump at a time.
 
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