Chapter Text
The day started, as most terrible days at Maellard’s Interstellar Park did, with Mordecai and Rigby doing absolutely nothing productive.
“Dude, I’m starving,” Rigby whined, draped upside-down over a maintenance railing. His Quantum-tinged aura flickered faintly—not from any threat, just indigestion from the 14 bags of Nebula Nachos he’d eaten for breakfast.
“You’re always starving,” Mordecai muttered, not looking up from his phone. “Just go to the snack bar.”
“I can’t. Benson said if I use my employee discount one more time before lunch, he’d dock my Park Bond.”
“Then pay for it.”
Rigby made a sound like a dying hover-engine. “With what money?”
Above them, through the massive transparent dome that encased the park, the star-speckled void of space twinkled peacefully. It was a slow day. The anti-grav carousel hummed. The Cosmic Cotton Candy Nebula puffed contentedly. Skips was doing something ancient and important near the shield generators. Pops was serenading a topiary shaped like Qlipoth’s hammer. Muscle Man and Hi Five Ghost were testing how many churros they could fit in their mouths simultaneously. Everything was, against all odds, perfectly calm.
Which is exactly when the Stellaron hit.
The impact was not an explosion. It was more like a wrong note played on a galactic piano—a shimmering, golden-pink *crack* that split the snack bar’s roof open and embedded itself directly into the deep fryer. The shockwave rippled outward not as heat or force, but as harmony. Every object within fifty meters suddenly began vibrating at the same frequency. The napkin dispensers hummed a C-sharp. The soda fountains burbled in three-part harmony.
Mordecai dropped his phone. “Uh… what was that?”
From the ruined snack bar, a column of iridescent light shot upward, painting the dome’s interior in colours that didn’t quite exist. The light pulsed once, twice, and then a sound emerged—a sweet, melodic chime that somehow carried an entire argument within it.
Let’s all be together. Let’s all be one snack.
Benson’s voice crackled over the Park Bond intercom. “WHAT IN THE AMBER LORD’S NAME IS HAPPENING AT THE SNACK BAR?! Mordecai! Rigby! I swear if you two—”
“WE DIDN’T DO ANYTHING!” Mordecai shouted back, already running. Rigby scrambled after him, his earlier nausea forgotten in the face of potential destruction that was, for once, not their fault.
The snack bar was no longer a snack bar.
It was a congregation. Every food item had crawled, rolled, or oozed out of its packaging and was now migrating toward the glowing object in the deep fryer. Hot dogs slithered like fleshy snakes. A battalion of sentient churros marched in lockstep. The nacho cheese had formed itself into a vaguely humanoid shape and was conducting the smaller snacks with a tortilla-chip baton.
“Oh, dude, gross,” Rigby said, eyes huge.
“MY CHURROS!” Muscle Man barreled past them, Hi Five Ghost fluttering anxiously behind. “You know who else hates when their snacks form a hive mind?!—”
“Don’t,” Mordecai said.
“—MY MOM!”
Hi Five Ghost gave a spectral thumbs-up of agreement, then immediately a spectral thumbs-down of concern as a flock of sentient popcorn kernels dive-bombed them.
Benson arrived at a dead sprint, his amber Park Bond flaring hot around his wrist. The fire element in his veins was already smouldering. He took one look at the cheese-conductor, the churro army, and the deep fryer pulsing with alien light, and his left eye twitched violently.
“What,” he said, voice dangerously level, “is that?”
Skips materialised beside him, having apparently been there the whole time. The immortal yeti’s Ice-element presence frosted the air. He studied the glowing object, expression grim.
“Stellaron,” Skips said.
“A what-aron?” Rigby asked.
“Cancer of All Worlds. Seed of disaster. The IPC calls it a cosmic tumour.” Skips crossed his arms. “I’ve seen one before. Two hundred years ago, one turned an entire moon into a single organism that sang funeral dirges for a decade.”
“Great!” Benson threw his hands up. “Perfect! A cosmic tumour landed in our deep fryer! Do you have any idea what corporate is going to say about this?!”
“Probably something about insurance,” Mordecai offered.
“WE DON’T HAVE INSURANCE FOR CANCER OF ALL WORLDS!”
The Stellaron pulsed again, and this time the wave of harmony was stronger. The park’s ambient music system kicked on unbidden, blasting a jaunty rendition of the IPC corporate jingle. The cheese conductor raised its baton. The churros began to dance.
And then Pops wandered in.
“Oh, my!” He beamed at the chaos. “What a delightful parade! Are we having a snack festival? I do so love festivals!”
“Pops, no, stay back—” Benson started, but it was too late. Pops clapped his hands in pure joy, and the Stellaron responded. The light shifted from golden-pink to a warm, buttery amber. The snacks all turned toward Pops and bowed.
“It likes him,” Hi Five Ghost whispered, audibly for once.
“Of course it likes him,” Skips said. “Stellarons respond to desire. It’s reading the world around it and trying to grant its wish.” He paused. “This snack bar’s deepest desire is probably… to be eaten with enthusiasm.”
Rigby’s eyes lit up. “I HAVE ENTHUSIASM!”
“RIGBY, NO—”
Ten minutes later, the situation had escalated.
Rigby, now glowing faintly with Stellaron resonance, was riding a giant sentient pizza across the park’s main promenade. The pizza was singing—actually singing—a sea shanty about mozzarella. Mordecai was in the air, trying to dive-bomb Rigby off the pizza with Wind-element blades, but the churro army kept launching itself like sugary javelins to intercept him. Muscle Man was suplexing a sentient soft pretzel that had wrapped around a park guest. The guest, an IPC middle manager from the Trade Division, was screaming. Hi Five Ghost kept phasing through him to offer calming high-fives. It wasn’t working.
Benson stood at the epicentre, gumball barriers flaring around him, sweat pouring down his face as he tried to contain the Stellaron’s harmonic radius. Every time it pulsed, another food group gained sapience.
“Skips!” he roared. “How do we stop it?!”
“You can’t destroy a Stellaron,” Skips said, carving ice runes into the ground to slow the cheese conductor’s advance. “Best we can do is contain it. Seal it in Preservation energy until corporate can send a retrieval team.”
“How long will that take?!”
“Last time I called IPC Retrieval, it took forty-seven years.”
“FORTY-SEVEN—Mordecai, if you don’t get Rigby off that pizza, I am firing you into the nearest sun!”
“I’M TRYING!” Mordecai screeched, dodging a volley of sentient jalapeño poppers.
Pops, meanwhile, had acquired a parade baton from somewhere and was marching cheerfully at the head of the snack procession. “Left, right, left, right! Wonderful form, little pretzels! You’re all doing splendidly!”
The Stellaron sang.
It was Hi Five Ghost who figured it out.
He’d been watching the Stellaron’s pulses sync with the park’s emotional state. When Pops was happy, it was gentle. When Benson raged, it spat fire-aspected nacho bombs. When Rigby wanted more, it grew. The Stellaron was a Harmony seed—it wanted everything to unify into a single, cohesive whole. In this case, a single, all-consuming snack entity.
So Fives did the most Hi Five Ghost thing possible: he phased directly into Benson, possessed him for exactly three seconds, and used his managerial authority to issue a single command through the Park Bond:
“SNACK BAR IS CLOSED FOR RENOVATION. ALL FOOD ITEMS RETURN TO STASIS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.”
The Park Bond flared. The Preservation energy that held the entire planetoid’s rules in place rippled outward, and for one beautiful moment, order reasserted itself. The churros froze. The pizza collapsed. The cheese conductor let out a mournful G-flat and splattered into a perfectly normal puddle.
Rigby tumbled off the pizza, Quantum sparks fizzling. “Aw, man…”
Skips moved fast. With the Stellaron’s harmonic field momentarily suppressed, he encased the deep fryer in a solid block of enchanted Ice, then layered it with runic wards of Abundance—not to destroy, but to soothe. The Stellaron’s light dimmed to a sleepy amber pulse.
Benson stood there, chest heaving, high five ghost sheepishly phasing out of him. “Did you just… possess me?”
Fives gave an apologetic thumbs-up.
“...That was the most efficient thing anyone has done all day. I hate that it worked.”
Later, in the wreckage of the snack bar
Mordecai was picking popcorn out of his feathers. Rigby was sulking because the Stellaron-infused pizza had tasted “incredible, dude, like the best pizza ever, and you guys ruined it.” Muscle Man had the pretzel that attacked the IPC manager draped over his shoulder like a trophy. “I’m keeping him. I’m naming him Bretzel.”
“You can’t keep a Stellaron-mutated snack as a pet,” Benson said, face in his hands.
“Watch me.”
Pops was gently patting the ice block containing the deep fryer. “There, there, little cosmic tumor. You just needed a nap, didn’t you?”
Skips was already on the line with Mr. Maellard, explaining why the snack bar would need a rebuild and how they now had a live Stellaron in cold storage. From the speaker, Mr. Maellard’s ancient voice crackled: “Did you say Stellaron? Those are worth a fortune on the black market! Put it in my office!”
“We’re not selling a cosmic cancer,” Skips said flatly.
“Fine. Use it to power the roller coaster.”
Benson screamed into a pillow made of frozen cotton candy.
The Stellaron remains contained in Skips’ rune-ice beneath the snack bar, where it occasionally hums showtunes. Bretzel the Pretzel is now an honorary member of the grounds crew and has been assigned a tiny Park Bond. Rigby still tries to eat him. The IPC has been notified. They’ll respond in approximately 47 years.