March 8th, 2987

Weather: warm, stinging rain Mood: cautiously optimistic Music: Allman Brothers - Melissa

Dear Diary:

Here's a haiku I just wrote:

Winter leans to spring,
As beside the narrow road
I drink the flowers.

As I write this, I'm sitting next to a little dirt path up above the Candy Kingdom proper, up in those grassy rolling hills that seem like they're the foothills of the northern mountains. Only, it's just perspective, because the mountains are on the other side of a big wasteland from them. It's morning, and I'm going to press on a few hours under cover of my parasol, then make camp under the big linden tree a mile up the way.

I had a hell of an evening yesterday.

I left the cave while it was still dark yesterday morning, with my axe for a bindle-stick. In the sack, I put a few changes of clothes, a couple of apples, and other essentials, and threw it over my shoulder like I was one of the No-Home Boys. Imagine that...

I made it through Bonnie's lands by lunchtime, flying quickly at high altitude, and by 12:45 I'd spotted a nice cave to spend the brightest part of the day in. I dive-bombed it at speed, because I could, pretending like I was falcon, and flew straight in the cave mouth faster than any living thing should go.

Of course, I nearly hit the back of the little grotto and had to turn into a bat in order to wave off quickly enough, dropping my axe on the cave floor as I did. Tranforming exhausted me, since I was running on about three hours of sleep and a lot of hopes and prayers. I turned back into myself slowly, like coming back to your senses after a massive high. Parts of me kept being a bat for about an hour, I guess, while I worked on keeping my internal organs in the right shapes and the right places.

After that, nothing much happened for about six hours. I played my axe, listened to some music on that broken MePod Bonnie gave me about a hundred years ago, and thought a lot about how much I miss my record player at home. But then, as the sun went down and the frogs and the crickets started up, I heard him.

I didn't hear him with my ears, I heard him telepathically. Whether he knows it or not, his subconscious is loud as balls, loud enough that even I can hear it, and I'm half-deaf by vampire standards. A lot of the time, what I've come to know as The Billy Song is running through his head. It's an infantile rhyme he made up about his "heroic deeds," half of which never happened anyways.

Then he started shouting in to me. "Abadee-uh, come out! Mah-celine Abadee-uh! Your time is he-uh!"

Here's how it is: Billy first saw me at a bad moment. I was sucking a little blood out of a pretty young mutant woman I met at a bar. She was totally into it, for the record. He's had me down as Public Enemy Number One ever since then, though. That was easily fifty years ago, and even now that he's retired, unretired, gotten posessed, apparently died in another universe, and come back from that somehow, he still has a little spot on his belt for me, between the notch he made when he iced the Lich of Atlanta and the notch from the time he fought a bear. Yeah, he still brags about that damn bear.

He's a superstitious old man: if he ever gets the drop on me, he won't just kill me, he'll bury me in multiple places and then stake my heart, like a damn Van Helsing boy. And this is the third time this year I've run into him. There are four big chips in my axe from that idiotic sword he calls No-Tongue, and that's just since the last time I've sharpened it.

So I considered my options. I was exhausted both physically and magically, so I couldn't use my demon form and I couldn't turn into a bat and escape. I'd hate to lose my axe anyways. Wolf-form, Snake Form, Scissorhands: all out of the question. Maybe if I had even an hour of sleep, but what's the use in wishing?

So I had to stand and fight, and hope my muscles wouldn't give out. I walked to the mouth of the cave and faced him, axe over my shoulder. There he was, about ten feet from me, black against the sunset. He's huge and well-muscled but not very graceful, which is the only real advantage I have. Other than time, that is. I'll outlive the jackwad eventually.

The last bit of sunlight stung, but didn't burn, as I squinted to see him better. This was strange, though; he wasn't carrying or wearing his sword.

"Mah-celine, I must talk to you," he shouted.

"Yeah, jeez, I'm right here," I shouted back.

"I'm giving you one last chance to tuwn you-uhself in to the lawuh," he said, only slightly quieter.

"Billy, we had this conversation once. What law even is there?! Princess Bubblegum? Because you tried that and she laughed in your face."

"I'm wu-wu-wuwuhking-wuwaking fo-wah- that is to say, I'm in the employ of the Fie-uh Kingdom now. They appweciate lawuh, unlike some."

"Sewiously? I mean, seriously?" I asked. "You want me to turn myself in to them? Billy, it's been fun fighting you and all, but you're getting a little dumb in your old age."

"Then I must kill yew." He charged.

I jumped over to the side of the cave mouth and pressed myself up against it. He couldn't stop and plowed right past me. He bumbled around in the cave trying to find his footing.

It's at this point that some small, primitive part of my brain seized control, like a damn government coup. I needed energy if there was a protracted fight, and for the first time in like twenty years, I didn't feel even slightly conflicted about sucking someone's blood. So I jumped in and latched on to him like a leech. I didn't get the neck, which was probably good, because he'd make a sucky vampire if I turned him. There were enough veins in his shoulder for me to get some red cells out of him in the second or two before he shook me off against the cave wall.

Ah, blood! Not just red, but iron red! I felt good. I felt like I'd slept recently, even. But there was another dimension to it. I suddenly felt kinda stoned or drunk or something... suddenly my heart was racing and my hands were shaking. And I wanted more.

Fuck, I thought. Billy is sorta blue all over. Red plus blue equals... purple. Which does what, exactly?

It was at about that moment that I lost control completely and really let loose on Billy. I chased him from the cave whacking him over the head with my axe and cackling like a hen. I can't remember a lot of the things I shouted, but they were all to the tune of "MURDERSTABKILLCHOPWOUNDBLOODBLOODBLEEDINGBLOOD" and so on.

I remember sitting on the ground and watching his little black silhouette as he ran wildly off in the direction of the sunset. I giggled like a maniac, I think, mingling with the sound of his terrified screaming, which seemed to go on for quite a while after I stopped chasing him, echoing through the night air.

Well, I have to worry about purple now, and red when I might get blue mixed in. It's funny, I thought I would have discovered that at sometime in the last thousand years. Maybe I have and it hit me hard enough that I don't remember it now. It wouldn't be the only time I've ever had amnesia.

Well, anyways, I eventually crashed, like the red and blue kinda balanced out and left me where I'd been before, minus all the energy I spent beating up Billy. Or maybe it was just a normal come-down but not as bad because I actually had some red in me when it happened. Glob knows.

I had to crawl like a lizard to make it back in the cave, but I drained the rest of my apples and felt all right after that. I even got some sleep from sheer exhaustion before the morning light came and I had to set out again. Aside from my accidental run in with purple, I guess the journey's been alright so far.

Here's another haiku:

As the year matured
And became a young woman-
I thought of a song.