Dipper sat alone on a large mossy log surrounded by trees. White spotted mushrooms and yellow dandelions dotted the ground, and the forest pressed in dense and close around him. White birches mingled with the pines, staring out at him with dark eye-like patterns in their white bark. The place had a wild, eerie beauty to it, but Dipper felt oddly detached from it all, as if he weren't actually there. He could have been sitting there for five minutes or five hours. He wondered idly that the trees towered much higher than any others he had seen in Gravity Falls, and their long shadows cast his small glade in gloom. When he turned his eyes upwards searching for light, the snatches of sky that he could see through the branches were a deep, bruised purple. The world around him was perfectly silent; he couldn't hear even the rustle of a light breeze or chirping of birds. The tree eyes stared. Getting slowly to his feet, it dawned on him that something about this place was very wrong.
How had he gotten here again?
His heart picked up a pace. He turned in a slow circle, but the forest was the same in every direction. His footsteps were excruciatingly loud even on the soft ground. Though he was unwilling to break the unnatural silence, he called out, "Mabel? Soos? … Grunkle Stan?"
A soft humming made him whip around, and a point of light so bright that is was difficult to look at hovered just ahead. To his dismay, the light began to form into a triangle. It imploded and with a loud pop Bill Cipher appeared. The triangle's slit of a pupil shifted down to meet Dipper.
"You!" Bill exclaimed, voice deep and echoing.
Dipper bolted like a dear. His heart raced ahead of him as he dodged around trees and hurtled over fallen branches and bushes. He didn't think, he just knew that he didn't want to be in a strange place alone with that thing. Not after last time. The unnatural voice followed after him, fading with distance.
"Hey, wait, come back! I'm serious, you won't last out there!"
Dipper ignored the lies and kept running. Suddenly, the forest around him blinked out of existence, and the ground beneath his feet disintegrated, leaving him floating in empty white space. Bill appeared before him laughing and twirling his cane.
"Well, hello there! Did you really think you could escape me on my turf, kid? C'mon Pine Tree, I thought you were smarter than that!"
Dipper struggled and kicked his legs, but he was unable to move in the vacuum. He could only hang there and try to catch his breath.
"Let… me go," He managed to bite out, between gulps of air.
"Hold your horses, bucko! I'm not done with you." Bill circled around him once, eyeing him. Dipper hated the way that big eye seemed to take in every detail, his most private thoughts bare. He crossed his arms over his chest.
Bill laughed at his discomfort, but then stopped abruptly. "So, it's embarrassing to have to ask this, but how did you get here? Miss me so much you ripped a hole through dimensions?"
"N-no!" Puberty and nerves made him hit the word higher than he had intended. He cleared his throat, and managed in a more normal voice, "Wait… you didn't bring me here?"
Bill rolled his eye, "Even if I could, I wouldn't bring you here. I don't like visitors, kid, and you definitely weren't invited."
"S-so, you didn't do this? Where am I?!" Dipper asked again, genuinely at a loss. He felt like his brain was a sputtering engine.
The triangle placed his hands on his 'hips' and sighed. "Man, humans are really dumb when they're panicking." Bill lifted a hand and snapped his fingers.
Dipper landed on hard wooden floor with a loud oof. He looked up to find himself in his shared attic bedroom in the Mystery Shack. Mabel sat on her bed, combing her hair out with Waddles pressed close against her side.
"Mabel!" Dipper scrambled to his feet and made for his sister. He frowned when she didn't respond. "Mabel?"
"She can't hear you, we're in the dreamscape, remember?" Bill interrupted loudly, making Dipper flinch. The demon glanced around the room, "Huh, looks like your body isn't here at least."
"My body…" Dipper's eyes widened. If he was in that weird dream-reality again, that meant his body was somewhere in the physical world, empty. "I won't let you take it again!"
"Re-lax kid! I can't occupy a body without a deal." Bill explained. "Speaking of which…" His eye flashed blue and his palm burst into flame.
"No!" Dipper yelped, and took a step back, pressing his hands against his chest, as if they would reach up and grasp the burning hand of their own volition.
The demon shrugged, and the blue fire flickered out with a wave of his hand, "Worth a shot!"
"After what you did last time there's no way I'm ever making another deal with you again!" Dipper shuddered at the memory of the many cuts, bruises, and aches he had suffered after their last run-in. If Dipper had learned anything from that experience, it was that Bill Cipher couldn't be trusted. Dipper glared up at the demon, who only seemed to smirk at his declaration. Dipper teetered over the edge into a blind, impotent fury.
"Put me back in my body, Bill!" He shrieked.
Bill snapped his black fingers again, and Dipper felt a sickening moment of weightlessness before his feet settled on thin grass. It wasn't unlike taking a ride in a plummeting elevator. Now, he found himself outside on the front lawn of the Mystery Shack. The mid-morning sun blazed high in the sky, though Dipper could feel none of its heat. Grunkle Stan and several tourists passed right through Dipper and Bill in the golf cart.
"I'm not the one who can do that, kid. Do you even remember where you misplaced your body?"
"I- no, I don't." Dipper deflated. He remembered staying up late last night to study the journal, and at some point he must have passed out, but…
Bill interrupted his train of thought, "Well- and I definitely mean to alarm you with this- you aren't going to last very long here. Meat-sacks aren't meant to be here."
"But I was just fine last time," Dipper retorted skeptically.
"Yeah, well this time you've somehow gotten yourself completely uprooted. I'm not feeling any connection between the you that's here and the you that's probably lying on the side of some road. Right now you're less than a memory of a figment of an imagination. You're literally nothing, and that reality is gonna catch up to you real soon if you don't do something about it." The demon leaned into Dipper's personal space. "You can feel it can't you? That you're slowly drifting away…?"
Fear washed over Dipper, making the color drain from his face. He could. He knew logically that he was in front of the Mystery Shack, but he felt as though he were a thousand miles away at the same time, and slowly, gently being pushed further. In that moment, the thought of dwindling away to nothing, as if he had never existed, sounded far more terrifying than any gruesome death he could imagine. He looked up at the demon. "What do I do?"
Bill rubbed just below his eye, squinting in thought. "Your body could be literally anywhere in Gravity Falls," everything around Dipper, including the ground, trees, and distant mountains, flashed Bill's light blue. "And if you don't find it soon, it'll be an empty vessel until it rots away." He conjured a skeleton with a suspiciously large skull in midair, which clattered to the ground in a pile of bones. Dipper had to jump out of the way. "What a waste!"
Dipper swallowed hard, but his panic just rose up again, stronger.
Bill vanished his cane and reclined in midair, crossing his legs. "My best bet is that you've got until sundown. Chop-chop, kid!"
"But where do I start? I don't even-"
"Oh, I'd love to help you, Pine Tree, I really would, but I'm in a bit of a time crunch," The triangle looked down at a loudly ticking wristwatch that had suddenly appeared on his arm. "No, no, you got yourself into this mess, so you'll just have to get yourself out!" Bill circled Dipper quickly and Dipper found himself forcefully tugged around as well. Bill rose and started to glow with white light. "Goooood luuuuuck!" The demon flashed once and disappeared.
"Wait!" Dipper shouted, but the demon's voice faded away. He was on his own.
Uh-oh. More coming. Let me know what you think? Thanks!