Once upon a time, the mighty American Buffalo Buck took a shit right in the middle of the land of Tavos. He did it so magnificently that he even bothered to give it a name: Tal’ip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All manner of flies and bugs lost no time falling into orbit around this glorious turd, and as the years passed they formed a rather harmonious symbiosis. Every day the houseflies spread all the diseased ideology festering in the shit to everyone else; the mosquitoes sucked up people’s hopes and fed them back into the shit as statistics; and the cockroaches stole whatever there was to steal and stuffed it inside. Between the three of them, the shit never dried out, and it kept offering everyone around it an ever-expanding, top-of-the-line place to live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Disturbed and pushed to the margins by all this, the hardworking ants and bees, the wise praying mantises, and the artistic-spirited ladybugs, fireflies, and butterflies either left the country altogether or sank into depression and withdrew into worlds of their own. The cicadas, whose voices rang out too loud, were silenced, and the high-strung wasps were wiped out with poison gas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
About ten years later, Buffalo Buck came back to the middle of Tavos, and \u2014 lo and behold! \u2014 the shit he’d left behind had grown so much, and spread over so much of everything, that there was no road left to walk and no air left to breathe. The only creatures left were flies and bugs of a single kind, running wild everywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Panicking, Buck called out at once to the wealthiest and most powerful creature in the whole insect world, the lying praying mantis: “O most virtuous and wisest of insects, Feta Mantis! Come, let’s clean up the shit that’s taken over this country together \u2014 and I’ll pile even more wealth on your wealth, and more power on your power.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Feta Mantis accepted the mighty buffalo’s bold offer, and called back all the ticks he’d spent years secretly keeping hidden inside the great heap of shit, ordering them to leak everything they’d gathered. The ticks did solid work \u2014 but that alone wasn’t enough to rouse the insect world that had been lulled to sleep under the shit, because by then the shit had splattered and stuck to everything. Even to their brains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One day, the Tal’ip Horsefly Army (TASO) clashed with the last of the resisting wasps atop the Massim tree. In the chaos, a young caterpillar named Elivian \u2014 who was only trying to eat the tiny scrap of leaf he’d barely managed to find \u2014 breathed in TASO’s poison gas and died right there on the spot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The death of young Elivian sent shockwaves through the insect world, because it’s a tradition in Tavos that every young insect has the right to reach the second stage of its life. Having that right stripped from a young insect by TASO woke up even the bugs sunk in the deepest sleep beneath the shit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even the laziest dung beetles, the wandering “helicopter bugs,” and the greediest grasshoppers joined the resistance. Bit by bit, they tore apart the shit and the army defending it, shrinking it down as much as they could. Watching all this happen, the mighty Buffalo Buck went back to the very spot where he’d first done his business, and found the shit starting to dry up: “Oh, you greedy Tal’ip \u2014 the one thing not even I could get out of my own ass! Neither I nor Feta Mantis, wisest of the wise, could ever get the better of you. But stopping one little caterpillar from becoming a butterfly, as you can see, is what finished you off.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The mighty Buffalo Buck raised his hooves for one last blow to the shit \u2014 but he never considered that the inside of Tal’ip might still be soft. The moment he put his weight down, he lost his footing and tumbled straight off the cliff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so, simply by standing together, the people of Tavos rid themselves of both plagues upon their heads, and they lived happily ever after.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Once upon a time, the mighty American Buffalo Buck took a shit right in the middle of the land of Tavos. He did it so magnificently that he even bothered to give it a name: Tal’ip. All manner of flies and bugs lost no time falling into orbit around this glorious turd, and as the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":109,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","ktt_post_credits":"","ktt_post_subtitle_formated":"
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