Chapter Text
In a land south of sweet but north of savory, a river of molasses flowed slow and crushing through canals of hardened waffle. It pooled in the golden-brown squares, forming that weird white-transparent skein, before being tugged onward by the cloying current, against which swam pink smoked salmon. On the banks of the river, children made of toast and eggs and bacon frolicked, chasing orange slice butterflies that fluttered in the coffee-scented breeze. It was another beautiful morning in the land of the morning people — the Breakfast Kingdom.
A child’s shriek soured the pacific scene. Most of the children immediately started running in the opposite direction, their parents following behind, and when the crowd was all moving, the stragglers followed suit. One grizzled drumstick in a working man’s uniform, who had been taking in the scene, started to head toward the sound instead. He stopped, though, when an egg-shaped person in a cloak ran past him.
The shrieker, a star-shaped blue marshmallow, ran out from under a florentine porcelain bridge, fear in their eyes. They stumbled over a loose oat jutting from the pavement, landing on their face as their screams turned to sobs. Behind, a looming shadow encroached.
A comforting presence stilled the mallow’s cries. Looking up, they saw their seeming savior, cloak billowing in the wind, bow in their right hand, jagged white sword in their left. They were not, despite the shape of the body from which their spindly limbs protruded, an egg; they were instead a brown-shelled nut, like a hazelnut or something. They were humming something under their breath, and while the child couldn’t quite make it out, it was somehow comforting.
The beast was now in full view. It reared up, head eclipsing the corinthian rail on the bridge now behind it, lumbering arms flexing as its knuckles smeared across the ground ahead of its massive legs. The breath from its gaping, serrated maw was pungent — not unpleasant on its own, but disharmonious with the aroma of the Breakfast Kingdom it terrorized. Red sprouts that served as eyes fixed on the stalwart proteaceae who was interposing themself between it and the child; flecks of gravy mucus dribbled from its face and body. Lest I fail to mention: It was made of beans.
The nut stopped humming and met the beast’s gaze. “Leave this place,” she said. Her voice was undeniably a child’s, but the line was delivered with the cool indifference of a professional. “I will not ask a second time.”
The beast crooked its head, as if considering. Then it pulled back its mouth in a snarl and its arm in a fist. The macadamia’s eyes widened an instant before the punch was thrown. It was blindingly fast. The white sword was faster.
With a single circular swipe of Shark’s Tooth, barely more than a flick of the wrist, she cut off the attacking hand. A pile of beans splattered wetly on the ground behind her, a little dripping into the molasses river. The beast recoiled and stared in pain and confusion at its stump.
“Whoa!” said the marshmallow kid, now standing several paces back. “How did you do that?”
The huntress did not answer their question. Instead, she asked one of her own. “What’s your name, kid?”
“Estelle Le Bleu,” they answered.
“And what’s the coolest thing that’s ever happened to you?” she continued, snapping her sword in half with a thumb.
Estelle thought about this. “One time my friend’s cousin got me nosebleed tickets to a Number One Babes concert, and I don’t even have a nose.”
“Okay, that’s pretty cool.” She nocked the front half of the sword like an arrow, settling it into the string of the Nut Bow and drawing it back carefully. “Well, you’ll probably have a new number two, at least.”
“What’s that?”
“The time your life was personally saved by Eagle-Eyed Macy.” She fired.
The projectile sailed right into the beans monster’s eye. It squealed in pain, stumbling backward and hitting its head against the bridge. While it was doubling up from that, Macy ran forward, spinning around on one foot to hit the monster’s leg with the back half of her sword. It didn’t have the same cutting power — it wouldn’t until it regenerated — but she didn’t need it to cut. The force was enough to make the monster lose its balance and collapse right on the edge of the waffle canal.
With a great strain, Macy pulled herself up from the pile of beans, but they were still shifting as the beast tried to stand back up. “Hup!” she shouted, straining to push against it, barely making it slide in the direction of the river. “Hey, uh, a little help?”
The drumstick from before appeared and lent his aid, and together they pushed it in. It let out one final, guttural cry, as the molasses slowly began to mix with its bean juices and pull it apart.
Heaving from both the exertion and the unpleasant smell, Macy looked over at the civilian who had helped her. “Thanks for the assist,” she said between labored breaths.
“All in a day’s work,” he said mysteriously; he held out a hand, and Macy shook it. “And really, I should be thanking you. That culinary colossus has been mucking up our fine city for weeks. Makes a simple plumber like me weep. Least I could do is stick around ‘til it’s gone and done got vanquished. Hey, and so I can see that you get all the thanks you deserve, what’s your handle?”
Macy skilted1 for a moment before answering. “Macadamia the Nut, fourth Marquess Jugland,” she said, “but really, no thanks are necessary. All in a day’s work, as you said. And what’s your name?”
“Chucken Drimstick,” said the chicken drumstick with a chuckle, “but you can call me Chuck. You’re a goodun, Marquess,” he said. “You sure there’s nada I can do for yada?”
“Hm.” Macy looked down at the river. It was tough to make out in the bridge’s shadow, even for her, but the molasses here was clean on the surface, the beans having been washed further downstream. She wasn’t sure whether that monster had been a bioengineered horror, a product of a toxic bean dump from a nearby kingdom, or the result of a colony of beans that gained consciousness and malice all on their own; whatever the case, it represented an unnatural threat to the balance of Ooo. As such, it had been her role, symbolized by the acorn-clasped cloak she wore, to stop it — at least until her mentor and the cloak’s true master came back from vacation. She would never demand payment for that service; nature looked after those who looked after it. An offer of a gift was another thing, though, but what did she want?
Robin, the pastel-colored rainicorn-dog, snorted with laughter at the crystal in front of zhir. “You wasted your wish on what?”
“It’s not a wish,” came Macy’s voice through the crystal, a magical transdimensional communication device that had been jury-rigged to also take phone calls. “It’s a favor. And I don’t know why you’re so dismissive; I’m a big fan of learning.”
“Yeah,” Robin agreed, “such a big fan that you had your ducal daddy force the school to let you take a several month break for ‘sabbatical’. Besides, The Perspicacious Ballaster’s Guide to Plumbing, Pumping and Piping2 doesn’t exactly sound like a rip-roaring page-turner.”
There was a brief silence from the other end of the call, during which Robin knew Macy must have been rolling her eyes. “Looken, I don’t judge you for your interests.”
Robin guffawed, startling a nesting mountain-jay in a tree next to the bench zhe was stretching across. “Do you even know what my interests are?”
“Cooking, folk music, advanced color theory, antagonizing my eldest brother, perverting the laws of physics with your wizard friends, coming up with personal insults that even you would never dare say out loud, and bowling.”
Robin whistled, which calmed the jay down. “I’m not even sure how you knew some of those. Especially the bowling.”
“You left your dirty bowling shoes in Pen’s car.”
“Yeah, that was hilarious. Anyway, I know you’re not interested in plumbing, so why don’t you get some nonfiction about stuff you actually give a yelp about?”
“I already know everything about that stuff.”
Robin’s eyes, which were a ruby on the left and a sapphire on the right, did not have pupils to roll, so zhe lit up zhir horn and conjured illusory googly-eyes to roll for zhir. Macy wouldn’t be able to see them, of course, but this wasn’t about Macy. “I promise you, you don’t.”
“Oh yeah? Name one thing I don’t know.”
“Who are the people on each side of the lucky coin you always wear around your neck?”
There was a rustling as Macy dug out the purple toonie, strung onto a necklace through the pentagonal hole in the middle, and examined it on both faces. Robin knew that was unnecessary — Macy had studied it extensively ever since she first acquired it as a party favor from Princess Bubblegum herself, on the day the Duke came to the Candy Kingdom and adopted her, and Robin had come along for the ride — but looking at it always comforted and grounded her. “That’s easy. Betty and Fern.”
“Yeah, but who are they?”
Another pause. “See you soon. Love you.” The crystal beeped. Macy had hung up.
Robin sighed and allowed zhir stretchy body to melt through the slits in the bench; zhir thick black jowls wobbled in the faint breeze that made the brass chimes sing along with the birds. Zhe took in a heavy sniff of the mountain air that circulated through the small courtyard garden, right in the middle of Castle Jugland. To most, it would be just as fresh and fragrant as the forest down below in the Valley of Moths; zhir sensitive nose could make out the lingering aroma of eggs from breakfast expunged by the AC, and even hints of acrid metallic dust from the mines beneath the mesa.3 These notes zhe did not find off-putting. It reminded zhir of the place zhe used to call home, back in the Crystal Dimension with zhir clueless father, before zhe uprooted it all on a whim. They didn’t make zhir feel at home — nothing did, really — but they were at least familiar.
Speaking of family, Robin heard footsteps through the garden. Zhe pulled zhirself together and relaxed into zhir full, meter-and-a-half length, coiling territorially around the bench. Zhe met the disapproving stare of the newcomer, a peanut with fitted green suit and tousled black toupee. This was Penhaligon Arthur Jugland, Marquis of Nuts, right hand of the Duke, Macy’s oldest sibling, and Robin’s biggest hater.
“You know,” said Pen, reaching up and grabbing a strand of hair that was blowing into his face, “that bench was designed to seat two.”
“So’s your dad’s office chair, Hal,” Robin countered, “but you keep trying to scooch him off it.”
“What?” Pen took a performatively long time to figure out Robin’s insinuation. They had known each other intimately for two years now; he was no doubt familiar with zhir particular manner of elocution. He knew zhe was impatient, though, and he never let a bit of knowledge go to waste. “You really want to get political, Bean? Is that actually a dusty mineshaft you’re antsy to go down?”
Robin tilted zhir head, considering. “No,” zhe decided. Zhe lit up zhir horn, muttered a magic word under zhir breath, and teleported away.
Pen put his hand on his hip and addressed the empty bench. “You can’t turn invisible your way out of this conversation, Robin.” A beat. “Dreck.”
A different day’s noontime sun beat down on peaty wetland. Croaking frogs basked in its cool autumn light; buzzing flies and beetles sought out those flowers, floating lilies and hardy silverberries, that had yet to vanish along with the summer’s heat. A few bold rays pierced through murky fathoms into a subaqueous world totally invisible from the surface: a world carved into oozing columns, built half-hive and half-city. This was the Slime Kingdom.
And right in the middle of it — between a hole-mottled dome out of which variegated lights flashed and a shockingly typical modernist apartment complex — a very out-of-place prinzregententorte bavarian, flanked by baton-bearing bananas with bulging circular heads, loaded opaque glass boxes onto a humming, hovering box cart.
“Again, thanks for the help,” said Macy, emerging from the front door of the apartment complex. She was wearing a garish pink hazmat suit over which she had clasped her cloak, giving her an uncharacteristically humanoid silhouette. She held a giant set of pliers in both hands, at the other end of which was grasped a large grey larva of some kind. “You really didn’t need to.”
“Are you sure about that?” asked the torte, grabbing a box from the top of the cart and opening it for Macy to drop the bug into. “Look at yourself, Macy. You’re trembling.”
“Ah, you can’t prove that,” non-answered Macy, voice trembling. The larva dropped in.
A hearty laugh, surprising for her size, came from the torte as she put a lid on the box and put it back . “Macadamia Jugland, protector of the wilds and twice savior of the world, afraid to admit she’s scared of bugs?”
“Hey!” Macy shouted. The two banana guards instinctively raised their batons, reddish-pink and humming with electricity, toward the huntress at her aggression, but she paid them no heed. “Don’t you dare make fun of… wait, hold on.” Her anger trailed off; she doffed the head of her hazmat suit, tucking it under one arm, as she processed what her companion had actually said. “No, okay, you’re right. But it’s still not a very becoming thing to say, Princess.”
Princess Torte of the Candy Kingdom laughed again, this time a cutesy, parodic giggle. “Sowwy, I didn’t meant to upset the gweat Huntwess of Jugwand.”4
Macy rolled her eyes, then placed a hand on the ground and hummed. After a moment, an enormous mudfish burst through the muddy ground next to them and blew a giant snot bubble, enveloping the four of them along with the cart before rising up through the air and muck and popping on the surface.
One of the bananas started pulling the cart and the other hoisted Princess Torte onto his shoulders, as Macy walked alongside them. They already knew the way.
“Genuinely, thank you,” said Macy, finally allowing herself to breathe deeply now that she was in the putrid, decay-scented air. “You’re absolutely right that I couldn’t do this on my own. When I heard about the infestation, I was worried I’d have to ask Vesper for help.”
“Right.” Torte didn’t know much about Macy’s occultist cousin, not even their physical appearance — she wasn’t even sure if Macy knew that — apart from that they had recently been buddy-buddy with her older brother, the Peppermint Prince. Any friend of his was possibly demonic in nature. “I mean, you could also ask Robin, I presume.”
“I already ask zhir for so much. I don’t need zhir to patrol my dreams and pull me out of my delusions now that I have my sensory exercises and my antipsychotics, but zhe’s promised to hold down my school work while I’m wearing my teacher’s cloak.”
“I thought you said your school gave you a full-on break.”
“No, I mean my other school-related work. You know, helping my friends study, managing the class pets, keeping the peace between rival gangs so the schoolyard doesn’t break out into an all-out brawl every time someone tries to play a game of four-square.”
“Right, of course. How very… political.” Torte’s voice dropped toward the end.
Macy smirked, though she didn’t mean it. “I know why you’re really here, Princess. And it’s not just because you lurrrrv me.”
“What‽” Torte shot up so fast that she tumbled backward, nearly falling off the back of the banana guard. His lightning-quick reflexes allowed him to reach backward and catch her in the air, though he didn’t put her back on his head. “That’s— I never— who told?” she asked, upside-down.
Macy chuckled. “You did.” Then her mirth vanished and a cold pit swallowed her stomach. Once upon a time she was the one smitten, after the princess had helped her in the middle of a panic attack in Bubblegum Castle. To her, Torte had seemed an angel, and when she had come to her thirteenth birthday party, it was a miracle. Now, though, Macy was less innocent. “But you’re really here as a spy.”
Prinzregententorte Bavarian Bubblegum, daughter of Princess Regent Bonnibel Bubblegum and Queen-Consort Marceline Bubblegum, did not say a word. The banana who had been carrying her set her atop the cart, atop the bugs, while the other gave a sidelong glance at Macy.
“Hey, I get it,” Macy continued. “Politics may be more Pen’s thing than mine, but I absolutely understand why you’re here. I’m not acting in a political capacity, but I’m still a royal of the Duchy of Nuts paying a visit to the capital of the Slime Kingdom, one of your own kingdom’s biggest rivals—”
“—to which your kingdom once swore fealty,” Torte finished. “And mother isn’t particularly fond of your dad. I think it’s silly, but… I mean, she was going to send someone out here anyway, and this way I get to spend some time with you.”
Macy looked up at Torte, trying to match the affectionate gaze in her eyes, but the moment was ruined. Business and pleasure didn’t mix. She knew where she stood, and where her friend stood,5 and that was that.
The two banana guards exchanged a glance of their own, which Macy couldn’t interpret through their goggles. She hadn’t interacted much with the 500 models; when she was an orphan in the candy kingdom, she’d only ever seen the classic-style bananas out and about patrolling the city. These guys were special ops, reserved for critical missions like escorting important personnel into questionable territory. They were, near uniquely among the candyfolk, taciturn and serious.
Whatever; Macy had ways around that. She may not have had the thrice-magic lineage of her best friend, but she had her own empathetic powers, learned in her training with Huntress Wizard. As the bananas walked, their footsteps and breaths formed a distinct rhythm against the musical din of the bog. All Macy had to do was harmonize with this rhythm — hum, from her nose, a perfect complement — and she could think their thoughts, feel their feelings, for only the price of them feeling hers.
Or that’s what would have happened, but apparently Princess Bubblegum had prepared against that.
A flash of pain, pink and electric, jolted from Macy’s mind to itself, breaking her concentration and stuttering her pace. She tried to catch herself, tried to make it look like she was merely skipping along, but that just made her foot slip in the wet mulch and cause her to really fall. With a squelch and a splat, she splayed star-shaped on the ground, looking up at the noontime sun before it was blotted out by a concerned Torte.
“Don’t mind me,” Macy muttered, mustering the will to push herself up and keep trudging as the peat sloughed off the back of her hazmat suit. A very real part of her was still lying there, slowly dissolving into the bog. That was the part that cared about what the princess thought of her. The rest of her just wanted to get this job over with.
A few agonizingly, excruciatingly, nigh-unbearably, silently awkward seconds later, the banana guard carrying the cart came to a stop a meter away from a pair of trees that had grown into an arch. “We’re here,” he announced.
Torte hopped off the top of the cart, causing some boxes to wobble worrisomely, and landed with a splash next to Macy. “Well, I guess this is where we part ways,” she said. “Sorry about, you know, the espionage.”
“Don’t mention it,” Macy said, resisting the urge to rub her aching forehead so as to avoid spreading bog goop onto it. “We should get together sometime less politically-charged.”
“Natchy.”
A beat. Macy took the handle of the card from the banana who had been pulling it, while the other leaned down and whispered something in Torte’s ear. The princess’s eyes widened.
“Oh, right. Your birthday’s coming up in a couple months, isn’t it?”
Macy, who had already retrieved her sword Glob knows whence and begun advancing toward the arch, spun around to face her again. “Yeah, on the sixth of Abraham.”
“What do you want for it?”
She considered this for a moment, skilting. “I’m not selling it.”
Torte laughed, full-bodied and boisterous as before. “No, what should I get you for it?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Macy reached under the neckline of her hazmat suit, smearing bog goop on her face, and took out her lucky coin. She had thought she knew the stories of Betty and Fern — everyone had, in school — but when Robin had asked her, she had found that she wasn’t really sure. “I’d like to know more about the people this coin commemorates. The martyrs of the averted Great Gum War.”
“That’s… how about this: I’ll get you that as soon as possible, and then on your birthday I’ll give you an actual gift.”
“If that’s what makes you happy. Love you soon.”
Macy spun back around, doing a full 900-degree twirl, and then started humming a different tune. Shark’s Tooth began glowing multicolored light, and then she slashed through the air under the arch, filling it with a fractal pleochroic pattern which was at once a flat plane and a deep tunnel. Sucking in a breath out of habit, Macy put away her sword, tightened her grip on the box cart, and ran through.
Torte balled her fists as she watched Macy disappear. It wasn’t fair that this was how things had to be between them. Things hadn’t been this awkward before, and she wasn’t sure what had changed. She had helped Macy through mental health crises on multiple occasions. Surely she deserved more good faith than this! Surely her friend ought to have overlooked the ulterior motive as the obvious excuse it was!
She felt one of the banana guards’ hand on her shoulder. She looked up at him and nodded. “Yeah, we know what we need to,” she confirmed. “We officially have nothing to worry about.”
As he picked her up and piggybacked her again, the other guard rubbed his temple. “She attempted to spy on us on the walk here,” he said. “Our psychic defenses prevented it, but should we report it?”
Torte was taken aback by this, but she quickly regained her composure. She would have been a hypocrite to be truly put off. “No, fair’s fair.”
“Affirmative,” said the guard who was carrying her. “I have a more important question. What are you going to get for her birthday?”
“It’ll have to be something special. A gift that keeps on giving.” She snapped her fingers. “I’ve got it.”
The other guard looked up at her. “So, what’s it gonna be?”
“Huh? No, not that. I just remembered a word I was trying to think of two days ago that’s been bugging me the whole time.”
At the end of the tunnel, Macy stepped out onto a mostly-empty plaza paved with diamond. She turned around just in time to see the illusion of the tunnel she’d just come through fade away into the hex-faceted alexandrite wall of a municipal building — specifically, based on the Hangul engraved above, the Transportation something or other. She looked around at the rest of the square, populated by other Korean-language buildings through whose doors a handful of rainicorns and dogs were milling. All the buildings were hewn of gemstone, and the sky above was a tessellated dome.
Most people thought the town of Fort Eisenkiesel was beautiful, and in a sense it was, but Macy could not find it so. It smelled like nothing. She wasn’t sure how its inhabitants breathed, but she didn’t care for it. Still, this was the only place she knew with a wildlife shelter in which rockflies, being native to the Crystal Dimension, could be housed.
Macy reached into a pocket on the inside of her hazmat suit and pulled out a hot pink flip phone, but before she opened it, she heard a voice call her name. Looking out at the alley the sound came from, she saw the person she had been expecting: Lady Rainicorn,6 flying into the plaza at a leisurely pace. She wore a white visor and had a bag of putts slung across her long, undulating back. When she saw Macy wave her over, she went up to her and grabbed the handle of the cart.
“Chào chị, Lady!” Macy exclaimed, smiling across half the circumference of her shell.
Lady cleared her throat as she examined the bugs, prodding the stacked boxes with her horn. “It is good to see you,” she said, in somewhat slow and notably accented English.
“Tôi đã nói tiếng Việt nhỏ,” Macy said, in brisk, confident, well-pronounced, and very bad Vietnamese.
The rainicorn forced a smile. “That is not necessary. These are the bugs, yes? I will take them. Give my hello to my great-grandchild.”
Macy nodded. “Robin wanted me to give one to you, too. Zhe’s sorry zhe can’t be here.”
“Zhe is welcome to visit any time. Zhe knows where the portals are.”
“Yes, well, you know how zhe is.”
“I would like to know zhir better.”
Macy did not have anything to say about that. She couldn’t relate to Robin’s apparent desire to stay away from zhir family; she didn’t know how to broach the subject, nor would she want to if she did. She needed to change the topic to something less loaded. “So, how are things with the ancient superweaph—”
Lady shoved a hoof into Macy’s mouth. “The present that you gave me the last time you came here,” she corrected, staring intently into Macy’s eyes and boring into her soul, “is safe. I’m keeping it in mint condition, and there have been no problems with burglars. Hiểu rồi?”
Macy nodded; Lady took her foot out of the nut’s mouth. “Bluh,” she spat. “Anyway, that’s great to hear. I’ve gotta head out now if I want to be home by sunset. Prismgram Robin once the larvae are in the shelter.” She turned around and reached for her sword again, ready to open the way back to the bog.
“Why don’t you come with me?” Lady asked. “I know where the portals are, too. I can open the one near your home, and on the way you can tell me stories about Robin.”
“Oh yeah.” Macy blushed so hard it showed through her shell, embarrassed about not having thought of that. “That sounds like a plan. I mean, there are a lot of Robin stories.”
Robin, day-drunk on ginger ale in a noisy bar, sneezed. Someone was talking about zhir. More specifically, Lady Rainicorn had just beamed a prismgram transmission to zhir, and since zhir crystal did not fit in the pockets zhe shapeshifted for zhirself when zhe went out on the town, the message had went directly into zhir brain.7 Something about bugs? Zhe’d read it later.
“Brainfreeze cutting in already?” asked the bartender of the Gusty Goat, a slightly wilted giant sunflower. Two of his leaves were rinsing cocktail shakers, while a third rearranged the bottles on the visible shelf above and behind the bar. “Don’t give me a reason to cut you off, Robin. I wouldn’t be serving you at all if your detective friend didn’t pick up your tab.”
Robin waved zhir paw dismissively and stared at zhir reflection in the drink, swishing it until it formed a slight vortex. “Since you asked,” zhe said, “I’m just a bit frustrated with myself. It’s a thankless job, tutoring at the school, and I thought I was prepared for that, but I swear they’re making up subjects these days. Algebraic geometry? History of demography? Big band? Back when I was in school, we had history and arithmetic, and art if we were lucky. You feeling me, Helix?”
But the bartender was not paying attention. Despite literary tropes indicating the contrary, being a therapist was not part of his job description. The city had actual therapists for that.
“Fine!” Robin’s horn glowed, and the remaining ginger ale flowed in an arc from zhir mug to her mouth. Zhe swallowed the whole thing in a single gulp, then let out a pathetic whimper of a belch. Zhe reached for zhir side and withdrew, from nowhere, a jar of coins, then set one on the counter and walked away.
Helix saw this and did nothing to stop zhir. When zhe was gone, he picked up her mug and turned over the coin. It was not actual currency; instead, its front face had a picture of a gemstone, and on the back, Robin’s winking face, embossed with the words, “I’m good for it!”
He sighed. Things would have been so much simpler if it weren’t true. Zhe really did have the funds to pay up, from some sort of grey-market foraging business he didn’t quite understand. Zhe would always settle up eventually, often through zhir drinking buddy, the private detective Cash Daniels. But zhe refused to make things easy by actually carrying money. If only it were possible to spend that credit directly, perhaps by using some sort of card… but that was a ridiculous notion. And Robin was somehow a less frustrating customer than the university kids who had started showing up once the mines reopened.
He coughed into his leaf. His train of thought had been interrupted. Oh well, he’d just add this to Robin’s tab as usual.
Robin morphed into an equine shape and trotted through the bustling streets of downtown Jugland. Just as zhe liked it, zhe had no particular destination in mind. When school let out, zhe’d have to help a caffeine-addicted wheat stalk prepare for an oral exam about how to use letters and numbers to learn things about shapes, after which zhe would head down into the valley to collect some magic-rich mushrooms that could only be harvested at twilight, but until then zhir time was best spent wasted.
The day being nothing special, the time early in the afternoon, and the street one of those downtown paths whose businesses were most active after people let out from their day jobs, most of the people Robin passed on the street were either out-of-towners who didn’t know their way around or townies who would have preferred to be somewhere else. One half of the crowd was staring blankly at unfamiliar street signs and asking which way to this famous statue or that local theater, questions which the other half answered curtly or not at all before hurrying along on whatever their business was. Members of both groups occasionally cast strange glances at Robin — half at surprise seeing a horse of such strange color and pattern, the other half knowing full well who zhe was and wary of any trouble zhe might cause.
That put a bit of hop in zhir clop. It was nice to feel unwanted; that way, there were no expectations. With the bar set so low by zhir history, Robin could exceed expectations simply by doing nothing wrong, which was a lot less work than someone like Macy had to do to achieve the same effect. The girl could stand to learn a thing or two from zhir.
Eventually, zhe found zhirself at the source of some of those strangers, the lodging for the interlopers, the residential venue for the visitors: an enormous, rococo edifice at the edge of Jugland Mesa, fifty stories tall, iconic balconies reaching out from each level like the flailing claws of a centipede. The Bramblebush Hotel had been an eyesore when its rooms were rented out en masse to rich tourists at elevated prices. Now, housing researchers and students and diplomats and others who saw the duchy as a curiosity, all two or three to a room and noisy, it was a migraine.
Speaking of headaches, Robin saw a motorcycle attached to a nearby lamppost with a horse’s lead and, realizing a certain someone must have been nearby, decided to go cause one. Zhe relaxed into zhir true form, long and sinewy and bushy-tailed with buttons braided through, and plot toward the alley outside which the bike was hitched. Zhe ran in and saw a lean almond with a dark green leather riding jacket, across the back of which was fastened a traditional war scythe. Amélie Faucher, captain of the illustrious Gabon Guard,8 was intently studying some graffiti at the end of the alley, on the side wall of the Bramblebush; Robin couldn’t see her face or much of the painting, but based on her tightened posture and clenched fist at her side, it wasn’t up to her standards.
Moving slowly so as not to alert Mél to her presence prematurely, Robin stretched zhir neck up like a forklift to see the graffiti. Sure enough, it was crude in both craft and content: a wobbly line-art painting of a peanut and a stick figure in a giant hat pissing on the worst drawing of the great gates of Jugland that Robin had ever seen, while a surprisingly accurate portrait of the Ice King laughed in the background with lightning-bold angy brows. It was signed by La Reina Bianca.
“You’re not very quiet, Robin,” said Mél without turning around. “You should know that by now.”
Robin bend over to touch the ground in front of Mél, then switched zhir forepaws with zhir hindpaws and redistributed zhir mass until zhe was in zhir meter-and-a-half-tall ‘indoor form’, face to face with the irate guard captain. Zhe could spy a brow-crinkle and lip-twitch of irritation behind the mask of placid professionalism they always put on around zhir. “I didn’t mean to distract you, is all,” zhe said, not even attempting to sound genuine. “Thought you were on the job, though. Making a pit stop for some art appreciation? I guess all’s carrots and sticks9 at Castle Jugland, then.”
Mél ignored all of that, merely pointing her thumb past Robin at the graffiti behind zhir. “I received reports last week from one of the constables that there was some loitering around these parts. You’re a known loiterer; this your handiwork?”
“Nah,” said Robin. “Despite what my arrest record says, I’m not the artistic type. We could always ask the art, though.” Zhe twisted around, scrunching into a Pen-like peanut shape; zhir horn glowed as zhe started to channel a spell.
“Whoa there!” Mél tackled Robin to the ground and clasped zhir horn in their hand, fizzling the spell. They pushed up off the ground, leaving Robin flattened against the dank gravel paving. “Are you crazy‽” she asked as she dusted herself off, then grunted. “Don’t answer that. Just… you know you’re not allowed to bring any more pictures to life after the incident with the chapel.”
Robin grimaced. “Yeah, Macy’s coin encyclopedia was never the same. Sorry about that; it slipped my mind. Won’t happen again.”
“It will,” she sighed, “and I probably won’t be there to stop it. Anyway, I didn’t actually think you were responsible for this, to the extent that you can ever truly be said to be ‘responsible’ for anything. It’s clearly juvenile, and I mean that literally. I’m just going to get the hotel groundskeeper to clean it off.”
“Great idea,” said Robin. “Then the original artist can come in and give it another go. Maybe use stencils this time.”
“What? Robin, the idea is to remove the graffiti, not to improve it.”
Robin tutted as zhe slowly rose like a loaf of bipedal, dog-shaped bread. “I didn’t notch you for a free-speech-hating philistine.”
“Free sp—? Robin, the hotel is private property.”
“Viva la revolution! Liberté, egalité, razzamafoo!” And with that final, magic word, Robin teleported away in a shower of rainbow jimmy cantrip confetti.
Mél shook their head in dismay, then walked over to their motorcycle and unhooked it. Lifting the kickstand in the same motion they mounted it, they revved it up, and with a cry of, “Giddyup, Jackson!” they drove off.
It was a cold and blustery afternoon on the 16th of Thomas. On the surface, the twinkling light from a sun whose orbital inclination was verging on winter speckled the grasslands outside the Candy Kingdom through scattered clouds. Down below, where stones and streams and plasmodial slimes had not known the sun for years, the flickering torchlight was the same as ever. This place had no name; its inhabitants, mutant descendants of ancient humans who barely retained the ability to speak, ventured outside so rarely that they had no need to name where they lived. To them, it merely was.
To Macy, it was unbearable. She had thought the acrid malodor of the mines beneath the mesa had been unpleasant; she had believed the inorganic staleness of the Crystal Dimension to be suffocating. This place, however, was both and worse — mildew and uncured fish and something decaying but not quite dead. And that was just the people.
Shuffling the straps on her backpack to unfold her ratty, blue-grey hoodie, she tugged on the pelt sleeve of one of the women who walked ahead of her. She didn’t want to be as childish as this question was about to make her sound, but she had to know. Her voice came out high-pitched, echoing against the shimmering walls of the cave, as she asked: “Are we there yet?”
The woman — a broad-shouldered, dark-skinned specimen with a creamsicle-colored mouse hat Macy knew covered scales and gills — looked back at her with a placid expression. She shook her head, then made a series of intricate and precise hand gestures Macy couldn’t quite distinguish in the dappled light. At any rate, that was a clear not yet from Sally Sturdy.
Macy wanted to ask how long it would be — her feet were uncomfortable in her soaked sneakers, and the dark was starting to strain her sensitive eyes, in addition to the olfactory unpleasantries — but she knew better. Sally would have no way of knowing, having not been to their destination since long before Macy was born, even if she had any way of understanding her. As for the other two members of the party, Susan Strong was concentrating on comforting the pale, fishy young woman who led them on wobbling legs. If they had a name, they didn’t volunteer it, and Macy had feared it might have been rude to ask.
It was no wonder they were terrified, Macy thought, hoping to distract herself. The place they were going must have held horrible memories. They were kidnapped as a mere babe by some sort of drone, intended to be raised as the next mascot of the soda company whose factory was still chugging along from antebellum times. Susan and her hyooman friends had rescued them quickly and got the factory’s workers to destroy it, but it had left an indelible impression on them, and they found themself repeatedly going back there despite their trauma.
And it was a good thing, too. Otherwise, they might not have ever found out how much Susan had donked up by destroying the factory. Six hundred metric tons of viscous artificial grape sludge did not disappear overnight, and it was finally starting to leech into the surrounding rock. It was exactly that kind of reckless heroism that Macy had been training her whole life (or at least a year and change) to prevent.
…nah, it wasn’t working. “How much longer?” Macy groaned. Sally hushed her, then shrugged, and Macy thought it might have been a trick of the light but swore the older woman rolled her eyes.
Well. She decided to give the whole ‘walking in silence’ thing a try after that. If only it were silent. The echoing and faint splashing of their footsteps, plus strange distorted ambiance from the cavern itself, only added to the disquieting sensory buffet. Macy had to fight against her mind’s reflex to retreat away from all of that, to escape into illusion and imagination and fully shut out the uncomfortable world around her. She was managing her schizophrenia these days, between therapy, meditation, and medication, but she was still at risk of slipping into delusion if she let herself fully dissociate.
Normally she would focus on a specific physical sensation to pull herself back from the brink, but when those sensations were the problem, that wouldn’t be the solution. Instead, she preempted her consciousness trying to slip away from her senses by projecting both from her body. With the same power that had backfired on the banana guards a few weeks ago, she projected her mind out into that of the living organism that was the subterranean ecosystem.10
The disorienting space was a lot more bearable when it was a part of her. The faint trickle of water that built stalactites out of eons was the ichor that flowed through her capillaries; the arresting notes of fungal growth were symptoms of her digestion. She roiled with endolithic bacteria and archaea as she breathed through the vents maintained by hyooman colonies. She was sparse, but that just meant she was hardy.
A gnashing at the corner of her mind, stark and ferocious, brought her to alarm. She could all but taste her reflexive revulsion at the foreign emotion, like a body rejecting a transplanted organ. It was not uncommon for her to experience the feelings of animals in this way — in the past, she had even been overpowered by them. But the hatred that now encroached on her superconscious was of a purity not even the most brutal beast exhibited. That was, at the risk of trivializing, bad news.
Macy bit her tongue, letting the sharp, known pain yank her consciousness back into her body. She did not give her senses time to readjust to her physical form before stumbling forward and clasping Susan Strong’s namesake arm to get her attention. “Bad things are here,” she slurred. “I can feel evil in the caves. In the dark. They hate us.”
Beneath that calloused skin, Macy felt Susan tense up. “Lub glubs,” she half-whispered, drawing to a stop and pointing her torch out aggressively. This did not mean anything to Macy, but she took the body language as a cue to start going for her weapons.
Unsure if her bow would help, she gripped Shark’s Tooth in both hands and strained her eyes to try and pierce the darkness beyond the fire’s touch. She knew that what she had felt must be out there somewhere, but her fleshy senses could not perceive anything out of the ordinary. She stepped forward to take a position in front of the party, heart racing faster. Her shadow, cast by Susan’s torch, flickered and danced.
She felt someone tug on her sleeve. Glancing back, she saw Sally, holding some sort of small box and gesturing at Macy’s sword. Unsure what was going on, Macy held the sword out for Sally to see.
Click. She pressed a button on the box, and blue sparks came up from the box. She was trying to light the sword! Does she think this is a torch? Macy quickly yanked Shark’s Tooth out of reach of the hyooman, glaring as she skulked back. Glob, I can’t keep my eyes off—
A loud crackle just over her head, accompanied by a bright flash of light, startled Macy so badly she nearly lost her footing. She managed to pivot around just in time to see some big shapeless mass of black, inset with a gnashing maw, crumble into smoke around a smoldering ring in its center of mass mere centimeters away from where her back just was. Staring it down was Susan, outstretched arm now shimmering in the torchlight with metallic bits that weren’t there before, or at least were hidden.
The smoke was already pulling itself back into the toothy thing. Well, Macy would not have that. She’d fought beings like this before, the second time she saved the world. If these were anything like Dust Devils, she knew how to handle them. She changed her grip on Shark’s Tooth, causing the strange serrated edge to shift into a flatter arrangement, and then stepped toward the thing and began to spin. She was going to blow it away before it had a chance to re-form.
A hand shot out of it and gripped her over the face, arresting her rotation and muffling her subsequent scream of terror. So these weren’t anything like Dust Devils. She’d remember that for next time, if she survived.
When she survived. She grit her teeth against the panic and let her training take over. She knew how to escape the claws of a beast. She called upon all the wiry strength in her limbs, leveraging her sword against the ground, and pushed herself free, panting. That horrid arm tried to lash out and reassert its grip, but she managed to raise her sword up just in time to deflect it. Her arms were knocked out of whack, shoulders ringing, and her footing was less than stable, but she still stood.
And Susan stood behind her. She held out her hand again, and this time Macy saw as it lit up like a flashbang. This time, it sent the creature packing, roiling as it rolled backward into the throng of similar things that were pouring out from cracks in the cave. Their bodies were so black as to be invisible, but they could be counted by their teeth, and they must have numbered in at least the dozens.
“Lub glubs hate light,” Susan explained, as Sally held out the flintbox again with an exasperated eyebrow raised. Macy sighed, then put away Shark’s Tooth and took out her bow and some arrows, the latter which she extended toward Sally for her to light. It was time to do her favorite part of the job.
Robin, shifted into a humanoid shape with flowing teal hair and ostentatious epaulets, struck a chord on the rickety piano set up in the corner of the combination cafeteria/auditorium at the school, drawing several oohs and ahhs from the juvenile actors, as well as an annoyed tut from their beleaguered director at zhir obvious showdogging. That was zhir favorite part of the gig.
“No, no, cut, cut, cut!” The ever-hoarse voice of Mx. Coyfield cut through the music and caused the ruckus onstage to draw to a halt, students of all grades frozen in place and embarrassed. (Robin deliberately kept the music going a couple more measures to stop at the end of a phrase, but zhe made sure not to drag on long enough to inspire a reaction out of the overworked theater teacher; it was important to pace out these campaigns of aggravation.) “This simply won’t do. None of you are in position, the crew’s missed all your cues, and you’re all totally playing your own part!”
The show’s leads — a super-senior bean boy, and a marshmallow much closer to Macy’s age — exchanged knowing glances. “Excuse my inconsmartitude, director, but I don’t quite grok what you’re gesturing at. You saying you want us to do the ol’ hot potato? The green room switcheroo? A regular Spookifying Saturfriday?”
“No, Mr. Waindell,” replied Mx. Coyfield, “I’m saying you lack… perspective.” Some enterprising underclassman manning the lights decided to dim the stage and put a spotlight on the teacher as xe started to monologue. “You can’t see past the lines of your own script, to how your characters form but patches in the tapestry of the grand show. You sink into your role, hoping to fill it with yourself, but only leave yourself empty. With no higher sense of the mise-en-scène, you can never hope to form coherently the story on stage. And if even this pedestrian thespianism eludes you, then what chance have you in the great Show Eternal in which even the mightiest princess is but a bit player?”
One single person clapped: an ice guy, a new transfer from the Icy Kingdom, hoping that his flattery would be rewarded with so much as an offscreen speaking role.
“Oh, whatever.” Xe sighed, while the lights returned to normal. “My talents are wasted on the youth, oy vey. Whatever. Just keep your upcoming cues in mind, and let’s take the scene from the top. No, no, don’t bother moving the giant egg back into position, we don’t need all the props, just pretend it isn’t there for now.”
A crew member and acquaintance of Macy’s, Slick the Sunflower wandered off from backstage and elbowed Robin with a leaf. “Get a load of xem, eh? Talk about hogging the spotlight.”
“You were the one who gave it to xem,” Robin reminded her as zhe sprouted a leaf to elbow her back.
“It was what the scene called for. Xe’s gonna look back on this memory and think xe made that part up.”
“Oh? Are you as big a prankster as I am?”
“It’s no prank. I’m just stating how things are. Personally, I’m a big fan.”
“Of what?”
“No, just in general.”
Robin snorted. Zhe didn’t buy Slick’s sunny, flowery disposition. “You’d better get back to your post.”
“In a sec. I didn’t come out here just to poke fun at the teach, you know. You left your crystal backstage; I think you’ve got text messages on it somehow.”
Robin shapeshifted zhir head into a question mark. “I lost my crystal two weeks ago. You saying it’s been here the whole time?”
“I guess? Anyway, you should — bye!” With no external prompting, Slick interrupted herself, spinning around and positively skipping back to backstage.
Robin wanted to go check the crystal and see if it was urgent, but zhe really was dancing on celestine. The play’s lead performers, Jordathan and Astrida, were the respective leaders of the Revs and the Rads, the biggest gangs on the schoolyard. Without Macy as a surprisingly effective mediator, and despite the fact that two of their respective lieutenants had been dating for well over a year now, the tense camaraderie of participating in Chait Coyfield’s productions was the only thing that kept their bickering from erupting into a full-on highway hootenanny. That, and the subtle hypnotic spell Robin wove into the music. Macy certainly wouldn’t approve if she ever learned of it, but she’d be much more distraught if the peace she worked so hard to maintain fell apart in her absence. So zhe told zhirself, anyway.
Well, zhe could multitask. Zhe left zhir body to take care of the piano part, playing on instinct, while zhir mind stepped outside of it for a little ethereal jaunt.
Zhe always saw the cafeteria for how it really was, but now we must as well to continue following zhir perspective. To mortal eyes, the ceiling was merely foam paneling and the seats around the room were mostly empty. In truth, a vaunted fresco hung above, one which had not yet been painted but whose future shone the light of potential down on a packed crowd of spirits. The beings here were of all kinds — ghosts of former students, psychic leeches feeding off vivacious prey, vagrant kobolds with an undiscerning eye for the arts — and too many disparate shapes to count. Robin was among these, as zhir own spirit’s form flowed and shimmered in a body type that was neither rainicorn nor dog but a snakelike compromise of zhir own design.
And next to zhir, horn poking out of zhir long, matted blond hair, white hospital gown tied up like a cultist’s robe, scowling as she swatted musical notes out of the air, was the spirit of a dog whose body was nowhere near the Duchy of Nuts. She reached a leg out and tripped Robin as zhe passed, causing zhir to phase partly into the ground.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” she asked. “I didn’t come all this way for you to ignore me.”
Robin floated out of the floor, flitted zhir tongue, and then drooped zhir head in a pathetic attempt at looking pathetic. “Hey, Charlie,” zhe said, replying to zhir astrally-projecting comatose great-aunt the way one might a colleague whom one got along with fine when passing each other outside the bathroom. “Love to catch up, but my crystal’s going banyaners and I really think I’d better check it before, uh, it’s overripe.”
“You can wait thirty seconds to hear what I have to say.”
Robin sighed, then grabbed a nearby, relatively chair-shaped spirit and sat down on it. “Alright, teach, you gonna tell me what I did wrong?”
“I don’t think you need me to tell you that.” She reached up and grabbed another music note out of the air, holding it up four inches from Robin’s face. “I don’t know how long you’ve been practicing bardcraft, but you need to stop doing it here. Enchanting schoolchildren is—”
“—wrong, I get it,” Robin interrupted. “I know you won’t believe me, but I really do think it’s the lesser of two evils.”
Charlie brushed a locke of blonde hair out of her face with the music note, then used it as a barrette to fasten it behind her ear. “Oh, no, I’m fine with that morally. What I was going to say is it’s a considerable waste of time and energy. You could probably just wow the puppers into submission with a more concerted display of your powers, thus freeing up future time for practicing more useful skills.”
“Kowtow a group of children into doing whatever I tell them?” Robin gave that considerable thought. “Nah, sounds like a lot of hassle in the long term. Anyhoot, what skills could possibly be more important than the magic of music, which I’ve neglected for far too long anyway? I’ve let Macy become more of a bard than I am, and she doesn’t even play any instruments!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Charlie said as she ran her paws through her hair, wincing as she dragged her claws through clumps. “Maybe the kind of skills that could be useful in releasing me from my eternal slumber? Like the one you’re using right now, to talk to me?”
Robin whinnied derisively. “It’s not an eternal slumber, it’s an injury-induced coma. And anyway, you really don’t want me attempting any kind of medical operation with my impulse control the way it is now. The club at Wizard City is helping me with that, but I can’t exactly pal around with them while I’m taking care of stuff for Macy while she takes care of stuff for Huntress Wizard. Plus, like, you’ve been in that coma for over a decade. What’s a couple months’ delay?”
Charlie’s eyes widened and flashed. “You know as well as I that time is growing short. The time-displaced ally you helped cover for is but one portend of the coming war, which will burn the seas to ash, melt the great domes of Mars, and set ablaze the edge of time itself. The web of prophecies that has—”
“Prophecies, shmophecies.” Robin’s scoff drew consternate looks from the other spirits, but zhe wasn’t going to start caring now. “If the Cosmic Owl wanted me personally to care, he’d visit one of my dreams.”11
“You know what? That’s fair. You do you. I’m gonna go haunt Bronwyn.” Charlie turned and walked out of the room through a solid wall.
Robin stood up, tossed the chair spirit over to where zhe’d got it from, then walked through the stage and the backstage until zhe wound up in the prop room. There, zhe rummaged around a bin of objects that did not move in response until zhe grabbed and physically picked up zhir crystal, pulsing with messages. Concentrating, zhe held it up to zhir astral horn, then winced as it beamed a fortnight’s worth of voicemails into zhir brain.
One repetitive fight and one short jaunt later, Macy learned an important lesson about not standing next to Susan when she was punching through a solid rock wall when a decade’s worth of coagulated soda syrup blasted out of the new hole and slammed her into the far side of the cavern. That was a mistake you only made once.
When she wiped the sludge off her face and was able to open her eyes, Sally had just finished signing something to Susan and was hoisting a back up to her shoulder. She tore off a corner and began to slowly sprinkle it over the slime. Immediately it started bubbling, making the hyoomans jump back in startlement, but Susan was unfazed, and if Macy hadn’t been too dazed to react, she would be excited.
This was something Macy had procured for this mission: a dehydrated algal culture that had been specially bred for this purpose over a series of weeks. It would attack the complex molecules in the spilled Porp™ flavorizing syrup, digest them, and then die off, breaking down the majority of the toxic chemicals and leaving nutrient-rich detritus in their wake. Razz Wildberry, the girlfriend of Macy’s vacationing mentor Huntress Wizard, had helped her to prepare this, but the bulk of the research had been done by the Flagellum Princess in correspondence with Dr. Campbell of the Isles. So many people’s work had been contributed to this effort that she couldn’t help but feel the warm-and-fuzzies even despite her current goopiness and possible concussion.
Macy put her hand over her face as the algae began offgassing the byproducts of its biodegradation. Cleanup, as always, smelled worse than the mess. “Save the bag, Sally,” she said, her head still ringing and now starting to feel light as well. “Ub, we deed to get to the cedter of the spill add stop it at the source. Follow by lead.” With great effort, she forced herself to push through the purple gunk and get to the hole Susan had opened. She desperately wished she’d thought to bring her hazmat suit.
Neither of the hyoomans noticed her wobbling gait as the fatigue spread to her legs, but Susan did. She held out a steadying arm, which Macy was not too proud to accept. Susan tossed her up into the hole, leapt up behind her, then reached down to pull up the two other companions.
As she did, Macy took out her phone to use its flashlight. Its battery would burn through pretty fast, but it would last long enough to get the job done, and it was safer than bringing the torches in here, since she didn’t know how flammable this stuff was. She saw that she had some texts from Robin, which she would look through later. Strangely, she hadn’t heard from Torte.
She was briefly blinded when the tunnel was illuminated by a bright light from behind. Right, Susan’s bionic flashlight implant that she had for some reason. That was so ridiculous, so totally out-there and bizarre in contrast to the normal things happening all around her, that her recall had eschewed it. Oh, well. She put away her phone.
Sally hopped into the hole behind Susan, still cradling the bag, followed by the other hyooman. They tensed up and quickly ran up to Susan, whispering in her ear. Susan nodded, then addressed Macy: “Alright, little nut girl, where do we need to go?”
The little nut girl looked around at the tunnel. It wasn’t plastic, despite the smell — most likely vitrified clay. She could feel the molasses-like flow past and through her legs, tectonically slow though it was. Distantly, she heard dull echoes of Susan’s words at a couple delays. Her first instinct was just to follow the gunk upstream, but wading through it could take too long; it was putting out cloying fumes that it wouldn’t do well to inhale more than need be. There had to be service walkways somewhere for a waste management system this cavernous, but she didn’t see any from where she stood.
She snapped her fingers and did her best to look behind her. “Shy girl,” she said, addressing the hyooman whose name she didn’t know. “You’ve been back here a few times, right?”
The hyooman looked up at Susan, got a nod of support, then cleared their throat and spoke. “Ey, that’s spot on, girlie, but what’s it to ya? Nah, I’m just messin’. Ain’t been back in a hot minute, though; not sure what I could tell ya. Got that mad misty memory, ya know how it be.”
Macy blinked a few times, code switching. “Nah, but I getcha. Just hit me with one thing, ey?”
“For shizzle, but I probably won’t remember anything too in the deets.”
“Is the waterworks system pneumatic or STEG?”
“Pneumatic, although there’s an emergency backup system that uses effluent gravity.”
“Gotcha.” Macy trudged over to the wall of the sewer and began knocking and advancing, keeping her ear slit as close to the clay as possible. As soon as she found an echo, she’d be able to follow it, and eventually there would have to be a service hatch for use by maintenance crews and sewerage tourists. Once she found it, Susan and her friends would think Macy was super cool and smart.
“What are you looking for?” Susan called out. When Macy turned around, she saw that Susan was waving a piece of paper in her non-flashlight hand.
“Um, it’ll be easier to show you,” Macy lied. She had to keep up the mystery or it wouldn’t be cool! Every twenty-first century TV show that Princess Bubblegum donated to the orphanage had taught her that.
“Well, would this map Sally brought help you look for it?”
Macy sighed, then splashed back over to Susan, hand extended. “Yes, it would, thank you,” she admitted.
Looking it over, she quickly realized where they needed to go. As it turned out, this factory had very much not been built to code and there were no service tunnels accessible from here, and the main entrance was much too thick with Porp™ syrup to be accessed. Nevertheless, after a mere hour of trudging, another skirmish with some straggler Lub Glubs, and a harrowing incident where Susan got her flesh arm stuck in a broken pneumatic tube and nearly blew up the whole tunnel with her robo-arm trying to get it out, they arrived at a cracked reservoir that looked like it couldn’t possibly have held so much synthetic grape syrup.
While Sally climbed the ladder and started scattering the algae and the other hyooman left to stare into the dryest corner and meditate, Susan knelt down to talk to Macy at eye level. “This was pretty cool of you to come here, Macy,” she said. “You didn’t have to, you know. They wrote on the side of the bag how to disperse the algae.”
“Oh.” Macy had felt real special for walking Sally through the process. In retrospect it wasn’t particularly complicated. She didn’t linger on that, though, as her brain latched onto the compliment. “But I’m cool?”
“Uh-huh.” Susan pointed to the map in Macy’s hand, which she opened up. Actually, now that she was taking a breather, it was more like a building plan than a map. She’d been hyperfocused on the relevant parts before, so she hadn’t noticed. “You were able to read that so fluently. Do you have experience with architecture?”
“No, but I did recently read The Perspicacious Ballaster’s Guide to Plumbing, Pumping and Piping cover-to-cover.” Until that moment, she hadn’t even realized that was how & why she’d done all that stuff I just told you about. “I’ll have to ask my dad to make me write another thank-you note to Chuck.”
“I don’t know who this Chuck is, but he sounds like a hero.” Susan gave Macy back pats so hard she thought her exceptionally tough shell was going to crack. “Anyway, we can take care of the rest of the cleanup. Your little lungs should head upside and answer your messages.”
Macy’s hand instinctively went to the pocket where her phone was, probably low on battery. “No, I can wait.”
Susan tsked. “Frieda says messages are like salted fish. If you let them pile up, it stinks.”
“Huh?” Macy skilted. “That sounds like a poorly thought-out meta—”
With one arm, Susan scooped Macy up, spun her around, and hurled her at the ceiling with the force of a cannonball from a well-armed cruiseliner.
“—phoooooaaaaaaugh!” Macy closed her eyes and braced herself as she barrelled through layers of metal, rock, and dirt headfirst, spinning like a drill bit. She tasted feldspar.
Thwoom! She burst through a layer of matted grass roots, welcome evening sunlight briefly washing out her vision; the strong, sage-scented grassland breeze buffeted accumulated dirt off her body as she tumbled parabolically.
She was very used to spinning, though. She managed to land mostly gracefully on her feet, and only came within ten centimeters of falling backward into the hole she’d just made before gaining her balance. She reached into her backpack, took out a circle of sod she kept on hand for just such an occasion, and laid it over the hole so no unsuspecting squirrel would find itself dumped into a vat of toxic chemicals and become some sort of soda-themed squirrel supervillain. Then she read her texts and called Robin.
“Yo, yo, wazzap Mace?” Robin had answered the ringing with an alacrity that surprised even zhirself. The bracing valley air was good for zhir; kept the lethargy at bay. “You cleaned up the drink yet?”
“Natchy,” Macy replied. “Well, I’ve done my part at any rate; Susan’s taking care of the rest.”
“And Susan’s the one who caused it in the first place, right?”
“Yeah, so it’s fair. How about you? Keeping up your promise?”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got everything here under control. Mind if I ask for a reprieve, though?”
“Yeah, nothing’s scheduled to go wrong in the next couple weeks, so I can head back home for a time. So, anyway, what’s this about Princess Torte texting me and not you?”
“Oh, that.” Zhe tossed zhir crystal between zhir paws, which zhe knew would create an uncomfortable noise on Macy’s end that would hopefully cover the dead air as zhe tried to remember what zhe had been talking about earlier that day. “So, she got a new phone and lost all her old contacts, but Bonnibel had my number from that one time I broke into the castle.”
“When did you break into the castle, and why would that result in—?”
“I’m afraid those records are classified. Point is, she wanted me to reach out to you and tell you that she dug up info on those two guys you were asking about.”
“And?”
Robin paused for effect.
“An—?”
“Fern stole some guy’s bike once.”
A beat. “That’s it?” Macy sounded cute when she was dejected. “That’s everything she learned?”
“She asked her parents about it, but apparently they didn’t really know Fern all that well, and that’s the only thing Marcy could remember.”
“And nothing about Betty?”
“Right, when Torte brought her up, Marcy said, and this is supposedly a direct quote: ‘You have to let her go, uh, uh, I mean, I’ll tell you when you’re older, I think I heard a knock at the door, bye.’” Zhe did a pretty good impression of Princess Torte impersonating Marceline the Vampire Queen when zhe said that.
“That was a pretty good impression of Princess Torte impersonating Marceline the Vampire Queen,” Macy replied, correctly. “But did she try to find out anything else?”
“Nope. After that, she completely forgot about the request. She said she was working on something else, and that you’d finally get what you really deserve, so either it’ll be the best birthday present ever or she’s turning into a supervillain. Or both.”
“Or both,” Macy agreed. “It’s too bad, though. I guess I’ll never learn the true history of Betty and Fern, since there’s nobody else we could possibly ask about that.”
“Yeah. Hey, by the way, do you know when the person who taught you magic and literally lent you her mantle is going to come back from vacation?”
“Probably not soon. Her legendary boyfriend Finn the Human went over to join her for a bit.”
“I guess that will leave his best friend and brother, Jake the Dog, my great-grandfather whose biological brother is currently on commission in your dad’s castle, lonely and in need of company.”
A crackling sigh came from Macy’s end. “Dang. That’s unfortunate, and it’s also unfortunate that we don’t have anyone we could possibly ask about those legendary heroes from the war that Finn and Jake were both famously crucial in averting.”
“Two unfortunate and unrelated problems,” Robin agreed. “It’s a shame that these two problems don’t have individual solutions, let alone one solution that will address both of them, which we could—”
“Okay, you’re dragging the bit now,” Macy cut in. “Just call up your great-grandpa.”
“What bit?”
In a humble house in the shade of a massive willow tree, around a sturdy porcelain table inset with open skulls that was probably plundered from some accurséd tomb, over fresh-baked spinach puffs with unicorn creme fraiche and jasmine tea steeped in holy water, Macy and Robin sat in school-grade folding chairs and wide-eyed amazement as Jake, shapeshifted into himself in a rocking chair, told them stories.
“…and then Finn said something like, ‘When you see the King of Mars, up above the stars, it’s a cosmic sign, that you’re gonna have a bad time.’” Jake guffawed. There was no other word to describe the laugh that came out of his mouth (alongside a not miniscule amount of spittle). “I’m sure it was smoother than that.12 But, yeah, Prubs — Princess Bubblegum, I mean — was not having it. She was dead set on making her uncle pay. You know how staunch princesses can get when it comes to politics.”
Macy stared into her tea. She was starting to see a bit of that in Princess Torte. Was that something her mother was instilling in her, or something she was coming into on her own? Or was it always there, and Macadamia was just getting to see that part of her now? “Why is that?”
“Why is what?” asked Jake.
“Hm?” Suddenly, Macy felt the warmth from the tea she’d already drank rush to her cheeks. She felt like not asking about that anymore. “Sorry, I mean, why was Betty hanging out with King Man?13 What were they doing, and what did it have to do with Gumbald’s war?”
Smooth, came Robin’s voice in Macy’s head. She shushed it, kicking zhir out of her brain.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get to that,” said Jake. “I’m telling the story, so I’m gonna tell it in order, by which I mean the order it happened to me. So, anyway, after that, we all met in the war tent to make plans. Actually, Macy, your dad was there. He wanted to use blimps.”
Macy downed the rest of her tea in a single gulp, noticing that it was starting to get cold. “He says hi, by the way.” She hiccoughed.
“Tell him he still owes me for back in the day. Point is, when Huntress Wizard spotted a spy in the meeting, we knew that Gumbald’s army knew our situation, and we knew they knew, and they knew we knew thee woo blah blah bloo, and so basically there was nothing for it but for both of us to attack immediately. Right before the armies could clash, though, Finn convinced Prubs to call a parlay. So there we were, just me and my bro and the Princess on one side, and on the other was Gumbald and Lolly and the Green Knight, sandwiched between the two biggest armies Ooo had seen for a hundred years probably, and what does Finn have me whip out?”
Robin cleared zhir throat. “Sorry to interrupt, poppopppop, but, uh, who was that person you mentioned who was with Gumbald?”
Jake morphed a paw into a giant, grotesquely-detailed human hand and did a loud facepalm that left a visible imprint. “Aw, gee, did I forget to mention her? She was—”
“No, I know who Lolly is,” Robin corrected. “She’s the vizier now. I meant who’s the Green Knight?”
Macy elbowed Robin, whose hip sputtered like a burst balloon as zhe shriveled up. “That’s Fern,” she said. “You know, the alt-timeline Finn who turned into a sword, and then merged with a different sword, and was then resurrected as part of some twisted science experiment by Gumbald. Were you not paying attention?”
Robin stretched a paw into the kitchen of the quaint cabin to grab a bowl, poured its contents (the remaining batter from the puff pastries) into zhir hip to reinflate zhirself, then stared at Macy, not a thought behind zhir corundum eyes. “You should know better than to ask that question.”
“Fair enough.”
Jake reached out his uncanny fist toward Robin, who conjured an illusion to return the bump. “Now I remember why we get along, Robin. We oughta hang out more.”
Robin grew strangely shy, shrinking back into zhir chair and excreting some dough. “I’m busy that day,” zhe said.
Jake nodded in understanding. “None of you guessed it. I still had that bottle of dream juice from the Nightmare Princess, so I threw it on the ground like a splash grenade, and luckily for everyone, that was how it worked. All six of us got sucked into a dreamscape, and my bro Jermaine may or may not have been there too, that part was sorta unclear. Point is, while Prubs and Gumbald were seeing each other’s perspectives and almost reaching an understanding, Finn saved Fern by teaming up to confront a literal manifestation of their traumas, and then also killing the demon that was possessing Fern with a chair. Killing the demon in the dream musta killed it for real since it was living in Fern’s head anyway, but it was also the thing that gave him a body, so when they woke up he started disintegrating.”
“Dang,” Robin and Macy said at the same time.
“Dang indeed,” said Jake. “But that wasn’t the half of it. Once we all woke up, Gumbald turned on Prubs, and then Lolly double-turned on Gumbald, and it looked like everything was all fine and dandy until the Betty biznasty started mattering. She and King Man had been working on a portal to summon GOLB the Devourer of Worlds to resurrect their lost lovers.” He winked. “Forget I did that. Needless to say, that didn’t go quite as smooth as they were hoping. GOLB turned a bunch of guys into some eldritch abominations, and it took the combined forces from both armies that didn’t flee immediately to take them down, and then we all worked together to defeat GOLB through the power of music.”
Macy had been nodding along until then, nibbling on her spinach puff, but at that last sentence she jolted to attention, dropping her pastry. “That can’t possibly be true,” she said.
“I swear on my daddy’s grave. Even Prubs joined in, and she rarely sings. But it wasn’t all carrots and sticks. During the battle, the old willow tree where Finn and I had our treehouse done got smashed up, and Fern full-on disintegrated before he had a chance to learn about it.” He looked out a window at the massive tree that overshadowed the cabin. “So I planted his seed where the old tree was, and he grew big and strong, don’t you think?”
“You mean the tree’s a guy‽” Macy dropped her spinach puff again. This time, Robin was ready, stretching out zhir lower jaw to catch it.
“Yep. Lucky bastard just gets to stand there all day.” He returned his attention back to his guests. “Anyway, to make a long story short, while all that was happening Finn and Betty and someone else got eaten by GOLB, and when it got stunlocked by our savory licks, Betty used a magic wish crown to merge with it and make it go through the portal, while Finn plus one escaped its belly.”
“Wow.” Macy reached into her shirt and pulled out the coin, looped through her necklace as always. She examined Betty’s right-facing profile on the heads side, bearing the ‘Nächstenliebe ist Mut’ inscription typical to all Candy Kingdom toonies; the reverse read ‘Frieden ist Erlösung’ and showed an image of the Great Tree in honor of Fern (or, as she now knew, that literally was Fern). ‘Charity is courage.’ ‘Peace is salvation.’ Mistakenly, she thought she understood what that meant now. “One question,” she asked; “who was the other person with Betty and Finn? And who was Betty trying to save?”
“That’s two questions,” Robin interjected, but Macy kept her keen gaze on Jake. She knew full well they were the same question.
Jake the Dog, for his part, took a long drag of his now-tepid tea, and when he spoke, he held the floral china cup in front of his mouth to avoid giving anything away. “Don’t go digging there,” he said ominously. “I’m sure they’ll tell you when they’re older.”
Behind a stack of midterm papers in a poorly-heated room at Icy University, an aging human named Simon Petrikov sneezed.