cargo culture

Agents of the Thneux of Tophtareo bundled together in the cold. It had been a long, weary, winter, and the quest for the Theid of the Nohogien had been nothing but a wild duck chase with many dry tributaries and dessicated rivulets of opportunities. They had tried searching under the basalt stratigraphy, they had looked in Mrs. Yenderphleuw's spleen, they had tried overturning two recalcitrant continents, and in desperation, they had underwent comparative anatomical antidissections at the hands of Jones, Simeton & Daughters, Transanatomists-At-Large, but lo' they hadn't found the Theid. A priceless artifact of great and unadumbrated manufacture, that more or less words utterly fail to describe. It could be cubical? It could be shaped like a small philosophy or two, or a stalk of celery. Arwezio Val-Zogyar, the last known to possess the Theid, said it was like "a delicate milken dewdrop of alacrity diffracting off the mouse of misshapen carbonation", and refused requests for compact descriptions, breaking into pages and pages of dense, interwoven poetry, lyrical and glittery. The Thneux would not be denied. It would possess this most incomprehensible of objects, but as time wore on and its agents became ever more perplexed and bitter, it seemed, in fact, that the Thneux would be denied possession of the Theid.

Now, it is reported by later and more fact-pedantic data-archivists that the Nohogien Theid is in fact a Reheleth Advanced Hyperconcepts nine dimensional transnumismatic neutrino-muon coupler valve certified to run between 14 GHz and 18 GHz and produce flutter in less than one part in ten to the seventeenth (yikes!), which had accidentally left on Pleuroporr when the Sahagar-Rienstad cargo ferry crashed into the southern continent some thirty cycles before the Thneux ascended to leadership of Tophtareo. The Indigenous Culture Preservation League had swooped in and manage to remove most of the hypertechnological artifacts strewn about by the crash, but the Theid somehow managed to squirrel itself away into possession by the Nohogien