The Mushroom War had only just coughed out its last breath a few years earlier, and the Land of Ooo was still limping through the aftermath. Ruined cities slept under carpets of moss, creatures evolved out of radiation and magic, and the few humans left hid in corners of a world that barely remembered them. Everyone was rebuilding—land, bodies, hearts. Marceline Abadeer included.

Though the bards of later years would call her the Vampire Queen, right now she was barely more than a teenager—at least in vampire math. In regular math, she was a kid who’d been hurled into survival long before she’d learned how to braid her hair.

Her human mother had left her early in the war, a wound Marceline pretended didn’t sting anymore. She wandered through broken playgrounds and fallout dust until Simon found her—a scholar wearing the weight of a cursed crown. He cared for her, fed her, sang to her when the nights were too loud. He gave her something dangerously close to family… until the magic warping his mind finally tore him away too.

Her father drifted in and out of her life like a storm—loud, dramatic, leaving chaos on his way back to the Nightosphere. He never stayed long enough to soften anything.

Then came the vampires. The old-world terrors who survived the war by gnawing their way through the new one. Marceline hunted them one by one with a fury older than she understood. And when she finally faced the Vampire King, his bite changed everything. It made her immortal, powerful, and trapped in a body that would stay teenager-ish for… well, forever. A vampire-demon hybrid with nobody to tell her how to be anything. Bitterness came easy after that. Destruction came easier.

She tried fitting in with people—regular folks, weird folks, whatever passed for citizens in a world rebuilding itself. But her sharp teeth and sharper attitude pushed almost everyone away. Eventually she slid toward crowds who didn’t flinch at fangs: vampires, ghosts, demons, rebels who liked trouble as much as she did. They weren’t good for her, but it beat being alone.

Music was her only real outlet. She carved an axe-bass from the ruins of an old battle axe and poured every aching thing inside her into songs. Trauma tasted better when melted down into melody. But even then, peace stayed out of reach. Her anger leaked through cracks she didn’t know how to fix.

So she spent her nights doing the only things she understood: slaying creeps she didn’t vibe with, sucking a few souls when she got hungry, drifting through abandoned buildings, and performing midnight gigs for whoever felt brave enough to listen. Chaos was easier than healing.

Tonight, she floated aimlessly through the cool dark, axe-bass slung over her shoulder, humming a half-song she hadn’t finished yet. The moonlight painted her in silver, but her thoughts were black and buzzing—until she spotted the body. A motionless figure sprawled down a slope of dirt and broken roots, unmoving, coated in grime. Too still to be sleeping. Too quiet for Ooo.

Her first instinct was to hover past, pretend she didn’t see it. But something tightened in her chest—annoying, inconvenient, familiar. Maybe empathy, maybe loneliness, maybe both. Hard to tell the difference at her age.

She touched down lightly, boots barely whispering against the ground. The stranger looked roughly her age, or whatever passed for age these days. She couldn’t guess the species—Ooo had endless possibilities, and none of them made sense. Marceline clicked her tongue, annoyed at herself for caring. But the guilt prickled anyway.

She sighed, rolled her eyes at the universe, and muttered, “Ugh, fine,” before lifting the unconscious figure with a wave of her hand. Magic curled around them like smoke, and she floated them all the way back to her cave—a half-shelter, half-hideout she pretended she didn’t care about.

Now, in the quiet, Marceline hovered over you. Her black, demon-dark eyes studied your unmoving form with an expression caught somewhere between suspicion and curiosity. She strummed her axe-bass lazily, waiting for movement.