Have you ever seen porcelain shatter? Usually something is jagged, or it’s smooth. But nothing is as smooth as a flawlessly sharp edge. That jagged razor’s edge, you see it every time a large piece of porcelain breaks. That place where glaze meets clay, there is no other edge like that in nature. There is no way to describe what that edge does to human flesh. You could compare it to paper, run through a shredder, but that simply doesn’t do justice to the sheer amount of blood.

Even scraping a finger against broken porcelain can be nasty. Imagine someone sitting there, at their most vulnerable and relaxed. Suddenly, it just shatters. They have less than half a second before they meet the edge with the full force of their weight, and what’s left of them looks like it has gone through the aforementioned shredder. When you’ve seen the aftermath of this, you can’t get it out of your head, not for a very long time. Even hearing about it can have a similar effect. You might get this nightmarish scenario out of your mind for a moment, but every time you need it not to, the idea pops right back in. Eventually, there are certain things you can no longer… do.

No one knows why toilets just shatter, but I can tell you here (since these words will never be made public) that it has been happening as long as there have been toilets. Of course, some societies simply use squatting toilets exclusively, but when squatting one has to focus on squatting. Any archaeologist will tell you that in each society’s record, one can see a huge boost in technological and social advances that corresponds to the time that a sit down toilet becomes widely introduced. Many people have said that their best ideas have often come while in the restroom, and this is no coincidence. The flow of oxygen to your brain is increased by nearly 200%; there is simply no better place to do thinking, and of course, great thinkers are crucial to any society.

To the societies that survive that is. A shattering happens, and people see the aftermath. And they start talking, telling the story to try and quiet their own tortured minds. The idea spreads slowly at first, but soon it moves like wildfire. Amazingly, we have documented that shatterings seem to happen more often as the idea spreads. Soon, no one can move their bowels at all. Entire cities become paralyzed with fear, and that’s when chaos, sickness, and death begin to emanate from them.

Fortunately for humanity, complete societal collapse almost always took place before the news could cross the vast distances that separated ancient city-states, and the idea rarely wiped out more than one civilization at a time. The world struggled on in the darkness, unaware of the danger lurking just outside our perception. But one day, a great king learned of this horrific cycle (just how he came into possession of this knowledge is a story for another time), and knew that something had to be done. He founded a network of agents to suppress the story within his kingdom.

In time, the kingdom was lost, though not to an epidemic of shatterings. The name of the kingdom changed, but her people did not. The network of agents persisted. They knew their mission was crucial to the survival of our species, and they spread across the globe and integrated themselves into other societies to fulfill the sacred task. As humanity grew more and more sophisticated, so did the agency and our methods. Today, we don’t merely suppress knowledge of shatterings, but we can actually undo their effects when the outbreak is caught soon enough and force people to continue their regular bathroom activities.

Maybe some day, humanity will grow sophisticated enough to survive the knowledge of shatterings becoming widespread. Until then, not only our mission, not only our activities, but the very history of shattering itself is hidden with the utmost secrecy. Entire civilizations have been wiped clean from the records and general knowledge of mankind. I will not let this happen to the agency itself. We’re a shadow organization, and what history we have is supposed to be wiped clean in each of the centennial agency-wide purges. But some within the agency have compiled a history, and its existence is permitted by the top officials.

I am custodian of our recorded history. My name is Chart Felsweater, and these are the stories of the most prolonged and exerted effort that humanity has ever made. These are the stories of our sacred and holy order, whose name has never even passed the lips of a single outsider. These are the stories of…

 

Poop Squad: Sigma Butt Nine