*Revised 10/19/2014

Bubblegum sat at her workbench, poring through her books and diagrams. She was on a mission to make synthetic skin that would remain smooth and soft despite being applied to P-Bot's bulky, metal build. She had considered candy, but despite her intentions to make the robot resemble her, she stood by the idea that making anything too resembling of a clone would be disturbing and more than a little odd.
"THERE! Right there, there, THERE YOU ARE oh yes, MOMMA'S ON A ROLE TODAY!" She suddenly crowed this happily and shamelessly, violently circling a sentence from a thick, leather bound book with a red pen. Making a few adjustments on the notepad beside her open tome, she swung her arms over her head and stretched with a loud "Mmmmm," feeling close to concluding this terrible and harrowing chapter of her life. She went through a mental checklist, swiveling her chair to look around the room. She had everything she needed, except...
She sighed. There was nothing she could do about that, though. Her thoughts floated to Finn and Jake, whom she had not seen since she had sent them on a journey the day previous, in search of this key detail she needed to animate P-Bot. She hated waiting, but she was confident in the boys' diligence, and knew they'd be back sooner than any expeditionary team she could have otherwise dispatched.
With that in mind, she forced away the feelings of impatience, rubbing her temples before returning to her work. When the pencil she had at her ear refused to release itself into her grip, she noticed, dully, that her hair was a tangled mess, and she pushed her glasses onto her nose for the umpteenth time that day with a small "humph." She considered showering, but all thoughts melted away at the sound of the door opening behind her. Not caring about her current state, she turned eagerly to see Finn and Jake pushing through, arms full of apple pies, broken crusts oozing globs of golden sugar onto the floor, staining the dust-covered tiles the color of autumn. The younger of the two failed to notice that he stepped into one of these sticky puddles as he made his way to the princess, smiling widely, crumbs littered about his chin, upper lip, and, somehow, left eyebrow.
"Hi, Princess! We asked Tree Trunks to bake some apple pies for us yesterday! You've been working so hard, we thought you'd like to have an apple pie party!" The last part he near screamed, and the dog behind him cringed, fur standing on end along his neck. "Hope you're hungry, Princess!" Ever enthusiastic for a good time, this one.
Ignoring the low rumbling in her belly, Princess Bubblegum shook her head, tiara tipping to one side, held to her head only by the tangles sequestering her pencil.
"Finn! Thanks, no pie, but I'll take the soul stone now. I'd like to make some modifications to it before I put it into P-Bot. I have to say, I'm surprised you got back so soon, I thought you'd take a few days at least." Rising, she dusted off her lab coat, taking the few steps that closed the distance between them. "I'm glad you didn't, though, you may have shaved a significant amount of time from my project, thank you! You're quite a hero, Finn!" When he didn't beam up at her, didn't unpack the stone, didn't move at all, Bubblegum knew there was something wrong. Sighing, she fell back into her chair. "You don't have it, do you?..." She asked softly, eyebrows knotting together.
"Actually…" Finn hated to turn down the praise, especially after seeing how excited Bubblegum had been. Sheepishly, he stuck his thumb into the apple pie, flicking grains of sugar off the crust with his forefinger. "…we don't have the soul stone. Braco caught up with us before we got too far out of the kingdom... He said he'd like to do it so that he could win your affection, or something like that..." Finn whispered this, something inside him constricting a little at the mention of it. Part of him wanted to punch Braco's stupid face, but seeing PB's expression made him wonder if she would end up doing it herself, anyways.
"He...wants to win my...affections?" Bubblegum didn't mean to, but she snorted after a while, and then covered it up with a fit of coughs. Then she sighed, shaking her head, pinching the bridge of her nose strong enough for it to hurt. When she let go, a small lavender imprint outlined where her fingers had been. The gears in her mind started turning, overtime to make up for the time lost on Finn and Jake.
This is gonna slow me down quite a bit…but...maybe I can-
"That's ok, Finn." She finally offered him, when she noticed his frown becoming a full-on pout. "I think I'll manage without the soul stone for now, actually. Thanks anyways…for the thing, too...the pie." Bubblegum's brain ran at full throttle now despite the lack of sleep; she didn't notice when the boy and dog left, leaving one of the soggy-looking pastries on a lab table among several boxes of moldy pizza.
Outside, Finn picked at his own pie.
"I didn't want to say anything in front of PB, but that lab has got some serious stank…you think it's ok to just leave her there? What if she...I dunno, suffocates or something?"
"It's not stank man, it's the aroma of genius!" Jake offered helpfully. He bit off a healthy portion of his treat, his long tongue pursuing the bits that threatened to escape down his front. "Plus, we left her a pie- not much else to do. At least we know she won't starve, right?" He crumpled the now-empty tin and tossed it into a bin, starting on the next pie. "Let's get home and play some videogames with B-Mo, get your mind off all this lady biz. Sound good, bro?" He offered casually. Finn nodded, taking a bite from his mishandled tart.
"Yeah, bro. Sounds good." They walked away together, oblivious to the sounds of muffled German cursing coming from the lab.

It'd been three days since she'd last seen the heroes, and Bubblegum was exhausted. She had spent the majority of those hours fussing with the mechanical aspects of building the doppelganger, which was now completely physically assembled. It look just like her, floating, suspended by wires in its vat of oil like a puppet from a travelling theater. Beside it, Bubblegum sat admiring the bluish-purple glow of the artificial soul she had constructed, wiping at her brow with a sleeve of her lab coat, now a dingy lavender from her sweat and the grime of the lab. The soul was in its preliminary stages, still undulating unevenly about its edges as it floated above its container; she expected it would be ready to install by morning.
Finishing P-Bot had taken much longer than Bubblegum had predicted, and knowing Marceline was jumping to the worst possible conclusions about the entire ordeal with Braco only served to make her job more stressful. Sure, she could have called her, set things straight- but she had a suspicion that the vampire would have simply ignored her calls. Had she gone through with the action, she would have been correct.
Bubblegum wiped her forehead with her sleeve for the last time that day, smiling at her creation as it floated in its vat of oil. She calibrated the machine at the side of the tank, and several large bubbles rose to the surface as it accessed P-Bot's internal hard drive and programmed it. Leaving the thing to make the proper calibrations, the princess allowed herself a moment to relax. As the computer hummed, Bubblegum walked up the many flights of stairs into her bedroom, earning surprised looks from her staff. Looking down at herself she wondered if the shock came from her appearance or return from her absence. Once in her room she walked immediately into the bathroom and stripped, sniffing her clothes and wrinkling her nose as she did so. "Disgusting…" The staff, she decided, had been surprised by a little more than her appearance.
Pouring shampoo into her palm, Bubblegum washed out her hair, contemplating for the hundredth time just how she was going to explain all of this to Marceline, and when. A few minutes of vigorous scrubbing later, she climbed out of the shower and dried off, dressing in clean clothes and moving to her lab, donning a truly white lab coat again. She tapped on P-Bot's tank, grinning when the mannequin moved in response to the sound. Auditory responses: check.
After checking on and recording the progress of the soul, she looked at her wristwatch: 3:45am. Perhaps tonight would be the right time to tell Marceline...she sat at her desk, writing some last minute notes, stomach knotting unpleasantly at the thought of the confrontation. She reached out for the phone, but before her fingers even made contact with the plastic, a pair of black hands descended over her eyes.
"Guess who!" A distressingly familiar voice called out happily.
Bubblegum groaned only quietly enough for her to hear and withdrew her hand from the phone. Her glasses were surely smeared.
"Braco..."

Marceline was curled in her cave of blankets, refusing to emerge. She was famished, but had no desire to eat. She'd only done so three times in the past week, waiting until her skeleton protruded from her flesh in small mountains and valleys and her mind went almost black to allow herself the privilege of draining the red from socks and shirts and anything else that didn't require she leave her room to obtain. The week before her forced starvation, she'd eased her pounding heart by playing extreme gigs and getting home in the wee hours of the morning, using crisp red ale as the main source of her sustenance. Not until her head was buzzing pleasantly did she collapse on her bed in a wiry heap, sprawling out over the blankets and burying her face into the pillows.
But red ale wouldn't help her now. Her stomach lurched, crying out for her attention. Her heart lurched, too, whining for Bubblegum. Groaning, Marceline made her way to the kitchen, as she'd drained everything in her room to grey. The apples in her fruit bowl were disgusting, furry, burgundy things, but she drained them anyways- eager to fall back into bed. She thought to herself, pathetically, that what she wanted more than anything was Bubblegum, and no apple- no matter how sweet- could ease the burning in her throat.
"But she's too busy…" She sighed, and dug deeper into the pile of blankets. "…with Braco." She huffed, closing her eyes. "What a weenis."