Chapter 22:
"Twenty minutes out," announced Piotr. Finn nodded and thanked him.
The King of Ooo's expression was haunted and unhappy. It was very unlike him, and Sarah could sort of see why her cospouses were upset and worried about him. He was a different man than he had been, and who was to say if he was a better man. "It's funny," Finn remarked. "The name of her home is Rebirth. I never knew that until Talia's wiz-biz." Rose had given him the name a lifetime ago when last he'd been there, but he hadn't really known what to do with it at the time. "Bonnie's memories of Skeleton Princess are sketchy," Sarah replied. "She mostly keeps to herself. Nobody really has much memory of her," said Finn. "Except Marceline." The two great undead forces of the world–the Princess of Zombies and the Queen of Vampires–both hailed from a time before the bombs.
"What's the plan," Sarah asked? "Not sure," Finn admitted. Orzsebet's news was sketchy. The Bandit Princess had agents looking to lay hands on a purified version of the virus if they could. It was a crazy thought to Finn. How did you purify a virus? "Finn," Sarah burbled, her lovely face twisting into a frown. "Yeah, babe," he replied. "Every princess guards something," the android-hottie reminded him. The big man's face went very pale. Baba Yaga guarded a copy of the bomb that wrecked the world. What if Rose guarded something equally as terrible?
It had never mattered that much to Finn what the various kingdoms contained. What would he have done if he'd known? He'd never been interested in taking what the royals had in their possession. Now, he thought it just might be the most critical thing in the world. Questions drifted through his mind. What did Rags guard? What was in her Kingdom? What did Blanca and Ramona guard? All those awful things might become weapons to shatter the peace.
Shaking off the worry, the big man got up and went over to the bench where Orzsebet lay sleeping. She'd been doing quite a bit of that. She would say nothing of why or what was going on with her, which was another cause for his worry. Calling her name, the big man shook her shoulder. The older woman swam up out of the darkness full of fight and very nearly kicked him in the jaw. Those long, lean legs were shockingly strong, and he found himself on his back, with those thighs wrapped around his neck, his face stuffed into the crotch of her pantyhose. "Mmmrhmma," Finn mumbled. "I think he's saying that it's time to go," Sarah laughed.
Releasing the big man from the deadly embrace of her crotch, the Lady of Spies gathered the shreds of her dignity. Climbing off the floor, Finn took his parachute from Sarah and began gathering it on. Yeah, he needed to talk to Orzsebet about what was going on. Dusting herself off, Orzsebet retrieved a parachute of her own. The airship crew was already about the job of preparing to open the rear ramp. There was equipment to stow or tie down–lest it be blown out the rear. And then, as the ship slowly began to circle lower, they began to lower the air-pressure in the cabin. Finn could feel his ears popping, and he opened his mouth to compensate. "Five minutes," shouted the cyborg near the ramp, as he began to lower the ramp.
The King of Ooo found himself praying–for the kids who were rushing about now, tending to his empire and the kids who were just being born or growing up. He prayed that he could keep this whole thing going because a whole world of kids was depending on him. Sarah rested her hand on his reassuringly. Once more into darkness, he thought, as he took those last, fateful steps. And then he was falling into the darkness over the vast desert that Rose called home.
Back in the Candy Kingdom, Princess Blargetha had her face buried into the magnifying lenses of the soldering station. Just a few hundred more circuitboards to go. She'd been working night and day on this. The cool thing was the android had done a lot of the heavy lifting of testing by simulating the circuits in that lovely bundle of memory-chips and processors she called a brain. The toy-girl had found a lot of the flaws, letting Blargetha rush ahead to manufacturing her designs.
As the evil sister worked, the older sister stood in the shadows of the doorway, her mind going in strange directions. The man she'd loved for a lifetime was out there somewhere, rushing into danger once more. She'd taken months to come to this decision, finally being forced off the fence by this latest trial. They were getting no younger–Finn getting no younger. The world was seemingly lined up against them. Everything she valued was at risk of loss at seemingly any moment, and she was starting to understand what her doctor had been telling her.
She wasn't promised another day.
She could wallow in misery the rest of her days, but she wouldn't get back what she'd lost. It wouldn't do a damn thing to punish those who hurt her, and it wouldn't bring back her old life. If she wanted to have a life at all, she had to move on. The world was rapidly leaving her behind.
Noise from the door announced a visitor, and Blargetha raised her head from the solder-station to find her big sister standing there. "Hello, sister," announced Hurletta. Blargetha rolled her eyes. It had been a fair bit since her sister stopped by to threaten her, and she could have done without a reprise.
Moving into the room, Hurletta looked around at her sister's new digs–finding them at once familiar and yet... different. Blargetha had always been a nerd–her mind far keener than Hurletta's. It was typical to find racks of bottles and vials with various chemicals in all their strange colors and arcane books in the younger sister's apartments. A younger Hurletta had seen it as industriously useless. Today's Hurletta saw it as something different.
Her sister was a slave.
Never mind that Blargetha had brought her current fate on herself. She was Finn's slave–shackled to that table to build weapons for him. Scraps of food and detritus scattered about told the tale. The younger sister all but lived in this space. Stains on her dress suggested that she rarely even got a change of clothing. "Are you eating," she asked? It was out of the blue, and Blargetha stared at her. "Would you like some clothing," 'Letta asked? "We're a similar size."
The whole situation was eerie–and made all the more so by Sarah's absence. Sarah was utterly loyal to Finn, and while Blargetha knew that loyalty would see the android woman carry through on the chilling threats she'd made, she also knew that Sarah would never let her be harmed. Finn had said that she would live as long as he was pleased, and Blargetha believed that. Unfortunately, Finn and Sarah were both out of the palace, leaving her at her sister's dubious mercy. Frowning up at her sister, Blargetha demanded, "what's this about, 'Letta? Why are you here?"
Confusion was plain on the younger sibling's face. In eerily solemn tones, Hurletta said, "I need to move on, Blargetha. I want a life. I have a chance at a life with a mate and children, but hate and vengeance can only get in the way. I've spent three quarters of our joint life hating you. Now I need to let go. I have to forgive you for hurting me so I can love my child. This is goodbye, Blargetha. I won't come back, but I want there to be peace between us." The older sister paused, her eyes seeming to search her younger sister's eyes for... something. Blargetha's face only showed fear. With a heavy sigh, the older sister turned and, without a further word, walked out of the lab once more.
The evil princess sat there, staring at the door for a long, five minutes, her mind in turmoil. What did that mean? There was the obvious answer. Hurletta was making her play. She was making the play to become one of Finn's many paramours. She was going to burrow her way deeper into Finn's affection, and that was very dangerous for the fallen younger princess. Work forgotten, the plump princess rose, setting her soldering gear aside. Holding onto her face, Blargetha began to work her way through all the implications of that.
Finn had always loved Hurletta in his way. He always put up with a female that was clearly incompatible with him doing her best to throw herself at him. She'd completely understood just what he was thinking in the way-back-when in their youth. Blargetha had done her best to seduce and romance the fools who'd pined after her sister. Trouble was that she'd had nothing to offer them. She couldn't even formally marry them. Hurletta had to be married first. She was ashamed and embarrassed to have had to resort to creating a fake paramour in a bid to try and steal the throne. Now, Hurletta was, strangely enough, closer than ever to having Finn in her bed. Blargetha herself had made that possible.
Trouble was, when Hurletta was Finn's woman, the equation of life for Blargetha would subtly but drastically change. It was one thing to tell one of his vassals 'no'. Hell, he could even tell one of his senior counselors to get stuffed. It was quite another thing to tell the woman he shared his bed with that she couldn't have what she wanted. Hurletta could demand her sister's head, and Finn, who held Blargetha's life in her hands, would be very tempted to comply. The younger sister could very easily find herself staked out in a rain-storm, being murdered to suit her sister's rage. Trouble was, what was she going to do about this? She didn't really have a lot of leverage here. You need to figure this out, she thought. Her life depended on it.
Morning found Billy sitting at the entry to the lizard-folk's rock quarry with Olesia at his side. They'd come up here the previous day and camped out all night, taking watches turn and turn about. Billy had been slowly getting the younger woman to open up about the things she'd seen and done, sharing the ugly experiences he'd had and helping her to confront the unpleasant feelings she still had over the fight in the former Wildberry Kingdom. He thought she would never be the happy-go-lucky girl she'd been before. The world had a way of grinding down the soft layers of youthful optimism for a harder-edged cynicism.
But Olesia was laughing again.
She was laughing and wearing tight clothes and showing off that killer fucking body that she now sported. He was having trouble refraining from commenting on it because it brought back all the raw feelings he'd had towards her. He tried to channel those thoughts, telling her that she ought to be careful, or she might end up burning some poor, thirsty dude who just couldn't help himself. Of course, on her side, Olesia was delighted to see him noticing what was out on display.
"So what's this marvelous idea of yours," she asked? Setting aside his coffee cup, the big man said, "we're going to help them get ahead on their stone quarrying..." It took weeks for the lizard-folk to quarry a decent quantity of stone to build up one building. It took weeks and thousands upon thousands of workers. They worked with treadmills and riding lizards, and hand-built machines that sliced the stone out with copper cutting-wire and grit. Trouble was, it was the dead of winter, and they couldn't get thousands of peeps up here. They couldn't move them. They couldn't keep them fed. They couldn't house them all.
"Learned something when I was trying to get my ass through college, O," Billy said. He'd actually mostly earned a degree at Bonnie's science institute before the world went sideways and his wife tried to murder him. Olesia herself had only barely completed high-school before rushing off on the adventure of a lifetime. As he talked about his efforts to earn an education, Olesia was struck with the sudden realization she'd sort of walked away from hers. She'd been set to start college! It was fascinating to listen to this man as he explained how they could shatter the rock with heat and cold to break free the stone blocks needed to finish the wall down at the sea-shore. Then all Hamest needed was a qualified engineer to draft the plans and lay out how to build it.
"They'd still have to move it," she murmured, though she was becoming more and more comfortable with this. Kneeling at her side, he said, "we can make that happen too, babe..." He sketched out a map of the land around them, showing the mountains and the long slope down to the sea. "All we need is a way to reduce the friction to make the blocks slide," he murmured. "Ice is very good at that." The way he spoke to her–like they were having an intimate conversation did things to her. Her mind went to the sleepers, sitting just now in the bottom of her bag in a tiny steel casket. Any hope that she didn't still feel those things for this man burned away. "C'mon," he said. "Let's get cracking." Shaking off those dangerous thoughts–they had no time for that sort of thing–the plush princess rose with him, saying, "yes, let's..."
Back in the Candy Kingdom, an impromptu family meeting was underway. The ladies of Finn's household had come down to breakfast in the family dining salon in their various states of dress, and Lollipop couldn't help a chuckle looking at some of her fellows. The thought that maybe Finn would have a preference based on seeing them in their less... put together moments had gotten blown away fairly early on for Lollipop. Pretty much none of them looked her best this particular morning.
Bonnie had a crust of dried spit on her right cheek. Betty had lines from her pillow pressed into the left side of her face, while Simone had them on the right. Cherry's eyes were bloodshot, suggesting she was still grinding away at her taxes, well after they were due. Breakfast's smile-wrinkles were showing since she hadn't gotten to put foundation on yet, and Drew's face suggested she'd been crying. A lot. Nadia would have been one of the prizes of the bunch if her hair wasn't askew as if she'd stuck her finger into an outlet. The only person looking anything near chipper was their youngest member. Strudel was in a fantastic mood, munching away at her favorite foods and playing a game on her phone between bites.
"Sarah left this for us," said Lollipop, as she shoved a thick folder across the table. "It's the analysis of Finn's blood. Those words drew everybody's attention instantly. "Let me see that," Bonnie said, as she intercepted the folder. Taking the report, she began thumbing her way through it as the others began piling food on their plates. Mumbling under her breath, the bubblegum princess thumbed through the pages of Sarah's report. In a teasing voice, Nadia asked, "do you even understand what you're reading?" Bonnie stopped in mid-mumble, her face turning bright crimson.
The cyborg princess took the document then and began to read. Indeed, she tore through the pages, dismissing some sections out of hand. The gathering held its collective breath as she approached the end of the folder. "Nothing," Nadia muttered as she slapped the report on the table. Whether it was the violence of that action or the finality of the statement, her audience jumped in startlement.
"Nothing," Nadia repeated. They'd been jumping at shadows. By her calculations, Finn was well-below the number of nano-machines in a cyborg's blood. It stood to reason. Cyborgs had an artificial organ that produced the machines en-masse. The population in Finn's bloodstream was clearly self-replicating, but that was barely enough to sustain the numbers he had. He wasn't ordinary, but he wasn't radically different either. "S-so what's wrong with him," blurted Drew? It didn't come out quite right. That wasn't something a doctor articulated. She was supposed to be the one telling them what was going on with their husband.
Cherry laughed. She laughed and laughed. "Ok," muttered Breakfast. "What's so funny?" "You all," chuckled the gangster. Shaking her head in unholy mirth, she said, "you're all acting like our husband has become a monster. What if he's becoming a man?" They stared at her. Showing a grin a mile wide, the lord of the underworld asked, "what if Finn Mertens actually understands what it means to be King of Ooo? Hmm? What if we're the dummies, looking for him to still be a randy jackass while the world is burning?" Nodding, Simone murmured, "it fits..." Even at eighteen, Finn had been well aware of the consequences of screwing around. He'd greeted Simone with a nursery before they even knew she was pregnant. He'd built–rebuilt–a home where they could raise babies while she was down pregnant with Billy and fighting madness.
Drew babbled, "then he... Why is he... not the same...? Not with us... Not with the kids..." Twirling a lock of her hair around one elegant finger, Cherry retorted, "because he has thirty-four kids when you count the ones he agreed to sire, Drew. He has fifteen wives, and you might as well add five mistresses on the pile. How the fuck is he going to manage all that glorious mayhem if he's flying off the handle all the time? Somebody has to be the adult in the room. Lord knows the pack of us are stirring it up enough." She was staring right at Strudel when she said it. Thumping her hand on the table, the family conscience said, "we need to step up, ladies. The problem isn't him, it's us."
Nodding, Simone said, "some of us are letting the maids raise our kids. Some of us are clearly more involved in our jobs than in the children we birthed." She mentioned nary a name, but several faces flushed or glanced away. "I'm guilty," Simone murmured. "I let Wizard City take over my life. I... need to change that. I need to find the time to be a mother like I did with Billy and Fionna." "I swear," Lollipop agreed. "I swear," Cherry announced. "Me too," said Betty, followed moments later by Drew. Silence reigned a moment. "Ok," muttered Bonnie. "Better mommy. Got it." "Ok," chuckled Nadia. "I don't have mine," Strudel growled! "It's not fair!" Which set the others to laughing.
Meanwhile, Finn sat on a tall outcropping staring at the distant island that was Rose's home. She'd told him that the land around her domain had been a desert an age ago before the bombs fell. Now her mountain had become an island. She'd wanted nothing more than her endless empty dreams of her past life. The undead were content on their island, and Bandit Princess wanted to stir shit up.
"Marceline once told me about the world she grew up in," Finn murmured. It had been during a lull in the fight against the resurrected Vampire Court. Marceline–and Simon, before he went mad–had lived in a nightmare world of death and starvation where corpses would randomly come back to life sometimes. Sarah's face whipped around. "I...," she started to say. She didn't have memories of that. "She never talked about it with Bonnie," Finn muttered. "Bonnie..." "Didn't have the empathy to understand," Sarah sighed. If the former Vampire Queen had issues with basic humanity, Bonnie had her problems too.
"There were zombies back then," said Finn. "It wasn't like the goo-bros where they'd mostly ignore you if you didn't get too close. These guys would hunt you down... They'd crack your head open if they could and eat your thinkin' meat out of your skull." Sarah blanched. That was every kind of gross. "They didn't have to kill you to kill you," Finn continued. "They could infect you," Sarah agreed, "with the very virus that our friend is looking for." The sex-doll stopped right where she was. "That's it, Finn," she murmured. "That's why they want a pure form of the virus!"
Now it was Finn's turn to frown. That didn't really make sense to him. His eyes said it. You're the brain. Fill me in. "The virus is a living thing, Finn," she said. "Like all living things, it changes over time... It became... less dangerous... The zombies became more passive." The zombies of Rose's kingdom spent most of their time lurking in the shadows of their kingdom, doing nothing more terrible than shuffling about aimlessly. Most of the vast horde that afflicted the world after the apocalypse had rotted away to nothing. The only thing sustaining their numbers were the few fools who still wandered into the kingdom looking for riches. "Which is why just snatching a zombie doesn't fit her needs," Orzsebet rumbled. "I guess you're useful for something more than a walking calculator." Sarah glared at her, as Finn asked, "did you make contact?" "I did," replied the spy-girl.
She had the boat lined up. She had fishermen who would be willing to take them to the shore of the island. They'd leave them there, and come back to get them the following morning. "Left on zombie island all night," Sarah muttered. "Lovely." "What're you complaining about," Agent Princess retorted? "You're a machine." "Zombies are gross," Sarah retorted. "Let's get good sleep," Finn interrupted. "We're not going to be sleeping on the island. Sarah? You're least susceptible to fatigue. Why don't you close down for a while...? You know...?" It was the same thing he'd asked Rattleballs to do when he, Huntress, and Rattleballs had gone up against the goo-bros to keep them out of Bonnie's kingdom. At her freshest, the heavy-duty hottie could go for two or three days straight without ill effect. If she could get anything to sustain her systems, she could stretch that to a dozen or more before her organic systems started to fail. "Ok," Sarah sighed.
"Weird," Orzsebet muttered, when the android-woman had closed her eyes. "You're honestly fucking that thing..." It was half a question. Finn gave her a warning look. Sarah was off limits. "Never saw a man in love with a toy," she muttered. In the fresh light of day–with the sun out, Finn had other concerns. Were those bruises? Had this woman been in some kind of fight? His mind wanted to conjure some kind of ugly confrontation to bring him the information that Bandit Princess was raiding Zombie Island. His mind went back to the scars. Orzsebet had lived a hard life.
The King opened his mouth to ask, but Orzsebet got their first, asking, "shouldn't we also be sleeping?" "Shifts," Finn replied. "You first." "Well, then," she replied. Finn drew off his heavy jacket and wrapped her in it, saying, "it's cold. Get some sleep." She stared at him a moment. Whatever she might have said, she choked down on it and lay herself out. Moments later, she was snoring softly. The King of Ooo rose and stood at the edge of the rocks, staring out at the ugliness waiting for them. His mind wanted to conjure images of horrifying undead crawling across that island. Simon had been some kind of crazy to brave the island to steal Rose's leg.
Late that afternoon, Fionna rolled into the headquarters after a day of fruitlessly building and rebuild the reflecting node. She felt all of a fool. She'd done her best to learn what she could from Nadia, but that was starting to seem like too little too late. Maybe if she'd listened more during class at Toffee High, she'd understand better what her stepmom was trying to tell her, but in the right now it seemed like there was no way she was going to duplicate the mechanical marvel Nadia's folk had crafted. While she was standing before the map, wondering if it was too late to maybe dig some trenches or build some kind of wooden wall, shouts from outside announced the return of the patrol that had left that morning. Fionna looked up to see ghost-face coming through the door.
The Warrior Princess was in a blue funke after her excursion to the burgeoning refugee camp on the far side of the barrier. The mood was thick on her–her face closed and looking bleak. Fionna knew instinctively what was ailing her. Indeed, there was confirmation on the faces of every last one of the officers who'd gone with her. The Bad Bunny intercepted her stepmother as the older woman crossed to the 'celebratory cabinet' that she kept in a corner of the headquarters.
With tears clouding Ingrid's eyes, she almost blundered right into Fionna. "Mother," Fionna murmured, as she hugged the older woman. Shocking several of the bystanders, the hard-hearted woman began to cry. She actually began to cry. It was short moments before she was bawling her eyes out–a sight that nobody could ever recall seeing. "Th-they're all starving," howled Ingrid! "I... we don't have anything for them, and a baby died right in front of me, and I couldn't help it...!" The King's daughter stood there rocking with her stepmomma, holding on with all her might as the older woman cried and cried.
Fionna had gotten her own dose of this. Ironically, she was a little better prepared for this. Ingrid's world had revolved around burly men and brutal conflicts over power. She'd been forced to develop a hard stone shell around her heart, never letting anybody or anything in. She'd never met the sort of insignificant souls found in that camp. She'd never held a baby until she'd held Fionna's baby brother. But there were things that could get through that stone shell–terrible sights that could penetrate even the hardest of hearts. "We're gonna' fix this, mom," Fionna murmured. "That's what our family does. We fix stuff like this."
Back in the Lizard Kingdom, Billy and Olesia were making very short work of Billy's little project, and the elemental was impressed by the way the whole thing was coming together. The big man had created a system that had made this whole thing so easy, they'd quarried thousands of tons of stone today. Olesia would channel heat into the stone, bringing the stone to a temperature where the face was hot enough that it was dangerous for Billy to touch it. Working with the Tiara, Billy would precisely freeze segments of the hot rock, causing slabs as big as a man to cleave off the side of the mountain.
Billy would then use the powers of the tiara to float the stone slabs on flows of ice and snow down to the massive ice-flume that he'd constructed down to the valley far below. She'd insisted on taking him down on her wolf, refusing to let him use the power of the Tiara to fly. They'd gotten the mass of stone halfway down the mountain. Billy hoped to get it the rest of the way by the end of the week. It wasn't going to build a very big or very thick wall, but they really only needed to extend the wall beyond the surf. Summer would give the Lizards more chances to improve things.
"This is amazing," Olesia opined, as she channeled heat into the last chunk of stone they planned to quarry today. "It's amazing you could think all this up on the spot." "Hardly," Billy replied. "That's my dad's forte. I... I'm a little more methodical." Maybe it was the fact that he'd actually gone to school, where his dad had barely gotten home-schooled before Margaret died. "I missed school," Olesia sighed. "I... sort of feel like I threw it away." Billy said, "there's always time to go back. My mom told me that." Her eyes fell on him, bringing heat to his face. Yeah, all those old feelings were there. If he'd met this girl before all the troubles with JJ and before he'd fallen in with Rags, Abieuwa, and Noemi, things would have been a lot different. "What do elementals like to eat," he asked? "I'm'a... I'm'a buy you a nice dinner when we get back to the world." "Only if I can return the favor," Olesia replied.
As dangerous thoughts filled the two youths' minds, danger of a far different sort was looming on the far side of the world. The King of Ooo sat in a leaky, creaky old boat–the sort of boat that a lot of the old videos from before the bombs said would leave you stranded in a place like Zombie Island. Rebirth, Finn thought, but he wanted nothing to do with the way things got reborn around these parts. "Not much activity," Sarah murmured. "If you're using some kind of electric sight, the zombies won't show up," Orzsebet snorted. "They're dead." Sarah's face snapped around. "No body-heat, babe," Finn agreed. "Switching to low-light," the android muttered. She should have thought of that. With a sigh, she said, "yeah, babe. They're there... They're there, and I think they may be stirred up..."
Ingrid gets in touch with her motherly feelings, while Billy and Olesia get... touchy feely... The girls learn to appreciate their hubby, and Finn? Well, it appears that things are a lot more ALIVE in Zombie Land than maybe he's going to like.