It was a quiet night in the Candy Kingdom. The gumball guardians, with no threats to deal with, idly blew bubbles in the moonlight, Princess Bubblegum and her citizens slumbered peacefully, with no lemony earls staring at them as they slept, and Peppermint Butler had taken the night off to go play a few holes of golf with Hunson Abadeer. Even the Ice King seemed to be favoring a quiet night in, likely putting the finishing touches to his latest "literary masterpiece", Fionna and Cake: Full Ice Consequences.

All in all, a perfect night for sneaking into Princess Bubblegum's secret lab.

"So remind me again why we're sneaking into Princess Bubblegum's secret lab?" Jake said as he stretched up to the window nearest to the lab, Finn on his back.

"I gotta send my reply to my penpal, is why." Finn responded in-between envelope licks.

"Waaait, since when do you have a penpal? And what's that gotta do with PB's lab, bro?" Jake questioned as the two of them stepped through the open window.

"Since like a couple months ago. I found a letter in PB's Dimensport-box - you know, that thing that we thought was a science fridge - addressed "to anyone". At first I was gonna give it to PB, since I was there to collect her mail from it anyway, but I read it while looking for her and it turns out the dude who wrote it is pretty cool!" Finn dug around in his backpack for a moment, then pulled out a stack of letters and proceeded to start reading the first one aloud.

"'Dear whoever finds this letter,

Hello from my dimension! I've been told this device can send messages to other worlds, and I' wanted to give it a shot! You can call me Professor Coldstone - I'm a pretty big hero in this world, even if I've done a couple things I'm not proud of in the past, and to our knowledge I'm also the last known human! Are there any other humans in your world? I'd love to hear all about it!

Hope to hear from you real soon,

-Professor Coldstone"

"Woah, so you think this might be you from an alternate dimension?" Jake said. "I mean, they said they're a human, AND a big hero."

"Could be!" Finn said, re-folding the letter as they entered the lab. "I know PB uses the Dimensport-box to write letters to herself in different dimensions, and if there's a PB in Professor Coldstone's universe, there's gotta be a me too, right?"

"So what kinda hero biz does your buddy get up to? Did he fight the Lich too?" Jake asked.

"Yeah, he mentioned that in letter two…" Finn said as he rifled through the letters again, heading for Princess Bubblegum's Dimensport-box as he did so. "He's taken on all the other big bad monsters, too - dragons, chimeras, witches… And look, in letter four, he talks about how he took down two robbers with nothing but a bag of flour and some donuts! After he gave them his actual weapon!"

"Whaaat?!" Jake grabbed the relevant letter from Finn. "He's gotta be makin' that up… No, wait. Now I'm reading how he did it, it actually sounds pretty plausible. Dang, man, what if you and he teamed up in person or something? I bet the two of you could smite some serious evil together! Too bad we can't visit him or somethin'."

"Yeah…" Finn said, opening the Dimensport-box, latest letter to Professor Coldstone in hand. He often wondered why PB had made the inside so big if she was just going to use it as an interdimensional mailbox…

It was then that he realized that, if he tucked his knees in just right, he could totally fit his entire body in there. And if Jake shrunk himself down to about the size of a loaf of bread, he could fit in there too.

"….Jake, you think you could stretch to hit the "send" button on this thing from the inside? I've got an idea."

"Probably, but are you sure Peebs is gonna be okay with you mailing yourself to other dimensions with her sciencey stuff? And do you even know how to work this thing?" Despite his verbal protestations, Jake had already started to shrink down to a bread-loaf-ish size as Finn climbed into the Dimensport-box.

"She showed me how when I wrote back to Professor Coldstone the first time." Finn said, tucking his knees in. "She said it was okay, and she wouldn't have made it big enough to transport something the machine couldn't handle, right?"

"I guess so." Jake replied, clambering into Finn's lap and closing the door behind him, keeping one arm outside for now. "Wait, we're not gonna leave my arm behind when I hit the send button, right? I need that arm for stuff. Important stuff!"

"There's a three second countdown before it actually sends stuff, you can totes pull your arm in on time." Finn said. "Now c'mon, I wanna see a whole new dimension!"

"Okay, I'm hittin' it!" Jake said, and sure enough, a moment later the machine whirred to life as Jake pulled his arm back into the box and tugged the door fully shut.

"Three… two… ONE!" Finn counted down. "HERE WE GOOOO-"

The whirring noise intensified.

There was an electric, crackling noise, then everything got momentarily bright.

This was then followed by a loud, fizzing POP.

Then everything went dark.

"…Was that it?" Finn felt Jake shifting position in his lap.

"I think so. Although I'm pretty sure the lights weren't supposed to go out." Finn said, opening the door. Immediately, his heart sank - not only were the lights in the lab all suddenly out, but he spotted smoke coming off the panel on the outside of the Dimensport-box - that wasn't supposed to happen! "Oh Glob, I think we overloaded it! PB's gonna be furious at me!"

"And I don't think we went to a different dimension, bro - everything looks about the same." Jake said, peering into the gloom. "Just darker. Maybe all we did when we turned that thing on was blow all the fuses out!"

Finn sighed. He'd been looking forward to meeting "Professor Coldstone" even more than he'd let on, and now all he'd done was blow out all of PB's fuses. Now he'd have to wait until she got more before he heard from his penpal again! And what if it COULDN'T be fixed? Or more likely, Princess Bubblegum didn't let him near the thing again after it got fixed? Then what?

Finn was quickly denied the chance to worry any further about such things, as moments later a figure emerged from the blackness, grabbing the front of his shirt and yelling at him:

"WHAT DID YOU DO?"

It was Princess Bubblegum, but she looked… different. She was wearing a pair of sciencey-type goggles on her head instead of her crown, which, while odd, wasn't entirely out of question… but she also looked like she'd decided to forego sleep and hairbrushes for a week, a decided change from her previous appearance fifteen minutes before.

"I-I just wanted to see if your dimensport-box could transport people! I didn't mean to break it!"

"I-" Bubblegum squinted in the gloom for a moment, then dug a small flashlight out of her coat pocket, which she proceeded to shine in Finn's face, then Jake's. "…You're… oh!" All the anger in PB's voice dissipated, although her iron grip on Finn's shirt did not.

"So wait, are we off the hook here?" Jake asked. "Even after blowing out half the power in the lab?"

Bubblegum didn't seem to be listening, and instead was muttering to herself, sounding increasingly manic as she went on. "Yes… This just might work! I mean, you're clearly not going to be exactly the same, but there's a chance that if I work off of your brain waves and compare them to his…" Abruptly, she lifted Finn off his feet and tossed him into a nearby examination chair. "Stay RIGHT HERE while I fire up the backup generators and try to get main power back online!" PB dashed through to an adjacent room" We're gonna need as much juice as we can get!"

"Wait, Juice?!" Finn called after her. "For what?"

"For the deep brain probe-scanning, silly!" Bubblegum called back. "Don't worry, I've done this a couple times before! And I'll use a clean bonesaw on you, I promise!"

"Uh… Yeah, that's good!" Finn yelled, trying to conceal his sudden, very intense concern for his own safety.

"Wow, I… I think Princess Bubblegum might have gone crazy." Jake whispered as Finn leapt out of the chair.

"Geez, I think so. maybe us using the Dimensport-box thing caused that?" Finn hoped he could fix this before this new, maniacal Princess Bubblegum decided to brain-probe-scan everyone in the candy kingdom.

"I dunno. Maybe she's a Princess Bubblegum from an alternate dimension! One where she's crazy or somethin'." Jake responded, morphing his hand into a key for the door.

"What?! Oh geez, what if we dialled the wrong dimension and summoned a bunch of evil counterparts!" Finn whispered (Well, it was more like quietly screaming at this point).

"Maybe, dude. " A click announced that Jake had managed to open the door. " For now, let's get out of here before this crazy version of PB saws your dome open and starts pokin' at your noodle."

The two of them had managed to sneak halfway down the hall - which, for some reason, was more darkly decorated than Finn remembered it - when they heard the lab door slam open.

"WAIT, COME BACK! YOU DON'T KNOW HOW IMPORTANT THIS IS!" Finn turned to look to see PB advancing on them rapidly, some sort of electric probe in one hand and a bonesaw in the other.

"OH GLOB, LET'S GET OUT OF HERE!" Jake yelled, shifting to a larger, rideable form. Finn took the hint and leapt on his best friend and brother's back, gripping his fur tightly as Jake put on some extra speed as he rounded a corner. "We better check outside, dude, maybe we can find the real Bubblegum, or someone else who can help us!"

"But what if the crazy PB follows us out there? We need to make sure she doesn't rampage outside the castle! We need to make sure she stays inside the lab until we find the real PB!"

"GUYS, GET BACK HERE!" PB yelled distantly - from what sounded a lot like the corridor outside the lab. "I CAN'T LEAVE THE LAB UNATTENDED WITH ALL THOSE BUST FUZES!"

Finn paused. Then, pointing, "…Take a left here, we'll head out through one of the side gates."

—

It became immediately apparent, after exiting the castle, that they were NOT in fact in the Candy Kingdom.

A flock of bats passed overhead as the two of them took in the sights. It wasn't just the interior of the castle that was darker than Finn recalled - what was once yellow and pink candy brickwork was now black granite and steel, with accents of crimson and purple here and there. The local houses had similar makeovers, with slate tiled roofs and wrought iron railings being a staple motif. Looking down the road from his vantage point on Jake's back, Finn realized that some of the buildings in the kingdom were built on stilts in what looked like vast pits of mud or tar.

"Woah, dude, how did everything get so spooky all of a sudden?" Jake said, backing up against the door. in a nearby cafe patio, Nearby, a couple of skeletons and a fuzzy jumping spider the size of a person had looked up from their plates of fries to stare at the shockingly unspooky newcomers.

Finn, however, did not seem quite as perturbed. "Wait, Jake. I know where we are!

"Wait, really?"

"Yeah!… Well, I think so." Finn dug the letters out of his backpack again. "Professor Coldstone mentioned a Monster Kingdom full of good monsters in one of his letters! We did travel to his dimension after all!"

Jake grinned. "Awesome, the dimensional fridge machine worked!…. or it did until it broke, I guess."

"Yeah, I guess we're stuck here till we work out how to fix it." Finn hadn't thought that far ahead yet. While he had wanted to visit his friend, he definitely didn't want to be stuck away from home forever.

"Well, we can ask your letter buddy to help us, right?" Jake said. "'Cause I… don't really wanna face that Princess Bubblegum. She might saw open MY head too. Where does Professor Thingystone lives?"

"I think he said it was a treehouse near the monster kingdom." Finn responded, waving at the three gawkers. He didn't think anyone would recognize his friend's pen name, but he knew something else that would identify him to locals. "Hey, do you guys know if there's a human living nearby? We gotta ask him something."

The jumping spider, proboscis still in his fries, spoke. "Y'r tlkin btt Sch'mn rtt?" He raised a fuzz-covered leg and pointed east. "ih Iizz th't wy bhh't thee mlzz."

Finn had only understood a fraction of what the spider had said, but he and Jake both understood pointed directions easily enough. "Thanks, dude!" Finn called as he and Jake rode off. "Enjoy your fries!"

"W'll drrr!" the spider said, waving after them. His skeletal companions frowned at his bad manners. Speaking with your mouth full? How gross!

—-

It was only after passing through the last of the bone-white, red-needled pines that lined the edges of the monster kingdom that they saw it on the horizon, illuminated by the rising moon.

"Dude, that looks pretty much exactly like OUR house." Jake said as they crossed the river. "right down to the boat on the roof."

"Weird. I know he said some stuff in our world was kind of the same, but our exact same treehouse?" Finn frowned. "We gotta check this out, Jake."

"Yeah, what if our presence caused a dimensional shift and your buddy's being held hostage by, like, evil versions of us? Maybe they took him by surprise and he's tied up in their secret lair!"

"Whaaat?" Finn raised an eyebrow. "Jake, the possibility of even half of what you said happening is pretty low." Finn responded as they neared the treehouse. "Besides, from what he's said in his letters, Professor Coldstone's totally smart enough to outwit two evil dimension doubles."

"Uhh… You sure about that, dude?" Jake said, pointing to the front door - which had been torn off its hinges and was lying a few feet away from doorway. "'Cause it looks like SOMETHING broke in really really recently!"

Finn jumped from Jake's back, running inside. If the door to this treehouse was anything like the one back home, it would have taken a hell of a lot of force to rip it off the hinges. "Eesh. Yeah, I think we better check inside." Despite the sudden potential threat, Finn couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement - After so long, he was finally going to meet Professor Coldstone! Heck, if there really WERE bad dudes in there, he was going to meet his friend by fighting alongside him! What could be more math than that?

However, once inside, he realized that things were decidedly more off than he had expected. The treasure room looked… different. Instead of artifacts, gold and jewels being heaped haphazardly wherever they could fit, someone had carefully stacked gold coins into countless pillars, sorted trinkets and gems into large crates, and placed illuminated scrolls - what were scrolls doing in the treasure room?! - into neatly arranged piles. It looked more like a cargo hold than a treasure room, Finn thought.

"What the-?!" Jake exclaimed as he headed inside. "Did someone break into your buddy's house and tidy up?"

"We'd better check out the rest of the house." Finn said, climbing the ladder to the upstairs levels, Jake following close behind. "I don't know what's going on here, but it clearly ain't right."

—

Despite the gloom inside - the only light was a dim glow from the oven, which was on for some reason - it became immediately clear that the treasure room was not the only thing that had been changed. Bookshelves and cabinets filled with all sorts of artifacts lined many of the living room walls, with tapestries and wall-hangings taking up most of the free wall space. It looked like something between a museum and a library.

A delicious, sugary aroma was emanating from the oven.

"Hey, smells like whoever broke in is bakin' cookies!" Jake whispered, his nose stretching all the way over to the oven to get a better sniff. "I think they put a little honey in these! Nice!"

"Jake, focus! We gotta find out who broke in here and make sure Professor Coldstone is okay!"

"Well, can we at least turn on the light?" Jake said, following his nose over to the kitchen. "At least then we'll know if they're hiding in the corners of the room or somethin'."

"Yeah, good point." Finn said, flicking on the light switch next to him with a click.

Immediately, from above them, came a frantic scuffling, followed by several thuds.

Finn's head snapped upwards. "I think they're in the bedroom!"

"Yeah, but now they know we're comin'. Want me to stay here and cover the exits?" Jake said, conspicuously eyeing the cookies in the oven. They looked about done, and Jake was sorely tempted to take them out of the oven before they got burned.

Finn rolled his eyes. He trusted Jake to not get so distracted that he wouldn't notice someone trying to make a break for it, cookies or not, but still. "Yeah, just… don't get too distracted by those cookies, dude." Finn climbed up the ladder leading to the second floor and bedroom, taking care to skip the creaky fourth rung on his way up.

Jake, finally alone with the cookies, suppressed a giggle of glee as he slipped on some oven gloves, quietly opened the oven door and pulled out the tray of cookies. The uninhibited scent of cookies hit jake's sensitive nose like a delicious fist. He'd have to wait a minute or two for them to cool down, but once that happened, he was totally gonna go to town on those cookies…

Jake suddenly registered hurried footsteps behind him, and they didn't sound like Finn's. He quickly put the tray of hot cookies on the kitchen table, pulled off the oven gloves, and turned around just in time to see the person making the footsteps rush into the room.

"Oh, hey, you caught them before they burned!" The newcomer said, not seeming all that concerned with Jake's appearance. "They're for you and your friend anyway - Bonnibel sent a messenger over saying you were probably on your way here - I don't know why she didn't send Peppermint Butler, though, the guy she did send got too impatient and ripped the front door right off its dang hinges when he got here! I must say, I wasn't really expecting you to be, well, you, but she did say you were both from an alternate dimension, so I guess I didn't know what to expect!"

Jake de-stretched his jaw from the floor to its proper place. Of all the people he'd been expecting to see here, he hadn't been expecting this. And he hadn't expected that out of their mouth.

"So, uh… If you're…" Jake gestured weakly to the other, having trouble finding words for what he was seeing. "Then who's Finn gonna find upstairs?…"

Jake had a feeling he already knew the answer to this.

—

Finn's gut turned at the dim but unmistakable sight of bunny ears peeping out from under the bedcovers - What if they'd been in the wrong dimension all this time, and he was in a dimension where Ice King's creepy fanfiction about a girl version of him was true?! he hoped fervently that the part about her being in love with Ice King wasn't true, too! Steeling himself for a fight, and his sword half drawn, he pulled back the covers…

…Only to be greeted by a taxidermied rabbit and a sweater full of pillow. A trap! Finn fully drew his sword and whirled round just in time to see a shadowy figure leap from the top of a nearby bookshelf and lash out at him with some sort of flail. Whoever had taken over the treehouse in this dimension, they'd heard him coming! Finn blocked, then struck out at the newcomer, who dodged - wow, he's fast!, Finn thought, as he tried to dodge a blow from the flail-type weapon and only partially succeeded. Throwing all caution to the wind, he charged at the figure, grabbing the collar of their clothes with the intent of slamming him up against the wall.

It might have worked if it hadn't been so dark and he hadn't essentially thrown both himself and his adversary down the ladder hole to the floor below by accident instead. instead, the two of them went tumbling head-over-heels down to the next floor, kicking and punching each other as they went (Finn's mystery assailant didn't hit nearly as hard as he did, but he hit faster and was better at fully evading blows). The two of them hit the floor in a heap, Finn scrambling to his feet as the newcomer leapt to his own

"Give up?" The shadowy figure spoke for the first time - his voice sparking some sort of memory in Finn's head that he couldn't quite place.

"No way." Finn replied, readying his demonsblood sword again as the other started to twirl his flail once more. He didn't know who this jerk was, but he was prepared to engage them in an epic battle to defeat him and find out what had happened to Professor Coldstone, even if it took all ni-

The light clicked on.

"Geez, Finn, I leave you alone for five minutes and you get into a fight and don't even invite me!" Jake's voice sounded from the doorway, his mouth sounding suspiciously full.

"I guess they share bad manners in common," another voice intoned from the doorway. "Oi, put the nunchucks down, we've got guests!"

Finn wasn't paying much attention to whomever was in the doorway, his focus more on his now-revealed ambusher.

He knew this boy, this fellow human. From a thousand-year-old VCR tape.

"Now, I never believed in the supernatural stuff, just had a fascination with superstitions…"

Except the last time he'd seen him like this, he'd been an adult, and he'd lived before the war.

"But everything changed when I came into contact with this item…."

Finn now quite clearly remembered where he'd heard that voice.

The other boy looked just as shocked as he did - although judging by his expression, the shock seemed to be rapidly giving way to curiosity? - and didn't seem all too willing to put the nunchucks down just yet.

Then, tentatively, he spoke. "…Finn-Ice, right?"

Finn-Ice. There were implications behind being called that, ones Finn didn't like. Did that mean that HE was the one who got cursed by that crown in this world?

But if he was the one with the ice crown in this world, then that meant…

That meant that this guy…

Finn looked towards the doorway. Beside Jake, holding a plate of cookies (That Jake was rapidly demolishing), there was a penguin.

"C'mon, man, put the sword down!" Jake said, growing even more arms with which to hold tasty baked treats. "Gunter made us cookies!"

Finn couldn't help himself. Gesturing wildly towards the other boy, he stated what he assumed to be the bleeding obvious. "BUT—- BUT HE'S A BIG NER-"

A loud THWACK - the sort of THWACK one would get if you struck someone in the head with nunchucks - resonated through the treehouse, followed by a weighty THUD as Finn collapsed to the ground unconscious.

"SIMON!" Gunter exploded. "What was that for?! You are SO not getting any cookies now!"

Simon adjusted his glasses with one hand as he hung his nunchucks from his belt with the other. "You heard him! He called me a big nerd!"

"No offence, dude," Jake said with a mouth full of cookie, "But you're wearing a bow tie and glasses. That's kinda super mega nerdy right there."

"That doesn't mean he gets to break into my house and be a jerk about it, bro." Simon folded his arms. Gunter facepalmed (Or face-winged, to be more accurate). Why did this happen every time somebody popped in for an unexpected visit?