Inspired by the 2007 'Flatland' film. Reposted from Archive of Our Own.
He drew each of them on the stones outside Gravity Falls.
To the unknowing eye, it appeared a child had scribbled the shapes they'd learned on the first day of school, simple shapes with no meaning, no voice, and certainly no story.
It was long ago, before the spark greeted this universe, before matter such as ours and space by our comprehension began. So, so long ago.
They'd called for a savior, for aid, for mercy. None of it was heard.
...
The oval hadn't a name that could be translated well enough into human language. He lived in a broad building, as up and down didn't exist. He had few friends, was flustered easily, and there was a 'wall' in his head that stopped him thinking beyond the usual lines. Oval was wandering around his house when it happened, you see. There'd been this odd noise he'd tell you – like whistling, then a kind of music. Bouncy and light. He'd rolled his single eye, expecting children to be playing about in a ruckus outside.
Then the world split open. Up and down formed in an explosion of horror, and his mind was pulled apart in directions that hadn't existed until then. It burned.
Everything had been too much. Too much noise, too much variation, the sight especially was assaulted and didn't know where to settle. But through it all Oval was able to see something he did recognise. He saw a triangle, all sides equal. His laugh echoed through reality itself as the world burned.
Oval took some appalled satisfaction from the idea that in this chaos this...being had created, in the end he was just a triangle, utterly recognisable and as plain as they come. That kept him sane right up until the moment he died.
He didn't die right away. He found himself sliding through the street, and an arm dragged him into the old storage building. They'd boarded up the walls and huddled in darkness. Then, in that moment of calm, Oval let out his frustration. Who was this charlatan that had broken the world? How dare he?
A square answered him, with a level of shakiness that betrayed some guilt.
...
Bob was a square. You can call him 'Bob' because his dimension had an equivalent of that name; a plain, simple little 'boop' of a name, an everyman. Bob had been curious. Bob lived in a square house at the edge of town, where he'd heard whispers of things so bizarre they kept him up all night long in a pondering loop. Lying there like a giddy child, thinking of 'up' and 'down'. About...irregular shapes.
Things unfathomable to him, yet perhaps...within reach. He hadn't wanted this, though. It came too quickly, but for him the damage was less. While everyone else spent the first five minutes of this new state of existence screaming their proverbial lungs out, Bob had forced his eye to move in a direction that he'd never been able to look before.
Up.
At him.
It's because of him, oddly enough, that there were survivors at all. 'Under' was a term he'd studied, too, and after wracking his brain for a plan he barely understood, he'd led the stragglers into a crater covered in broken walls and rubble. There, in the dark, the frightened jabbers turned to silence as they waited.
Waited for the yellow triangle's goons to find them.
...
Meroe listened to the sheepish square explain. In the gentle terror and quivering silence, he murmured his explanations as explosions sounded in the far distance, muffled by the rubble canopies above them. The group of mismatched shapes sat in huddles, staring at him fretfully, clinging to his words like they were a lifeline made of sound waves.
It helped, a little. The young triangle, barely eighteen, and equal on all sides (They'd all flinched at the sight of him, his own long eyelashes, thank goodness his pupil and colour is different) sat the closest, letting it all sink into his mind. A sponge soaking up water as he hugged his legs closer to his (green, newly green) body.
The nauseating, out-of-body state that had come to be was up and down. Had they gotten used to it so quickly? Time had stopped, as far as he knew. He was sure they hadn't been here for one night, yet nothing had changed. How long had they been here? Why hadn't they starved? They slept, they whispered, but the hour didn't budge.
The strange things you see, like light and dark, are colour. The square had explained – the new way you're hearing things is how another dimension, the third dimension, hears. At first, after being tugged into this hiding spot, the survivors had just...sat there, adjusting the best they could. The yellow guy, as that rectangle had so blazingly put it, gave them no choice. He'd changed how things...existed. They were lucky, the (light blue) Square had said, to have kept their sanity. Most of it.
Meroe had chosen his name, like Bob had done. Moving on, making decisions, kept them saner. Others followed. Might as well pick a name, pick a colour if you want. Meroe stayed green.
Bob did his best to explain most of it, but no one knew who the yellow triangle was. What he wanted.
He wants us dead, said the rectangle, some (purple) sour fellow in the corner.
The Square agreed, but in his quiet, shaky voice, he explained even further. It was like the chain of thought was his only link to sanity, and judging by their prospects, it probably was. He held out his hands, riddled with the slightest tremble, and drew lines in the dirt to show them how barriers between universes worked.
We can get out, he said. Meroe leaned forward along with all the assorted shapes, their single eyes wide with barely-allowed hope. It will take time, Bob said, with a tone that seemed to assure both himself and the others, but it's not like time is going anywhere.
...
The women were harder to see, therefore harder to target. Mrs Hexagon, her husband lost to her and her only child huddled in her arms, had forced her damaged legs to move her to cover. When you have a child, differences in reality didn't matter. Instinct beat confusion.
The other children, without their parents, had huddled around her at the sight of her newborn. The other women stayed away. Perhaps they lost their own, perhaps they didn't have children. Suddenly it didn't seem to matter, the past. The triangle had wiped that all away, you see.
She found herself helping. That's what women do, after all – help hand out tools, listen to the Square – to Bob's – worry over the group. (The Group, with capitals.) He drew blueprints first, huddled with the others in the dark. The shapes' comprehension of this 'science' was barely manageable, like clutching sand in your hands, but through finger-curling logic they started The Project. Again, with capitals.
The purple rectangle didn't help. He said it was pointless, that the women and the 'brats' would be the first to go.
She hit someone for the first time then, and surprisingly, the oaf didn't die.
...
It felt like the same morning – same night. Whatever it was. Things progressed, but without time it was futile to attempt to scale how long they'd spent beneath the rubble, without the need of food or water, their every thought focused on The Project. Even the children – who had not aged, though even a month's worth of progression should've had the baby look different, were helping. In hushed voices, Bob led the production. He'd memorised as much as he could from his books, the Triangle youth in green, Meroe, had re-read them a thousand times.
Mrs Hexagon's baby didn't change; he remained blissfully unaware. The other children were taught to go silent whenever noise sounded above their hide-out, to duck down, and what to do if...running was suddenly a necessity.
The Isosceles Triangle, who was injured in his fight with the Yellow Triangle's goons (Fiery teeth sinking into his right side,) Found the math too difficult to comprehend, and set about defences, waiting at the ready. He was a solider. He would protect, slice off limbs if he had to.
So when it became clear that they would need more knowledge, more tools to begin building – at last, it felt so long – it was him that planned the expedition.
That is, the insane trek out of their hidey-hole into the horrific wasteland that used to be their dimension.
Isosceles was the one who poked his top point out to peer around the wreckage. Utter chaos stared back; bubbles floating in the sky, (By this point he'd conquered the concept of looking up,) streaks of colour, loud distant whirls of wind. Fires here and there, and behind it all...darkness. He could almost make out...shapes, but he had the incentive not to look.
Bob told him, and several others, what to get. His solider-training coming back to him, steeling his heart and calming his nerves, Isosceles trekked out into the din. They would succeed. They had a plan.
...
The Oval made himself useful by talking, oddly enough. He was seen as pompous, but to the shell-shocked bunch that almost seemed...comforting. Like an adult with confidence among fretful children. He was the eldest one there, after all.
Oval spoke about the simpler things. To those from out dimension, you could say he tried to preserve the 'better aspects' of their world. Of How they once mastered difficult feats like sight recognition, for one. History, names of shapes, technical things. The children listened, and asked questions.
They didn't hear of chromatism, because now everyone had coloured sides (And newly formed 'faces'.) They did not hear of irregular shapes, for they were all dead. Perhaps they shouldn't have been.
Oval would never deny the unease he felt at seeing an irregular. But something in his mind changes, seeing...the Yellow Triangle.
Perfectly equal on all sides, yet warped to the core. They had been wrong. He had been wrong.
He told the children that the Yellow Triangle was everything a shape shouldn't be.
...
It takes a long while to teach yourself quantum physics. To make math a limb to you. Then to apply it all to science, then even longer to re-apply it to testing new branches. But, as I said before – time didn't exist. Bob, no expert by any means, had to push himself further. They collected books. They grilled their minds, those able to, (not everyone had the right education.) So by the time they started to build his device, he felt like an eternity had gone by...and yet, at the same time, it didn't.
E Line was considered rather cold by the others, almost frowning, and her tone flat. She didn't fear death, which was considered mad, and though she didn't participate in the building, she would add in her two scents. When it was worth the risk to traipse into the outside.
They hadn't seen hair nor hide from the yellow fellow. Isosceles was getting used to – she snorted at the idea sometimes – used to going out, looked forward to it, even. Stir-crazy. And once Bob started getting his project built, slowly but surely, it was like a surge went through the group. That something was happening.
She tried to shut it down. They could hope, but they couldn't get reckless. Not now.
The purple rectangle would usually check out the sides of the rubble, makeshift windows boarded up with cloth. (The whole thing was like some self-sustaining roof of debris over a crater really...) As if expecting death on the horizon.
E Line agreed with him, but she didn't feel like dying any time soon.
...
To begin with, (That is, somewhere closer to the start than the present...) Things were tense with the men and women. No one wanted a relationship, not now, but there were only four alive, and the others were children. They couldn't handle the cleaning and helping around all on their own, and getting them to do so almost cost them their lives.
Isosceles had almost been tackled by Purple Rectangle, who liked to peer out the cracks in the rubble. He'd almost bent his sides in fear when he told them that they were coming closer.
Candles were blown out. The work was covered in blankets. Every nook and cranny blocked and stuffed, and they flattened themselves against the floor and trembled in a horrific silence as the Yellow Triangle and his friends sauntered by.
The baby hexagon gurgled.
Eighteen shapes had a simultaneous heart-attack. Above them, Bill Cipher paused, picking at his nonexistent nail.
He hadn't heard.
After that, Bob told them, there would be no arguments that got past three sentences. At all.
...
There were happy moments, too. When the candles were lit and the voices were soft; a triangle man, C Triangle, and his wife, liked to dance around as the others sat in a circle. C Triangle was a funny fellow, ditzy and clumsy, his wife rather giggly when she wasn't feeling no-nonsense. C Triangle did a tap dance to entertain the children one day and toppled into Bob and his group of self-made engineers.
Luckily, his fall was flattened by poor Bob and Oval, and there was no resulting crash.
They laughed for the first time in a long while.
...
Isosceles told himself that they were the last. Everyone else was dead. His brothers, his brothers at arms, his elderly parents, his aunt and all of his cousins. All gone. That he knew in his heart, but it didn't stop him searching out of the corner of his eye for other survivors. They'd need the numbers if – no, when they escaped. But he found no one.
He proposed going further, hoping that Bob at least would listen – but everyone shut him down. No one else would've known what Bob knows, the knowledge that saved our lives, they said. Even if someone did survive, Oval said, they'd be too far for us to help, and seeking them out would result in everyone's death. There's nothing we can do, he said.
Isosceles kept an eye out.
They shouldn't have felt regret for not looking further – unbeknownst to them, everyone else really was dead.
...
E Line began recording things about reality. The changes. When Isosceles found books, she took the ones that spoke of the universe, the outdated ideas. She began writing down the differences, how the Yellow Triangle had 'broken the rules'.
She wondered how he'd done it – and if anyone could, now that he'd busted the chains of reality.
...
Isosceles began rounding up the triangles, right angles, equilateral (Meroe was the only one) and the like, to begin training. Though not as thin and sharp as himself, they'd have to do. Their points were needed in combat, should it arise, though with 'up' and 'down' this became a lot harder.
There weren't enough, so with some swallowed pride, he told himself to suck it up, and enrol the childless women.
E Line and her two friends would be lethal; women could kill by accident, imagine what they could do on purpose. A Straight and L Bar were timid most of the time, but E Line, the cold-eyed woman, took to it well, and followed him on missions almost instantly. She was oddly stoic, but he supposed that was needed. He was glad with their progress.
...
It was time to search.
None of them, repeat, none of them dared to feel giddiness until then. Until then it had been exhausting fear, exhaustion, terrifying hope. But yes, it was with Giddiness that they finished building the machine, and a bitter blow when it didn't work.
Bob had expected this, he told them. Now it was time for tweaking, like a radio.
They tried, again and again. Each time, Bob caught a signal through the dimensional plane. Every tiny inch louder, stronger, sent a thrill through the group.
Unbeknownst to them, an eternity had passed by that time. Meroe fixated himself on the knowledge of the other universes, of getting there. He stayed up testing the signals all night, eerily patient for someone so (physically...) young. He would get there. They all would.
...
Oval and Bob were the de-facto leaders. Meroe found himself discussing things with them the most. Oval told him of the past, Bob the future. If only you could understand, Bob said, our dimension has changed, but the Third Dimension is even more. We'll get there someday.
Oval wasn't concerned with all that. He focused on one thing – if they made it could, they'd be safe. The children would grow, they could live again.
Meroe wanted all of those things.
...
They awoke to laughter, and light. Brightness, blinding and hot, and laughter that trilled towards madness and incoherency. They were jolted from sleep, lying complacent on the floor, to find that the rubble that sheltered them was gone entirely.
The Yellow Triangle's voice ended in a sharp 'hmm' sound, and his goons appeared around the crater, a circle, an ambush. Smiling gleefully, all teeth and hungry eyes. The Group screamed; the children wailed, Isosceles was yelling abuse no mother could allow.
They barely heard the Triangle's little monologue, his nonchalant menace and threat. He leaned against a wall that wasn't there and congratulated them on hiding for so long. But there was far less mirth in his eye, then, the tone of voice didn't reach the eye.
He told his goons they could help themselves to their new snacks, and the screaming and begging resumed.
Bob dove for his device, and so did everyone else.
Yellow Triangle had pointed a single finger at him, tittering like a teacher scolding a child, and something bright and hot shot from his black tip.
It never got to Bob. Oval had pushed him out of the way. He died instantly, without a sound, and as Bob froze up like a statue and the Yellow Triangle's laughter rang in his ears, Meroe snatched the device out of his hands and pushed the button.
...
You want me to tell you whether it worked.
All I can tell you is that someone drew those specific shapes on that rock, with their specific colours. An orange oval, a blue square, a purple rectangle. A green triangle. Someone drew them, but I don't know his name.