Dimension ?, July 25th, 2012
Ford and Mabel stuck out like scarecrows on a golf course. They were dark blotches in a market full of transparent or white creatures. Luckily, unlike in some other places Ford had been, none of the people here were alarmed by the difference, though he still cradled Mabel close as he carried her between the crush of people. Eight foot mantis-like creatures that looked like they could be made of glass or ice calmly stepped over them on their way to stalls, crystals and white woolen ornaments tapping against their antennae and arms, and the furry creatures, looking a little like they had the lower body of a polar bear with all the fur, muscle, and fat, walked just close enough for Mabel to try to reach out and touch one.
Ford caught her hand. "Don't touch. You don't know if they'll bite." Literally.
"But they look so sooooooooooft," Mabel whined. Ford folded her arm over her chest again and continued through the market, forcing himself to sidestep and duck around the crush of alien bodies and overwhelming amount of product—cloth, weapons, whole fish, cuts of meat—dangling from stalls and overflowing from countertops. It didn't smell nearly as ripe in this market as in many others, despite the abundance of alien meats that hung from hooks made of crystal. The ice kept everything cool.
"Never start off by touching or talking to the creatures you meet out here. You don't know how they do things, and it might be very different anything you've seen before. You have to observe first."
The girl was pouting, but she was also listening, so Ford would take it. "Look around for me, Mabel. What do you see?"
As Ford walked, Mabel turned her head to squint at the stalls. Her ears perked, her mouth twisting up in concentration, and her face looked so strange that way that he had to bite his tongue to keep from chuckling.
"It's mostly the fuzzy ones that are selling stuff around here. Some of them are selling white fur, even though it looks like they have full coats. And lot of them have done pretty things with their hair, like fancy braids."
"That's good. How do they behave with each other?"
More squinting. He couldn't stop a smile at how serious she looked. "When the furry ones buy from each other, they run their… paws?" She looked at him with a question on her face, but he just shrugged. The bear-like creatures had four arms, but their 'hands' had pads and claws, so he supposed 'paws' worked as a good descriptor. "Through each other's hair. Sounds like they get better prices, too. But they don't touch if they're not both the furry kind."
"Very good. So now we know a part of their etiquette. Do you see anything else? Who looks like they'd give us the lowest prices?"
She let out a giggling snort and pressed her cheek against his chest. "You sound like Grunkle Stan."
Ford winced at the name and sputtered. "What? How?"
"He's always telling me and Dipper to people watch." She puffed up her face and tried to make her voice low and gravely, which sounded more like she had a bad cold instead. "'You gotta pick out the suckers before you play them! Mabel, put on the cute eyes!' Ha, he's so silly."
Ford grimaced, suddenly trying to look anywhere but at his niece. "I wouldn't put it quite that way." He cleared his throat. "But if you could look cute, that would be helpful."
"You got it!" She grinned and snuggled his chest, which while uncomfortable was undeniably cute.
A rebellious thought hovered in the back of his head. Stan didn't used to be preoccupied with manipulating people. He'd cheat on tests and homework, but he didn't typically cheat people. The closest he ever came to it was occasionally shoplifting or pickpocketing when they were small children.
But what did Ford know? He hadn't really talked to Stanley for around forty years now, besides that one… incident. The child in his arms would know his twin brother far better than he would.
He pushed the thought back and firmly denied any thread of discomfort that came with it.
"Foreigners!"
A rumbling and somehow simultaneously squeaky voice called his attention to one of the stalls made of ice bedecked with finely worked leather of all sorts. Mabel gave him a wink before flashing the widest, most beautiful brown eyes at the voice's owner, a tall furry creature with brightly colored crystals dangling in intricate braids around its neck and four wrists, the braids arranged in intricate geometric patterns. She's good, Ford thought, and he was once again reminded how wonderful and perfect his niece was.
"Oh, you're gorgeous." The stall owner held up a padded hand as it started to run three sets of claws through the fur at its waist. The motion chimed all the crystals together. "Give me a moment, I have… ah."
It pulled out an earbud from its fur and slipped it in one tufted ear. As the disk opened up, the merchant set all four paws on the ice-table, covered in various trinkets made of hair, crystal, and bone. "There we go. Come here, come here, I love foreigners."
"And we love locals!" Mabel said before Ford could get a word in. She waved an arm, which looked a little less impressive because she was still wearing his jacket and the sleeve was far too large for her, flopping uselessly while she gestured. "And may I say that you look beautiful today? I love what you've done with your hair!"
"I'm so glad you noticed! Most foreigners don't know what kind of work goes into fur, but your fur is gorgeous."
As Ford approached the stall, two of the merchant's paws went out, dragging claws through Mabel's frozen hair. His hand immediately went to his side where his gun was strapped, but far from being afraid, Mabel giggled and leaned her head back to allow the creature more access to her hair.
Ford frowned but went back to holding Mabel with both hands. It was good in this context, he tried to tell himself. It meant acceptance from the alien species. A part of him still squirmed to see a stranger touching his niece.
The merchant didn't seem to notice his discomfort. It made sense, since no species that wasn't psychic (and there were a few of those out there) could usually parse out another species' body language unless they lived closely together.
"So what brings you here?" the merchant asked. Mabel reached out to the paws running through her hair, digging her fingers into the merchant's fur. She grinned so hard that her braces gleamed.
"We're passing through," Ford said, though he felt a little invisible as his niece and the merchant bonded. Well, it was good that Mabel was taking well to a new species, he thought. It took him forever to build a good rapport with anyone most of the time, alien or human.
"Oh, they're always passing through." The merchant didn't turn its large black eyes from Mabel as they kept playing with each other's hair. "What can I do for you?
Mabel looked up at Ford for guidance. He cleared his throat and adjusted his grip on her. "She needs new shoes, clothes, and gear. We're going to be traversing a wide range of environments, and she needs to be dressed appropriately." Ford looked down at Mabel critically. "We'll need to do something about your hair, too. It's too easy for it to get caught or grabbed this way."
"You wouldn't cut it, would you?" the merchant said, probably looking scandalized. Mabel grabbed a handful of her hair, squinting at Ford warily.
"Do we really need to get rid of it?" Mabel asked, petting her hair like an old friend.
"I didn't say we need to get rid of it." Though it would probably be the smartest thing, he didn't want to make the transition into this life any harder on Mabel than it already was. She could cut off all her hair herself when she was ready to accept she wasn't going to go back home. "We just need to make sure it's out of the way."
"Braid it," the merchant said shortly.
"I have never braided anything in my life." Ford looked down at Mabel. "Do you know how to braid your own hair so it sticks to your head?"
"I could try to figure it out?" she offered.
The merchant threw up all four arms. "You can't leave fur that gorgeous cut or poorly braided. I'll show you how to do it, free of charge. We haggle for everything else after."
"Oooh, I can have braids like yours?" Mabel's eyes gleamed. "That's amazing!"
"Of course it is." The merchant patted the edge of its stall, waiting for Ford to put Mabel down on it.
And that was how Ford ended up spending his time on an ice planet braiding his niece's hair with an alien.
He would have been happy with just doing a simple French braid or a braided bun, but no, the alien insisted on teaching him how to do fancy things like braid a tiara in her hair or arrange it like a flower. Every time he started to try to put a stop to it, he'd see how much Mabel was enjoying herself and he'd swallow his objections. As irritating as it was, Mabel nearly had her leg torn off that morning and he could stand to learn how to make stars in her hair if it made her happy.
Up until he was carding his fingers through her hair to learn another braid and something bit into his fingers.
He jerked his hand back, biting back a curse as his fingers started to bleed.
"Grunkle Ford!" Mabel immediately swung around, her smile disappearing as she saw him holding his hand. "What happened?"
He carefully took a silvery hair between his nails and pulled it off his hand. He grimaced as his own blood dribbled off it. "That stuff from the last dimension must have gotten tangled in your hair."
"What?" The merchant looked at its paws before carding its claws quickly through its fur, coming up with tangled silvery strands as well. It must have picked them up when it was playing with Mabel's hair. "Where did you get this?"
"The previous dimension we visited. It was attached to a sea creature that seemed to use it as netting." He started to dig in his pockets for a bandage. Mabel grabbed the uncut fingers of his wounded hand, looking at the blood in concern.
"I can kiss it better," she said firmly.
A flush rushed to his cheeks and he gently pulled his hand from her grip before wrapping a bandage around the cuts. "That's not necessary."
Hurt flashed over her face before she lowered her eyes. He immediately felt like an ass. He didn't have time to apologize before the merchant said, "This is good for you."
The merchant left the silver hair in a pile on the stall. "It's razor fur. Twist a few strands of this together and it can slice through bone and never break. It can't slice through our fur, though." It paused for a moment to preen its fur. "We can only get it when portals to the water world open and one of those creatures falls through. It's too dangerous to try to take it in the water."
"You're telling us." Mabel pulled her bandaged knee under her chin, hugging her hurt leg and allowing the other to dangle off the side of the stall. "We were in this big bubble and it popped."
"Did you have fire in it?"
Ford and Mabel exchanged looks. The merchant clucked.
"Fire, no matter how little, attracts the fish and bursts the bubbles. They'll re-form with time." The merchant pushed the bundle of razor fur towards Mabel. "I don't work with razor fur, but because I like you, I'll tell you who does. There's a stall made of black crystals further in the cave. Tell them Anise sent you and they'll give you a deal. But first…"
It picked up a swatch of leather. Ford didn't think too hard about where the leather might have come from. "Our deals."
The haggling was tough, but not as fierce as Ford was used to. It was always easier when a merchant liked him, or in this case, his niece. Apparently, shoes in this dimension were usually reserved for the sickly who needed extra help to stay warm, and any clothes would have to be custom made for Mabel. The whole time, Mabel stayed quiet, working on redoing the fancier braids in her hair, but it always came out a little messier than Ford could manage. After they finally agreed on a price, Anise pointed them towards hotel—and by a hotel, it meant a cluster of burrows dug into the ice and lined with fur that one could rent—and they were on their way to the black crystal stall with the razor fur.
Ford had put the extra silvery hair into a jar with the rest, which Mabel examined while he carried her through the market again.
"Grunkle Ford?"
"Mmm?"
"Is it okay if I keep some of the hair?"
He arched an eyebrow at her. "What would you do with it?"
"I got an idea. So can I keep some? Please?"
How could he say no to that face? "Okay. In fact…" He slowly set her down on the ground before pulling a scarf from one of his many pockets and offering it to her. "Put this around your foot."
"Why?" she asked as she took the scarf and started doing as he said.
"It will protect you from cold damage. We might be out here for a while." He picked her up again after she tied off the scarf, balancing her on his hip before digging into one of his many pockets and offering her a soft leather coin purse. "Look around while we walk and let me know if you see something you like."
"Really?" She frowned at him, fingering the purse. "I thought we would be saving money for necessities and stuff."
"You can be frugal and still get nice things sometimes. Think of it as me starting to make up for all the Hanukkahs and birthdays I wasn't around for." He smiled, and she started to smile back.
"I'll make sure to pick something super cool." She flopped against his shoulder and peered at the tangle of people clumped at stalls and elbowing past each other. "A knife? No… A skin? No…"
It wasn't long before she gasped. "Oh my gosh, are those knitting needles?"
She flailed in the general direction of a stall draped in utensils made of bone, manned by a massive glass-like mantis creature. Ford frowned, but he approached anyway, because it was pretty clear that Mabel had her eye on two long pins that looked more like they were meant to crack a carapace than knit a scarf. "I'm not sure if those are—"
"Can I see your knitting needles?" Mabel blurted at the mantis. It was tall and thin with threaded white charms hanging off the edges of its pierced carapace, and it had to bend its legs and lean down as far as possible to look at Mabel.
"I have no knitting needles," it said. Ford searched it for a sign of a universal translator, just to see a custom one attached to its antennae.
"Sure you do!" Mabel pointed to the bone needles on the ice table. "There they are!"
The insectoid folded its 'arms' together and rolled its head side to side. "Those are not knitting. I don't know what knitting is."
The gasp Mabel let out was positively scandalized. "I have to fix this! I need a skein of yarn and the use of your needles."
It was always difficult to read expressions on species Ford hadn't encountered before. This one's antennae twitched, threatening to dislodge the translator before it leaned to the side towards a furry merchant selling swatches of glimmering fish skins. "Do you have fur to borrow?" the insectoid asked.
"Why?" The furry merchant passed out skins to customers, who all pressed them to their fur or carapaces to compare and check ornamentation value.
"The little foreigner wants to show me a trick," the insectoid said.
"Foreigners are weird," the furry merchant said, rearranging the skins for maximum gleam.
"They can understand you."
"So?" But the furry merchant dug under its stall with one arm and pulled out a messily wrapped skein of white yarn that perfectly matched his fur. "Tell me if it does something funny."
"This is going to be great!" Mabel kept wiggling until Ford finally set her down on the stall table. She brandished the needles and her hands blurred as she cast on stitches. "You can make so many great things with a couple sticks and some yarn! You can make sweaters and hats and scarves and little stuffed animals and—"
Stitches bloomed between the blur of sticks and hands. They coiled out from under her as her mouth ran, and the insectoid's antennae vibrated as it lowered itself to watch her. Its neighbor, the furry skin-seller, paused in its rearranging to watch as well.
"And look! You have a hat!" Suddenly, instead of a swath of stitching, she had a bright white hat with a bright white poof on the top. (Ford was pretty sure knitting that in less than five minutes was physically impossible.) She plopped it on the insectoid's head with a bright, "Ta dah! You look gorgeous."
The hat forced the transparent merchant's antennae to bow left and right to accommodate it, but it didn't seem to mind. Instead, it quirked its head towards its neighbor.
"Caraway. I have fur now."
"It doesn't count if you didn't grow it!" the furry merchant grumbled.
"What else can you do, little foreigner?" the insectoid gently tapped Mabel's arm with a claw. "Show me."
"Oh, I can show you plenty!" Mabel was drawing a crowd as she launched into another project. Ford should have probably told her to quit it, that they had more important things to do and it was best to not draw so much attention, but he was too busy marveling at how easily it came to her. People wanted to listen to her. They wanted to watch her demonstrate things, and she could read the crowd even though these were all aliens with body language and social cues that should have been incomprehensible to her.
Ford had no idea how she did it, but it was remarkable to watch.
"And there! You have a sweater now!" Mabel popped a sweater on the insectoid merchant (how in God's name did she knit so fast?) with a huge grin. "You look beautiful."
The insectoid looked down at itself, its hat drooping to one side. "I love it."
"I want to try! Give me needles," an insectoid about the size of Ford declared, slapping down coins on the table.
"Get out of the way, ice skin! Me first!" a polar-bear-like creature said, shoving the insectoid with two of four hands.
"No me!"
"Me!"
Ford warily watched the crowd pressing in, watching their eyes to see what they were focusing on, but they were looking at Mabel's sweater, not Mabel herself. Caraway, the fish skin merchant, slumped at his stall, probably pouting. The insectoid merchant nudged Mabel gently with one claw. "Take the needles. Have extra fur too. No charge for you, little foreigner."
Mabel's grin threatened to split her face. "Why, thank you!"
Ford scooped her up as soon as she got her gifts, still eyeing the crowd. She hummed, petting her new yarn, completely oblivious to the world around her. It was fortunate that Ford was paying attention, because the fish skin merchant was losing customers to the insectoid, and the furry creature was eyeing them in a way that tripped Ford's well-honed instinct to leave. He held Mabel close and ducked between two large white aliens, disappearing from the stalls' view.
"You should be more careful, Mabel. You shouldn't draw so much attention to yourself."
"What?" Her face fell and she clutched her new needles and yarn close, like he might take them away from her. "I thought they liked me."
"It's good that they like you, but it might not be good that they remember you. Bill Cipher has a standing bounty on my head, and now likely yours. If a hunter comes and asks questions about two humans, how many people do you think will now be able to answer?"
Her shoulders slumped. His stomach twisted to see all her cheer extinguished again. He should press his point harder, but she had gotten the message, hadn't she?
"You didn't spend anything in the purse. You can still look around for something else you like," he said. She perked up again, but the shadow hadn't left her face. Ford would take what he could get.
On their way to the stall Anise had told them to go to, Mabel finally settled on a gift, and she allowed Ford to deal with the haggling. It was a simple thing, a pendant that looked like a bullet. One could pull off the 'shell' to reveal a black crystal that sucked the light out from around it, shrouding her and Ford in darkness in the middle of the market.
"It'd be great for hide and seek," Mabel said.
One of the transparent mantis-like creatures manned the stall made of black crystal. It was far less personable than Anise or the needle seller, but more polite, and it had a voice that sounded like wind whistling over glass flutes. Ford did his best not to stare at its beating hearts while they bargained over the silver hair, but Mabel wasn't so discreet. He had to catch her hand more than once before she reached out to touch the shopkeeper.
He kept a generous amount of razor fur for Mabel, though she didn't ask him twice about it, and by the time they made it back to the burrow they were going to stay in, his arms were hurting from carrying her around everywhere.
"How does your leg feel?" Ford said as they slid into a burrow carved into the ice among many similar burrows. Inside, it was all lined with fur, insulating them from the cold.
"Warm," she said as she settled on the ground. Her bandages were red, but they weren't dripping. Even so, 'warm' wasn't a good sign with wounds. Ford frowned.
"We should check your bandages." Ford repositioned himself next to her wounded leg and unwrapped his scarf from her foot. There wasn't quite room enough for him to stand in the burrow.
"Do we have anything to eat for after that?"
Ford hesitated before unbinding her bandages. "Oh, right." Children need to be fed. So do adults, actually. He'd forgotten that. "Of course. I have seeds in my bag. Just check the left topmost compartment."
As she started to eat, he unpeeled her bandages. Both he and Mabel winced when bandaging that had been stuck to her newly formed scabs pulled away, making her bleed again. The skin around the cuts was too red for his liking, and it wasn't from the fresh blood. "I'm going to need to disinfect this. It might sting."
Mabel grimaced, but she nodded. "Okay."
The bag had a whole bottle of diluted hydrogen peroxide, a lot of which he'd probably have to use. Hopefully, he could bargain for more in this world. Peroxide, he'd found, was a pretty universal thing. Even if people didn't use it to disinfect themselves, they would use it for something.
"Deep breath, Mabel," he said before he started pouring it all down her leg.
Mabel drove her teeth into a nut shell, her face turning red as the muscles in her calf tensed. The only noise that escaped was a soft whimper. Ford had to ignore it.
"It will be over soon."
After drenching her whole leg, he let it sit for a short while before patting it dry. Blood spotted the cloth he used, and he pulled a jar from his bag. "I'm going to put this on. It will help your healing."
She whimpered again, and he made sure to be as gentle as possible as he spread a generous amount of ointment on her leg. Her muscles spasmed under his hand and she chewed on the nut shell, working her jaw to keep from yelling. The ointment hurt too, he knew from experience, but it was effective. It was the only way she could hope to heal fast enough for their hectic lifestyle.
"Okay," he said before wrapping her leg in fresh bandages. "It's done."
She panted, curling up in a fetal position and shaking. He had a feeling she wasn't shaking just because of the first aid, but he didn't know what to do to make her stop.
She didn't stop. She kept shaking, kept panting. She looked at him, expecting something, but he didn't know what. Stanford Pines did not know how to deal with children, and he suddenly resented her for needing him, resented Stanley for giving her to him, resented himself for not knowing what to do.
Mabel looked away before he figured out what she wanted, sniffing and scrubbing her face. Shit, she was going to cry. Some uncle Ford was.
"Your leg will heal well," he said. It was the only thing he could think to say. "You just need to try not to strain it." Were she in their own world, she probably would have gotten stitches. Stitches were mostly there to help with healing and keep the scarring from getting too bad, though. In this situation, the ointment was better. It wouldn't help with the scarring at all, but it would keep the wound from reopening too easily and would hurry along the healing. It was better than potentially introducing her to a new source of infection in an unsterilized environment with unprofessional stitches. "If things keep going as well as they have been here, we can stay for a while and let you rest."
She nodded slowly, no closer but no further from crying. He wondered if he could just leave and the problem would sort itself out, but that was the coward's way out.
"How're your hands?" she said softly.
He looked down at his hands, one covered in bandages and the other clearly burnt, though only in the first degree, from their jaunts between the portals. He was immediately reminded of Mabel's burning influence and the way they escaped the sea monster.
"They'll also heal. The lucky thing about extremely sharp things is that, while it's easier to get a cut from them, it's also much easier to heal." He curled his fingers. "How did you do that? In the portal?"
She frowned at him, scrubbing her face with the heels of her hands. "Do what?"
"Destroy the netting. We were being dragged back into the water and you got us loose." He furrowed his brow. "Don't you remember?"
"I…" She wrinkled her nose, and the glassiness in her eyes started to fade. "I remember, but it's all… blurry. I didn't know I was the one who stopped it. I just remember really, really not wanting to go back."
"You burned it," Ford prompted, holding out his unbandaged hand. "You see?"
"I did that?" Mabel looked at her hands, turning them over like she'd see the secret in them. "But I didn't have any fire."
"You were the fire. Or…" Fire wasn't the right word. She wasn't inherently destructive between the portals. Just overwhelming. "You were light."
"What? Get out of here. I'm just a kid. See?" She jabbed a finger into her own cheek. "Boop. Kid. You're the one who looks funny between the portals."
"Really?" Ford took his journal out of his bag. He had a feeling he should take notes on this. "What do I look like to you?"
"Like…" She chewed the inside of her cheek before flopping onto her back, staring at the ceiling of their burrow. "You were like lightning, but you didn't disappear like lightning or change shape. And there were words. A lot of words. They give me a headache." She hesitated before bringing her hands to her temples while Ford wrote furiously in his journal. "Right after the weirdness in Bill's world and before we went to the cloud world, it was like I understood how the whole universe worked, but it was going to explode my head because I'm not supposed to, and I was seeing all the things in it I should be scared of."
Ford's pen paused over the page.
"For me, it felt like I could finally see the universe," he said slowly. "But all I could see was how beautiful it all was, and the light it took to finally see it was going to burn me into nothing." He started writing again. He wondered if these images of each other would be consistent if they were observed by others. Was he always some kind of written lightning, or was that just Mabel's perception of him? "The best way I can describe the way I see you between portals is like a star. You can burn me if I get too close or something goes wrong, but when things are the way they should be, you just…" he trailed off, searching for the words. "There is a lot of warmth, light, and color. That's the best way I can describe it."
"That's… good?" She gave him a tentative smile.
"More than good. It's perfect." And that was the only adjective he could use to describe it. Even if it burned his hands and overwhelmed him with vibrancy he'd never seen in decades of wandering the universe, there was not a single thing he could think to change about it.
Her smile became more genuine. She didn't look like she was ready to cry anymore, so he must have done something right.
Ford maneuvered himself so he could crawl past her towards the entrance, grabbing his coat on the way. "Stay here and rest. I'll go and explore some more and bring back any food that would be edible for humans. If Anise comes by, there's enough cash to pay for all the clothes on the bottom rightmost compartment of my bag."
"Okay." Mabel picked up her bone knitting needles. "I got a project to start anyway."
Ford could hear the clicking of needles as he left the burrow.
No warnings for this chapter.
Thank you once again to Tsukara for betaing this. Also, thank you everyone who has reviewed. Comments, compliments, and critiques are all very warmly welcomed.