Ray opened his mouth. Somewhere in the back of his head, a song he hadn't heard in eight years started playing.
"...What time?"
Sunrise, it turned out. Jake showed up at the cabin with the first light, already the size of a horse, and Ray had been awake for an hour by then. The last four carrots had gone into the coals for dinner, the garden was down to weeds, and the word "pancakes" had kept him company most of the night.
The ride took about an hour, the way Jake had said. Ray spent it holding on to yellow fur with both hands and trying to memorize the route.
There was the gully, and a rock that really did look like a butt, and then grass, more of it than he had ever seen in one place, rolling out flat and green to the edge of the sky. He lost track somewhere after the pond, around the time Jake started describing, in detail, a sandwich he had eaten two days ago.
"That's us." Jake pointed with an ear.
Ray had seen the Tree Fort a hundred times on a screen, and it was a different thing with the sun behind it.
The tree was as big as an apartment building. The house grew out of it in pieces, a room here and a balcony there, with a boat stuck up in the branches for no reason he could see. He didn't say anything for the rest of the ride.
The inside smelled like bacon. Finn waved a spatula at him from the stove, and something small and teal walked across the kitchen table on two thin legs. It looked up at Ray with a face made of pixels.
"Hello, tall Finn."
"...Hi." Ray had "a talking game console" on his list. Having it on a list was not the same as watching it walk over to shake his finger.
"That's BMO." Finn flipped something and missed the pan. "BMO, that's Ray. He's a human and he does lightning."
"I also do lightning, if you plug me in wrong." BMO went back to its business.
Then Jake took over the stove, and Ray stopped noticing anything else. The pancakes came off the pan thick and brown with strips of bacon cooked right into them. Jake sang while he flipped, and it was the song that had been stuck in Ray's head since yesterday. Ray ate eleven. He counted, because he wanted to remember the number.
Nobody at that table told him to slow down, and nobody asked him to pay. He noticed that somewhere around the seventh.
"Okay! Swords!" Finn ran off to get them, and Ray followed as far as a doorway and stopped.
The room behind it was full of gold. 'Holy shit.' There were coins, cups and crowns heaped against the walls like laundry, and a suit of armor buried in it up to the chest. Ray had $212 to his name in a bank that no longer existed. These two kept a dragon's savings account next to the kitchen and walked past it like a closet.
Finn came back out of the pile and dumped an armful of metal on the floor.
There were nine, as promised. One was rusted brown, one curved like a banana, and one was so thin it bent when Finn waved it. Ray only cared about one thing, a scabbard, and only two of them had one. He picked a plain blade in plain leather and pushed it through his belt where the replica's had been.
"Good pick. That's my third-favorite." Finn gave it a fond pat.
"I'll be careful with it." Ray meant it, too.
The adventure turned out to be a cave north of the pond. Finn explained it on the way, walking backward in front of them.
"A guy at the market said something in a cave's been eating a farmer's chickens! For weeks! And nobody's doing anything about it!" He spread his arms. "So it's ours!"
It was a twenty-minute walk, and something happened to Ray on the way. His heels were wrapped in real bandages from Jake's cupboard. He had a sword on his hip and eleven pancakes in him. Yesterday he had killed a wolf the size of a pony with one move, and the more he thought about that, the better it sounded.
'I one-shot that thing. One move. That's protagonist behavior.' By the time they reached the cave, he was walking in front.
It was a wide, low hole in a hillside with chicken feathers blowing around the entrance. The air coming out of it was cold and smelled like a pond that had gone bad. Finn lit a torch. The light went in about thirty feet and landed on something pale.
It was a toad. It was the size of a delivery van, white as a mushroom, with eyes like dinner plates, and it sat on a heap of small bones. It blinked at them one eye at a time.
"Whoa. Okay, Jake, you go left and I'll—" Finn started.
"Relax." Ray put a hand on Finn's chest and moved him back a step. He didn't look at him; he had seen this done, and you never looked at them. "Stand back, little bro. You're in no danger."
"I'm not?"
"Nah. I'm the strongest human alive." There were two that he knew of, and one of them was twelve.
He strolled out in front of the toad. He slid his foot back, put his hand on the hilt, and let it hang there a moment for effect. He took a quick sip of air through his teeth, since he still had a line to deliver.
"Thunder Breathing, First Form: Thunderclap and Flash."
The sword came out of the scabbard with a clean ring, and that was all that came out.
The toad blinked its left eye, then its right.
"...One sec." He sheathed it, crouched again, breathed even faster and drew even harder. The sword rang a second time, and nothing else happened.
Then the toad's mouth opened, and something pink shot past his ear and hit the wall behind him hard enough to crack the stone.
"AAAH! Nope! Fuck, nope, nope!" He was running before the tongue had even pulled back, past Finn, past Jake, all the way to the entrance, where he threw himself behind a rock.
"Was that the lightning?" Finn yelled after him.
"That was a demo!" Ray yelled back. "It's bugged! The move is bugged!"
Finn laughed and charged in with Jake behind him, and the cave filled up with croaking and crashing. Ray looked once. Jake had a fist the size of a barrel and was pounding the toad on the head with it, and the white skin sank under every hit and sprang back like a mattress. Finn's sword slid off its side without leaving a mark.
Ray stayed where he was. He had both hands on his knees and he was panting, short and fast, and it was the panting that told him.
It was the same breath he had taken in front of the toad. It was a sip. At the rock wall yesterday, the air had gone all the way down to his feet; today he had been busy talking.
'I was monologuing. You can't breathe and monologue at the same time.' He put his forehead against the rock. 'So that's a rule now. Great.'
"Ray! Little help!"
That was Jake, and he didn't sound relaxed. Ray looked around the rock.
The tongue had Finn. It was wrapped around his middle three times with his arms pinned inside, and his gold sword lay on the floor. Jake had him by both ankles with his back legs dug into the ground. He was stretched out like a rope between them, and he was sliding. Finn had stopped laughing.
Ray's head went quiet, the way it had at the wall.
He walked back in. He sheathed the sword, since it needed to start in there. He slid his left foot back and bent his knees, and this time he shut his mouth and pulled the air in slowly through his teeth, down past his chest and into his legs, until the heat came.
Jake saw it from the side, and he had a bad angle and no free paws.
The tall guy had come back in without a word, which was the first strange thing. The second was the smell. It rolled over Jake from that side of the cave, sharp and clean, like the air right before a storm breaks, and every hair on his back stood up at once.
"Thunder Breathing, First Form." Ray said it low this time, mostly breath. "Thunderclap and Flash."
The crack took the hearing out of Jake's left ear. A yellow line went across the cave, straight through the tongue, and the tongue came apart in the middle. Finn flew backward into Jake's chest, and the two of them rolled over in a pile of slime.
The toad made a noise like a wet trumpet and fell on its side. There was a black stripe burned across it from jaw to hip, and it was smoking.
"Where'd he go?" Finn sat up with the end of the tongue still wrapped around him.
Jake pointed. At the back of the cave, past the toad, a pair of legs stuck out of a hole in the wall. The hole was about the shape of a tall guy with his arms out.
They pulled him out by the ankles. His hair was standing straight up and his eyes weren't pointing the same way, and he was holding a sword handle with nothing on it. He smelled like a burnt wire, and small sparks were still hopping between the bracelets on his wrist. The rest of Finn's third-favorite lay across the cave floor in little bright pieces.
"THAT WAS SO MATH!" Finn grabbed him by the shirt and shook him. "You went through the tongue! You went through the WALL!"
"Sorry about your sword." Ray's voice came from far off. "I can't feel my legs again."
"Are you kidding? That's the coolest thing that ever happened to that sword!"
Jake looked around the cave and did the sum out loud, because somebody had to.
"So that's one sword. One wall. One toad, and okay, the toad was the job." He stuck a claw in his left ear and wiggled it. "And one ear. You're an expensive guy to bring along, Ray."
He carried both of them home anyway, one under each arm, since only one of the three still had working legs. He had already decided Ray was staying for dinner. A guy who ate eleven pancakes and then went through a wall had earned a second meal, and Jake could run him back to his cabin after.
There was a visitor at the Tree Fort when they got there. A gumdrop in a tiny hat stood on the doorstep holding a pink envelope almost as big as he was. He handed it to Finn, bowed, and waddled off without a word. Jake set Ray down on the grass by the door, where BMO came out to ask if the tall Finn was broken.
Finn read it, and his ears went red under the hat. Jake knew that color. It only came from one place.
"It's from Princess Bubblegum. There's a slumber party at the Candy Castle in four nights." Finn turned the card around so Ray could see it from the floor. "You're coming, right?"
"It says 'Finn and Jake'."
"It doesn't say 'not Ray'."
Ray didn't answer that. He was looking at the pink card with his face all scrunched up.
"A slumber party. At the Candy Kingdom." He said it slowly. "Why does that sound familiar?"