 Pollution Solution
by bonsai_penguin
--------
With the discovery of the Underwater Fishing Cavern in old Maraqua, comes the
astonishing revelation of what litterbugs Neopians must be. The number of useless
and unwanted items in the world has suddenly skyrocketed, and the vicious cycle
of rubbish repeats itself yet again with the introduction of masses of new trash.
Someone will find it, and then throw it away for the next person to find… And
so on and so forth forever. For a long time we have had careless people dropping
Neopoints all over the place – who hasn’t had the event, ‘Something has happened!
You find ten Neopoints on the floor!’ But Neopoints are something that everyone
wants; a little carelessness poses no threat to anyone. What does pose a serious
problem is a lake full of discarded waste that never made it to the rubbish heap.
The amount of junk people are pulling out of the water is horrific! Over the last
week, Neopia has been literally flooded with rotten shoes, soggy cardboard boxes
and broken fishing rods. Thousands of shops have a collection of this miscellany
at 1NP in the vain hope of passing it on to the next person. Quite frankly, I’m
surprised that the fish could survive down there! So what will happen to it all?
Already saturated with piles of sludge and rotten berries, I’m sure the Neopian
marketplace can’t deal with this amount of useless, unsaleable items. It only
means that shops need to expand to fit everything in. Expansion in the marketplaces
is already exponential, with a rapidly growing number of users adding to the industrialisation
of the planet.
When people have things they don’t want, they usually donate them to the Money
Tree under the pretence of charity. But what poor newbie wants to battle through
hordes to get a pile of dung or a rotten boot? It’s almost cruelty to pass your
junk on to an unknown victim. Already we have the Money Tree full of poisonous
jelly, which will undoubtedly go to someone who doesn’t know better than to
feed it to a starving pet.
The only other option we are left with is to discard our junk. But is Neopia
not the same as our precious Earth? Do we really want landfill sites all over
our favourite landmarks – on the Tyrannian plateau? Or in the centre of Faerie
City? Already Meridell’s rubbish dump is blighting our beautiful Neopian landscape.
More to the point, when you hit the ‘discard’ button, how can you be sure that
when we simply throw things away they will go to the right place? You wouldn’t
throw a crisp packet into someone’s front garden, would you? That must be what
people have been doing, or how else could the vast repository under old Maraqua
have got there? Landfill and littering are clearly not the answer. Surely we
should be more green-minded about Neopia’s unwanted items. Since we have not
yet been provided with a recycling factory, I give you a solution.
I came up with a few stupid ideas that just might work:-
-You could throw your old sandals and soggy cardboard boxes down the Symol
hole. No-one except petpets will notice, and they’re not exactly going to tell
anyone.
-Since the Snowager is so determined to give everyone an icy blast for stealing
his treasures, why not give things to him instead? He might just as well guard
shoes as neggs.
-Hurl stuff into Techo Mountain. You never know, it might get confused and
give you a red codestone.
But no, none of these are the prize-winning answer to the entire problem. As
most of you will probably be aware, Skeiths are incredibly hungry beasts. But
when I say hungry, I don’t just mean two-helpings-of-pudding kind of hungry.
I don’t even mean Hobbit-style meals at 20 points during the day. If you play
the ‘Hungry Skeith’ game and think, ‘Surely they can’t eat and eat forever without
getting bloated?’, I’ll tell you – they can.
Not only do Skeiths eat continuously, unless you have owned one you may not
know that they eat everything. Not just food, but *everything*. They have an
impossible ability to digest every material known to Neokind; metal, glass,
rubber, wood, cloth, plastic or paper. They will happily gulp down gross food
without blinking. They even have no morals about eating living things – petpets
and petpetpets included. An unwitting friend of mine, upon first owning one,
fed her Skeith a ‘Trumpet of Blasting’ before she noticed that on every item
is the option; ‘Feed to [your pet Skeith]’. And it doesn’t matter at all if
the Skeith is bloated already. It will be able to wolf down whatever item comes
its way regardless of size and regardless of hunger. (Imagine, if you will,
the ultimate frustration of someone unaware of this impossible ability. Someone
who, 120,000 Neopoints later, accidentally feeds their Skeith a ‘Tonu Transmogrification
Potion’. The Skeith turns around and says, “*BURP* I’m bloated. I don’t think
I could eat another Tonu Transmogrification Potion!’ He’s lying. Of course he
could.)
And in this ferocious, hulking, ravenous animal, we have our solution to every
waste problem Neopia will ever have. There is no need to flood the Money Tree
with your unwanted broken items and delegate the responsibility to others. There
is no need for dropping them where you stand and creating further rotting heaps
around the planet. Simply make a friend who has a Skeith, and feed all your
junk to them! A Skeith is, to this end, simply a living recycling plant. Nothing
is wasted when fed to a Skeith. Not only are you doing the Skeith a favour by
keeping its enormous appetite at bay, but you’re recycling otherwise useless
items and ensuring the beauty and sanitation of all of Neopia.
We can only hope that by fishing it all out, we are in our own way cleaning
up the waters. It’s too late for old Maraqua, but now that New Maraqua has survived
the onslaught of pirate attack, please don’t ruin their glorious new home with
trash!
| 
