Day 1

Finn opened his eyes gingerly, bracing himself against the inevitable assault of the sun. To his pleasant surprise, there was a dense shadow that shielded his fragile corneas from Ooo's obnoxious, natural alarm clock. Except—the shadow seemed to be hovering, drifting leisurely up and down.

"Uhhhh…Marceline?" He queried wearily.

"'Sup?"

Jake stirred in his hastily constructed cocoon of covers, jerking erratically. "Wha's goin'…on, man…" He muttered in barely intelligible fashion, still half asleep.

"Time for your first lesson, dude. Come on." She lay comfortably atop the soft oxygen, resting her head on folded arms. She smiled unassumingly.

"I…I haven't even had breakfast yet," Finn said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and swinging his legs around to his side of the bed.

"Oh, don't worry about that, I made you guys waffles and eggs. Figured it was the least I could do."

On that note, Jake's eyes flew open. "Dude. Free breakfast."

"Jake, I don't—" Finn tried his hand at speech, but failed rather miserably.

"We were just offered FREE—BREAKFAST. That's a once in a lifetime opportunity. You gotta learn to appreciate things like that, man."

Finn looked back over at Marceline, who was grinning like a fiend and must have been having some sort of rare eyebrow spasm. The brows in question oscillated rapidly up and down in a rather persuasive manner. He groaned and rubbed his temple.

"Fine," He said begrudgingly, which was expelled from his lungs more as a breath than a word.

(Transition)

It soon became readily apparent to everyone—with the exception of Marceline—that there was a good reason the vampire never prepared meals for anyone, even herself. The waffles were an artisan's blend of stale, fibrous grains and carcinogenic ash. And the eggs…? Well, let's just say neither of them wanted to touch her eggs, in the interest of keeping their flesh intact.

"WOW MARCELINE I HAVE TRULY NEVER HAD A BETTER BREAKFAST THAN THE ONE BEFORE ME NOW," Jake emphatically exclaimed, overselling it even as he slid everything he hadn't eaten onto Finn's plate behind her back.

"Thanks, Jake," She said smiling as she turned off the stove and proceeded to wash the pan of yolky byproduct. "I usually don't have to make food for people, but, hey, as long as Finn is trying something new, I thought I might as well give it a shot."

Finn stared at the horrible abomination of nature below him, his face twisting irreversibly into a Picasso-esque caricature of itself. He tried not to cry.

When she had finished destroying the evidence, Marceline turned and sat across from her newly traumatized friends.

"…So I guess I should start this off by saying that rap music is a lot more than talking fast over a catchy beat. It's an art form with many intricacies that is only part of the larger culture of Hip-Hop. Or well, it was, anyway, until humanity was practically wiped out."

"Hnnnnnnnn…" Jake checked the watch produced by his skin. "Alright, well, I'm gonna go on a life changing adventure now. Just let me know when you guys are done. With this." With that he excused himself from the table and climbed down their personal ladder. Finn stood to follow him, but not before turning to his new teacher.

"Just a sec, Marcy, aiight? Just gonna see Jake out."

"Oh, okay. Take your time, man. I got nowhere to be."

And with that he and Jake were standing by the front door, conspiring in confidence.

"…But I mean, man were those eggs horrible. I thought they were gonna eat me!"

A particularly piercing glare from Finn made him consider an addendum.

"…And, uh…sorry for giving you mine."

The hero's gaze remained notably sedimentary. "…Well, good luck with your adventure, man."

"Thanks. Good luck with your lesson. Hopefully it's as exciting as whatever crazy hi-jinks I get myself into." On his way out the door Jake added: "After she's done teaching you to rap, maybe Marceline could stick around and I could teach her how to cook."

"Stereotype subverted," Finn replied. "Heh." This exchange was consummated by a fist-bump of prestigious friendshipitude and radical bromanticality.

When Finn went back upstairs, he found his vampiric tutor drumming on various kitchen appliances with the makeshift sticks she had fashioned from leftover silverware. She turned to see her student waiting patiently, hands folded, in a posture clearly expressive of his eagerness to learn.

"So…" She began, immediately tossing her utensils aside. "Where were we?

"Not even I was alive in its heyday, and by the time I was old enough to even comprehend what music was, all of the old musicians were gone. All we had were a bunch of leftover records, but that was all I ever needed. Run DMC, Grandmaster Flash, Public Enemy…Curtis Mayfield—okay, so it wasn't all rap, but it was all beautiful. Formative. Back in their time many of them lived in horrible conditions, with no guarantee of a future. Death was a constant threat, and trust was always fragile at best. So basically, I could relate pretty easily. Our experiences were different, but similar."

Finn looked out over the horizon and wondered what Jake was doing. By this point he had probably enlisted himself in the jetpack-grasshopper navy and was conducting Cold War caliber espionage against the fearsome trebuchet toads.

"For them, music was an escape from their surroundings. In more ways than one. Rapping was a way to forget about your troubles, sure. But if you got good enough at it, maybe you could get signed to a label, make some money, and move somewhere else. Life on Earth was okay—if you could afford to live in a decent place where you and your family's lives weren't threatened daily."

Oh no! Agent Hopper has been discovered! They're taking him deep into enemy territory for enhanced interrogation! Abort mission! Abort mission! Covering fire on the lily pads! Sending an away team now to retrieve the package!

"…Finn? You listenin', buddy?"

He was, in fact, the picture of ADD, a bit of drool ever so slightly trailing the corner of his mouth and a wondrous, faraway gleam in his eyes.

"—Huh? What? Oh—listening? Of course."

"Soooo, what did I just say?"

"Um. Uhhhhh…sorry?"

Marceline just groaned, throwing her hands in the air in impatience.

Day 2

"Rhymes are pretty important for rapping, man."

"Ah."

"But seriously, without rhymes, it would just be poetry spoken to a beat. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with poetry—in fact, there's a lot of poetry in rap—but that's not what we're going for."

Finn nodded, exhausting all of his mental energy in a valiant attempt to stay focused.

"But aside from that, the constraints for this sorta thing are fairly loose. Sure, it's good to have an extensive vocabulary. Rhyming words is what you do. But it's more important to think of them as syllables first. If you break a word down to its parts, you can rhyme that one word with two. So, like, cauldron and all in. Caul with all, and ron with in. This can be really helpful, especially when you find a word that just doesn't rhyme with anything else."

Marceline was positive he was listening, what with his butt tethered to the sofa by an impossibly thin thread, imperceptible to the human (or vampire) eye; he was leaning so far forward he seemed to be a fearsome lion posed to tackle some helpless prey. But she wasn't sure he was getting it.

"Er…Finn, if you have any questions at all, I want you to ask me, okay?"

"Gotcha."

She almost continued her lesson.

"So…do you have any questions?"

"Nope."

Her lips pursed.

"So what you're telling me is you understand everything I just said."

"Um. I think so."

"You think so?"

"Well, it seems pretty simple. I don't know what I—"

She shrieked and punched out a nearby light fixture, her arm taking the form of a muscular bat limb seconds before impact.

"Oh glob, I'm sorry—" There was a slight register of panic in her voice. "I didn't mean to—" She let out a warbling, frustrated cry.

"…Give me a minute, will you?" She floated into the other room and dropped heavily into a chair, tilting her head back as far as it would go and blowing her scraggily, unwashed hair from her eyes. Finn waited for at least that long, then gingerly approached the kitchen, making sure the waters weren't still typhonic.

"…You okay, Marcy?" He asked, settling into a chair a good distance away.

"…Yeah. I'm sorry Finn, my temper really sucks." She started to fiddle with a small sliver of wood that was loose on the back of her seat.

"We can always get back to this tomorrow," He said. "I'd understand if you didn't feel up to it."

"No," She replied, looking straight at him through narrowed eyes. "Thanks, but I think we should keep going. I'll try to not be such a jerk." She smiled. "…I do feel like we both need some incentive though…If we get through this session alive, let's play some videogames, okay? We can even invite Jake. That is, if you want."

Finn laughed. "I think Jake and his life-changing adventure are too good for us."

"Definitely too busy for vidja games," She confirmed. "…So, syllables! We already know they're great when you're hurtin' for rhymes, but they also help if you want to rhyme more than just dog with log. Going back to our favorite word, cauldron, we got maudlin, squadron, stalling, falling. Those were all imperfect rhymes, and they're awesome."