Funny Potato Shirts: A Kids' Story. Explore the Potato Rulers of Vegetable Valley.

Chapter One: Roots Without a Root

Sir Spudsalot of Mash-Metropolis

Sir Spudsalot had known his father, and that was somehow the harder thing. Papa Potato had been a large, golden-skinned spud with a booming laugh and an appetite for adventure that no single kingdom could contain. Spudsalot remembered sitting on his father's shoulders during the Harvest Parade, the whole of Mash-Metropolis stretched out below them, feeling like the tallest thing in the garden. He remembered the smell of aged butter and old leather that followed his father everywhere. He remembered the morning, shortly after his sixth birthday, when he came downstairs to find Mama Spud standing at the long palace dining table with her hands folded and her face arranged into something careful and prepared, and the chair at the head of the table empty for the first time in his life. Papa Potato had left before sunrise. No note. No ceremony. Just gone, the way a storm leaves — the damage present, the cause already somewhere else.

It was Nana Peel who became the fixed point of his childhood after that. Sharp-tongued and unhurried, she had the kind of wisdom that came from watching three generations of potatoes make the same mistakes and declining to soften the lesson. She sat with him in the palace kitchen on cold mornings and told him things his mother was too heartbroken to say and his sisters were too young to understand. Once, when he was eight and trying very hard not to cry about something he would not name, she looked at him over her tea and said simply, "You have his posture, you know. Sit up straighter and make it yours." It was the closest she ever came to sentimentality and the most useful thing anyone ever said to him. He grew up pouring himself into the grandeur of Mash-Metropolis the way you fill a crack in the wall — thoroughly, and because something needs to hold. When he came to rule at seventeen, he was loud and certain and genuinely good at it, and if sometimes the loudness was a way of drowning out a quieter and more inconvenient feeling, well. The gravy boats were decorative, the palace was magnificent, and Nana Peel was still in the kitchen every morning, keeping score.

The Dictatortot of Small-Fry City

The Dictatortot remembered his father the way you remember a bruise — not the moment it happened but the tenderness that stayed afterward. His father had been powerfully built and widely respected in Small-Fry City, and young Dictatortot had followed him around the training compound with the unquestioning devotion of a child who has not yet learned that admiration can be misplaced. He was four years old when Uncle Brawl — barrel-shaped, salt-scented, a potato of very few words and absolute convictions — sat his father down at the kitchen table and told him plainly that a potato who could not be relied upon had no place in a city built on strength. The conversation was short. His father was gone by morning, run out of Small-Fry City by the one potato in it with the standing to do it, and Dictatortot was left with a gap where a role model had been.

Uncle Brawl filled it imperfectly and completely. He never replaced what was missing — he was too honest a potato to try — but he showed up at the edge of the training yard every single morning without exception, arms crossed, eyes steady, saying almost nothing and meaning everything. For a boy who had already watched one man decide to leave, that daily unchanging presence was worth more than any speech. Dictatortot grew up understanding that his father had not simply left — he had been found wanting, which was its own particular wound. He responded the only way that made sense: he became stronger than anyone, more disciplined than anyone, more relentlessly present than anyone, as though sheer physical force of will could retroactively correct whatever weakness had sent his father running. He became ruler not through ceremony but through the simple acknowledgment of everyone around him that he already was. He governed through iron and grit and believed completely in the philosophy Uncle Brawl had given him — that strength was the only honest currency. Most days that was enough. Some mornings, standing at his window before his soldiers woke, he thought about his father and felt something that was not quite sadness and not quite anger but lived exactly in between, and then he went to training, and the feeling went with him, and he lifted until it was gone.

Empress Earthapple of the Empire of Greasy Potatoes

Empress Earthapple's father had been, by every public measure, one of the finest potatoes in the garden. Generous in the marketplace, beloved at festivals, the kind of golden-skinned sweet potato that whole harvests get named after. Mum Earthapple had loved him wholeheartedly and Earthapple and her three older brothers had grown up proud to be his children. She was seven years old when she began to notice, slowly and then all at once, that her father was everyone's favorite potato and nobody's present one. He attended every public celebration and missed every dinner. He knew the names of every vendor in the market and forgot which of his children had the autumn birthday. He was beloved in every corner of the Empire and absent from the only corner that mattered, and the distance between those two things was where Earthapple grew up.

It was Grandpa Tato who filled that space, slow-moving and deeply philosophical, a potato so old and unhurried that he seemed less like a person and more like a feature of the landscape. He sat with Earthapple for hours in the big armchair by the window of the Democratic Congress building, talking about fairness and listening and how the wisest leaders were the ones who understood they did not know everything. He never tried to explain her father or excuse him — he simply made himself so thoroughly present that the absence felt, if not smaller, at least more survivable. When her father finally stopped coming home altogether, sending instead a polite letter about other opportunities that explained nothing and answered nothing, it was Grandpa Tato she sat with in silence until the silence became bearable. She was elected Empress in the most chaotic vote the Empire had ever held, winning by a single margin — her own — and she governed carefully and listened more than she spoke, the way Grandpa Tato had taught her. Some evenings she still sat in the big armchair alone and thought about her father with a low, steady ache — not fury, not bitterness, just the particular tiredness of someone who had spent years waiting for a potato who was always, in every room that mattered, somewhere else.

The Tater Tyrant of the Crusted Keeps

The Tater Tyrant's father had been a merchant potato of middling reputation and considerable charm who had wandered into the Crusted Keeps one season peddling seedlings and wandered into Mother Tyrant's life shortly after, which she maintained was the single greatest lapse in judgment of her otherwise immaculate existence. He had stayed long enough to become a fixture — long enough for the Tater Tyrant and his twin older sisters to know him, to have memories of him, to understand what it felt like to have a father in the house. And then, when the Tyrant was six, something went wrong. The family was never told precisely what — Mother Tyrant sealed the subject the way she sealed everything inconvenient, with documentation and silence — but it involved a debt, and a scheme, and several very angry beet merchants from the eastern garden, and it ended with his father leaving the Crusted Keeps in considerable haste on a moonless night with nothing but a sack and the boots on his feet, and it was the last anyone officially saw of him.

Auntie Crinkle was everything his father was not and everything he needed. Warmhearted and magnificently chaotic, she burned every single thing she cooked and was beloved for it, because the burning was always accidental and the love was never. She showed up after his father left and simply refused to leave, installing herself in the Crusted Keeps kitchen where she produced smoke and scorched roots and an endless, cheerful certainty that the Tater Tyrant was going to be absolutely fine. She called him her little lawmaker when he began writing his first regulations at age seven, and she said it with a pride so genuine and uncomplicated that he stored the memory somewhere warm and returned to it often. She was the only one who treated his rulebooks as something to celebrate rather than something to worry about, and he loved her for it with a loyalty he would never have reduced to policy because some things were too important to be written down. He came to power through sheer accumulated expertise and governed with the iron certainty of someone who had decided very young that a world with clear rules was a world where people could not vanish in the night owing money to beet merchants. In his desk drawer, beneath the current draft of the kingdom's heat-retention statutes, sat a folded piece of parchment — not a law, not a policy, but a list of questions he had been composing since he was six years old and had never found anyone to ask.

Chapter Two: A Rotten Smell in the Garden

Five years into their respective reigns, the four rulers of Vegetable Valley had settled into an uneasy but functional rhythm. Sir Spudsalot had completed two full remodels of Gravy Palace and was already sketching plans for a third. The Dictatortot had doubled the Iron Tot Brigade and introduced a mandatory pre-dawn training regimen that was wildly unpopular and demonstrably effective. Empress Earthapple had held more votes than any previous ruler in the Empire's history and somehow managed to keep her citizens mostly happy and almost always heard. And the Tater Tyrant had produced so many regulations for the Crusted Keeps that they now filled an entire library wing he visited every morning the way other rulers visited throne rooms. The garden was prosperous. The radishes were plump. The purple-nosed worms had been kept to a manageable nuisance. Everything, by most reasonable measures, was going extremely well.

On the first day of the growing season, the four rulers gathered at the Great Garden Table for their annual meeting. They covered the usual ground — strategies for repelling the purple-nosed worms, proposals for taking turns tilling the shared soil along the kingdom borders, a lengthy discussion about whether the eastern compost heap constituted neutral territory or belonged to whoever composted nearest to it, which took forty minutes and resolved nothing. After the routine business was dispensed with, the Tater Tyrant cleared his throat and opened his binder to a familiar page, and the other three rulers settled into the particular expression of potatoes who know exactly what is coming and have accepted that it is coming regardless.

He brought up the Scroll of Aoli, as he did every year. The scroll — sealed in hardened butter wax, centuries old, written in Soilscript — outlined the terms of ownership of the Golden Radish Mine, the most valuable resource in all of Vegetable Valley. According to the scroll, signed by the original garden founders generations before any of them were born, the mine and all its contents belonged equally and permanently to the four ruling bloodlines of the valley, now and forevermore. It was older than any law any of them had written, more binding than any treaty any of them had signed, and maddening in the way that documents are maddening when they are completely clear and completely inconvenient at the same time. Every year they gathered to debate whether there was a crack in it. Every year there was not.

"The word for equally in Soilscript has three interpretations," the Tater Tyrant said, opening to a bookmarked page. "Two of them support a tiered distribution weighted by kingdom age. I have documented this thoroughly." He patted his binder with the quiet satisfaction of a potato who had done his homework.

"Mash-Metropolis has the longest radish mining heritage in the garden," Sir Spudsalot said, gesturing broadly with his gravy ladle. "The founders would obviously have intended for us to have the larger share given our immense experience. It is practically a tuber-given right."

"You cannot argue founder intent without documentation," the Tater Tyrant said.

"The Empire supports forming a subcommittee," Empress Earthapple offered, raising a chip hopefully.

"No subcommittees," the Dictatortot said, with the finality of a spade hitting clay.

The argument had been rotating in its familiar circle for forty minutes when the door to the meeting hall burst open with a bang that sent gravy boats sliding, ketchup splattering, and a pile of carefully organized seed packets scattering across the floor. The Dictatortot, to everyone's surprise, immediately began to well up over the spilled seeds, which he covered quickly by crossing his arms and staring at the wall. A small wild-eyed turnip in a mud-caked messenger jacket skidded through the doorway, grabbed the doorframe, and bent double trying to breathe.

"A new tunnel," he gasped. "In the radish mine — enormous — premium grade — found this morning."

He looked up at four rulers staring at him with expressions ranging from stunned to dangerously thoughtful, and added, unnecessarily: "Big one."

Silence. Then the room came apart entirely.

"New tunnels are a new discovery," Sir Spudsalot said, rising from his seat. "Not envisioned by the Scroll of Aoli. Mash-Metropolis claims first rights on the basis of heritage alone."

"The perpetuity clause covers all future contents," the Tater Tyrant said immediately, already on page forty-four. "This is not a gray area. I have a subsection on this specific scenario."

"The people must vote," Empress Earthapple said firmly, and nobody acknowledged her.

The Dictatortot leaned back in his chair and let the others argue for a long moment, the way a boulder lets a stream go past it. "The scroll didn't know about this tunnel," he said finally. "What is new belongs to whoever is strong enough to hold it." He looked at the Tater Tyrant. "Write whatever clause you like. It doesn't sprout any differently."

"That is not how law works," the Tater Tyrant said, visibly pained.

The Dictatortot said nothing further, which was somehow worse than if he had continued.

The turnip messenger had sunk into an overturned chair and watched everything with the hollow expression of a vegetable who had delivered bad news before and understood exactly what came next. The garden had been four peas in a pod for five years. He could feel the pod splitting. He pulled his jacket tighter and said nothing and hoped very hard that he was wrong.

Another twenty minutes passed with no movement. The same arguments circled the table, landing nowhere new, convincing nobody of anything. The Tater Tyrant added three new bookmarks to his binder. Empress Earthapple finished her chip bag and started on a second. Sir Spudsalot rearranged his gravy boats twice. And then the Dictatortot placed both enormous hands flat on the table and waited until the room went quiet, which it did, because rooms tended to go quiet when he decided they should.

"We are never going to agree on this," he said. He looked at each of them in turn — his siblings, his fellow rulers, the only other potatoes in the garden who had grown up with the same hollow in the same shape. "There is only one thing that has ever actually settled anything in this valley."

He looked at each of them one final time.

"This," he said slowly, "means war."

The turnip messenger put his head in his hands. Not one of the other three rulers disagreed.