Strange things happen as a thing roams the range. Or, perhaps, it's not so strange at all; say perhaps you trudged through some of that disgusting sloppy muck so much of your world is made out of. You would leave furrows in it, since it can't occupy the same space as your "torsos" and your "pants" and other solid matter parts. You would probably also leave bits of yourself behind, like hairs and cloth fibers and flesh flakes and particles of the grease that's always oozing out of your epidermal cells. At the same time, you would get a lot of the muck smeared all over your matter in turn. Maybe you even keep a little of it to eat later, or whatever it is you do with all the filth your live around. At the very least, it would leave you with new memories, new knowledge of the nature of this particular pit of muck, a little more understanding of how to interact with muck, and maybe, also, a stink even worse than your regular one. What I'm saying here is that wherever you go, you make changes to it, and it changes you too. And the thing about the perception range, if you haven't noticed by now, is that it's a heck of a lot messier and more complicated than just a puddle of mud.

  I say this because some of you had been wondering whether Cheryl the Human was actually Cheryl the Human, and not something like Cheryl the Vibrotationoider or any of those other dumb things the writer makes up on the fly. No, friends, she was very much one of you things, but she had trudged through a LOT of the disgusting sloppy muck of reality's many disgustingly sloppy layers. That was why she could do things you probably think are weird and not-human, but are, I'm delighted to tell you, EXTREMELY human, when the human in question has been through, you know, The Muck. Just as a human works a little differently underwater than in the air, you know? But there's a lot more kinds of things out there than water and air, guys. Perhaps if you didn't know what water was, and you saw one of your kind swimming around in it, you'd think they were some kind of insane monstrosity until you got in and figured out how to swim a little yourself, or I suppose you just drowned. A LOT of you would probably "just drown" if you got up to any of the nonsense Cheryl's gotten up to. The things even Fern or the blue guy could have done at any point if they only realized how much muck they were in would have made for a very, very different sequence of events.

  I probably didn't need to get into all that, but I thought you might appreciate the insight into why, at the moment, Cheryl was walking an elaborate course that precisely avoided a lot of other terrible things while precisely homing in on her terrible thing, now that she knew for certain that the two of them were sharing a zone. It's also why, quite suddenly, she perceived something that made her say "...SHIT" and start to really hustle. She wasn't "psychic" (that isn't a thing, especially since, technically speaking, neither are "thoughts" in quite the way you would describe them) but, you know, Muck stuff.

  Unfortunately, her newfound henchbeasts had picked up on the same perceptual cues; that the three of them were not only heading for one of their own kind, but one that both dolphins in fact recognized. Quite closely, in fact. And while they certainly continued to hustle right along with the Cheryl (the "Dolphin's Code" and whatnot), they did so with decidedly less enthusiasm than they had when we last had to listen to their drivel. What say we listen to their drivel now!

  ...Cheryl had, by this point in the discussion, actually stopped moving, having skidded to a halt and grabbed Blowhole II by the gross, dangly snoot around when he indicated they were on course to encounter the dreaded spurtbirther, or, in case he would prefer to explore any other alternative terms for his progenitor, a creature some zones refer to as a delphinian stenchwomb, lesser bottle-nosed whorrorshow or nightmare-defecator, to name a few.

  Cheryl was far too stubborn to be having second thoughts, but she'd paused so she could briefly appreciate having all her bones and guts in the right places before she came face to face with what was debatably either the second or third Most Heinous of all the many Most Heinous sorts of dolphins that existed, which was all of them, really.

She sighed, letting go of the porpoisoid's dangly snoot thing and wiping off her now even sweatier hand on her skirt. She had not been looking forward to things getting this much worse.

   But then, she picked up on something else; not just the unmistakable vibrations of a little, tiny, terrible dogthing's perception sphere, but a canid whose exospinal branches were now contracting into an anticlockwise corkscrew thrumming fourteen octaves to the left. This was among the things a concept core did in response to something similar to "pain," and suddenly Cheryl wasn't even hustling, but running full speed ahead, and from the depths of her tar-caked lungs there erupted a word that has never once been uttered in all the layers of this "Webbed Series:"

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