Nobad halted. Only one last set of library shelves stood between him and that increasingly exciting stench.
He did not, of course, comprehend as you do what a "Dolphin" is. Not the literal, related-yet-unrelated dolphins that hunted the salty, wet pits of your dirt clump, nor the unrelated-yet-related capital-D "Dolphins" that lived only to widen the wounds of bleeding conceptual boundaries for a reason that I, as a Narrative, am incapable of divulging until it will have the appropriate Narrative Impact, regardless of how accurately or inaccurately any of you already puzzled it out, but I am at the very least free to express that the reason is very stupid.
All Nobad knew is that this smell was usually something even he would have been wise to avoid, but that something (ahem...you) had overridden those instincts so profoundly, it had become the smell of safety. Of his mother. He had not come to a sudden halt to second-guess this logic by any means, but out of sheer anxiousness that he was about to see HER once more. It felt to him as if he hadn't seen his sweet and precious caretaker in something similar to decades, and now he was getting cold feet as he tried to work out what one should even say in such a situation. How does one greet their loving goddess after centuries apart? What emotions should one feel gazing into the face of infinite, all-encompassing Love Itself after millenia of suffering in the savage world beyond the warm caress of her sacred, ashtray-flavored aura?!
What we mean by all this, of course, is that the skittering glob of dandruff was so overwhelmed by the anticipation, its sticky collection of viscera were arguing over which orifice ought to expel which kind of tepid celebratory sludge in which oder, but it wasn't long before a faint, dogly equivalent to something a little like "ah, screw it, they're all good choices" finally finished dribbling through the wrinkles of his cerebellum, and he at last rounded the final corner to greet the source of that noxious, dolphiny funk.
...And aren't you just so fortunate that Cheryl's new pet imbeciles were maybe perhaps the only dolphins present in the library. How clever of you to gamble on that possibility! I, your dear friend the Narration, truly made the right choice pairing up with you wise sages!
