"We have stories about zombies back home."
"Across the sea. Where your boat sank." She wrote it down. "Stay for breakfast, Ray. Afterwards, I'd like to run a few tests."
Breakfast took an hour and ten minutes, because the second human ate for all of them. Bubblegum counted four plates.
'Where is he putting it?' She watched a boiled egg go into his shirt pocket when he thought nobody was looking, next to something wrapped in one of her napkins. 'And he's stockpiling. At a full table.'
By mid-morning she had him on a stool in the lab with his sleeves rolled up. Finn had come along to help, and stood at her elbow holding a tray of instruments she hadn't asked him to hold. Jake had come along to sleep, and was doing it under the window.
She began with the knee. The hammer was small and tipped with rubber, and the leg kicked out exactly as Finn's did.
"Ow. What did my knee ever do to you?"
"It responded normally." She wrote that down, and under it, after a moment, the question as well.
'That's nine jokes since breakfast. I understood three.' She started a column for them.
Grip came next. He squeezed the brass gauge with his right hand and then his left, and the needle stopped well short of where Jake would have sent it and a good way past Finn. She hardly looked at the number. There was a ridge of callus across the base of the fingers on both hands, thick and even.
'That didn't come from a sword. It didn't come from a rope, either.'
"What did you do for work, across the sea?"
"I moved boxes. From one place to another place, all day. Sometimes all night."
"What were the boxes for?"
"That's what I kept asking."
She believed that one, and wrote it down with no question mark beside it.
She took his pulse at the wrist, with two fingers and the sand timer. It was quick, and it got quicker when she leaned in to look at his eyes. His ears took on some color, much as Finn's were doing behind her for no reason she could see.
'Fast, and faster when I get close. Why?' She thought it over and wrote down the likeliest cause. Pulse elevated near examiner. Probable cause: the notepad. He had been watching it since the stairs last night, the way her citizens watched the dentist's drill.
"Doc, be honest with me. Am I cooked?"
"You haven't been near any heat."
"No, I mean... never mind."
"Princess, do you need me to hold anything else?" Finn lifted the tray higher. "I've got room for like two more things."
"Thank you, Finn. You're doing very well." She said it without turning around. She was behind the stool by then with the scissors, and she had a lock of black hair in an envelope before Ray had finished saying "Hey!"
"It grows back."
"You could ask!"
"You would have said yes. This was faster."
"What's the envelope for?"
"Analysis."
"Analysis. Sure. Totally normal. You do this to everybody?"
"Only the ones I can't explain." She labeled it Human 2 and filed it in the drawer behind Human 1, which held a lock of yellow hair that Finn had never missed.
She had wanted the scissors mostly for the view. From behind him she could get a proper look at his collar.
'If he swam away from a sinking boat, where's the salt?' It should have been in every seam, stiff and white. His shirt had been washed in a creek, and it was soft.
The stitching bothered her more. She measured a finger's width of it twice to be sure, and every stitch was the same length as the one before it. Nobody sewed that evenly by hand.
Inside the collar sat a small white tag, printed with letters too fine for any press in Ooo. Under the letters was a row of tiny pictures: a tub of water, a triangle, a square with a circle in it. She copied them down.
His shoes had the same problem. The red cloth met the sole with no stitches at all, and the sole was a pale, springy stuff she couldn't name. She had boiled every kind of rubber in Ooo.
So there was a place that made such things by the thousand, all to one standard, and no ship from it had ever reached a shore she knew.
'He's lying. About the sea, and the boat, and quite possibly the dogs.'
She could say so, right here, with Finn listening. She went over what she had on him instead. He had recognized a threat to her kingdom at a glance and kept it from sixty of her people with a song, and afterward he had asked for breakfast.
There were things under this castle that she had told nobody about in all her years.
'I'm hardly the one to complain about a secret. Let him keep it for now, and see what he does with it.'
She wrote "Origin: unverified" and turned the page.
"That's everything I need in here. Now I'd like to see the lightning."
She had chosen the old drill yard behind the kitchens for it. The walls there were rock candy, twenty feet high, and the Banana Guards had spent the morning walking everyone off the streets on that side of the castle, with orders to keep the windows shut. Her citizens did poorly with loud noises. Last night had been proof enough.
Peppermint Butler brought the sword out on a cushion. It was a guard captain's blade from the armory, straight and well balanced, in a lacquered scabbard, and nobody had drawn it in years.
"You sure about this?" Ray held it away from himself like something on loan from a museum. "I've got kind of a record with these."
"He does." Jake had woken up for this part. "It's a bad record."
"It's a sword, Ray. Somebody ought to use it." She was busy with the instruments. There was a brass rod on a stand, wired to a needle gauge, and a drum of paper with a pen on it to draw whatever the needle did, and her clock. Twenty paces off stood a block of rock candy the size of a door.
"Can I hold the clock, Princess?" Finn had run out of tray.
"You may hold the spare pen."
He held it with both hands.
Jake walked down the yard, past the block, and flattened himself against the far wall like a quilt hung out to air.
'Napping again. At least he's out of the way.' She turned back to Ray. "Whenever you're ready."
He had found a smile from somewhere, and he was aiming it at her. He pushed the hair out of his face and set his hand on the hilt.
'Why is he looking at me? The target is over there.'
"You might want a fresh page for this one, Princess. I'm about to become your favorite subject."
He took a short breath through the grin, said a long name quickly and drew. The sword rang, and the needle sat on zero.
"He talked!" Finn had both hands on his hat. "Ray, you can't talk first! That's the whole rule!"
"I know it's the rule. I made the rule."
She wrote it down as she had seen it. Attempt one: subject announced himself. No discharge.
"You don't have to put it like that." He was reading it upside down.
"How would you put it?"
"...Warm-up."
"I wrote what I saw." She waited with the pen. "Again, please. Without the announcement."
He sheathed the sword, and the joking went out of him. She could have marked the moment on her paper. His face looked older with nothing moving in it, and his eyes stayed on the block.
His left foot slid back and his mouth closed. The breath went in through his teeth and kept going in, for longer than a breath should. She saw the needle tremble before he had moved at all.
Then the smell reached her. She knew it from her spark coils, and from the air over the kingdom before a storm, and she had never had this much of it in her nose at once. Her hair lifted off her shoulders, all of it, and stayed there.
"Thunder Breathing, First Form." He hardly said it. "Thunderclap and Flash."
She had been watching for the movement, and she missed it anyway. What she got was an afterimage, a yellow line from the place where he had stood to the far wall, as straight as if it had been ruled. The crack went through her teeth.
'I didn't blink. I know I didn't blink.'
The block of rock candy stood in two halves, and the faces of the cut were running like syrup. On her table the needle had gone all the way over and bent against its pin. The wire to the drum glowed orange, sagged and fell, and the pen had drawn one line straight off the edge of the paper.
Her thumb was still resting on the clock; she had never pressed it.
"Interesting." It came out level, and she was pleased with that. Her handwriting was another matter; she would have to copy this page out later.
At the far end of the yard, the quilt peeled itself off the wall with a groan. Ray was in the middle of it, folded in half. So that was what the quilt had been for.
"Oof. Okay. He's fine, and I'm mostly fine." Jake sat him down on the ground and held out what was left of her captain's sword, which was a hilt. "And that's two."
The rest of it lay along the yellow line in bright pieces. She picked one up through her sleeve. It was hot, and blue at the edges, and it had come apart along the grain.
Steel could carry the thing for an instant, it seemed, and then had nowhere to put it. It would take a metal that let the current pass through, and she didn't have one yet.
"WASN'T THAT SO MATH, PRINCESS?!" Finn had her by the other sleeve.
"It was very math, Finn."
Ray sat where he had been put. His hair stood straight up, small sparks were hopping along the bracelets on his wrist, and he was patting his own thighs with both hands.
"Can't feel my legs. That's normal. That's the normal part." He squinted up at her. "Did you get it? Tell me you got it. I'm not doing the warm-up again."
"I got enough." She had got one bent needle and a line off the side of a page, and it was the best data she had taken in ten years.
She sent Peppermint Butler for a second gauge and started on the scorch mark while it was fresh, walking the tape along it from the first footprint. It ran twenty-one paces. She was at the fourteenth when the tape went stiff in her hand.
There was frost on it. Her breath came out white, and the syrup on the cut block had stopped running.
"Aw, come on. Not today." Jake said it to the sky.
'Him. Of course it's him. It had to be this morning.' She didn't look up right away. She finished reading the number, wrote it down and capped her pen.
"Princess Bubblegum!" He came over the top of it beating his beard like a pair of wings, a blue old man in a blue robe with his crown on crooked. "Guess who! It's your favorite bachelor! I've had a cancellation at the castle, so there's a spot open, right at the front of the cage, and I thought, who deserves—"
"I'm working, Ice King."
"You're always working! That's why you need me! I'm fun!" Frost crawled down the inside of her wall behind him. He had a bolt of ice ready in each hand, and Finn already had the gold sword out of his backpack.
Then the old fool's eyes went past her, down the yard, to the young man sitting on the ground with his black hair on end.
The beard stopped beating. He dropped three feet, caught himself, and hung there with his mouth open. One of the ice bolts slid out of his fingers and broke on the ground.
"...Marshall Lee?!"