He sat down in the grass with the fake sword across his knees.
"So this is home." His voice came out small. "Then where the fuck did everybody go?"
Nobody answered. He sat there until the sun had moved off the sign and onto the back of his neck, and then he got tired of waiting.
He took out his phone. It was at 9%, and he finally understood that he had been saving it for nothing. There was no tower left for it to find, and the only numbers in it belonged to a supervisor and a pizza place a very long way behind him.
'Might as well spend it on something good.' He opened his saved videos and tapped the first one.
Zenitsu crouched with a hand on the hilt. The screen went yellow, the kid crossed the frame, and the bass dropped as clean as it had in the break room. Ray watched it loop with his chin on his knees and the tiny speaker buzzing against the quiet, while the number in the corner fell to 6%, then 4%.
Somewhere around the twentieth loop, the screen went black in the middle of the crouch.
"Yeah. Fair." He looked at his own reflection in the glass for a bit, then put the phone back in his pocket anyway. Throwing it away felt like littering on a grave.
He got up because he was hungry, and sitting there wasn't going to fix that. The exit sign pointed along the valley, and a sign like that used to lead to gas stations and drive-throughs, so he followed where the road should've been with the sword over his shoulder.
'Two miles to Something-field. I'll take a burnt-down Wendy's at this point.'
He counted his steps to keep his head busy, lost track somewhere past four hundred, and started over. Every time he stopped, his head went back down the escalator, so he kept his eyes on the grass and the numbers going. The valley bent east after the first mile, and he bent with it, staying on the flat ground where the craters didn't reach.
Two miles later he was standing in more grass, in front of a line of trees he didn't know. They were short, with silver bark, and round orange fruit hung from them in bunches the size of his fist.
Ray stood under them for a long time. Every survival video he had ever half-watched said the same thing about eating strange fruit. He hadn't eaten in a day and a half.
"If it's poison, at least I'll die full." He picked one, wiped it on his shirt, and bit in.
The fruit screamed.
It was a thin, high squeal, like air leaving a balloon, and it kept going while the juice ran down his chin. The taste was a lemon that had been soaked in dish soap. His tongue went numb from the tip back.
"Oh, come on!" It came out as "oh, cub od." He held the thing at arm's length, watched it squeal itself out, and looked at the bite mark.
Then he ate the rest of it. He ate three more after that, screaming and all, because soap-lemon was still calories and he had stopped being proud sometime yesterday.
The regret showed up about an hour down the valley. His stomach cramped like a fist was closing inside it, and every few steps he burped up the taste of detergent. He was bent over with his hands on his knees, promising the universe he would never eat anything orange again, when he heard the crash.
It came from over the next ridge: rock breaking, and something heavy hitting the ground. Then a voice. It was high and it was yelling, and it sounded like words.
Ray straightened up so fast his stomach lurched.
'People. That's people.' He had gone a day and a half without hearing a voice that wasn't his own, and he was running before he had decided to.
He took the ridge on all fours with the sword scraping behind him, and he had just enough sense left to stop at the top and look before he waved. A boulder sat up there, split down the middle. He put his face to the gap.
The ridge dropped into a rocky gully, and at the bottom of it a monster was trying to kill a child.
There was no other word for the thing. It was a pile of boulders and mud in the rough shape of a man, as big as a city bus stood on end, with a mouth that opened sideways. It swung an arm, and a tree went flying.
The kid went under the arm. He was small, maybe twelve, in a blue shirt and shorts with a green backpack bouncing on his shoulders, and he had a gold sword he clearly knew how to use.
"Kid, no. Kid, run!" Ray hissed it at the rock. His tongue was still half numb, and he couldn't make himself stand up.
The kid did the opposite. He ran up the monster's knee, hacked at the mud between two boulders, and jumped clear as the leg buckled. He was laughing.
The monster roared and slapped the ground where the kid had been. The kid was already behind it, poking it in the back of the other knee.
'...Okay, he's going for the joints. That's the right call against a heavy type.' He couldn't help it; he had watched too many tournament arcs. 'Footwork's wild, zero guard, but the kid's got hands.'
It was the hat that bothered him. The boy wore a white hat that covered his whole head and tied under the chin, with two little round ears on top. Ray knew that hat. He knew it the same way he knew the mountains, from somewhere soft and far away.
"Jake! Fist!" The kid pointed his sword at the monster's chest.
A yellow dog trotted out from behind a rock. It was a regular, slightly fat bulldog for about one second. Then its front leg swelled up to the size of a garden shed, stretched across the whole gully like taffy, and punched the monster in the face.
Ray's mouth fell open.
'The dog stretches. Why do I know that the dog stretches?' The itch at the back of his head was a fire alarm now. A boy with a hat, a dog that stretched, a bowl of cereal, and a theme song somebody played on a ukulele.
The monster went down on its back. The kid ran up its chest and drove the gold sword into the mud where a heart would be, and the whole thing fell apart into gravel under his feet. He threw both arms in the air.
"Mathematical!"
"Adventure Time." Ray said it to the boulder, very quietly. "I'm in Adventure Time."
His knees went soft, and he slid down behind the rock until he was sitting in the dirt.
...
Down in the gully, Jake shrank his arm back to a sensible size and shook the gravel off his paw.
It had been a good fight, the short kind. The rock ogre had been sitting on the road to the berry patch for three days, eating travelers' carts, and Finn had wanted to punch it since breakfast. Now it was a pile of pebbles, and Jake could already taste the victory sandwich waiting at home.
"Did you see that, Jake? I ran up his leg!" Finn was jumping on the gravel with his sword over his head. "And then you were like, bam! And he was like, bleeeh!"
"You were all over him, man. Like butter on a hot bun." Jake stretched his back legs until his spine popped.
That was when the wind turned, and he caught it.
His nose was almost never wrong. This smell was sweat and dust and old sugar, and under all of that was something he only knew from one place. It smelled like Finn. But Finn was standing right here, smelling like Finn and mud, and this one came from up the ridge.
"Hey. You smell that?" Jake lifted his snout.
"Smell what? Is it the ogre? Jake, can rocks fart?"
"It's like you. But, like... taller."
"How does tall smell?" Finn sniffed his own armpit with great interest.
"I dunno, dude. Higher up." Jake squinted at the top of the ridge. There was a split boulder up there and a whole lot of sky.
"That's just me, dude! I've been sweating like a hero all day!" Finn stuck his sword in his backpack and started kicking through the gravel for treasure.
Jake thought about walking up there to check. It was a steep ridge, though, and that sandwich wasn't getting any fresher. Behind him, Finn pulled a bent spoon out of the rubble and held it up like a crown jewel.
"Eh. Probably a bird. A tall bird." He scratched behind his ear and turned for home. "Come on. I'm breaking out the good mustard."
...
Up on the ridge, Ray stayed flat behind the boulder until the two voices were long gone. It took him that long before he could stand.
Twice he had almost stood up and yelled. They were right there, a human kid and a dog who could talk, and they had a home somewhere with food in it. But what was he supposed to say? That he used to watch them on Saturday mornings? That he had just walked out of a mall full of bones?
And that kid had killed something the size of a bus and called it math. Ray stacked boxes for a living. If a fight broke out anywhere near those two, he'd be the first thing that got thrown.
He also knew how these shows worked. The hero's friends were safe, and the random guy who wandered into the episode got eaten to show the monster was serious. Ray had "random guy" written all over him.
'Nope. Information first. Hero stuff never.' He pulled his knees up and tried to remember a show he hadn't thought about since he was ten.
It came back in pieces, and in no useful order.
The kid was Finn. The dog was Jake, and Jake stretched. He was solid on those two.
There was a princess made of bubblegum, pink from head to toe, who did science. There was an old guy with a long nose and a beard who lived in the ice and kept kidnapping princesses, which explained the mountains with the face. Something about that one had been sad, and Ray couldn't get hold of what.
A vampire girl with an axe for a bass guitar. He remembered her better than most of the plot, which said a lot about his priorities at ten.
A talking game console. A rainbow horse that was very long. A purple cloud that talked like the meanest girl in a high school cafeteria. A lot of songs, and one of them was about bacon pancakes. Past that it was all scraps, faces without names and jokes without the setup.
"Great. I've got the soundtrack." He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes.
What else? The world. There had been something about the world, in a video he'd watched years later about dark details in kids' cartoons. The whole show took place after a war. It had a stupid name with a mushroom in it, and it had ended everything about a thousand years before the first episode.
A thousand years. He thought about two cups on a tray.
So that was where everybody went.
He sat with that until the shadows of the rocks had moved. Then one more thing came up from the bottom, slower than the others, like it had been waiting for the rest to clear out.
A skull. A skull with horns, and green fire where the eyes should be.
The name wouldn't come, and neither would anything it did. His memory only handed him a ten-year-old reaching for the remote.