The voice came from behind him, at the tree line. It was high and young, and it sounded completely delighted.
"Do that again!"
Finn had been having a pretty good day even before the lightning.
The road to the berry patch was open again, now that the rock ogre was gravel, and he and Jake had spent the whole morning there. His backpack was so full of berries that the bottom had gone purple. They lived a long way from these woods and were already heading home when the thunder went off.
It was one single crack, out of a sky with nothing in it. Jake's ears had gone straight up, and then his nose had started going.
"It's the tall smell again. That way." Jake had pointed, and Finn had been running before he finished.
So he only caught the end of it. He came through the last trees in time to see a guy against a rock wall, a wolf in the air, and a line of yellow light that went from one side of the clearing to the other faster than Finn could turn his head.
Then the wolf was on the ground smoking, and the guy was on the far side, stuck to a tree.
It was the most math thing Finn had ever seen.
"How'd you do that? Was that a spell? Are you a wizard?" He ran along the burned line in the grass, hopping over little pieces of metal. "You went like, fwoosh! And he went like, bluh!"
The guy on the ground rolled his head over to look at him, and Finn stopped.
He was tall. He had black hair sticking out in every direction and a bleeding scrape down one cheek, and he was holding the handle of a sword with no sword on it.
His clothes were strange too. He wore a shirt over another shirt, shoes with strings all the way up, and a ring on a cord around his neck, which Finn thought was a pretty smart place to keep a ring.
The weirdest part was his face. Finn looked for the fur, the scales, the candy shell or the slime, and all he found was pink skin with dirt on it, two eyes, and in the middle, a nose.
Finn had been fooled before. There was the guy at the market who turned out to be three gnomes in a coat. There was the lady with the nice hair who was a bush. There was the boy on the hill who looked exactly right until it rained, and then he melted, because he was clay.
So Finn checked.
He crouched down and poked the guy's cheek, and it was squishy like his own. He looked behind both ears for gills. He pushed the black hair up to look for horns, and picked up one big hand and counted the fingers, twice.
"Bro. Bro, what are you doing?" The guy's voice came out rough. He didn't pull away, mostly because he didn't look able to.
"Five." Finn held his own hand up against the big one, palm to palm. "I've got five too."
His hand was a lot smaller. But the fingers lined up, one for one, and the thumb stuck out on the same side. Finn looked at the two hands for a while without saying anything. He had asked Jake once where all the people like him went. Jake had said he didn't know and made him a sandwich, and Finn had not asked again.
He let go and breathed in as far as he could.
"JAKE! JAKE, HE'S GOT A NOSE!"
"Dude, you have got to stop running off like tha—" Jake came puffing out of the trees and stopped dead. He looked at the wolf, then at the burned line, then at the guy. "Whoa."
"He's a human, Jake! A real one! I checked him for gills!"
Jake walked over, stuck his snout in the guy's hair, and took a long sniff. "Yep. That's the tall smell. Told you."
He went and poked the wolf with a back paw next. It was cooked all the way through.
"You do this by yourself?" Jake asked. The guy nodded. "Not bad, man. Little overcooked."
The guy stared at Jake with his mouth a little open. He had been staring at Finn the same way, like he was looking at two ghosts, and Finn didn't blame him. He had probably never seen a magic dog before.
"Give me a second." The guy shut his eyes. "I'm buffering."
"What's buffering?"
"It's... when you're loading."
"Loading what?" Finn looked around for a cart.
The guy made a small, tired sound and didn't answer, so Finn moved on to the important stuff. There was a lot of it, and it all wanted out at once.
"Where'd you come from? Are there more of you? How many? Do they all do lightning? Is lightning a human thing? Can I do lightning?" He grabbed the guy's sleeve. "Am I gonna do lightning when I'm tall?"
"I, uh." The guy's eyes went to the sky, to the broken handle, to Jake, and back. "I'm from far. Really far away."
"How far?"
"Across the..." His eyes did another lap around the clearing. "...sea."
"The sea?!" Finn gasped so hard he almost swallowed his tongue.
The sea. The big water, the one thing in all of Ooo that made his knees go soft and his stomach flip over. This guy had been on the other side of it, and he had crossed it to get here. That meant he was the bravest person Finn had ever met.
It also meant there was an other side, with humans on it.
"Across the sea, huh." Jake lifted one eyebrow. He kept it up there for a second, then let it drop, the way he did when a thing wasn't worth the trouble.
The guy had gone pale. He looked like he had swallowed a bug and it was still moving, and Finn understood right away. He had said it out loud, and now he was thinking about home and how far away it was.
"It's okay, dude." Finn patted his shoulder. "You don't have to talk about it."
"...Thanks." The guy looked like he meant it a lot.
"I'm Finn! This is Jake!"
"Yeah, I kn—" The guy coughed. "Nice. Nice to meet you. I'm Ray."
"Ray! Like a ray of lightning!"
"Rays are sunshine, dude," Jake said. "Also a fish. A flat one. Good fried."
"Sunshine lightning!" Finn threw both arms up. It was the best name he had ever heard.
Ray tried to get up after that, and his legs folded under him like wet paper. He said they were asleep, both of them, and that it would pass. Jake didn't wait to find out. He grew until he was the size of a cart horse, scooped Ray onto his back with one stretched paw, and asked which way he lived.
Ray pointed back toward the stream with the sword handle. Finn ran circles around them the whole way there.
...
It took Jake ten minutes to cover the ground Ray had run in a blind panic, and Ray spent all ten of them regretting the sea.
'Across the sea. Why did I say the sea?' He had thrown out two perfectly bad lies yesterday, and then picked a third one with no thought at all because a twelve-year-old was holding his sleeve. There was no taking it back, either. Finn had already asked if the sea people had boats.
He was riding a talking dog. That part he was dealing with later.
It had been three days since anybody had said a word to him, and now two of them wouldn't stop. Finn talked the whole way, about the wolf and the lightning and a sword he'd found in a lake once, and Jake answered about half of it.
The cabin came up through the trees, and Jake shrank down at the porch and tipped him onto the step. Then he put his nose against Ray's neck and sniffed him all the way down to the sneakers, one side and then the other.
"You evil?" Jake asked.
"No?"
"Cool." That seemed to be the whole background check. Jake wandered inside, looked at the fireplace, and frowned. "You don't have a fire going?"
"I ran out of... fire."
Jake gave him a look, fished a flint out of Finn's backpack, and had the old wood burning before Ray had finished being embarrassed. He left the flint on the shelf next to the mug. Ray looked at it the way other people looked at jewelry.
What came next was harder to watch. Jake found the garden. He came back with an armful of potatoes, both squashes and most of the carrot row, buried the potatoes in the coals, split the squashes on the hearth, and started eating the carrots while he waited.
'That's Thursday. He's eating my Thursday.' Ray counted what was left of the row through the window and got to four.
Then Jake handed him a potato, black on the outside and steaming in the middle, and Ray forgot to be mad. It was the first hot food he'd had since a honey bun. He ate it skin and all, and then a second one, and a half of a squash with his fingers.
Finn, in the meantime, had looked at everything.
"What's the M for?" Finn had his nose almost on the door.
"It came with the house."
"Why are the apples grey?"
"They're busted," said Jake, with total confidence.
Neither of them seemed to know the place, and neither of them asked if it was his.
The sea came up again, because of course it did. Finn wanted to know if the humans over there had swords, and Ray said some did. He wanted to know if they had dogs, and Ray said lots. Every answer was one more thing he would have to remember he'd said.
The blue berry from that morning never did anything, as it turned out. That made it the friendliest thing he had eaten all week.
"Okay, you ate. Now do the lightning!" Finn bounced on the bed.
"I need a sword for that." Ray held up the handle. "This was my sword."
"Swords are just fancy sticks." Finn ran outside and came back with a stick.
Ray's legs had mostly come back, so he tried. He pushed the stick through his belt, slid his foot back, and pulled the long breath down the way he had at the wall. He said the words. He drew.
He was standing in a cabin, holding a stick.
Maybe it needed a real blade, or maybe he had breathed wrong. He honestly couldn't tell which, and that bothered him more than the stick did.
"That's okay! I've got like nine swords at home. You can borrow one!" Finn was already at the door, pointing. "It's easy. You go west to the gully where we wasted the rock guy, left at the rock that looks like a butt, all the way across the Grasslands, past the pond, and it's the big tree. You can't miss it."
"West, gully, left at the pond, past the butt."
"No, the butt's first."
"How far is this?" Ray looked at his heels.
"Most of a day if you walk it." Jake licked squash off his paw. "Two, on those feet. I'll come get you in the morning. It's like an hour for me."
"Get me for what?"
"Adventure!" Finn punched the air.
"Yeah, no. I don't really do adventures. I've got a rule." It was one day old, and he was proud of it.
"I'm making bacon pancakes first." Jake shrugged from the doorway.
Ray opened his mouth. Somewhere in the back of his head, a song he hadn't heard in eight years started playing.
"...What time?"