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?"
It went on sounding familiar for four days, and it never got any further than that.
The days themselves were easy. Jake showed up at the cabin every morning, since the garden had nothing left in it, and Ray ate breakfast and dinner at the Tree Fort and tried not to count what he owed.
In the afternoons he sat on the porch and practiced the one thing he had figured out: mouth shut, air in slowly through the teeth, all the way down to his feet. The heat came most times now. With no sword to draw, it sat in his legs for a while and then drained out, and he got up with pins and needles and nothing to show for it.
At night he lay on the grey blanket and went back to the card. Slumber party, Candy Kingdom. All he ever got was the theme song, the part with the ukulele, over and over until he fell asleep.
On the fourth evening Jake came for him with Finn already on board, and Ray asked the question before he had both legs over.
"Can I borrow a sw—"
"No." Jake didn't even turn his head. "Not inside the castle. It's a party, man. There's gonna be snacks and pillows, and I only have the one good ear left."
"I've got eight more!" Finn leaned around Ray's shoulder to say it.
"And they're staying home, where it's safe."
So Ray went to his first party in Ooo with an empty belt, wearing the only clothes he owned. He had washed them in the stream that morning, and they were still damp at the seams. He had also skipped lunch on purpose. A guy with no food at home went to a party hungry; that was just math, the regular kind.
The ride took the rest of the daylight, and he smelled the place before he saw it. It was the smell of a donut shop at six in the morning, and it came across the fields a good mile ahead of the walls.
The walls were pink and cream, and smooth like frosting. Behind them the towers went up in stripes, and against them, one on each side of the gate, sat two giants with their legs stretched out in the grass. Each had a glass globe for a head, full of colored balls the size of cars. One of the globes turned to watch them go in.
"Gumball Guardians. They're chill." Jake trotted right between them.
'Gumball machines. The cops here are gumball machines.' Ray kept his eyes on them until the gate was well behind him.
Inside, the street went uphill between houses made of gingerbread and sponge cake, and everybody on it was dessert. There was a candy cane with a walking stick and a lollipop in a nightgown, and a whole family of gumdrops carrying one long pillow between them. All of them were headed for the castle at the top. Ray's stomach made a noise that Finn turned around for.
He reached down from Jake's back as they passed a windowsill and broke a corner off it.
"Don't eat the buildings, dude. People live in those."
"It's a wafer."
"It's somebody's kitchen."
Ray ate it anyway. It was vanilla, and he regretted nothing until they reached the castle doors and he saw the inside.
The great hall was already half full. It was pink, which he had expected, and the size of the warehouse floor, which he hadn't. Candy people in pajamas were spreading blankets across the tiles, and along the far wall stood a table he decided not to look at yet, for his own good.
"Finn! Jake!"
She came down the main staircase with a notepad under her arm. Ray had her on his list as a bubblegum princess who did science, and the list had left some things out.
She was pink all the way through, skin and hair both, and the hair hung past her waist in one thick piece that looked like it would stretch if somebody pulled it. There was a gold crown on top with a blue stone in it. She looked about his age, and she smelled like strawberry gum.
He had expected cute, and she was, for about four seconds. Then she noticed him, and her eyes went over him the way the scanner at work went over a barcode.
"H-Hey, Princess!" Finn's ears had gone red under the hat. "Nice... stairs!"
"Thank you, Finn. They're load-bearing." She didn't look away from Ray. "And you would be the second human."
"Ray. Thanks for having me. I know the card didn't have my name on it."
"It would have, had I known you existed." She walked a slow circle around him with her pen out. "How tall are you?"
"Six two."
"Six two what?"
"Feet. Six feet, two inches."
"Whose feet?"
Ray opened his mouth and found out he didn't know.
"Never mind. Hold this." A tape measure came out of her sleeve, and he was pinning one end of it to the floor with his sneaker before he thought to ask why. She wrote down a number. "Open, please."
"Open what? My heart? We just met."
She tapped her own front teeth with the pen. He opened. A pink hand took him by the chin and turned his face toward the light, and she looked into his mouth for a good while.
"Thirty-two. Flat molars, small canines. The same as Finn's, only more of them." She let go of him. "Where are you from?"
'I came for the cake, and I'm getting a physical.' He worked his jaw back into place. "Far away. Across the sea."
"Which sea?"
"...The big one."
"In what kind of vessel?"
"A boat."
"And where is the boat now?"
"It sank." It was out before he could stop it. He had a boat now, and it was at the bottom of the ocean, and he would have to remember that along with the swords and the dogs.
"I see." Her pen moved for a long time for someone who had only heard two words.
"And he shoots lightning, Princess!" Finn had been holding that in with his whole body. "Out of a sword! He went through a toad, and then he went through a wall!"
The pen stopped.
"Lightning." She looked at Ray's hands, then at his legs, then at the empty spot on his belt. "From a blade. Generated by you."
"It's kind of in beta." She wrote that down too, with a question mark.
"Do you have the sword with you?"
"It died a hero."
"No, I don't imagine it survived." She wrote something and underlined it twice. Ray didn't like the underline.
A peppermint in a butler's suit had come up beside her at some point; he barely reached her knee. He tugged at her skirt and said something too low to hear, and she nodded.
"Already? Good." The notepad went back under her arm. "Finn, I need a hero's hands for an experiment. It's just outside, and it won't take long."
"Y-Yeah! Hands! I've got two!" Finn was following her before she had finished asking, with ears that could have lit the hall.
She stopped at a side door and looked back at Ray. "Please don't leave. We aren't finished."
The door shut behind them.
"She likes you." Jake sounded impressed.
"She counted my teeth."
"Exactly, man. She doesn't count just anybody's teeth."
With the princess gone, there was nothing left between Ray and the table, so he went.
It ran the whole length of the wall. There were cakes and pies, bowls of punch, cookies by the tray and a tower of donuts taller than Finn. After a week of screaming fruit, carrots and other people's pancakes, Ray stood in front of it with an empty plate and didn't know where to start.
He started with a cupcake. Then a cupcake in a bathrobe walked past his elbow, wished him a good evening and took a cookie, and Ray looked down at the one on his plate.
"Jake. Is this a guy?"
"That's a cupcake."
"That was also a cupcake." He pointed at the bathrobe, which was walking away.
"That's Mr. Cupcake. Totally different." Jake had three pies stacked on one arm. "Guys say hi, food doesn't. Don't overthink it."
Ray poked the cupcake on his plate. It didn't say hi, so he ate it. He went on eating down the table for the better part of an hour, and when nobody was looking, he wrapped four bread rolls in a napkin and buttoned them into his shirt pocket. It was an old habit from other people's houses, and the empty garden had woken it right up.
Somewhere in that hour a rainbow came in through a window. It was about forty feet long, with a horse's head and a horn at the front end, and it wrapped twice around Jake and rubbed its cheek on his. Jake's voice went up to a place Ray hadn't heard it go before.
"Ray, this is my lady. Lady, this is Ray."
'The long rainbow horse.' That was one more off the list. She looked at him with big, kind eyes and said a whole friendly sentence, and he didn't catch a word of it. He knew the sound, though. The day shift used to watch dramas on their phones at lunch, and every one of them had sounded like that.
'Is that Korean? The world ended a thousand years ago, and the horse speaks Korean?'
"She says hi, and she likes your shoes." Jake patted her neck.
"Thanks. I like your... all of it." Ray waved a hand at the general length of her. Lady laughed and said something else, and Jake didn't translate that one.
Finn came back not long after, through the side door, by himself. Ray saw it from across the hall. His hat was crooked, there were grass stains on both knees, and the red had gone out of his ears along with the color from the rest of his face.
He stood with his back flat against the door for a moment. Then he put on a smile that was much too wide and clapped his hands.
"Hey, everybody! Who wants to play Truth or Dare? I do! Ha ha! Me!"
"You good, little bro?" Ray had walked over with his plate.
"Yep! Super good! I can't talk about it!"
"Buddy. You're sweating through your hat."
"Nothing! There's no sweat! There's no 'it'!" Finn's laugh cracked in the middle, and he ran off to push candy people into a circle.
Jake watched him go with one eye narrowed. "He's hiding something, and he stinks at it. If it's a prank, I want in."
The game started without them. A lady made of chocolate and strawberry dared Mr. Cupcake to take off his wrapper, the circle shrieked, and Mr. Cupcake untied his bathrobe with great dignity.
Ray stood at the edge of it with a donut in his hand and an itch between his ears. The princess was gone. Finn was sweating through his hat and running party games like somebody had a knife to his back. Around them, a hall full of candy people sat in their pajamas.
'I've seen this. I've watched this exact thing.'
He turned away to give Mr. Cupcake some privacy, and that left him facing the tall windows on the garden side. It was full dark outside by now. Low down in the nearest window, something was pressed against the glass.
It was a hand. It was green, and soft at the edges like a gummy left on a dashboard in July, and it slid down the glass slowly and left a wet smear behind it. A face came up after it. It had been a gumdrop once. Half of it had caved in, the sugar on it had gone grey, and its mouth hung open against the window.
Ray stopped chewing.
The theme song in his head finally moved on to what came after it. It was the first episode, the very first one, the one they reran every weekend. There was the princess and her science, and a graveyard, and dead candy people getting up and walking to the castle. There was a slumber party, so that nobody would find out.
'The note said try not to die in the first week. It's been a week and a day. That's cheating.' His hand went to his belt and closed on nothing.
"Oh, shit." He said it out loud, with his mouth full. "It's the zombie one."
"The what one?"
The voice came from beside his elbow. A small round candy guy in striped pajamas stood there, holding a cup of punch in both hands and looking up at him. Somebody had called him Chet earlier, over by the donuts.
"Did you say zombies?" The punch in Chet's cup had started to ripple. "Are there z-zombies?"
"No! No, I said..." Ray looked for another word that sounded like it and came up empty.
Chet began to shake. It started in his hands and went up his arms. Then his cheeks rounded out, and his belly after them, and the striped pajamas pulled tight across the front. A thin whine came out of him, like a kettle just before it goes.
That was when the rest of the episode came back, the part that explained the party. It was about ten seconds late.
'They blow up. Candy people blow up when they get scared.'
The top button of Chet's pajamas shot off and hit him in the chest.