Chapter 20:
The gurney came off the airship flanked by a couple of Grid-Face people with Finn at their back and Blargetha bringing up the rear. Drew was on the spot with an ambulance and a medical team, and they whisked the patient away just moments after the gurney was on the pavement. Bonnie, Betty, and Simone moved in as soon as the ambulance was out of the way. "That wasn't really what I expected," Bonnie burbled, as she regarded the ambulance that was, even now, speeding towards the gates of the airfield.
Finn's face was deeply troubled. It stood to reason. The Hyoomans were dead. Susan Strong should have been dead with them. The Dipped had gotten into their caverns under the grasslands and collapsed them. There should've been no-one left to tell the tale. Finn had mourned their loss for months before finally shaking off the pain of it. Now, somehow, Susan Strong was alive. At least she was breathing. Signs of wounds and sores on her body suggested she'd been unconscious for quite a while and in the care of indifferent hands. It reminded Finn, in some ways, of what had happened to Bronwyn. He'd been toying with the idea of making kidnaping a capitol crime carrying a sentence of death. Trouble was, if you knew you were going to bite it for kidnaping, why would you leave the kidnapee alive?
Betty, who'd never met Susan, was a little more on-point. "We know this Susan was the 'creature' the gangsters handed over to Bandit Princess," she remarked. "They couldn't have had anywhere to be sending a signal." Finn wasn't so sure about that. "The transmitter was on, Bets," the big man rumbled. "It was on for a reason. The prisoners kept talking about a signal. She was sending a signal somewhere. It wasn't here on Ooo. You don't need a machine like that to send a signal to somebody on Ooo." Betty nodded. "Arecibo," she muttered.
Bonnie's face snapped over to hers. "That was what it was called in my day," Betty murmured. "It was... We were trying to use it to see if there were creatures... out there." She had hardly thought about what it would mean to get an answer back then. Now she knew. The thought of the destruction they wrought sent a shiver through her body. "It was powerful, Finn," Betty remarked. "It was a very powerful instrument. It... I don't think that it could have sent a signal to an actual power... unless they were already in our solar system. Not without help from alien know-how."
"Susan was a simpleton," Bonnie opined. "She's certainly no alien, from what I could tell. She shouldn't be able to manufacture a tachyon transmitter like Martin wanted me to build..." "Tachy-whats," Finn interrupted? "Faster than light radio-waves," Bonnie responded. It was clear there was more to it than that, but it was just as clear that she was on the edge of what his small brain could understand. Finn moved on. "But it could have been rebuilt that way," Finn murmured. "Yes," Bonnie admitted. "If you knew what you were doing, but I only barely understood what your father was trying to tell me." Susan wouldn't have had any knowledge of that. Turning to face her hubby, Bonnie stroked his newly-young face and said, "I think we can stand down for a bit, darling. Thor and Bill can wrap things up with the rest of Bandit Princess's crew."
The pink-princess stepped off, bound for the limo. Finn stepped off after her with Betty and Simone at his side. Behind her, two of the guards moved in on Blargetha. The plush princess sighed. Back to prison. At least she'd seen the light of day for a bit. There was a hope of getting back to the jungles to work on the rocket-base. Maybe she could even earn the Coca-Peeps' trust. That would maybe give her a hope of being free permanently.
Arriving at the palace, the King immediately diverted to the nursery to see his kids. War and battle always did that to him. He was grateful for his children, and the risk of never seeing them again always made him anxious to be with them. When Bonnie might have protested, Simone shut her down and dragged her away. While Bonnibel Bubblegum was disinterested in her daughter, the loving father was very invested in little Rosie. Simone had been named Finn's executor, and there was no immediate need to rescind that.
Elsewhere, Tallulah the water-nymph princess was getting called on the carpet for her failure to perform. One of her mother's agents had come in from Wizard City by flying carpet and cornered her in the rented room she had on the King's island. Just now, a floating image of Margarida's frowning face in neon-blue hovered above the table. "You said you had an angle, Tallulah," the angry Matriarch snarled! "This fool boy is in my palace harassing me on a daily basis! He's threatening to undo our entire kingdom!"
Tallulah was a little cranky herself. She wasn't used to rejection. She was used to men throwing themselves at her feet for just a whiff of the cookie. She didn't understand why Finn was playing so hard to get. It wasn't prejudice. He'd been sleeping with a nymph for decades. He had a nymph daughter. It mad no sense at all that he would object to a little nymph-nookie, freely given. "Then find out, Tallulah," growled Cenobia! The young nymph flinched. She'd had no idea her mom had company. Now she wondered just how many of the council were there and just how much damage Billy the Kid was doing.
"I'm working on it," the young princess retorted. She felt like her mother and the idiots in the council were at least as much at fault here. They'd let that fucking bandit run around in their backyard doing who-knew what! She'd been building a mushroom-bomb for globsake! Who was going to just ignore that?! The pack began carping in the background, and Tallulah had her answer. The council was pig-piling on her mom, and her mom was coming down on her.
"Listen," she interrupted! "If you play nice with the kid, he'll get back on an airship and go home. His bitches are here practically pining for him to get home. Tell him lies! Make him promises that we don't plan to keep! Let him get his butt back on a ship and go home!" Shoving Margarida out of the way, Catalina announced, "we do plan to do our part to get this William out of our hair, Tallulah. You'd better do yours. The Confederation is watching." The council ended the connection from their end.
Tallulah glanced up at her unpleasant visitor. The wizard's face was unreadable. She was older–maybe a little older than Jakinda, who was elder on the council. Her lush frame and pale hair suggested she was maybe two-hundred. She was old enough that the typical nymph hobbies weren't really important to her anymore. More to the point, she didn't have much in common with Tallulah. It was like having one of the council-bitches here riding her ass. "Well," said the young nymph, "I suppose you can go now." "I've been instructed to stay," the older woman replied. "I will purchase quarters in this inn." Tallulah flushed unconsciously. Yeah, this was going to be a problem.
In the Confederation, Olesia woke to the sound of Nieve bustling around her 'room'. Billy had brought his girlfriend straight back from the ship and installed her in the blacksmith shop in the Matriarch's palace, kicking out the horses and the blacksmith and daring anybody to complain. Olesia had been sleeping here for days. She was a bit of a mess, and Nieve had been looking after her while Billy dealt with Margarida and her cunts.
The Muscle Princess threw open the shutters on the window, admitting in the bright morning sunlight. Striding over to the fire-pit, the young-princess took up a set of tongs and adjusted the heavy cover over Olesia. "I-I'm awake," Olesia muttered. She'd been laying in bed because she wasn't feeling well rather than a need to sleep. Nodding, Nieve stepped back and said, "I brought you breakfast. I called your brother and asked him what you liked... took the liberty of looking at your contacts in your phone." The plump girl sat bolt upright. Nodding, Nieve said, "yeah, he's a little worried, O." Olesia flushed to her burning hair.
Sitting on the anvil beside the fire, the hard-body said, "I never had any friends growing up, Olesia. Just the usual royal entourage. I'd hate to lose my first one." She'd been alarmed to see Billy bring back her friend with wounds all over her body. Handing across the plate she'd made up, Nieve smiled and said, "who'd keep me going down the straight-and-narrow?" Accepting the plate, the plump girl dug in by way of trying to avoid dealing with the problem Nieve had just raised. Nieve let her. For the moment. "Tell me about that unique looking necklace," she said. She was changing the subject to let them get through the unpleasantness of the moment.
The King stayed head down with family matters for several days with the Kingdom of Ooo running mostly on autopilot. Job one was screening teachers to help with the job of teaching the kids who were getting to that age. The Royal Kids would be going to school outside in the village, and that meant making sure that the school in the village was a good one. Simone, Betty, and Bonnie kept the Privy Council at bay, in spite of their increasingly strident demands for Finn's attention. A grateful Finn used the moment to decompress from the stress he'd been under the last couple of years, rediscovering the joy of being a dad.
Early in the morning, on the fifth day since his return from the west, Drew summoned him up to the infirmary to deal with the strange remnant of Peihong's scheme. Susan had not awakened the whole time they'd been moving her. She was breathing on her own, but she'd remained stubbornly asleep. Finn was eerily reminded of Maja's troubles where she'd gone under and stayed for weeks. Heading upstairs, the big man found several members of his family gathered there around the bed as the heavily built humanoid woman lay in repose.
Drew had stripped the filthy clothes off of her and even removed the purple cat-hat she'd worn for so many years. Now Finn had a good look at the strange thing he'd felt under her hat all those years ago when she had shoved his hand under there. Of course, that wasn't the thing that struck him the most. "Is she... human," Finn burbled? Nodding, Drew said, "she appears to be. I looked at some of her DNA. I don't see any of the genetic shift that I expect from the run of Ooo's population.
"How is it that she's still so young," Finn murmured? "Susan's got to be sixteen years older than I am." And it was unlikely that Susan had a friendly witch to throw a youth-spell her way. Pointing to the gadget tucked into the base of Susan's skull, Drew replied, "this... It's stimulating her pituitary gland, among other things." The strange technology snaked down along her spine, interfacing with various organs and glands. "She's getting continually dosed with various hormones that stimulate cell-regeneration and healing," the doctor explained. "I'd guess that's why she's so strong. In many ways, she's a biologic cyborg–artificially strong and healthy."
"Ok," said Finn. "When was this done?" "Not your nasty customer, if that's what you're thinking," Drew replied. "This is much older. I'd guess this tech has been embedded in her body for most of her life. She's pretty much always been this way. That hat was covering this up." Finn nodded his agreement, saying, "when she pushed my hand under her hat, I felt something that startled me. Now I understand what it was."
"The super-soldier project," Betty burbled in awestruck tones. "The who-what," Drew demanded? "The US Army announced that they were going to actually create Captain America," Betty replied. Which was just as unhelpful as the previous statement. "He was an imaginary character," the time-traveler explained, "from a series of videos in my time. Scientists had experimented on this wimpy little guy and turned him... basically into Finn. Only better." The big man blushed. "That's some kind of experiment," Drew chuckled. Flushing, Betty said, "it was a fantasy... until they had a breakthrough in their understanding of human physiology." Frowning himself now, the King of Ooo rumbled, "alien technology." Betty's face snapped up. "Everybody got something," Finn rumbled. Nodding, Betty agreed, "this could be what America got."
Now Drew weighed in, asking, "you think she's that old?" "Maybe," Finn replied. "Never knew where Susan came from. It was like the Hyoomans just found her. She was clearly not one of them. She was the only thing close to a human I ever met until Betty came along." He'd felt the strange box under her hood and at the base of her neck, and he'd always wondered what it was. Of course, there was a War-Elephant in the corner.
"Can she be revived," he asked? Drew sighed. That was the tough part. She'd been dreading this conversation. "I don't know," she admitted. "She should be awake now. They used drugs to put her to sleep from what Cherry said, but those drugs would have worn off, and you told me she didn't have anything plugged into her in that room where she was kept." There was no reason Susan should still be asleep. Betty burbled, "she's not..." "Brain dead," Drew finished? "No. We're getting nominal readings. She's asleep. She's dreaming." Finn frowned at that news, his mind going back to the shaman who'd been guarding her. "Try Maja," Finn rumbled.
The lovely faces around him stared at him. "A long while ago, Marcie's dick of an ex-boyfriend dosed her with magic sleeping-dust to put her to sleep," he said. "He tricked Jake and me into going into her dreams and stealing her memory of him selling Hambo." Bonnie's jaw came open. Hambo had been Marcie's one prized possession, more important even than the axe-bass. "Was that how Maja got Hambo," Bonnie howled? Finn nodded. "Ash sold Hambo for a magic wand," the big man rumbled. "Marcie dumped him right after. Ash wanted her back, so he tricked us into stealing her memories of that moment." Trouble for Ash was that Finn had seen the moment when he was stealing the memory out of Marcie's skull. They'd used the same magic dust to put Finn and Marcie to sleep together so Finn could show her what had been taken.
"He tried to press charges against you," Bonnie rumbled. "I swept it under the rug because Marceline was involved. You came close to going to jail..." Finn flushed and tugged at his collar. He'd been pretty pissed off, and he'd fucked Ash up something fierce and sent him to the Candy Clinic to spend a few weeks wrapped up like a mummy. Resting a hand on Finn's face, Bonnie said, "thank-you, by the way. Thank-you for caring, Finn."
Clearing her throat, Drew asked, "do you think she's been affected by this magic-dust?" Her voice dripped distaste. Drusilla Princess and Bonnibel Bubblegum were two peas in a pod that way. They didn't really think that much of 'magic'. At the same time, she didn't have any answers of her own. "Worth a shot, doc," Finn replied. Drew sighed. She hadn't really gone to see Maja since 'the event', and while she was grateful to be wearing a new body like a new set of clothes, she was a little disturbed by the way Maja had done that as well as the witch's casual disregard for basics of human rights and safety. "Ok," she muttered. "It can't hurt to ask."
The family moved on. It was time for Finn to go down and face the music. The Privy Council was expecting a report on what had gone down with Bandit Princess. They wanted to know if she had, in fact, managed to send out a signal. Unfortunately, Finn's news was mixed. She'd been transmitting something. Blargetha was sure of that, and that suggested to Finn that Peihong probably had tried to contact someone/something. Trouble was, he didn't know what/who she'd been sending that message to or whether or not a response had been received. They were flying blind.
Boarding a fleet of limos, the family headed out, driving south and east along the coast to Dessert Kingdom where the other royals were meeting. The journey brought back memories for Finn. He'd taken this trip a few times with Bonnie. Back in the day, the annual princess meeting could be a dangerous event, with bandits trying to jump the royals on their way to the meetup. He'd met Sheila, Djanira, and Sakura the year Djanira held the meeting at her place, and even back then he'd had a thing for Sakura and Sheila. It was funny how the world had changed around them.
Simone and Bonnie kept up a pretty steady chatter, talking over various family goals they had in mind. Finn did his best to listen and pay attention, though he was continually distracted by the view out the limo's right window. How long ago had it been that he'd been able to just watch the world go by? His mind conjured up the memory of Davey, his alter-ego. Davey had been an escape from the pressures of taking care of Bonnie's peeps. A piece of him wanted to be Davey again, instead of the King of Ooo, but that world was closed to him now. There were just too many people depending on him. He didn't want to make the same mistakes Jake had made. Shutting out the hunger to be normal again, the big man took Simone's hand and gave it a squeeze, somewhat startling her.
The gathering was well underway when the limos rolled into town at the edge of the sea. Djanira's capitol had suffered a little bit during the Lich-War with waves of bitter cold sweeping across, smashing crops and driving people into their homes for extended periods. A lot of Dessert-peeps had bit the big one. As they rolled through the town, the big man kept his eyes peeled for signs of how the locals were doing. Fortunately, things appeared to be looking up for Djanira's kingdom.
The town square had been taken over, and the vast park setup as an encampment for the royal entourages to hang out instead of taking over Djanira's much-smaller castle. Thor's dudes had things well in hand with a fenced-in section all laid out for the King and his family. One by one, the limos rolled up, discharging the Royal Family at the entry. Then the limos moved around the back to be put up.
No sooner had Finn stepped out of his limo, than Hurletta had her hands on him and her lips glued to his. Simone laughed at his pole-axed expression. Passing him by, the tall wizard slapped him on the ass. She and Bonnie were still laughing as they headed out of sight, bound for the tents they would be using while they were here. "Uh...," Finn burbled. The Slime Princess knew exactly where his mind was going to go. She and Drew had discussed this.
Stroking his handsome face, Hurletta remarked, "perhaps I'm love-bombing you not out of grief, Finn. Perhaps it's because I actually love you. I've always loved you. When Blargetha sicced those goons on me, you were the first person I thought of." Strolling around him, showing off that bangin' body, she said, "perhaps I now have the goods to give you what you want..." Finn flushed. Both of the sisters had become unbelievably stacked thanks to Maja's magic, and he found his eyes watching that round ass as it wig-wagged back and forth. Straightening his tie, she said, "we're collectively climbing on the horse again. You've seen those you cared for abused, and you're having trouble showing your love to me. And me... well, I'm trying to learn how to be touched again. I love you. We're going on a date, honey. Dinner, dancing, and maybe some fucking if you're good... We both know I can make you feel good. Seven sharp. Don't be late, and don't bring those fucking rubbers, either."
In the right now, the opening session was ready to begin. The castle bell-tower was ringing even now, announcing that Finn had arrived. Taking the big man by the arm, the Finance Minister turned and headed for the guarded passage leading to the side gate of Djanira's castle. Finn went along to get along. Clearly the other girls knew about this. He was being lent out. Again.
Arriving in Djanira's cramped throne room, Finn went straight up to the throne and sat himself. Unlike the dais at Bonnie's place or in his new digs, the Desert Princess's home didn't have space for more than one seat on the dais, leaving Finn feeling like he was on the hot-seat as the various princes and princesses began to arrive. Reaching for the calm center inside himself, the King pushed aside the worry in favor of greeting some of the women in the first row. Finally, the last faces were in their places, and Hurletta announced that business could begin.
"Good afternoon everybody," Finn announced. "I'd like to thank you all for coming to the Grand Housewarming of my new home. Unfortunately today has to be about business." Turning to Thor, the King said, "Captain, please give us your report on the current state of affairs with the security of the civilized kingdoms." Thor stepped forward and, in a clear voice, announced, "the fortifications of the wall are in good condition. Princess Fionna has gone east with Lieutenant Pedersen to examine the only problematic location with the wall, but our defenses are in place." Finn turned his attention to his wife. "Da," Nadia muttered. "I'm working on the second reflector node." She clearly felt put on the spot, but this was critical.
Finn, unfortunately, had one more tasker. "Need somebody to go into the wild lands west of your kingdom," he said. Straightening, the big man said, "the first of the reactor machines has been allocated to towns inside the wall. I'm now looking at ways to increase the standing and prosperity of kingdoms outside the wall. I would greatly appreciate it if Princess Nadia, Princess Alexia, and Princess Hamest could open discussions with the small domains in the wild lands." "Risky," Alex rumbled. "Finn, there's... a problem with going north into the wild lands." The King knew just what kind of problem she meant. "I understand your concerns, Al," Finn said. "I don't intend to push that issue yet. We can contact those domains that don't require pushing the boundaries." He would have to deal with Princess Beautiful someday. In the right now, the broken domains near her kingdom were getting hammered by refugees swarming through and eating their crops. It was time to do something about that.
Crab Princess opened the next item of the debate, demanding to know what was going on with Bandit Princess and the machine in the west. It was time to face the music. There was no more time for dancing around the issue. Folding his hands in front of him in an unconscious sign that he was troubled, Finn announced, "with the aid of Pirate Princess, we found the outlaw's lair. We did find that she was in possession of an ancient transmitter of large scale. Princess Blargetha was able to ascertain that it had been brought back to life..." There were wails and howls of worry at that news. "We are in full production of the flying weapons," Finn declared! "We're acting out of an abundance of caution. I expect the mobile war room to be ready within weeks. We will be ready, just in case."
The princesses were on edge, but Finn had never been a liar. Bonnie's antics had made him wary of keeping secrets. He played it straight with them, telling them what the risks were, as he knew them, and laying out everything he was doing to safeguard Ooo from rapacious villains. In the end, it was just enough. They weren't happy, but they were calm when he walked out of Djanira's palace. Wish I could calm myself down, the King thought, but it was just like Betty had said. Uneasy lay the head that wore a crown.
Wonder how many bandits Susan smashed up before they put her to sleep? And what was Bandit Princess doing to/with her? Hmm? And where, oh were did that signal go?