Sorry for the dubiously relevant flashback and comedy scene! I'm looking for feedback from my regular readers about whether I should amp the horror in this fic way up or leave it about where it is. This will influence a major plotline, because I have an idea that involved some body-horror and I kinda wrote the outlines around it.

Doing a dumb update like this where nothing really happens in the present is a good way to put off making a decision. Sorry!

April 11, 2987:

Weather: Gloom, beautiful gloom
Mood: Aight
Music: Pink Floyd - Cymbaline

Dear Diary:

Sometimes, I think that if you were a real person, you'd resent how often I retell stories you've already heard. This has sure been a year of flashbacks, right? Maybe I never told you that story about the village where I went on a feeding frenzy, but I surely told you all those stories about Mom and Dad and Simon before, back when I remembered them right, and I know I wrote pages and pages about that day in the back lot with the girl who liked my songs, right when it happened, but I told you again a couple of pages ago, just because.

But I guess it's useful to retell them now. I dunno whether I'm looking at my life now through the lens of the past, or the past through the lens of my life now, (and like, that sentence made no sense,) but I guess we find our meaning in life where we can.

Like, what I'm trying to say is, bear with me for this one, diary.

Half my life ago: it was the 2510's, and I was sitting in a jail cell. I'd beat somebody up, stolen something and gone on the lam, but they caught me before I could get to my vehicle. I didn't plan this one with the rigour that I would have planned a war, really.

I can still remember that day exactly in perfect color, unlike a lot of things from back then. It's like if you're not careful when you're shooting pictures on film and most of them turn out too dark or too bright, but one is in perfect, lifelike color. Clumsy metaphors aside, I was sitting with the shadows of prison bars across my face, stinging a little from the filtered sunlight from the tinted windows high above. I can somehow remember that I was barefoot, wearing jeans that were hardly ragged at all and a really expensive men's flannel shirt in autumn colors. I could probably describe that plaid well enough for someone to make it, if those kinds of machines weren't so damn hard to find. It had brown felt elbow pads too.

The bass guitar I'd stolen had gotten smashed in the fight when the police aprehended me, and they'd taken my pocket change and my satellite phone. They didn't even give me a phone call. Yeah, things weren't looking good. This was, like, in a bad place, out west, and I could have gone to prison for a long time. Well, a long time for you, which is a medium time for me. I was waiting for a very precise moment to escape. My plan was to like, turn into a bat as they took me to the courthouse or something. This bat, you cannot cage...

Well, suddenly, I hear this girl's voice in the next cell. She's whining in a language I didn't speak at the time. I actually know a few words now.

I guess what she said was "Mein Gott, Mein Gott, warum hast du mich verlassen?" And she said it in a voice like she really meant it, too.

So when the warden left to get coffee, I shouted over to her.

"Hey, who are you?"

"I'm Princess Bonnibel Bubblegum of the Candy Kingdom. I'm a political prisoner, illegally, I might add."

"The Princess Bubblegum?" I asked. I'd ruled a kingdom briefly too by then, and I was way impressed with the fact that she was taking on the Seven Gangs. Those boys were crazy. Somebody needed to throw their asses in cells, not mine.

"The one and only," she said in a voice that was supposed to sound cute or something. "Who are you?"

"Marceline the Vampire Queen."

It was her turn to be impressed.

So I turned into a bat and snuck into her cell.

This was before even my first bout with insomnia. When I look back now, it's with a... whatcha call it, a jaundiced eye. I feel like I was always bursting with energy back then, and like I never did that much with it.

Then again, I have a discography that's measured in hundreds of albums and I've ruled multiple countries- this one time, for a couple of days, I was the superpower in Ooo - and fought many wars besides. I really wasn't idle.

But I can't help but look back with envy and resentment now: until I get this insomnia licked, I can barely turn into a bat on a good day. Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone? ...mmm, bop bop.

I changed back into myself, clothes and all, inside the cell.

She looked me over and I looked her over.

I like to think she fell hopelessly in love with me in that moment, but to be honest that's some wishful-thinking buttshit. It took her a while to even accept help from me, while we were stuck in that cell.

So we busted out, and made our way to where my hearse was hidden, under a camoflauge tarp in the forest behind a Squeezee Mart. See, since getting kicked out of the Second Iowan Imperium that I'd built on the ashes of the first one, I'd been making a few cents here and there as a gonzo journalist.

(I know you know, diary, but I don't often revisit these things, and writing about them keeps them fresh in my memory. I'm always scared of losing my memory like the guy in that book.)

For about two years, I drove around in a hearse called "Horse," with a beautiful pre-war AE-1 film camera on a strap around my neck and an electric typewriter that ran off the cigarette lighter, interviewing political dissidents and rock bands and shit like that, for the "Zombie-Ass" alt-news zine.

Did I mention that Horse could fly? Back when I had magical energy to spare, dude... When I was dating that prick, we totally should have been "Ash the Whatever Queen and Marceline the Enchanter," not "Ash the Enchanter and..." for all he ever enchanted anything. So yeah: Horse was a flying hearse with a padded coffin in the back and vinyl bucket seats from a pre-war El Camino in the front, not to mention a working eight-track player that I'd stolen from a dictator's Cadillac.

So the princess and I were heading back from the coastal wastelands that were once West Texas, at a cruising altitude of I don't care. Clouds were going by under us, and the mutant algae sea was glowing in the broad daylight out the right window, while the cratered desert was blinding to the left. The princess looked frankly adorable sitting on her hands in the passenger's seat with my typewriter in her lap-I guess there was nowhere else to for her to put it.

She was telling me about how much work it was governing her little empire of morons. She'd been stuck in the cell for a week, and had been away for two days before that, so she fully believed she'd come back to a smoking pile of rubble where her castle had been.

"Like, the guy I left running it, Mr. Creampuff-"

"Whoa, is he like, your boyfriend?"

"He's like my boyfriend."

I noted her lack of a comma. "Anyways, keep telling."

"-he might have been fine for 48 hours, but nine days? He's a little... slow. I'm thinking of creating these little gumball robots to handle this..."

This was when the two police choppers caught up to us. I rolled down the window (Horse didn't have power windows, so this took a tense ten seconds,) leaned out and flipped off the police. I was surprised to see the uptight little princess start rolling down her window a second after I did. She flashed them the deuce when she got the window open.

That's when the bullets started flying. They started strafing us! A few rounds hit my poor Horse. My only consolation was that bullets were worth about twice their weight in gold in that economy. Yeah, shoot me, suckers, I might have thought. You're accounting to your bosses for every shot! How do I know? I was the defense contractor who outfitted you twenty years ago, and those look like the same choppers I sold you for thirty million a pop.

So I told the princess that we'd use plan 11B. I had no plan, much less any numbered contingencies for these situations, but there was only one real option. I'm not a fighter pilot; I can't fight in the air. We suddenly dropped a few thousand feet and made a rolling landing on the beach. I had to do all this mentally, by the way, because the steering wheel was just for show when Horse was in the air.

We bounced around, rocked and rolled down the dirty beach and finally came to a halt, making a dust cloud all around us. We were parked on a wide strand with the sea a hundred feet to our right. I stuck my head out the window. The wheels were fouled. They'd buried themselves up to the center of the hubcap.

The choppers landed about a hundred feet away and a full SWAT team of those little red scaly mutants poured out of them.

I froze up. I hadn't been expecting that.

But the princess opened her door and got out. She strode like Patton towards the small army advancing towards us. I got out to watch, but stayed low.

When she was dead between the hearse and the men, she shouted "You have forced me to use my final sanction!" She dialed something on a remote that was apparently set into her wrist.

I'm not going to lie to you, a laser beam a foot wide shot down out of space and swept back and forth while she worked the remote. It killed them all. Glob, they screamed as they burned. The pilots ran out instead of taking off like they should have, and she killed them too.

"Gotterverdammt, verdammt, verdammt!" she said when she got back to the hearse. I didn't really need that translated.

"What?" I said, in a frightened whisper.

"That satellite only works once, and I didn't build it. Damn the Soviets! No foresight at all!"

Horse was stuck in the sand. It took me several days and a lot of energy to alter the spells on it so that it'd lift straight up instead of taking off like a plane. I let the Princess sleep in the coffin and I kept watch by a little fire at night. She'd been quiet since her tantrum after killing the men.

One night, she came out to me.

"You know, you're alright, your majesty," she said to me. "I'd heard you were a real psychopath."

"You really don't have to call me 'your majesty,' your majesty. You've never even called me by my name," I said. I wasn't sure who'd called me a psycho, but I kinda wanted to find them and drink their blood, so I probably wasn't doing much to help my case.

"You want a job or something?" she asked me.

I almost said "or something." What I said was "yeah, that'd be nice."

I didn't have a lot of energy left after all the magic work, so we put Horse on the helicopter that the laser hadn't grazed, and we flew it back to her kingdom. I should say I flew it, because she mostly just listened for radio transmissions. I let her take the controls a couple of times, but I noticed that the chopper would start vibrating funny whenever she flew it.

SECTION BREAK

Six months later we were married. It's like, really weird: I can't remember who courted who. (Who courted whom. Sorry, mom.) I guess we both kinda jumped into it after a while. I mean, we were both attracted, and a brainlord like Bonnie needs someone she can actually talk to.

Lying in bed one night, in the half-finished candy castle, I asked her who'd called me a psycho.

Hoo, boy. She'd followed my work, as it turns out. Nobody told her I was a psycho, she decided that for herself.

I asked her if she still thought that.

"You know, I'm really not convinced one way or the other. Your psychology is fascinating..."

"Whatever, I didn't really want to know."

She didn't like that I interrupted her, or that I didn't care what she had to say. Ten seconds later, we were insulting each other and raising our voices. It went on all night, and a lot of heavy artillery got called in. I brought up her mommy issues, which is, like, a big deal for her. She doesn't think she can have mommy issues since she came from the Mother Gum. I think she'd almost have to.

She brought up my father, my mother, cussed out Simon, and said some unkind things about my favorite species as well.

Six months later, we were divorced and I was just a low-ranking general in her army. The second time we tried, a century later, we didn't get married, the third time... well, you know how that went down.

I say all this to say: that's how romance always goes for me, I'm realizing. Six months in, we have our first fight and six months later it's all over. It's not Peebs, it's probably me at this point, because it happened with Ash, it happened with Max... it pretty much always happens

So why do I still want romance so bad? I do, I really do. I just don't know why. I'm ready for another relationship, but I want this one to be different.

So what I'm really saying is, I need to find a way to get out of going to the ball with Melissa.

Classes were alright. Dr. Mungey was teaching today, rather loudly, I'll admit, when Dr. Foxham strode into the classroom with his stepstool under his arm. He opened it and stood on it in front of Mungey's desk, which brought him eye level to Mungey.

"Für die Liebe Globbes in fickendem Himmel," Foxham said, "LEHREN SIE RUHIGER!"

(It's funny, becaue I keep forgetting Foxham speaks German.)

"Your pronounciation," Mungey said, grinning smugly, ear-to-ear, "could stand to be better. 'Ruhiger;' pronounced 'ROOO-ih-gur,' say it with me."

"I mean, it's all week," Foxham said. "I'm trying to teach a legitimate Inglish class next door, while from the sound that's coming through my wall, you seem to have made lazily lecturing on a dead language into a full contact sport! Could you tone it down just a little on occasion, Phil? Ich meine, mein Grott!"

I'm such a terrible person. I love to see my favorite people fight. I feel like I know them better afterwards.

The end result was that Dr. Sarastino came in with a rolled up newspaper. She towered over them threatening to smack them, until they reached a diplomatic solution.

So Foxham taught German for the rest of the period, and Mungey must have taught Inglish next door. Foxham should totally be one of the German teachers, but I guess he does everything else in the universe, so one more thing would be an imposition.

I can only imagine how Mungey taught Inglish...