"So," Proclaimed the Ostentatiously Decorated Guardian of A Thousand Horrible Things With Too Many Capitalized Letters (a name nearly as long and awful as the guardian's form was horrendous to behold, a chaotic length of extradimensional sentience so bizarre and unsuitable for mortal minds to ever behold; naturally, Finn, Marceline, Bubblegum and Loki were totally fine with it because Marceline had already been half-eldritch abomination before she'd been vampirized, Finn was the incarnation of the Norse god Thor and so his mind could handle more than a mere mortal's, Loki was an ACTUAL god and was pretty insane to start with, and Bubblegum was a scientist so she was totally used to mind-breaking insanity that made no sense; the Guardian was quite plainly put out by all this) "Now you four face the Extremely Inconsiderate and Loosely Described Challenge of No Particular Narrative Relevance."

"Yes, we already knew that," Bubblegum said. "Why are you narrating that?"

"I am unable to explain without breaking the fourth wall and this isn't that kind of joke," the Guardian said. It paused, noticing that Bubblegum and Marceline were standing VERY close to Finn, somewhere between an honor guard and just looking extremely territorial. In retrospect, given that the girls were so much taller and larger than Finn, it was a wonder it had even noticed him in the first place, they were standing so close to him they were practically sandwiching him between themselves. "Hold on a moment. Why are you girls standing so close to the boy?"

"…Uh…" Finn said, a blush crawling up his neck. He started to scoot away before Marceline put a hand out, stopping him right where he was. "Because we're 'friends'."

"…Why are you saying it like that?"

"Definitely not avoiding any potential social distrust because of aspects of our relationship that people aren't comfortable with for some reason even though it's our business!" Finn and Bubblegum said quickly. "…Wow," Bubblegum said after a moment. "We are SO SMOOTH."

"INGENIOUS!" Finn agreed.

Marceline and Loki facepalmed. "Norns damn your shoes, bro, you SUCK at lying!" Loki complained.

"Great, now look at this," Marceline said dryly. "First you deny our relationship, now you got me agreeing with your pyromaniacal megalomaniacal compulsive liar of a brother."

"I'm not denying!" Finn said, horrified. "I'm just…trying to avoid public backlash about the thing with me and you and Peebs all being together in, like, LIKE-like but super-serious and for-real and stuff."

"I honestly cannot find anything to object about anything Marcy said about me," Loki observed. "…Damn it, woman, STOP KNOWING ME SO WELL! You'll feed the shippers, dang it!"

"Hold on a moment," The Guardian said slowly. "The girls and the boy are…in a relationship?"

"Yes," Finn, Bubblegum and Marceline said. "A relationship of three people. Which is to say that there are THREE of you, in a mutual romance. And it is serious."

"Yes," the three said. Hastily, Marceline added, "Well, there's a fourth of us, but Flame Princess was busy so she couldn't come along, but...yeah, defs serious." She looked a trifle embarrassed but pleased at the admission.

The Guardian was silent for a moment. "FOUR of you," it amended. "All together in a relationship with a boy who appears to be, at most, in his mid-teens. And the two women I see are young adults, at minimum. Physically, to boot."

"Yeah, so?" Finn, Bubblegum, and Marceline said, in varying degrees of annoyance: Finn and Bubblegum sounded resigned, in a 'not another complainer' way. Marceline just sounded like she'd like to punch the Guardian. (It HAD been her idea to demonstrate the finality of their relationship to all of Ooo, but Finn found most of them too perverted to even THINK about before passing out. Bubblegum was privately intrigued. Bubblegum's secret and immense degrees of pervertedness was perhaps the Candy Kingdom's best kept secret, and a pretty awkward one at that.)

"…That's creepy," The Guardian said, proving that certain biases stick with even extradimensional horrors from beyond. "Everything you said is creepy. You're creepy! And INSANE." It stared at Finn. "You're, what, fifteen? If even that? Could swear you're younger than that."

"So WHAT?" Finn snapped, and a low rumble of thunder rolled across the sky, and a bolt of lightning shattered the gloom, a threat of godly retribution.

Bubblegum swelled up in outrage, her eye twitching madly and her jaw working as though she were mentally chewing on the Guardian's soul, and Marceline was more direct. "Okay, you shut right the hell up," She snapped. "Quit complaining about our love life and focus. NOW."

For a moment, the Guardian was silent. Aware that it had overstepped the bonds of a professional obstacle-adventurer relationship, it relented and resolved to simply arrange to have the last fifteen minutes of its life erased at a later date. "...Of course. The trial, the EXCESSIVELY UNSPECIFIED AND PROBABLY EXITING TRIAL, begins now! Are you ready, hapless and extremely perverted adventurers?!"

"How'd you know I'm perverted?" Loki asked, genuinely curious as Finn, Marceline and Bubblegum scowled fiercely.

"You mean you are? I honestly could not have called that?"

"The crapstuff!?" Loki cursed...in his own special lexicon of weird curses. "I'm LOKI LIESMITH! The God of Chaos, Flames, and Effeminate Perversions! No, seriously, that's on my Purview list, I went and checked. I AM A TITANS-CURSED GOD OF PERVY-NESS, YOU STRANGE SILLY GENDERLESS ENTITY." He paused. "Say, you ARE genderless, yes?"

"...Yes," The Guardian said, feeling that if it regretted drawing the trio out into the revelation that they were...well, a ROMANTIC trio, it was REALLY going to regret what Loki had to say next. "I am without gender. And for that matter, sexual identity."

"So basically you're saying that you may not have a bias either way," Loki said. He grinned, a disturbing sight to see with the gruesome scars lining his lips and stretching from the corners of his mouth to his ears, like a twisted clown's smile. "THE LOKI-MAN LIKES IT. My place, after this adventure? And by my place, I mean my bro's basement. He's in a foursome love, he won't mind if I bring home another entity with mysterious sexual cravings. Loki LOVES spreading the love to everyone! Female, male, she-male, he-lady, transsexual, asexual, vertebrate, invertebrate, sentient and non-sentient, alternate forms of matter or energy, god and goddess and mortal and immortal and Time Lord, in ones or twos or fives or dozens by the measure of eons, the Loki LIKES THEM ALL."

The Guardian stared.

"So," Loki whispered to Finn, seemingly oblivious to the way the three were staring at him. "Think I've made a date on this? That's the stare of ATTRACTION, my friends!"

"No, I'm pretty sure that's the silence of utter horror," Finn said, looking like Loki like he was having a hard time deciding whether to be nonplussed or resigned to his brother's behavior. "You should be used to that by now."

"If I was, I wouldn't be doing my job right!"

"Wow," Marceline said dumbly. "And I thought I knew people that really went places. You make some of the other people I've dated sound boring." She didn't sound disgusted, exactly, but she was certainly a touch disturbed; not by the measure of Loki's interests (as she had lost interest in such minor details as gender labels and other classifications in favor of companionship and romance), but at least by the sheer scope and indiscriminate attitude. Being so casual about bedmates just felt wrong to her.

"...I don't suppose you kept notes?" Bubblegum said innocently.

"Yep," Loki said, while Marceline and Finn looked at Bubblegum in horror.

"Ah," Bubblegum said. "May I borrow them?"

"Sure!"

"Peebles!" Finn cried.

"Bonnibel, WHAT?!" Marceline nearly shrieked. "Dude! You're supposed to be the INNOCENT one! Half the people that think me and you should get together think you're the prissy one!"

Bubblegum pouted. "...Whatever gave people THAT impression?" She asked, sounding genuinely surprised.

The Guardian stirred at last, rising from this latest horror. "Please stop talking," It whispered in the bleakest of voices, one normally reserved for survivors of eldritch abomination meetings.

"Oh, good, you're back?" Loki said. "So! A word on that date?"

"By the ten thousand curses of Malfeas, NO!" The Guardian shrieked.

"Eh, your loss," Loki said, just grinning.

"Yes. I shall CERTAINLY remove this entire experience from my mnemonic consciousness. Are you ready for the trial or not?"

"Yo, I say, we were BORN ready!" Bubblegum declared confidently.

"I was born naked and screaming!" Finn said, for no apparent reason.

An awkward pause ensued.

Loki, who had decided not to even pretend he wasn't criminally insane that day, said, "And if all goes according to plan, you'll DIE that way too. Heh." Marceline and Bubblegum slowly turned to face him, flat expressions of murderous rage presented to him. "…Aw, crapfish."

A inexplicably gigantic laser canon (that Bubblegum somehow fit under her jacket) and a slash to the head from Marceline's axe left Loki lying on the ground, bleeding horribly but not very much hurt, owing to his ability to withstand any injury provided it was funny. (Also, he was a god and therefore ridiculously tough.) "Girls can't take a joke," He muttered.

"...This isn't going to ward you off not giving me your notes, is it?" Bubblegum asked, holding the laser like she would shoot him in very indecent places if he was going to be a JERK about it.

"Sure, why not?"

"Why do all the complete lunatics take MY quest path?" The Guardian complained, throwing its nebulous limbs up into the air. "Metagaos devour my problems, MY LIFE SUCKS. I could have taken that internship with Slaneesh, but NOOOO, I said, 'I want to be a stereotypical guardian in Ooo, I don't like esoteric perversions taken to a horrifying extreme'! Look how THAT turned out!"

Finn favored the girls with a dopey lovestruck look. "Did you girls know, you're SUPER-pretty especially when you're savaging an enemy in a berserk fury?"

"Aw, you're adorbs," Marceline said, color rising a little in her cheeks, and she shyly bent over and kissed him on the forehead. Bubblegum did so as well, more forthrightly, and the two girls held hands the whole time, squeezing tightly. Their free hands sought out Finn's own hands, and squeezed just as tightly as they did each other, and he returned the gesture with even more emotion, hardly as suppressed as the girl's.

Loki had already gotten up and dusted himself off, no wounds to be seen. "Your romance is cute and all, but now's not the time." They ignored him, still kissing. "Okay, that's enough." Finn shyly raised his hands up, taking gentle grasp of Marceline and Bubblegum's shoulders, and squeezed once before daring to kiss them both on the cheek, the sound of it like a distant echo of triumphant thunder. "Okay, SERIOUSLY." They kissed him on the cheek too, Bubblegum taking the right and Marceline the left, and there was enough passion there to make the Guardian feel EXTREMELY awkward and even a bit blushy.

"YOU GUYS HAVE NO SENSE OF TIMING," Loki complained. Bubblegum and Marceline paused, looked back at him with eyebrows raised. They smirked smugly, even challengingly, and squeezed Finn's shoulders, their arms sliding down as his hands dropped. "Okay, seriously, that's enough, that's far enough down Missies One and Two! Hey, YOU STOP THAT RIGHT NOW!? ME DAMN IT, STOP PREDATORING ON MY LITTLE BROTHER!"

"Why?" Finn asked, a bit lightheaded and grinning like a complete dope.

"FINN, THOR, WHATEVER THE MUSPELHEIM YOUR NAME IS, STOP LETTING THEM PREDATOR ON YOU!"

"Nope," Bubblegum and Marceline said as Finn put his arms around their waists in a loose and informal hug, and he made a small squeak when they squeezed him elsewhere. Loki facepalmed.

All in all, they DID eventually make it pass the Guardian through the unspecified trial and went further on the even more unspecified quest. The Guardian had to get compensation for its trauma, and Loki reminded himself to move further back when he made jokes at Bubblegum and Marceline's expense.

And when they got home, he facepalmed so mightily that explosions of flame reached the stars; first when he told Flame Princess all about it and she wished that SHE had been there to join in the fun (both romantic and ass-kicking), and again when he told Jake about all that to get his fellow Finn-brother in arms only for him to express congratulations for Finn's accomplishments in love. At worst, he seemed mildly uncomfortable.

When Loki declared, "Those three are getting ENTIRELY too comfortable with each other," his annoyance at the understatement was mingled with his irritation that his little brother (who was technically older but this current incarnation was younger so it TOTALLY COUNTED) had three love interests, and he, Loki Liesmith, the most openly partner-mongering of the Aesir and lover with lack of discrimination on par with Zeus of the Dodekathon, didn't even have ONE.

His compulsion to skip a few realities over and introduce himself to the Ice Queen of Aaa was looking more and more appealing.