Chapter Text
“Can’t believe I’m doing this…”
Me-Mow crawled through the brush of the forest, following heavy hoofprints through the dirt. She had recently taken a deal with Princess Bubblegum: in exchange for her freedom, she’d have to retrieve a particularly dangerous serial kidnapper known as the Stag, dead or alive. Ever since that…elements-thing blew over, he’s been active once again.
What made it a lot worse was that all she was allowed was a knife, some camping gear, a backpack, and the clothes on her back. Thankfully, she had managed to mitigate the lack of food; as a cat, Me-Mow was a natural born hunter, and easily able to snag various wild animals. And he did leave a trail of sugar stains, no doubt his handiwork. It seems he got right back to it.
Soon, she began hearing rustling in the brush, and saw movement that was not her own. Immediately, she stopped and began to wait, glancing around from her limited viewpoint, her breath practically stopping, praying whoever passed by wouldn’t notice her.
And her thoughts were confirmed when she saw a brown, hoofed leg stomp down right in front of the bush she was in. Silently putting her hand on her knife, she waited to see if the Stag would notice her.
Her heart sank for a bit as she glanced up, the Stag scanning the surrounding wilderness. For a second, he froze.
Then he began to walk off.
Now was her moment to strike.
With a sudden swing of her knife, she slashed the back of the Stag’s ankle, making him topple over with a powerful, agonized groan of pain. She was quick to follow up towards the other ankle, and soon climbed out of the brush to sit on his back, pounding him with a rock, over and over, praying that he wouldn’t just throw her off.
Then he fell silent, seemingly knocked out.
“Easy part’s done, now I just have to…”
Getting up and tugging at the Stags’ ankles only yielded a few inches of movement. The journey to lug this thing is going to be much tougher than she expected… and the sun was starting to go down, too.
Slicing some of the nearby vines, she tied up the Stag as best as she could, periodically checking to see if he was about to wake up.It was only a matter of time until she fell asleep, concealed from the creatures of the woods.
But an uneasy presence remained, intangible, unseen, but felt.
—---------------------------
Sunlight shined down onto Me-Mow… and oddly early too. As she got up, she tried to get a look at her surroundings. What she saw was not the forest.
“...The flip?”
She found herself on a small floating island, with purple grass and her tent sitting alone, surrounded by wooden doors. Other floating islands lingered far in the distance, far greater in size, with colossal objects like pens and piano keys jammed in almost haphazardly. Clouds floated further away, and she could see tiny things occasionally move from one island to her next. Usually her dreams tended to revolve around hunting, or her old life as a second-class member of the Assassin’s Guild… but nothing like this.
The doors around her began frantically rattling, and she instinctively reached for her knife on her belt, bracing herself for what could come through. When the rattling stopped, one door started to sprout some strange, jagged metal… things, and swung open, revealing some kind of portal.
A tense standoff began with her and the door, Me-Mow ready to lunge and swing as soon as something came through.
A few minutes passed, the portal continuing to ripple and glow.
Wind blew across the grass…
..and soon, she realized that nothing was going to jump through. A sigh of relief came over her, but the portal continued to stare her down, tempting her to move forward.
“Well… nothing else to do, so…”
When she stepped through that portal, she found herself in someplace even stranger. Colossal chunks of twisted, iridescent metal stuck out of the violet, rocky landscape, trees were covered in unmoving eyes or were nothing more than stumps… and there was a sole, small, lanky figure alone on this distorted landscape, standing atop a stump right in front of her. Parts of the metal formations rippled nearby him.
As she carefully approached this strange figure, she had her hand hovering above her knife, only to jump back when they whirled around, almost as if they knew she’d be coming. While the rest of them was inky black, their face was almost like a crude drawing of white marker on top of a black screen. One eye was a simple circle, another an X, and their smile crudely drawn on.
“Greetings, visitor, to the Glitch Realm! You must be the hunter I’ve been looking for. Me-Mow, correct?”
“...How the heck do you know my name? Who even are you!?” She swung her knife at this suspicious figure, pointing the tip right where his nose would be, but he simply continued staring at her. Not flinching in the slightest. All that move succeeded in was intimidating her, not this Dorian guy.
“Oh, I have my ways. As for who I am, I’m called the Nightmaker by my enemies, but my buds call me Dorian.”
“And what do you want from me?”
“Oh, I’m just going to hire you. Seventy thousand dollars to capture two small things, and bring them back here.”
His face soon changed from the crude doodle, to split-screen footage, showing a green blob in a red backpack, and a blue rabbit plushie in a blue backpack, each on the back of a… human? Apparently, there was more than just Finn... but there was certainly something about them that screamed "not of this world". The way they seemed so... happy together.
“I want you to find a green blob by the name of Z-Blob and a blue rabbit plush by the name of Bunchu. They’re being carried around by a couple kids with magic powers named Mateo and Isabelle in the dream world, so you need to be careful and stealthy and hunt them while you’re asleep. Try not to let them see you.”
Me-Mow put the knife down. As creepy as this dude was, seventy thousand was enough to live off of for a year… and she wasn’t exactly sure that Bubblegum would give her any money for bringing in the Stag. “Alright. I’ll take it. But where did you last see these two?”
“That’s the tough part. They’re going all over the place, but they commonly get shuttled around in this… space-shuttle-school-bus-thingy, this uh… They’re in a blue and yellow spaceship with some other people, super easy to spot. Deal?” The figure held out his hand, waiting on a response.
She thought about this for a moment and weighed the options, the possibilities. If this is just a phony dream and nothing happens, things will just be as normal, whether she took the deal or not. But if she took the deal, and this was real… hey, a solid seventy grand is in the bag
After a moment, she shook his hand with a smile.
“Deal.”
—---------------------------
When she awoke, it was morning again, little dots of morning dew having collected on plants scattered about. When she checked on the Stag, something odd had happened. He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t moving either… and he seemed… a little less brown than usual?
Nonetheless, she decided to pack up and continue her walk in the forest, this time carrying the Stag over her shoulder, following her compass on the way to the meet-up point. But as she continued traveling, she couldn’t help but feel… watched. Any time she looked up and around to see who was watching her, there was nobody. Not a sound, not a voice.
And then she slipped on a piece of loose-leaf as soon as she entered a clearing, taking a humiliating back-first fall. Immediately, she swept it up in her hands to see who seemingly pranked her. “Okay, who put this… here?”
.
Maybe that dream she had was more real than she initially thought.
…But hey, seventy thousand dollars is seventy thousand dollars.
As she continued, things felt… weirder. Despite the day continuing to wear on and that awkward tumble, her captive only seemed to sleep deeper, instead of waking up with all the lugging-around. Almost as if they were incapable of waking up. She had expected some kind of fight to break out sooner or later… but was hardly complaining. In a straight fight, she would have lost.
Soon, she made it to the drop-off location without a hitch.All that was left was to simply sit down and wait by the back walls of the Candy Kingdom for Bubblegum to arrive. And as she waited, she could hear the candy people talk behind the walls. But instead of their usual inane blabber, the topic of “a really weird dream” just kept coming up. She scooched closer to the wall to try and get a better idea of what they’re talking about. Something about being chased around? Scary dreams? Some kind of weird half-man hal-
“There you are.”
By instinct, Me-Mow arched her back, whipped out her claws, and hissed at the approaching presence… before realizing that it was Princess Bubblegum, here to collect the bounty. She had a sack over her shoulder, ostensibly all of Me-Mow’s gear being inside. Me-Mow turned away and just shoved the Stag towards Bubblegum’s feet, refusing to look her in the eye. Still pretty mad about what got her into prison in the first place.
“...Here’s your criminal. Unconscious but alive. He’s been like that for a day or so.”
In exchange, Bubblegum put the bag in front of Me-Mow… and immediately, the cat began rifling through. Her blowgun, her crossbow, even her old oversized syringes were there. But something was still missing…
“Where’s Palomino?”
“Oh, don’t worry! He’s at the Candyheart stable inside. Come and get him when you’re ready!”
Much to Bubblegum’s surprise, Me-Mow’s sullen sulking flipped to an elated joy upon the news of her horse being alright. “Oh, thank Glob he’s alright! Thank you so much!”
—---------------------------
A sinister giggling rattled through the walls, as Dorian walked up to his newest captive. Me-Mow knocking out the Stag was an opportunity that Dorian had happily seized… and seize it he did. A sick, twisted grin had spread itself across his screen, as he examined the readouts next to his subject’s cell.
“My oh my, you’re the perfect candidate for this latest test. Your levels of evilness are off the charts… and your imagination levels aren’t that bad either.”
His hand gripped a massive switch, looking straight into those dead eyes... and when he swung down, every bit of machinery lurched into motion. Almost instantly, agonized bellowing echoed throughout the room, as the pipes attached to the Stag set to work bleeding them dry. “You and I are going to make magic together.”