"Who are these kids?" Asked Malvolio, half pompously glaring at me. "Your cousins?"

"No. this is Mabel, and this is Dipper. They-," Regan cut me off.

"Are booooring? Come on, demon, let's get out of here."

Dipper gave Mabel a look like "anyone who still calls him demon can't be good". Mabel, however, missed this. She was already glaring daggers at Regan.

"Hey!" She objected. "I am super duper the interesting! I knit my own sweaters!"

It was here that Mabel got on the table and threw her arms to the sides, showing off today's sweater. It was baby blue and had a bunny wearing glasses on it. Over top of the bunny, the word "Adorkable" flashed different colors, because Mabel can't have a normal sweater, no, every single one of them had to be different in its own different ways. Or, at least, that's what Mabel told me when I asked. I liked that idea. Malvolio, apparently, did not, because he rolled his eyes.

"Listen, sweetie." He said. "Sweaters in general are a bad idea, but sweaters in the summer? You just took a bad thing and made it worse. Plus, anyone who has time to waste on knitting can't have anything else to do. Especially not if you're making things like...that." He gestured to her sweater and mimed gagging.

Regan and Malvolio don't like new people. Regan and Malvolio hate new people. It's kind of their entire shtick. This, though, was uncalled for. Like, Dipper and Mabel were hanging out with me, right? So, they must be cool. At least a little bit. Interesting, at least, because I hate boring people. It's kind of my entire shtick.

"Hey, I happen to think Mabel's sweaters are super cool."

"Why?"

"It's Mabel wearing them. Mabel's the best."

"King Lear and Twelfth Night." Dipper mumbled.

We all looked at him.

"What?" Asked Mabel.

Dipper slank down. If he were any lower, he'd have been inderneath the picnic table.

"Listen, demon, if you're too busy with your friends to hang with us, that's fine by me. Just come by when you're ready to be cool again." Then Regan and Malvolio turned and left.

I take it back.

I'm not all that fond of summer Mondays.


"Bill, you are offically banned from Mabelland." Mabel said.

"I created Mabelland. You can't ban me." I objected, stacking snowglobes on top of each other in such a way that if a customer wanted to take one down and look at it, the rest would fall and break and they would have to pay for those too. This, though another tactic Mabel disproved of, was what Stan had told me to do.

"That was Mabelland 1.0. This is Mabelland 2.0. It's new and improved and created by me, so I can totally ban you."

"Mmmm." I nodded. This seemed like perfectly sound logic to me. "Why exactly am I banned?"

"Because you made friends with people who are capable of resisting my total cuteness! It's, like, a rule of life that people like that are jerks. Plus, Dipper was uncomfortable around them, and," she glanced around. Little Pine Tree was on the other side of the gift shop, talking to my Ice Queen. "He's super socially awkward, but he has good instincts." She glanced at me. "Don't tell him I said that."

"You know, if you were anybody else, I would have just walked over and told him." I told her.

"I know." She said.

"You know?" I asked.

"I know." She said.

"How?" I asked.

"You're pretty easy to read. The expression on your face was like "If she doesn't tell me not to tell Dipper she said this, I'm totally telling Dipper she said this.""

Ouch.

Ouch.

That hurt.

That hurt a lot.

If there's one thing I hate more than cucumbers (like, let's be honest here, we all know that cucumbers are just wasted pickle material) it's being told things like that. That I'm easy to read. That I'm predictable. I don't want to be like the cretures from my home dimension. Not even a little bit. These beings would take the same number of steps every day. They would say the same number of words every day. It was all the same, again and again and again and again.

-Bill Mason Cipher, signing out.