the mysteries of physics

Avrym Celeardth, Yorunnis Tetraclasm, and Julia Metacarpal stood at the corner of the galaxy -- a galaxy -- any whirlpool of stars not too far from the Blomongtale asterism, at least in the conventional argumentation of light years, degrees azimuth, and parallax-seconds. Avrym had three ngogns of walnut cream lugubriously applied to the radiation scars on his hands, and was making a fuss about the piano tuning. Yorunnis was trying to get our location in a better reckoning, and was only moderately successful: he knew which sheaf of which gerbe they were on, and could calculate their first and second cohomology groups, but he hadn't the foggiest idea where they were with respect to either Denver or Foofaraw junction, which made the first bits of information next to useless. They were thirty kilometers from the Exclusion Zone, which meant that they had at least five years worth of freeze-dried biscuits left, assuming that the Exclusion Zone didn't move around, but he couldn't be certain of even that. Julia had been fiddling with the innards of the Machine for nearly two months: the lack of certain irreplaceable components meant that she had to make a lot of hackish adjustments, linking coherence-reduction coils with bits of indium wire, and breaking open sealed glass modules containing heptodes because they contained rare earth minerals that could better be used elsewhere. The Machine was a giant cube, eight meters on a side, and it had gotten them this far: from the Lesser Arcwhirl of Kesser to the Greater Rip of Mossborough, and they still had five throntears to go to make it to the Third Cheese war that was scheduled to commence in half a month on Jeraringard. Julia had sent Avrym out to find motivic conductors. "What do they look like?" asked Avrym. "look for blue metallic shaped used yoghurt containers and check their spectra for warts... we want wart free ones". Avrym shrugged, slung a satchel over his shoulder, and went out in search of Julia's odd minerals. Yorunnis gasped in victory: "We're two throntears from Denver and eighty throntears from Foofaraw junction, I know exactly where we are!" Julia yarfed "which is useless because the wombat-filters are completely clogged by stable bosons. We're not going anywhere!"
Yorunnis looked up at her, tangled by a mess of wires and less comprehensible gizmos. "How do you unclog a wombat filter?" he asked, machinery not being his specialty. "Either you flash it in a two exagauss magnetic field, which we don't have the energy to make, or you dip it in helium dioxide for a week, which we don't have and don't have the equipment to either manufacture or purify it, which means that I've got to bypass the wombat filters, which is going to be a pain because when the Machine moves the wombats will resist our motion...." Yorunnis shrugged, not understanding the physical engineering involved in the Machine, and meandered off to have a sandwich.

Half an hour later, Avrym returned with a bag filled with objects, and asked of Julia "is any of these a motivic conductor?". Julia looked through the objects "that's a zeta function" she said of one. "that's the cosine of Denmark, it might come in handy" she said of a small unruly appearing green pentagon. "this is what we want!" she smiled, pulling a small gray sphere out of the mess of objects. "I don't remember picking that up" Avrym said. "That's because you didn't" replied Julia, taking it and wandering off to one of the nooks and crannies of the Machine.