Petey was extremely excited. Even more so than usual, in fact.

The anuran was leading him and all of his hoomans to a new place! They'd been walking for a pretty long time, and they were getting deeper and deeper into the wet and humid and hilariously muddy forest. As they kept going, the trees and plants kept getting bigger and bigger and WAY bigger until even the plants with the wide flat leaves that Petey had liked to chew at one point towered over him.

He was trying to think of all of the reasons that he liked this particular time of day. At the moment he had the list lined up to 1) there was mud! A lot of it! Like way more than he'd ever seen in one place! 2) His peoples were following him, and he was following the frog person! 3) He'd tried to eat the plants and they didn't taste half bad! They definitely didn't taste good, but they weren't bad! 4) He was genuinely curious about when exactly he'd learned how to do numbers in his head (or at all, for that matter) but he was really glad that he could because lists would be a lot harder to make without that particular ability.

The anuran glanced back at him. "Sir Petey, there's a fact of which you may be unaware. None of the mud in which you roll is sticking to your hair."

Petey looked down back at himself and found to his absolute horror that the anuran was in fact telling the truth. All of the mud which he'd been rolling in for the past four minutes just sort of pushed away from his fur. That aside, Leula was literally covered from eyes to legs to giant butt in mud, and he was forced to admit that he was slightly envious. Well, she was sitting on his head, so at least he was technically in contact with the mud.

Out of curiosity, he stomped his paws in the mud underneath him, and it instantly turned perfectly clear, spreading in a neat little circle around Petey's legs. He frowned, his perpetually lolling tongue briefly pulling back into his mouth. How was he supposed to roll in mud if it just turned into water when he stepped in it!?

The anuran's eyes widened in mild worry, the gigantic globes on the sides of the top of his head expressing his concern. "Is something the matter?"

Leula stared at him and whispered with her mind, He wishes to be in contact with the mud. I do not understand why I must be the one to be his test subject. I desire to be clean, but I cannot swim.

The anuran looked extremely surprised at the contact and squinted at her. "My dear spider, my apologies I must extend. I did not expect you, your mental voice to send."

Petey squinted at the anuran. That set of matching end words sounded a little dicey in terms of actually rhyming, but more to the point - Leula wanted to be clean!? He didn't understand why on earth she'd want to. To be covered in mud was to be covered in happiness. But if she didn't want to...

Taking a deep breath, Petey dipped his head down into the small pool of water. Normally he had to squeeze his eyes shut because of the little stuff that ended up getting in his eyes (and stayed there for incomprehensibly long periods of time), but with the water so clear around his head, he could leave them open. It was due to that fact that he could see a whole group of very strange-looking plants ahead. They were round and absolutely huge, and the rims had triangular white spikey things that looked quite familiar for some reason. Even underwater, Petey frowned for the second time that day and for the fourth time in his whole life. He had a bad feeling about those plants for some reason.

Remembering that he did in fact need to breathe at some point, he lifted his head and panted lightly, then looked upward. Leula was indeed clean, but didn't look very happy about it. She was trembling slightly, water dripping from her utterly soaked frame, and was clutching to Petey's head quite forcefully. I did not want to take a bath. I wished to be clean. Could you not have nudged me? I would even have accepted a lick. But I am a spider, and we DO NOT LIKE WATER.

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Petey lolled his mouth, wondering how she got clean if she never took baths. With an amused chuckled, the anuran turned back around, folding his webbed hands behind him. "We must truly get along, my friends. Our journey is fast approaching its end." He started walking forward, and then Petey remembered why the triangles were so important.

They looked a lot like teeth.

Now, Petey knew he wasn't especially smart. He'd been told so by quite a lot of his old owners, albeit in far less polite terms. But he knew that things with teeth generally liked biting, and he knew that the frogman was about to step on the tooth-plants.

This, he knew with concrete certainty, was a Bad Thing.

It was with that mindset that Petey launched himself forward, carefully deposited Leula upon the anuran's shoulder while him (and everyone else) was frozen in the weird time-stop thing that happened when Petey wanted to go fast. With his passenger safely put out of potential harms way, Petey walked on top of the tooth plants and let everything start moving.

His logic was as follows: that thus far in this world quite literally nothing had made it even past his fur, and that Leula was not a part of his fur. Therefore, the single easiest and simplest way to inform everyone present about the plants was to allow the teeth to bite him. He was very much certain that he would be fine.

True to his suspicions, the moment everything went back to normal speed, the water underneath Petey's paws exploded into action. Writhing around on long stalks, the teeth-plants had an eye growing out of the middle. Petey had no idea why in the world they tried to eat things if they couldn't swallow them, but then he realized that the black part in the middle of the eye was actually a tube. So that's how! He thought with pride to himself, nearly forgetting that the plants were biting him.

They genuinely weren't doing anything, but the anuran looked like he was on the verge of panicking. "Petey! Stay right where you are! I assure that you will be completely safe in just a moment!"

Petey was surprised. He must have been panicking after all, because he forgot to rhyme. At any rate, he held one hand out, and a thin whippy rod that was as tall as the anuran popped into existence in his hand. Or maybe he'd been concealing it somehow? Without Floof Speed activated (his new name for the time-stopping thingy) it was hard to tell.

He almost launched himself forward, but Leula calmly told him from his shoulder, Do not worry about Champion Petey, anuran. You have not witnessed his stat board. We have.

The anuran jumped a good eight feet in the air when he realized the spooder was sitting on his shoulder, and then glanced over at Petey calmly sitting amongst the thrashing tooth-vines. He looked uncertain and rather worried, so Petey decided that perhaps he should take care of the plants to make him feel better.

Opening his mouth, Petey very delicately started biting, but the plant he had his teeth around wailed in pain the moment he did, and he froze. Were plants alive!? These ones certainly seemed to be. Cautiously, Petey opened his mouth and immediately gave the bitemark a good lick. In seconds, the plant he'd bitten was fine again, and its eye swiveled in shock to the part. Looking up at Petey, it checked back at the part that should very much be hurt and then released a loud whine.

The rest of the plants stopped trying to bite Petey all at once and looked at the first vine. It screeched and chirped quite loudly at them for a moment, and Petey squinted at it. He was trying to keep up with the conversation, which was naturally quite difficult seeing as he didn't know a word of it.

A few seconds later, the rest of the plants looked doubtfully at Petey, and he let loose a quiet woof in response. He might not speak plant, but maybe they spoke dog. As for the anuran and Petey's hoomans, they looked absolutely bamboozled by the occurring events, and the frogman's mouth was hanging wider open than any other Petey had ever seen.

After several moments of incomprehensible discussion, the plants seemed to come to an agreement and pulled their vines off of Petey's body, making a clear pathway through their territory. Petey ran back to his hoomans to give them all licks of appreciation, hesitantly gave a lick to the anuran because he'd been worried for Petey (which was a first) and a really good lick to Leula, who crawled back onto his head. Once she was back in position, she mind-whispered, You are truly an unusual creature, Champion Petey.

He was okay with being unusual. The coolest things were always unusual.