Princess Bubblegum bursts into the hallway and nearly smashes into … some dark suit. She ends up falling back, dropping her load of papers. The leaflets with tons of her scientific scribbles go scattering everywhere.
Lowly cussing in mad German, she scrambles to regather her stuff.
"Achtung! Vorsicht wo du gehst...!"
As she scoops up her papers, she sees those boots. They're like what Marceline wears. The cowboy kind, with reddish brown leather. A hand covered in pale, greenish-blue skin reaches down to pick a stray page off the floor. As her eyes follow it, she sees the suit and the person in it. And she recognized him rather easily once he spoke.
"Why, hello there, Princess."
She'd rarely seen him much, honestly, and Marceline hated to talk about him. He was a monster, she said. He definitely wasn't human. But PB wasn't about to be intimidated as she stared into his slit orbs for eyes. With a huff, she stands and plucks the page from his hand. He lets her do so.
"Hunson Abadeer?"
"My little Marcy's mentioned me, I see?"
"Not in the most flattering of ways," She mutters in reply, "Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get the guards to throw you out for trespassing-"
"Hunson! You big dingdong!" She sees the little striped candy run up to them, "I told you not to wander off like some big wig!"
"Hoho, well, can't blame me, in a hurry and all," The demonic lord just chuckles, not in a hurry at all.
"Princess," Peps looks to her, "Apologies, but I had to invite him right away. He carries a message of utter importance."
"Uh huh..." She looks apprehensively at the suit with the toothy grin, "So, what? What's the deets?"
"The shredder's coming."
There is a moment of silence as Hunson lets his words sink in.
"... What the balls is the shredder?" PB shrugs slightly at the unfamiliar term.
"My, my, you don't know?" Hunson does his creepy thing where he circles around someone while pulling a contortionist act with his body, "I thought you practically figured everything out princess. Looks like you aren't as smart as I thought, even though my little Marcy-"
Before PB could give him a face full of files, Peppermint clears his throat as a signal.
"Oh right," Hunson refocuses, "There are clones of you guys here right now, aren't there?"
"Yeah," PB didn't have time to dwell on the fact that Marceline talked about her to her dad. She didn't think they spoke at all, "Don't tell me, the shredder's coming to rip reality apart because there's multiples of us?"
"Ooh, you do catch on quick at least, even if you don't know everything, hehe," The demon lord repositions himself before her, her reflection in his optical orbs, "Yes, it's coming. And the only way to get rid of it is-"
"I'm trying to send them back as it is!" PB indignantly throws up her arms, sending the papers scattering once more in the hall, "Geez! What the flip does everyone think I'm trying to do?"
"Send them back? Huh," Hunson's lips curl pensively, "I mean, I could just eat their souls like I did the last guy and-"
"Dad?"
The two adults turn heads to see the vampire queen coming over to them. Hovering behind her is Marshall Lee. Hunson is for once speechless and not smiling as he now sees the fanfiction equivalent of his daughter.
"Dad!" Marceline says again, "What are you doing here?! Ugh, did you bother Bonnie or something?"
"Oh!" Hunson snaps out of his momentary daze in a cinch, "There you are, my little monster!"
When he goes to hug her, she dodges. He acts like nothing went wrong and goes to wrap an arm around the unsuspecting Marshall instead.
"Gah! Woah!" Marshall sucks in breath through his teeth as he gets a good look at his parallel parent, "Ok, this is getting weird...!"
"You only say that now?" Marceline rolls her eyes.
"Well you sure are a bit like my Marcy eh? I've heard all about you," Hunson chuckles, "So, how's my counterpart look?"
"DAD!"
"Who, Helga? Uh, well..." Marshall says a bit uncomfortably from within his hold, "She's... she looks … kinda like you?"
"Well that's interesting and all but," As though he lost interest, Hunson twirls the vampire prince behind a random door and slams it in his face, "The grownups are talking now, BYE!"
"Uh, guys? Hello?" Marshall's voice can be heard behind the door along with his knocking, "Hey, c'mon don't make me burst out of here giant-bat style..."
"You are not locking me up with him," Marceline says grumpily.
"And he better not bust a hole in my castle!" PB chimes in.
"Who, cool down girls. You're included in this conversation, Marcy. And don't worry, I just didn't want him running off when we drop the bomb on 'em," Hunson snickers.
"What? What are you talking about?" Marceline looks suspiciously at her father
Hunson looks a bit to the princess, "You wanna tell her?"
"Well, you see, your dad's saying there's a reality-warping thing called the shredder coming to tear Ooo apart unless the copies are dealt with."
"WHAT?!" Marceline and her copy exclaim.
"Though I still don't know exactly what he's talking about. I was sure my tests showed the rifts that would expand like a dark hole once the instability was exploited. But they haven't changed in their composition at all..."
"Oh, that kinda egghead talk, hm?" Hunson chuckles, "Well, I dunno about that, but the magic which made them is unstable for sure. It's because of the environment of this world. It doesn't mesh, you get me? That's like an alarm for the shredder."
"So... So what do we do?" Marceline was almost afraid of the answer she knew.
"Off 'em. Easiest way. They'll probably go boom and outta here, quick and easy," Hunson shrugs.
There is suddenly a loud thoom and the sound of screaming candies. The noise of screaming came from outside, but the loud impact was from the room Hunson locked Marshall in.
"Oh, crab apples..."
PB runs to the nearest window to glimpse the giant monster bat flying away into the night, "Oh balls! The other clones might go nuts if they hear!"
Marceline flies out after Marshall without another word, breezing past Bonnie.
"Marceline! Ugh...!" She goes to get Morrow to pursue them, brushing past Hunson roughly.
"Hehehe, wow they are so alike!" Hunson just grins.
Peps smacks his own hard face out of exasperation.
…
"I'm gonna... get there first!"
"No... Me!"
Finn and Fiona crouch to increase their aerodynamic potential as they slide down the hill on their Cake and Jake sleds. They'd passed the running portion of the race through Marshmallow Meadows and now were due to the last stretch. The goal was to reach the cliffside before the ocean, where the moon was hanging bright and perfect in the sky. But just before it, they still had to get through the oily tanglewoods, where the tree liana hung like nooses, and the roots secreted pools of viscous oil. If you weren't careful, slipping and sliding could mean cracking your head open or getting your neck snapped.
"Woaaah...!"
"Steady here, Cake!"
"Jump, jump!"
Finn pulls Jake's ears and launches them over a rotten log. To his side, he could still see Fiona zipping through the trees. They still were well matched.
He grins as he hollers, "You're slipping up!"
"No, you!" She laughs.
"Finn! Puddle! Dead ahead!"
The trees part and Finn, too busy staring a little at Fiona, yanks at Jake's ear a bit too late to skirt a pool of oil. The literal dog sled skids right off the slick stuff and out of control, like a little tornado.
"Woooaaaah!"
They slide and ram into Fiona and Cake, causing them to spin out of control too.
"Auuugh!"
"Waah!"
With a thud and a splat, the four end up in a heap in a shallow puddle of oil.
"Oof... Augh... Everyone alright?"
"Yeah..." Fiona sits up, "Pee-yew, this oil stinks..."
Finn chuckles, "Yeah, but it actually smells kinda like pines once you sit in it for a while."
"Huh, cool," She giggles slightly, "I guess the frogs like it too."
"Wh- Huh?"
Finn looks up when Fiona points at his head. His hat was knocked off by the collision, and a slimy frog was sitting on his head, now staring down at him. He flails and it hops away. Then he laughs with Fiona at the whole mess.
"I think we tied."
"What? No way," She punches his arm playfully, "You did that on purpose. Otherwise I would have totally won...!"
He splashes some mud on her. She throws a gob back at him. It isn't long before Jake and Cake join in on the fun and they're all an oily mess.
"Phew... Think I'll take a bath in the ocean."
"Cool, I'll join you?" Finn says without thinking.
"Dude!" Jake throws up his arms, "They're girls!"
That snaps Finn back to reality and he blushes red as a beet, "O-Oh right, uh, forget I said that...!"
"Hehe, alright. C'mon, Cake."
The cat jumps on her head and they head off to the beach area below the cliffs.
"That was a close one, man!" Jake lightly slaps the blushing boy's back, "What were ya thinking? You never even got that far with FP!"
"I know, I know...!" The boy pulls his hat off the branch where it was caught, still rather red, "It just... It just came out, ok?"
"... Look man, I dunno if this is healthy for you. I mean, I know ya probably like her, like a lot. But you're way too desperate man!" Jake goes into his brotherly advice mode, "You gotta play it slow and cool. Remember how you blew it before?"
"Jake, that was because of the Cosmic Owl, I told you."
"Well if you hadn't been so desperate, maybe it woulda ended a bit nicer!"
"You were the one who got me all hyped on that premonition dream!"
Before Jake can retort, a huge gust blows overhead and a shadow passes the moonlight, darkening the area for a second.
"What the..."
"It flew towards the ocean! C'mon!"
As they run, Finn felt panic. About Fiona. She'd just come back... if anything happened again...
There is the sound of a large splash. When the boys arrive at the cliffs, they are greeted with a dousing of seawater. A fish even flies into Jake's mouth.
"PUH!" The dog spits it out, "What the...?!"
In the moonlight, the cove was illuminated. Two large shadows, bat monsters, were wrestling among the waves.
"Calm... down... Marshall!"
"You calm down!"
"Marceline?" The brothers squint.
"Marshall?"
Finn perks up at the voice and looks down the cliffside to the beach beside it. To his relief, Fiona and Cake seemed fine, with the water up to their waste. But Fiona was naked. Her luscious blonde hair was luckily covering most of her body in cascades from where Finn was looking.
"Fiona! You ok?" He calls out without thinking.
"Huh? Yeah, we're fine!"
"Who's that fightin' with Marshall?" Cake squints at the two bats, "Oh wait, is that the Marshall copy?"
"He's a copy of ME!" Marceline corrects her before Marshall slugs her in the face. He tries to take flight from her, but she pulls him back into the water before punching his gut.
"Finn! Jake!" The pink princess calls out to her two knights as she runs up behind them.
"PB!"
"What's goin' on here?" The old dog says, bemused.
"Marshall isn't too happy about the news."
"What news?"
"The shr..." Bubblegum doesn't finish her statement as suddenly her watch goes off like an alarm clock. She looks for a second, then out towards the sea. Terror in her eyes, she screams.
"Marceline, GET AWAY!"
The vampire queen turns at the sound of her cry. Marshall slips out from under her, flying up. There is the low sound suddenly of crumpling paper.
The ones at shore saw it better first. It blended in with the night sky, but it slowly grew in visibility with size. It was a spherical thing that was darker than night, and it had that sound of shredding paper. Marshall was about to fly right into it.
"MARSHALL!" Fiona shouts, "Look out!"
"Huh?" Marshall pauses in flight, but he was already within range of the immense gravitational pull, "Whoa...!"
He flaps his wings furiously, but the force merely increases. Slowly, he was being pulled towards the shredding nothingness.
"Oh no..." Fiona hastily wades further into the water, "C'mon, Cake!"
"Right with ya!"
The cat quickly transforms into a juggernaut suit around the girl's body and they dash across the surface towards the fray.
"F-Fiona! Jake, let's go-"
"No, it's too dangerous!" PB stops Finn.
"But look!"
To the monarch's horror, Marceline had flown up to Marshall and was trying to pull him back against the sphere. The Cake-suited Fiona jumps up to try and weigh them down too. The force of the sphere's pull was now causing droplets of water to slosh to the surface and rise. When one touches the rim of the dark orb, there is the terrifying sound of shredding, like SKRRSSSH and then there is only scraps of paper left.
Marshall's eyes widen in fear as their efforts don't seem to be getting anywhere. At this rate, all four of them will be devoured.
"Marceline! Globs Willes...!" Bubblegum curses.
Beside her, Jake shoots out like a harpoon for Cake suit's leg with Finn mounted. His own rear is anchored on the cliff.
"Guys, hold on!" Finn shouts, "Alright Jake, PULL!"
"HNGGGGHHH!"
"I gotchu, Jakey!" Cake's legs swirl about Jake's body and plant themselves beside him on the cliff, adding to their traction, "C'mon, put some back into it!"
To PB's astonishment, combined with the stretchy powers of Cake and Jake and Marceline and Marshall's wings, they seemed to slowly be pulling away from danger. But it can't last long. The amount of calories they're outputting would be too exhausting, and at the rate per second they move, they can't keep it up...
"Ach mein Gloob...!" The princess grits her teeth in frustration and whips out a small box from within her coat. It opens and unfolds into a sort of machine with coils, resembling something like a jackhammer without the pointed part. It was still a prototype, but with the air watts of a reverse mach jet, and an approximate tractive force of about 0.7 when she tested it on the smooth candy runway.
"Jake, Cake, this is gonna hurt a bit but grit through it ok!"
"What?"
"Whatever you doin', be quiiiick!" Cake screeches.
The princess affixes the device onto the base of the cat and dog bodies. Like a suction machine, it starts to mechanically grind and pull at the malleable bodies with a crushing amount of force.
"YEOOOWWWW!"
"AAAGH! AAAHHH!"
The cat and dog grind their teeth as the machine painfully reels them in by the flesh. But they don't give. Their own muscles are still yanking against the seemingly endless dark hole, which was drawing up more water, shredding it, and growing.
"ARGH! Dangnabbit Marshaaaalll!" Marceline and Fiona both exclaim simultaneously.
Then, by pure luck, the suction force from the orb suddenly stopped. Unfortunately, the amount of force built up on the other side just kept going. So, they all end up flung back onto the cliff with a huge crash like a cannonball.
"Ah!" PB steps back a bit from the dust as the cliff face crumbles from the sheer force of impact from the stretchy animals and two huge bats, not counting the two smaller humans.
"Owowowowow…" Jake moans as he collects his squishy parts. Then he gives a yowl," G-GAH! PB TURN YER MACHINE OOFFFF!"
PB gasps and quickly shuts off the machine, and the cat and dog stop having their guts grinded. As the bunch of them give a sigh of relief, PB's eyes trail uneasily towards the sphere, which now simply hovers over the now-stilled ocean waves.
"W-whew…!" Cake flops down, slowly retracting her stretched body, "Thank Guh-lob!"
"Ugh…" Marshall changes back to his regular sized form, rubbing his head, "What was that?"
"If you were thinking instead of running off, you would've figured it was the Shredder we were talking about!" PB sighs with exasperation, "Though it seems for now it's stopped… Maybe I can run some tests while its in this dormant state…"
"Whoa, no way, you cannot get close to that thing, princess!" Finn objects, "That thing almost swallowed all our bohonkuses!"
"Well we need to know more about these things and what they do exactly… and how to stop them… or else they're going to shred everything…"
"…Uh…" Marceline points with some hesitance in her voice, "Is that… another one?"
Their heads turn with alarm.
Indeed, against the fabric of night, a darker shape could be seen. But it was not merely one. It was many of these small spheres, littering the sky like black marbles dropped from the heavens.
"W-What the…"
"Uhh… I ain't sure what a shredder is but… That don't look like just one…" Jake says with a nervous swallow.
"Princess, what do we do?" Finn looks to the monarch.
"I … I'm not sure…" For one of the first times in her life, she was completely stumped.
…
"Ma'am please calm down…" Root Beer Guy sighs as he tries to talk to an inconsolable LSP. He looks over the report and waves over a banana guard, "I can't make heads or tails of this junk. How'd you find this nut case again?"
"Uhh, we didn't find her. She ran to our post outside and was screaming like a crazy person."
"Well why'd you bring her to me?"
"Cuz she wanted Princess Bubblegum."
RBG sighs and looks to the sobbing purple lumpy being. They had so far given her three milkshakes, but she was still blubbering and making no sense, moaning the same words over and over again like gibberish.
"M-my prince… Prince… handsome… omiglob… whyyyy…."
"Ma'am, I am trying to help you here, but you need to work with me, understand?" RBG sighs and puts his hands together, "What happened to you exactly?"
"Black ball… ate… mah priiince!" Another bout of bawls.
"'Black ball'?" RBG scratches his foam hair.
He then heard a sudden alarm bell from the watch tower. Excusing himself, he hurries up to where banana guards point. With a pair of binoculars, he looks out and sees the object of their confusion.
Tearing a trail through the old cotton stump land was a black sphere.
Sorry for the super long wait. Life is not easy this year...