If Dipper had learned anything from his great uncle, then it was that everything in life cost something. Sometimes it was fifty bucks a week to look after two rowdy kids for the summer, other times it was fifteen dollars to go through the world's most bland house of "wonders".
Sometimes things cost you money, and sometimes things cost you your life.
It was simple stuff, really, but there were people in the world who didn't know that. Knowledge, after all, didn't come free either. Student loans were a testament to that, a reminder of just how Oregon Trails College managed to afford to pay for such a grand building with so much new technology.
Money talks, Dipper reminded himself, and more people than just Gruncle Stan will listen to it.
So long as Dipper's parents had been able to afford to fork over what scholarships could not, then Dipper had been allowed to attend the university. It wasn't Ivy League, but for a sleepy state like Oregon it was the best that a guy like him could get.
The best for there, but not the best of the best.
He doubted, of course, that any human school could ever begin to compare. No books, no internet websites, no journals, no great uncles could ever compare or give him enough information.
Perhaps it was that scholarly lust that attracted the demon back to him, turned his world of books and papers grey.
Either way, Bill came, a splash of color in the dim, monochrome world.
"You won't even notice it's gone," he had promised.
It was a small fee, really and truly. There was a bit of blood, a few boxes of bandages, and a bit of time to adjust. Nothing too painful, nothing that Dipper couldn't do.
He was not his great uncle, no mere miser who clutched at his money even when he had a chance to buy the world.
There was no waiting four to six business days, no taxes, and no shipping and handling fees. A handshake, a girly scream, and some bandages.
If only all payments could have been that simple.
The knowledge came at night in dreams, in the day from the demon's whispers, from books that only Dipper knew of. It was everywhere, the facts all around him in plain sight. His eye widened and he saw.
He dove through the information, licked at it like a man in the desert licked at a newly discovered water spring.
The demon merely watched, making a few comments.
And yet, somehow, he took another organ, took Dipper's whole body.
Perhaps he should have read the dotted line; perhaps then the demon would also not have been able to take his heart.