Puzzlement I

It doesn't happen the way you think it will: the cyan gradients of this one matching those of that, forming a calm ocean blue. The piece will not fit; there. No amount of flipping and turning will allow the knobs to lock together to form one smooth tessellation.
    Complication. Beginning with that word: why not say "tiling," call it what it is, simply, a series of connections forming a whole that cannot be defined by the sum of its parts. These dye-cut pieces are not, no matter how much they appear to be, identical in shape; their knobs and lobes are their own and fit together only one way; if. What about the rest of us?
    The connection happens in what you miss: a lifeboat here, a smear of shadow there; the edge of brown that matches, however incongruently, the Day-Glo gold floating to safety on the tumult, the turquoise sea. After the other amoebae have been snapped into place the operator is left to confront the error, for somehow this has to work. A twist, two turns an uncomfortable flip and it slips into its space. The mystery itself is the key, the raft that must be steered to shore by equating unlike variables; computing the valence of elements in a solution.