Too Many Rotten Old Shoes?

There is approximately 120 million registered Neopets owners and 175 million Neopets. There are an estimated 70 million active owners (a lot of people have left to go questing for the legendary grail or some woman pilot) with at least one Neopet. Most people probably have only one pet they go fishing with. If even just half of these people's pets fish every day, and half of those pets caught shoes, then there's possibly seventeen and a half million shoes and sandals in the underwater cavern being reeled in a day.

Where do these shoes come from? They may be rotten to where they're kind of smooshy, but they're not of a gelatin substance - these shoes certainly don't come from the fabled Jelly World. Rumors have it there is another world outside of Neopets where owners come from that has a population of about six and a half billion people. If such a world is real, do the sandals come from there? Do people there even wear protection for their feet?

Is it possible we are only looking at the same several million right sandals or left shoes, or are we looking at a much higher number? The cavern has been accessible for fishing use for nearly a year as of this article's writing. If we took 365 days and multiplied it by 17.5 million, then that would mean about 6.4 billion shoes or sandals are in the Neopets world currently. Such a high amount of useless footgear seems impossible! If there really were that many, some of the examples of the locations of excess footwear would include:

* The Rainbow Pool would be filled with multi-colored shoes.

* The Wheel of Monotony would include a trip to the volcano filled with shoes.

* Shoes would dangle by their shoelaces from tree branches in the Haunted Woods.

* The stairway leading to the kingdom of Altador would be made entirely of sandals.

* Petpetpets? Forget that, sandalsandalsandals!

* Roo Island would be forced to closed down after being flooded by a raging storm of sandals.

However, we do not see this many shoes or sandals laying about. Where are they at, exactly? The most logical thing people do with these sandals or shoes is to donate them to the Money Tree or discard them. Entrepreneurs sell the found junk for a neopoint or two in their shops. Very few people actually save the shoes. Some collect them for the packrat avatar; others collect the shoes for the sake of being able to say they own a thousand left sandals but don't have a single right one to match any of them. What happens after the shoes are donated or discarded or sold? Who takes them from the tree or garbage dump? Who buys them from shops?

There are so many questions, but there are very few answers. There is reason to believe there is an entire underground organization or mystical village of retired shoemakers dedicated to recycling the same several million shoes to bring great angst and mystery into our lives or really polluted waters.

The lake is its quietest in the latest hours of the night. A large fishing boat creeps into the cavern and lurks in the dark, unnoticed by anyone. A number of pets lean over the deck and begin dumping the shoes they found throughout the day back into the fishing lake. When the job is done, they leave just as quietly as they came. People and their pets wake up in the morning and go fishing, only to be irritated by finding yet another old rotten left shoe. They donate their finds to the Money Tree. The members of this organization or village grab the shoes from the tree and repeat the vicious cycle.

If such a theory is true, how many pets are involved? How long has this been going on? Are they trying to tell us a message, or is this just for their own amusement? There is far too many holes in this idea to provide solid evidence of this being true.

Another belief is that Dr. Sloth is busy at work with his factories, and that these sandals are the waste of his evil devices. He pours the waste directly into the underwater fishing cavern, thinking no one will ever notice.

Careful search of the lake reveals no pipe or pump along the walls, but our scuba gear is not advanced enough yet to check the bottom of the lake, and the Peophins are too scared to look for us.

Environmentalists have proposed a hypothesis that the litter in the water is not litter at all. The shoes and sandals could possibly be food for the Titanic Giant Squid. With so many pets fishing these shoes out, the squids' supply of food is running low, thus the scarcity of Titanic Giant Squids. The squids are too busy searching the deepest parts of the lake for food, which explains why only the expert fishermen are able to catch the large sea creatures. Not much research has gone into this, mainly because the environmentalists are much too busy figuring out good fishing laws to protect the even rarer creatures of the sea.

How much of a problem are all these sandals and shoes in the lake? For the time being, it would appear to not be a very great problem, but one must consider the future and determine the origins all of the footgear. If there's a truly large number of shoes and sandals out there, something must be done to reduce it before the Soup Kitchen Faerie starts serving soup full of soles and spaghetti with shoelaces. Perhaps a great world exists out there, and those people inhabiting the world are in dire need of shoes - even if the shoes kind of smell. Maybe there's a cursed city full of Acaras who keep losing their shoes and are wandering around in just dirty socks.

The possibilities are endless, but we can eliminate the impossible with careful deduction. To paraphrase a great literary character, once you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever is left must be the absolute truth - no matter how improbable!