The Steampunk Motivational Speaker: Teamwork

Well met, Abilene Junior High School, my name is Huell B. Owlwright. I have just arrived here in Texas by way of chronoship from the Veld, a fictional alternate reality where South Africa of 1894 came to dominate the globe!

Huzzah! Huzzah for the Abilene Junior Wildcats! I am told the female’s volleyball team is quite “up there” in the tourney. Congratulations!

Your principal has asked me to come speak to you today upon the subject of teamwork. On the matter and most matters I have a simple object to show you. This.

Do any of you know what this is? A clock? Close! Over there, what do you think? A Frisbee? It does look a bit like a discus, I will confess, but no. This, my friends, is the humble cog. You will notice it is round, it turns, and you will notice these teeth.

One cog, all by itself isn’t much good to anyone. Look at that. But...now watch this...if you put two cogs together it will create a machine. The more of these cogs you add the better that machine gets until you have cog telewidgets and cog autopreambulators. It is these cogs working together that form the very foundation of pseudoscience.

Believe it or not, the handsome successful journeyman mechamotivationist you see before you today was once a gutterwaif and steam tramp, just barely scraping by in dockside cannery stacks of Old Cloyden Way. I was lucky to have a crust of mangoberry bread and enough oil for the wheel of my unipod. I was anti-social and mean. A real churlish maccuppin, which is the name for the bastards of the city guard of New Cloyden, protecting the up-crusters from us cannery kids.



Alone, by myself, busking and robbing, I wasn’t worth much. A spit. Half a spit. But from studying the cogs on the Cloyden Cathedral I came to watch the way they worked together, one turning the other and all of them turning together to make the whole thing work, and I knew I needed some friends.

So I met a bird man, a half-cogger, Jervis the pneumatic detective and the whole lot of them, and together we not only solved some cracking capers, we also brought down the Cloyden Aristos and their lousy maccuppins.

That, my friends, is what teamwork is all about. Do you have any questions?

No, I am afraid I’m not familiar with Twilight. Anyone else? Yes? No, I am not homosexual.

Thanks everyone. Remember, united we are one, divided we are zero. It is the motto of the Veld.

– Huell B. Owlwright, Mechamotivationist (@sexyfacts4u)