Illusion is Reality
Chapter 72
-Meaning is determined by conscious judgement-
The next morning, Melody brought breakfast up to the two demons, and they ate upstairs. Stan hadn't been all that thrilled at the idea of the two of 'em getting breakfast hand-delivered to 'em, but there hadn't been a better way to handle it, far as he could see. He wasn't gonna lock Ford in his room downstairs. It wasn't long after he finished breakfast with Ford and the kids that Stan made his way upstairs to finally sit down and have a one-on-two talk with their resident demon and his little sister.
(Stan was feeling a little better, because his brother was feeling a little better that morning… sort of. Stan had had the better part of a day to try and calm down, and realizing last night that the kid hadn't eaten had… well, he was still pissed with the kid about that, but he also knew how off the rails the kid's already messed-up thinking could and did get when the kid wasn't trying to get away with skipping meals (let alone adding further bad judgment and literal 'logic errors' on top of that when the kid hadn't eaten anything in too long). ...Stan was at least pretty sure now that he was past the point of not being able to stop from punching the kid in the face at the first wrong word, at least. Finally. He still hadn't really been feeling it that morning, yet; it was why he'd sent Melody up, instead of going up himself earlier.)
Turned out, as Stan's head passed the level of the floor, that Stan still didn't have to ask permission to walk on up and in; he just could. (And he guessed he probably would so long as he didn't take back the kid's blanket permission to sleep in his room downstairs, come in whenever, and all of that jazz. Kid was very tit-for-tat on a lot of stuff with him, so far.) He didn't call out to the kid like he usually did when he came upstairs (because of Ford, he didn't want to risk his brother overhearing him, and what might happen after that), but he did make sure to be his usual noisy self coming up the stairs so the kid could stop him or say something if he wanted to.
When Stan walked in on 'em, they were finished eating, stuff all cleared off to the side by the stairs, and Bill tilted his head at him - just like he usually did when Stan sat down on his bed, and Bill sat down on his - the same way the kid always did right before they tried talked things out facing each other.
There were no beds in here, though, so Stan suppressed a groan as he sat down. (He was gettin' too old to sit on the floor if he didn't need to.) Bill and Miz were already seated on the ground right in front of where he'd decided to sit. ...Well, yeah, okay, Bill was seated on the ground, Miz had gotten a pillow to kneel on. (Stan had considered grabbing one of those other pillows off in the corner, but it had looked like too much trouble. ...Eh, it wasn't important.)
"So, you got that emotion thing under control?" Stan asked first off. He figured it was best to get that whole mess outta the way first. Melody had said that Bill had said that Miz did, but he figured he'd better get the whole story outta the two demons himself. Devil was in the details with the kid, so, yeah.
Miz nodded at him, reaching a hand up to her headband, a pale yellow piece of cloth tied around her forehead. (Ugh, why did it have to be yellow? Ford was gonna…) Stan sighed but didn't actually question her color choice. He had other more important things to question, like... "So how's it work?" Stan grunted out at them.
"It shuts off every single one of my senses," Miz said. "And I modified it to allow a few of them back. I can only do three before the spell breaks under the strain."
Stan paused, then frowned. That sounded pretty extreme. "Explain," he said gruffly. She had to be able to see and hear him, from last night at dinner and now, but he wanted the full story here. (Demon. Details.) He watched Miz as she played with the cloth a bit, rubbing at it. "I have the sensation of Touch enabled. So any physical sensations are fine. I can tell how much pressure I'm exerting when I touch and hold stuff. And I can feel pain both internal and out." She placed a hand on her stomach.
Stan nodded. Okay. That was one of 'em.
"I got Sight because I need it to… well, see. But not See. I have my eyesight in this vessel but I don't have my All-Seeing Eye." Stan's eyebrows went up at this, and he glanced over at Bill, who looked… pretty damn uncomfortable. Yeah. This was a big deal.
"And I was going to forego hearing because I'm pretty good at lip reading but I realized I wouldn't be able to hear if anyone said 'No' or 'Stop' which meant I needed hearing," Miz concluded. Stan stared at her, noticing the way she shrank back in on herself a little bit as she talked. "What were you gonna pick, that you wanted more than being able to hear people talk?" Stan asked. It didn't get past him that she'd apparently picked something she wouldn't have otherwise, in order to try and follow an agreement she hadn't even really agreed to yet.
Miz blushed, which confused Stan. "Taste," she said, which confused Stan even more. That wasn't like Bill at all, the kid hated eating as far as he could tell. (Then again, he'd seen Miz eat, and she acted like…) "One of the reasons I take this form-" Miz gestured to herself "-is because it has human-like taste buds," she said. "My triangle form doesn't have taste buds that work like this and everything I eat tastes kinda bland."
She looked down at her hands, playing with her fingers, tugging at them one at a time. "I enjoy taste. It's unfortunate that I had to go with hearing instead."
Stan stared at her. Yeah, okay. That was different. -But who would rather be deaf than unable to taste shit, though? Whole thing here was messed up. Stan shook his head. "Right. But you're sure you don't feed off our emotions anymore?" Miz nodded. "How do you know that?" Stan asked neutrally, continuing his questioning.
They went over how they'd tested it, and the whole thing of whether she'd been affecting them at all in the first place, versus them affecting her, and what was different now. Stan sort of got over the course of talking about it - with Miz, Bill seemed to be staying out of it mostly except for confirming things sometimes when the kid seemed to think she might need backing up - that their 'emotional waves' or whatever that came of of them were something that Miz couldn't block out.
So, with what she'd said she'd been angry about two nights ago, of course the topic came up: if Miz could taste emotions, shouldn't she have known Stan wasn't bothered by Ford's comments, known that Ford wasn't trying to hurt Stan, but had been hurting because of what she'd said? The girl looked away, ashamed. "I was projecting, and angry and wasn't… thinking properly. Ford made me upset and I didn't want to let that go. I wanted to upset him back," she mumbled. "I'm going to try and not do that again." She couldn't face Stan, feeling much like a chastised child and hating it. "Is… is Ford… well, I know he's not ok, but is he doing better?"
Stan realized that Miz wasn't lying or just being 'polite'; she was actually worried over Ford's well-being. Huh. Hadn't expected that.
"He's doing better. -Not good, no thanks to you two," Stan told them with a grumpy anger, and he noted the guilty expression on the sort-of dragon's face. She was very expressive and didn't seem very good at hiding her feelings. He remembered what she'd acted like when she'd been here last time with that other friend of hers. She had tried to lie to him, spin up some tale. He hadn't fallen for it.
Her expressions when she actively tried to lie were more subtle, sure, but 'more subtle' wasn't actually subtle. He'd seen that at the breakfast table yesterday morning too, what with lying about the glasses. She hadn't been much better at it then; he still would've caught it, without having actually known what the glasses did before she'd put them on herself, absolutely. The only thing that had surprised him at the time was that she was actually better at lying than the kid seemed to be. (-Well, faster and smoother at it, anyway. He'd never seen the kid try to pull a lie off the top of his head before, and most anything Bill tried to pull with him seemed to be more of a 'leave stuff out' thing, not a 'lie to your face' thing.)
But it was all still pretty easy for Stan to see through, at least for him - even if she had managed to take the niblings for a bit of a ride on that one. (Had to give it to her, that one had been a pretty good, and pretty harmless, prank to pull.) Stan didn't know how to react to the knowledge that this girl, who was apparently a Bill Cipher from an alternative universe, was still a shitty liar, though. Or, at least, that she couldn't make outright lies that would even come close to fooling him. The only people she'd be able to fool would be the idiots here in Gravity Falls, and maybe the kids again, but only if she caught them in the middle of being excited or something when they wouldn't be really thinking things through. (Not that that couldn't be dangerous enough, though, Stan was sure his brother would be happy to tell him, as soon as he was completely feeling better.)
"Is there anything I can do that might… help?" Miz asked. Bill immediately turned his head towards her and demanded, "-Don't say yes to anything unless I say it's fine!" Miz nodded. "Good." Bill turned back towards Stan and gave him a long look. ...Yeah, the kid definitely didn't trust him with his little sister. Heh. Was almost kinda cute, except for how big a honking problem it actually was. Stan was still gonna try to get as much mileage out of it with the kid as he could, though.
"Help how?" Stan asked her, and Miz blinked at him. "-Oh right! Um, I was gonna ask if it would be okay for me to clear out the termites and the rats. And fix up any damaged wood in the shack, so that its cleaner and sturdier." Miz said, looking up at Stan with a hopeful look.
"Eh." The old man scratched at the side of his face and considered it. It sounded like she wanted to apologize by doing a favor for him. And her suggestion was to fix up the Shack. "Would it interfere with the voodoo barrier?"
"No. I won't be changing anything. Just making what's already here, better." Miz assured him. "Cleaning out insects, mice, dust, dirt and feces… I won't even kill the animals if you want, I can just push them out into the forest or something." She turned a pleading look at Stan. "I just want to do something to help out around here! I… don't want to be a burden while I'm staying here!"
Stan sighed. This junk again. Rate he was goin' he was gonna have to set up one of them halfway houses for Ciphers here, because none of them seemed to get that... "You're a kid-"
"But I'm not your kid. I'm just… staying here, for selfish reasons! Please let me do something to help! Just pretend it's chores but on a larger scale!" Miz begged. She knew for a fact that she would likely eat them out of house and home unless she found another source of fuel that wasn't their emotions.
"Kid," Stan held up a hand before she could interrupt again. "I don't ask Bill to do chores around here. The most he has to go with are penalties- and I still haven't figured them out yet," he began to say heavily when she looked about to interrupt him again, then lightened his tone when she backed off a bit again. Stan let out another sigh, and rubbed the front of his face with a palm. "Look, let me level with ya, okay?" he said, dropping his hand and looking between them both. "I ain't real happy with either of you two right now, I don't know what I'm gonna do about Ford yet, I just got done negotiating boundaries with the termites for the next year, and I don't need either of you two screwing up anything else with him, or the kids, or anyone else."
Stan took in a breath glancing between them, and didn't see any hard objections yet. -Good. "Your big brother here wants to take on any penalties you might get. After what happened yesterday, I can kinda see why." He glared at Bill. "You are not getting outta any penalties on anything," he told the kid. "I'm pretty sure I know why you rushed out the door with your little sister talkin' precautions now, when Ford started flipping out, 'cause if I understand this whole thing, if he'd started explaining things when we didn't know what was what, the kids would've started freaking out, and Miz would've felt that, and if she'd started freaking out then things would've gotten a hell of a lot worse. I got that right?"
"Yes," Bill said tersely.
"And you were worried what it was doing to her, feeling all our junk, anyway," Stan said. "So yeah, you thought it was more important to handle all that than eat. -But that ain't right, you coulda done both," Stan told him. "You still coulda said something over the phone when you were out there, or called us sooner," Stan told him. "You don't get to be off the hook for that. I've told you about not eating, and what happens when you don't do that, before," Stan reminded him heavily, before he let out a tired sigh. "But…" and now he had the kid's attention. "I didn't check to see if you'd eaten, or if there was any toast in that thing for you," Stan told him. "And I didn't check up on you for lunch, either, and that's one of the things I'm supposed to be doing for you." That was two things out of the whole set of four promises: food and learning. Stan had known that the kid didn't believe him about eating being all that important, yet.
"But you're still going to penalize me twice for that, anyway," Bill said slowly.
"Yeah," said Stan. He pulled in a breath, then made the plunge. "But I'm gonna penalize myself for that, too." Bill stared at him. "You screwed something up twice with the meals, but I screwed up twice with that junk, too. -They don't cancel each other out," he told Bill. "You didn't do anything to undo that, or fix that, and neither did I. So we both get two penalties each."
"Who picks yours," Bill said suspiciously, "Me?" Stan let out a snort. "No. I pick yours, and Ford's gonna get to pick mine, once he's feeling better. And if you think they're not on-the-level with your penalties or whatever, you can complain to me about it," Stan said. "But that doesn't cover what's going on with Ford, after what happened in the woods."
Bill gave him a long look. "...What if I help fix it."
Well, surprise surprise, maybe this would work out after all. Stan had been hoping that he'd managed to set it up right for this, and look at what he got here! "Can't fix it entirely, but you can help. Means the penalty's gonna be a lot less penalizing, if you help make it better than it would have been."
Bill gave him a long stare.
"Starting with tellin' me what exactly you two did, what he did, what the hell happened before we all got out there, and why you weren't even a little bit surprised or worried about it," Stan ground out at him.
Bill stared at him a bit longer, then looked away.
"Right now, or after you're finished with your other questions," Bill asked, finally looking back at Stanley.
Stan pulled in a breath, and he had to force himself to let it out slowly. Practically a whole day, and Ford being at least a little better than he was, and Stan still wanted to haul off and hit the kid.
...not least of which because he was afraid of what was gonna happen when Ford saw the kid again next.
"Fine," Stan said finally. "How bad off is your little sister from what we were throwing at her since she's been here, and from the last time," Stan asked. It got a startled look out of the kid. (...Yeah, didn't see that one coming, did you? Not an idiot, kid.) For all Stan knew, part of why the kid had been so okay with throwing shit to the wind yesterday had had to do with the fact that, technically, they'd all been 'mentally attacking' his kid sister with their emotions every second that she'd been there so far. "Only three senses? For a triangle with an All-Seeing Eye? -She's locked down hard right now. What happens to her when she takes that headband off? And how bad is it for her when she has it on?" He glanced over at Miz. He wasn't stupid, and he'd been paying attention to what little she'd said in the kitchen that morning. "This ain't just a feeding thing, is it. You were still angry with Ford because he was angry, weren't you. You okay? Or aren't you?"
"I'm… ok… sort of…" Miz rubbed her arm "It's just…" Miz sighed and looked down at her hands. "Why're human emotions so much stronger though? I can hang around angry aliens all day and just get irritated…" she mumbled quietly. It took a lot to really piss her off nowadays unless she had multiple days worth of issues stockpiled up. Or if someone did something really awful to piss her off. "And I feel a little… quiet right now, with the headband on. It's like… everything is… less vibrant? A little dizzy sometimes when I realize I can't See and I try to but there's nothing there…"
She glanced up at Stan. "And I was trying very hard not to be mad at Ford anymore during breakfast… but it was kinda… difficult."
Stan let out a long breath and looked over at the kid. Bill didn't look like he was about to have a nuclear meltdown, but he didn't look all that happy about any of it, either.
"You used to be human, right?" Stan asked. "Maybe human emotions just, I dunno, fit better with you. Hit stronger?"
"Maybe? My world's 3rd dimension is still in its early parts of humanity. Like, Egypt just became a thing. And with them, I'm stuck in the Mindscape most of the time unless I'm possessing something… which, funny story, is where the Egyptians got their misconception that the Pharaoh is a living god, they saw me with my eyes all glowy inside my host and started worshipping him…" Miz couldn't help but giggle a little. "It was both funny and exasperating."
Yeah, kid was definitely a triangle demon. She sure rambled away like the one he had did. "Kid," Stan said, looking to Bill. "How bad is it that she's feeling quiet right now?"
"She's lucky to be feeling anything at all," is what Bill told him almost flatly. "She's an empath with no ability to keep anyone else's emotions out of her mind and she's been spending most of her time around people. Most empaths with that kind of problem would have stopped being capable of feeling things themselves within a year or two of that, given her range and how strongly she seems to be picking things up without even trying."
Stan stared. It suddenly occurred to him why Ford might've been horrified in the kitchen, and why he'd looked so grim. Ford had gotten that 'I need to fix this' look that he sometimes got, the one that always, always got him into trouble… but Stan had thought that he'd been thinking about Bill, not the dragon-girl. He'd thought Ford had gone downstairs to that lab of his.
Miz mumbled, "Is THAT why Time Baby put me in solitary confinement after I accidentally laser beamed his courtroom?" Bill turned towards her. "You let him put you in the Infinitentiary?" Bill said with no small disbelief. "Well… I felt really bad about accidentally killing so many people! I didn't mean to do it! And he let me out after a few centuries when he needed help with something anyway…" she mumbled.
Bill and Stan both stared at her.
"Tell me you could have left whenever you wanted to," Bill said, sounding a little odd. Stan glanced over at him. "Yes. They wouldn't have been able to hold me." Miz confirmed. Bill closed his eyes for a moment. Stan realized that the kid was forcefully controlling his breathing. "...Fine," Bill said tersely, then opened his eyes again.
Stan wasn't sure what Bill was about to say, but he decided to cut in with, "Kid. Miz. Don't ever let anybody lock you up, even if you think you can get out later. That ain't smart. You don't know if you'll stay being able to get out again on your own." He didn't care if she was a freaking demon. Prison was hell, and she was still a kid, even more of one than the kid was.
"But… what if I lost control and hurt more people? I… I just felt really bad…" She trembled, remembering how she'd started hurting herself, slamming into the walls and biting herself until she bled everywhere. Anything to try and relieve that awful guilt burning inside her.
"Go someplace where there aren't any people to hurt," Bill told her flatly.
"I… felt like I needed to be punished…" Miz admitted quietly.
Stan frowned. He glanced over at Bill. "...And sitting in a jail cell you could leave, that was near a bunch of other people you could feel but couldn't keep out of your head or whatever, was being punished?" Stan asked her slowly.
Miz looked away. "In retrospect, if you put it like that, it does sound kinda stupid…" She shook her head. "But I'm out now! And it hasn't happened in eons."
"What hasn't happened in eons?" Stan asked her, glancing at Bill again. He had a suspicion...
"Getting Time Baby mad enough he felt the need to lock me up? He's been almost… nice these past few million years, still an asshole, but he hasn't asked me to kill anyone for him in a while…"
...and that had not been it. Stan's eyebrows went up. "-Woah, woah! Asked you to kill someone for him? The hell?" Yeah, 'nice to her'. Sure. Probably happy that he had a Bill Cipher killing people for him whenever he wanted, whoever the hell this asshole was.
Miz blinked. "Yeah. He says that since I'm Destruction anyway, I might as well be used for something. So, sometimes he needs history to happen in the way he wants, he has this whole timeline thing setup you see, and sometimes it doesn't go the way he wants, so he usually sends his police down there to… make sure things go smoothly. But sometimes he needs a more…" She struggled to find a way to put it. "...powerful creature to get things done? So he cut me a Deal, I do a job for him every now and then in exchange for a Favor from him."
...Shit. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. This was exactly the kind of thing Stan had been worried about with the kid. This was exactly why he'd wanted the kid to stay here, and not get caught up with who-knew-who that might come back to bite them all in the ass later. ...Hell, and if Miz could get here, what if that asshole decided he wanted to 'get things done' over here, and told her to start killing people over here, too? Only thing stopping that from happening (maybe) was the kid, and would Bill lock his 'little sister' out of anyplace she really wanted to go? Stan wouldn't bet his life on that, or the kids.
Stan turned to Bill. "-Can you get her out of this Deal?"
"...I don't know," Bill said slowly. "First time I've heard of it." Bill had thought, when she'd been talking earlier, about the 'trinity' of Time-Space-Energy that, that had meant they'd mostly been equal, or at least equal-ish. "Can you break it on your own?" was Bill's first question to Miz. His second was, "What were the terms of the Deal - do you have to kill whoever he tells you to?"
"Well… it's a case by case thing. I only make a Deal for one job at a time." Miz said, not sure why they were staring at her like that. "And each job, deal, I do for him, if I accept the job, he'll grant me a Favor. I've been keeping track of how many he owes me. It's how I keep my friends safe. I trade a Favor for their freedom and the Federation can't touch 'em," she said proudly at this solution she'd found.
Stan glanced over at Bill. Bill didn't look perturbed in the least… at least on the face of things. "Any restrictions on what the Favor can be?" Bill asked of her next. "Scope or duration? Anything?"
"Something of equal value to what my part of the Deal did for him. I tell him what I want, he haggles me down and we come to an agreement." Miz said. "I can have him make the Federation leave my friends alone so long as they don't blatantly break the law where an officer can see, or go on a mass murder spree. If they do break the law and get arrested again, I trade another Favor to get them out." She felt this was fine. She told them to keep the law breaking on the low and they had been behaving themselves.
"Have you ever not taken a job," was Stan's question, because, shit, how deep was this kid already into things, here? ...And what were her 'friends' like? (Yeah, okay, better than Bill's probably, if she usually didn't have to get them out of the clinker for mass-murders. Not that that was sayin' much. Shit.)
"Um… so far no? He gave me a thorough explanation of why he needed who he needed killed, and there was that one planet I had to destroy because it was infected with a very deadly parasite and he couldn't allow it to escape the planet to infect the rest of multiverse…"
Stan took in a deep breath. Let it out again. Turned to Bill and said, "Kid, how would you solve that problem if you didn't want anybody to die, and still not infect the multiverse." And as far as Stan was able to tell, the kid didn't even have to think about it. The kid just rattled off: "Roll back time around the planet. Roll back the entire planet and everything and everyone on it. The whole thing."
"Eh, Time Baby doesn't like it when anyone messes with Time like that. Which I always found kinda stupid… he's the god of TIME for fuck's sake…" Miz grumbled.
"So kill him," Bill said, and Stan had to cover a wince. "But then I'd be forced to take on his job and I had no idea how to do that!" Miz whined. "'Had'?" Stan said, because if this demon was anywhere near as exact with her words as Bill was... "As in, you didn't before, but you do now?"
"...sort of. I kinda get it now, but even if I took over, none of his police are gonna listen to me and rolling back time for the ENTIRE multiverse far enough to put myself as their original god would fuck up the timeline so bad that reality might actually snap…" Miz groaned. "It's just… so many strings and connections and consequences and-"
"So don't let them think he's dead," Bill said. "Put a mannequin in or something you can remote control. Or talk to that chatty 'dad' of yours that seems to like you, see if he'll vouch for you to the rest of reality."
"Eh… dad says I need to learn to get along with Time Baby," Miz said. "Of course he does," Bill said next, his tone dripping scorn.
"And he never talks to the rest of reality, lazy ass…" Miz grumbled. Bill didn't look horribly surprised at that. "Also, I tried replacing Time Baby with a Construct once, I was pranking him by spiking his drink with this super strong alcohol for Crimbo and he got knocked the fuck out!" Miz giggled. "But then Time started falling apart so I panicked and held it together until he woke up because of COURSE he set the damn thing to fall if he was taken out, apparently he sets up an autopilot thing whenever he takes a nap but getting knocked out was… a bit of a surprise- but either way, I had this fake Time Baby up and running for a little while and it was awful! He just sits in his courtroom all day with all that paperwork and people coming in and out to beg for favors and I tried helping them because they seemed to be in a bad place but there were all these long reaching consequences with a couple of countries never having existed because apparently I fucked something up while helping people and…" Miz paused in her tirade and sat back neatly on her pillow with a blush. "So… I don't think I can replace Time Baby long term," she said meekly.
Stan listened through all this, feeling (as usual) pretty over his head when it was things that had nothing to do with anything here, in 'this dimension', or whatever. All he could think to say was… "You think you could figure out how to set up one a' these autopilot things by, uh, lookin' at it with your Eye or whatever?" Kid complained about his often enough that he had a good idea now what they maybe could do with it.
"My powers don't work the same way Time Baby's does. I've been practicing and observing him but I think this is just something about how his existence is tied to Time and Fate while mine are tied to Energy and Death." Miz said.
"Okay…" said Stan. "But I ain't sayin', 'can you do it the same way?' I'm askin', do you understand how this autopilot thing works. Or why, or whatever." Stan knew the kid could do stuff with 'magic' that worked differently but did mostly the same thing as the kid could do using 'weirdness', or whatever. He figured that maybe the kid's kid sister might be the same way about this, with what this asshole baby-guy could do.
Miz scrunched up her eyebrows in thought. "I… can See the threads of Fate. I could probably make my own version of it, but it would be… different. Might not work the same. Time would move differently." She shook her head. "But disregarding all that, if I killed Time Baby, dad's probably gonna be upset. He might be forced to step in and take over running Time until Time Baby reforms himself." She winced. "And dad would be mad. I think? I've never seen him mad before but I think killing Time Baby might make him mad?"
"I ain't talking about killing nobody," Stan told her. That was well beyond anything he'd feel comfortable telling anybody, especially not a couple of demons who weren't talking about whether or not they could go out and do it, just what would happen if they did. "I'm just thinking that maybe knowin' how to keep time from collapsing if somebody else spikes the guy's drink next time, or kills him, or whatever, might be a thing you might want to have a handle on if you can do it. Sounds like not handling it might ruin your day." Oh boy did it ever.
Miz tilted her head. "I can start working on constructing a Curse that could automate the thing for me? Would probably take a while to program that." She pouted. "I didn't really think of doing that before. Time is HIS thing, not mine."
"Yeah, well," Stan rubbed the back of his neck. "I wouldn't really be thinkin' about how to hold somebody's hat for 'em, if they kept tryin' to get me to kill people for them, and were holding my family or whatever hostage over it, either." Didn't sound like the kid was in a really good situation over there, wherever she was from. Not at all. And he hated to scare her, but… "You got any idea what would happen if you ever tried to tell the guy 'no'?" Knowing how much of a hold this baby-guy might have over her was really the first step to figuring out how bad and how deep she was in.
Miz paused. "Um… I…" She looked down, a worried frown on her face. "He wouldn't be able to do anything to ME, but…" She pulled at her dress (Stan absently noted she must have used magic to change her clothes or something, since this was a different dress from yesterday) and looked uncomfortable. "But he might be… less willing to pardon my friends when they do stuff… I mean, they're usually on good behavior! Xanthar and 8-Ball and Keyhole are the sweetest guys! They wouldn't hurt anyone on purpose! But… Pyronica likes to eat people… and shoplift…" She mumbled quietly, "...and the Federation KNOWS her, they have her profile in their systems…"
Stan sighed. Kids. God, he hated it when the mob or whoever got them early. She thought killing people to get somebody else off for shoplifting was okay? (He could see why Bill thought he'd take advantage of her. Shit.) ...Well at least this one really seemed like she didn't want to run around killing people, if she didn't think she had to. He didn't think she was lying about that. Only reason he was trying to figure a way out of this for her. (Stan figured it would cause less trouble for him, because if she wasn't killing people, then Bill wouldn't be tempted to 'help her out' with the killing. Last thing any of them needed right now.) "Okay. Look. Are there any places this Federation isn't? And who makes these laws? Does the baby-guy have any pull on that?" He probably did, damn it. Stan hated explaining the facts of life to teenagers, he really did.
...Bill was watching him. Something was up, with the kid not jumping in and getting all chatty with him like he usually did on everything else.
"The Federation is a multiversally spanning governmental system whose business model is sending down powerful ships onto a newly discovered planet, asking the inhabitants if they'd like to join them and then force the inhabitants to join them if they refuse. But as bad as that might sound, it's been slowly getting better. I've been working sneakily behind the scenes to try and get some people who aren't shitty to join the council. It's slow going." Miz tried to explain.
Uh huh. Yeah. 'Course she was makin' excuses for them. And starting to get in way too deep, if she knew enough to be trying to change the system from the inside. (That usually didn't go well. That usually just got your own guys killed, or turned. And then where were you? -Running with your name on a kill list for bein' dumb enough to think you could change anything inside the system, that's what.)
"Kid," Stan said, "Let me be straight with you, here. Okay?" Miz looked up at him curiously. "Okay. Look. Guy tells you you're good for nothing but killing? You don't believe 'em, you get the hell out of there and run. That's bullshit. Understand?" Stan grimaced. "And if this guy's an asshole, probably the minute he decided he wanted you to be working for him, was already too late for some things. He knows your people, and he knows how to hurt you through them. That's bad. Means he has leverage. Now," Stan shifted in place. God, his back was not gonna love him tonight. Miz noted Stan's discomfort as he pressed a hand to his back. "It sounds like the guy's not everywhere. And I'm betting he can't get here, so you have an escape hatch. But the only way you can really deal with the bad ones, is to run and stay the hell under the radar until they die - 'cause they sure as hell won't forget you - and it sounds like this one dyin' is only gonna cause you problems, which is a mess and a half. So don't go runnin' to him the next time he calls, just don't even answer. Just stay away from him, get you and your friends someplace where this Federation isn't, and… I dunno, just stay out of it. Because if he's an asshole, he'll want you back, and 'laws' can be changed. And that's if you can trust the cops not to decide there's a new law just for you and your friends, because this big-shot baby says so, and they owe him a favor or two. Understand?"
Miz nodded slowly. "Well… a lot of the council members are getting on in years. There are four good people I'm trying to get into a seat of power right now. As for escaping the Federation… we could go to somewhere that they haven't gone to. But that's mainly fringe planets and the few planets I've managed to keep them from getting to. But… I don't want to restrict my friends from going out to where they want to go… even if I'm just trying to keep them safe. And… Kryptos is still in school, and Teeth has his job… and…" Miz seemed to wilt as she thought about it.
"Kid, if these people are okay with you goin' out and killing people when you don't want to, just so they can go places and pull stupid shit whenever they want, then they ain't really your friends," Stan told her heavily.
Miz looked a little angry. "They ARE my friends! And… and they didn't actually know about my Deals with Time Baby until like… a few hundred years ago…" She started out angry and then just looked sad. "I… never told them, explained it to them properly, until recently because I was afraid they'd think I was an awful person for agreeing to work with Time Baby…"
Stan took in a deep breath and let it out again. And this is why he hated the mob: they never really let you go, and just when you think you got out, just about everybody else would toss you back in. ...But sometimes, if you were lucky, 'just about everybody' wasn't everybody, and with this demon-kid... "Okay. I'm guessin' they had somethin' to say about it, if they're still your friends now."
Miz nodded. "They said I shouldn't have to do that for them…"
"Okay." Stan felt a little relieved. "After you told them, did they stop going places as much on their own?"
"...They've been on really good behavior these past several hundred years. We had one rampage, but that one was my idea. The Federation was bombing a rebelling city so I went to get the survivors to safety while my friends fought off the Federation soldiers…"
"So they give a damn about you, and they're willing to help you with shit. That's good," Stan said, glancing over at Bill again, who'd been unnaturally quiet this whole time. "So maybe give 'em a heads-up that you don't want to take that big baby's deals anymore, see what they say. Talk it out with them. Backup plans, what you'll do if you think you need to go… uh, handle one of those evacuation-rampage things again, or if one of your friends wants to do something that'll break one of those 'laws'. How you're all gonna handle that, without you havin' to go begging back to him for another favor or two." Because that would go really bad, once she tried to get out, and stopped taking their calls. They'd just nail her to the wall for good. She'd never get out and away from them again.
Miz nodded but still looked worried. "I feel bad that they'd have to do all this because of me…"
"Yeah, well, don't," Stan told her. "Sounds like these guys are actually your friends, since they're doin' it for you 'cause they want to. Right?"
"I'm already feeling guilty for trapping them with me…" She sighed. "I didn't want to restrict their freedom…"
Stan looked at her, confused. "You ain't trapping them, that stupid baby guy is. And you can always take 'em and leave that set of yours and go someplace else if you have to, right? Escape hatch?"
Miz shook her head, looking strained. "But I DID trap them with me. I made them immortal so they wouldn't age and die and leave me alone!" She looked away.
Stan blinked at her. "Uh… what?" The other stuff, he'd sort of been able to get. Just replace 'mob boss' with 'asshole baby guy' and 'her dad' with 'the other mob boss or whatever that you can't cross', and 'Federation' with 'those countries we own, 'cause we're the mob families who own the place', and 'planets' with 'towns', and 'friends' with 'family', and it all pretty much fell out the same way. Whatever. But he hadn't really been able to wrap his head around the idea of Bill being a trillion years old yet, and it was just a number because the triangle acted like a kid anyway. Stan couldn't imagine living forever.
"When… when I found them… and they actually wanted to be my friends… I was so happy! But, mortals aged and died. I didn't want to lose them! Not when they actually like me! So… I kinda… well, actually it was Pyronica who originally suggested it, but I was the one who added that hidden term to our Deal- ah, that is… I made a Deal with them to continue being my friends until the end of time and ah… I kinda forcibly made them immortal. They can still be killed, but they don't age anymore…" Miz looked guilty. "So, they're trapped… with me… because who else would they live with once they outlive their families?" She waved her hands. "And I KNOW that was very bad of me to do but I was so lonely and I didn't want to lose them and-"
Stan stared at her. There was nothing about this he understood. ...Okay, the emotions a little, maybe, but...
"-Are they trapped with you, though?" Bill said oh-so-lightly, as he finally cut in. Stan turned to look at him. The kid was looking at his fingernails.
"I felt bad about making them immortal without them knowing, so I told them they were free to leave and do or go wherever they wanted… but it's not like they have anywhere else to live except with me… and I feel bad about that."
"Do they still have Free Will?" Bill asked her, looking her directly in the eyes.
"Yes. I have never messed with Free Will. For a while I was worried that my Deal might have done something to them, to make them like me, but I got Jessie to check them out and they came up clean. So I haven't touched their free will!" Miz said vehemently.
"Good!" said Bill, with a smile. "Then they aren't trapped. You said it yourself."
"But… they wouldn't be able to do things like settle down and start a family. I mean, Pyronica had kids but they're older than she is now, well, older looking at least- you know what I mean- and… and they're gonna die someday. And…"
Bill let out a laugh. "Kid, you're missing the point." He spread his hands out to the sides. "You said it yourself. They can die. -If they really wanted out for good, they could just kill themselves," he told her, which had Stan swallowing hard and damn near biting his tongue. "Unless you'd stop them from exerting their free will, and they know it?"
Miz blinked. "...oh. Uh… I hadn't thought of that… ah… if they really wanted to kill themselves, I… I wouldn't stop them…" even if it would break her heart to see them go.
Bill nodded. "And," he continued. "You know how to jump dimensions and pick the time you want to come out at, correct?" She'd indicated so before, last time, to him, when they'd been talking to Seb. "So if they outlive their own race, it doesn't matter. They can go back and visit, find someone, and bring them forward. Or, you can create a new race for them, can't you?" Bill told her. "Or visit a different dimensional set with them entirely. You, and they, have options. No-one is trapped."
Miz nodded slowly. "The time travel thing would only work a few times before Time Baby notices, but I might be able to do the new race thing. I've been messing around with a planet I created and while the 1st generation of life I create are soulless, their children have souls…" That got another long stare from Stan. (Could the kid do that, too?)
"Right!" Bill said, giving her another smile, that was closer to a grin. "And you can always offer the same sort of immortality to others, who might say yes or might say no, if your friends ask you to, if there is anyone they might want to keep around who would want to live that long, too."
Miz nodded. Slowly a smile appeared on her face. "You're right!" She bounced in place. "So… I'm not a bad friend for making them immortal without telling them? Not, entirely a bad friend at least?"
"Mm," said Bill. "Not like most people understand what immortality means until they're a couple million years into it. You left 'em an out already. Is there any other way to break the Deal?" Bill asked her.
"Well, I used the words 'until the end of time' as part of it, so I guess if Time Baby dies they'd be freed from the Deal too. They wouldn't die immediately, but they'd be mortal again and start aging normally until Time Baby reforms himself."
"How long does it usually take your Time Baby to reform?" Bill asked her. "Takes a thousand years here."
"Like, a thousand years as well. Same for ME if anyone manages to destroy me bad enough."
Bill nodded. "So, how long do each of their species usually live?"
"Ah… let's see… 300 for Ronica? Xanthar's like… 500 maybe? Teeth's people only have 98-ish…" Miz mumbled as she thought about it.
"Well, that's a problem if you're stuck having to hold time together while he ain't there, if you don't got yourself an autopilot to handle things for you," Stan pointed out. He wasn't dumb, he could do the math. "If you're stuck holding time together so everybody doesn't kick it because time unraveled or whatever, and your dad don't take over… they still die. That ain't good." He glanced over at Bill, who glanced back at him and gave him a smile. The kid had an odd gleam in his eyes, too, for some reason, which was weird.
"Pfth… I actually boosted their bodies on the genetic level to stop their aging. So, I think their natural lifespans are actually much higher than their species are supposed to have. Not sure how much but I know that for Kryptos at least, he would be able to survive 1000 years, be pretty old but he'd make it."
"Yeah, okay," Stan said, rubbing a hand over his face again. "So, maybe a good idea to, I dunno, either boost it longer or get some cryotubes or something like Ford's got in the bunker," (what did you want from him, Stan was spitballing here), "And really nail down that autopilot thing, even if it will take a long time. Just in case whoever takes out that asshole baby decides they want to go after you or your friends next, so you can be ready there, waiting for 'em, or just grab 'em all and bail."
Miz hummed. "You know, I was wondering about that… Bill killed Time Baby here right? I'm guessing this dimension doesn't have its little pillars of reality directly tied into the gods that run them?"
"No," Bill told her. "Not at all. -Here, there's only one stupid giant Time Lord left, and it's in this dimension, and it's 'Time Baby'," Bill told her, then tilted his head at her. "If you're looking for models of dimensional sets that are set up without needing any 'pillars' in place, this would be a good one to look at, before I start changing all the underpinnings of everything everywhere and it gets a little difficult to tell what it used to be like 'before'!" he laughed out. It'd still be stable when he was done, of course, but getting from here to there was a step-by-step thing, and not just the steps but the order of them mattered. Changing things around in a different order could lead to a large-scale destabilization from a less-stable (or almost unstable) configuration that wasn't corrected in time, Bill knew.
(Stan glanced over at Bill. Oh, he was definitely talking about this with the kid later. First time he'd heard anything about this 'messing around with underpinnings' stuff, and that didn't sound good...)
"I wonder if I could scan what makes this place hold up without pillars and use that to write my Autopilot in my world…" Miz wondered, quite curious at what sorts of systems were in place to automate things in this world. "If your Eye doesn't change what you See, then go for it!" Bill enthused with a grin. He'd made sure observation using his own Eye didn't, at least as far as he knew. He'd tested it as much as he could; he was very sure about that now. The thing he was less sure about was whether his own observations could be noticed; he couldn't exactly try and use his old Eye to try and See his own Eye. He also didn't know enough about other dimensional sets and how differently they might work from his to assume anything about that one. The fact that there were 'pillars' in Miz's was a big hint that the Rules In Play might be vastly different in other sets. They might have learned to See very differently than he had, or his Eye might flat-out work differently there; he just didn't know.
"I would need to take this off-" Miz poked her headband "-if I wanted to take a look."
"Could go out to the lake, take the Stan O' War out with the kid, more than thirty feet out from the shore and the boats," Stan put out there, offering. He'd taken the kid out there before. "Don't think trying that inside here will do ya any good," Stan raised a hand and gestured at the room.
"Mm, starting small might be a good comparison," Bill put out there. "But the lake first, then here, then the lake again, for a good contrast?"
Miz nodded before looking down at herself and shivering as her tail retracted. "Oh, ok. How do I look? Human enough?" She laughed. "I'm joking, I know this looks human, it's what I looked like back when I was human!"
The joke got her a 'heh' from Stan, but the last thing she said got a thoughtful look from him. She wasn't even 5 feet tall. How… old had she been when she'd 'died' and been 'reborn' or recycled or whatever into being a 'triangle demon' like the kid? He suddenly had a sinking feeling about her childish behavior. (...in a lot of the same way he had a sinking feeling about the kid when it came to that, too…)
"Well," Stan scratched the side of his cheek. "Dunno if the kid said this or not, but if you're in trouble, come here." Stan grimaced. He didn't like saying it, but… it'd be better than the alternative. And hey, at least he could keep an eye on the both of them, if they were here. "I'll have to work somethin' out with Ford, once he's feelin' better. I don't like you talkin' with him, but…" He glanced over at the kid. "We can figure somethin' out. Keep you away from each other, if we have to."
Stan wasn't offering out of the goodness of his heart, here. He knew full well now what would happen with the kid if Miz ran into problems. -The kid would either try to leave to go to where she was (and who knew what would happen then), or (if Stan said 'no' to him about helping) the kid would drop everything and host her here himself, the rest of them be damned.
Stan didn't really want her here - not after everything she'd done already - but he knew that all he could really do at this point was keep on doing damage control. -She was a kid, yeah, but she'd hurt Ford. Twice. And she'd probably hurt him again. So Stan sure as hell wasn't feeling too charitable on that front about her or the kid right now. He wasn't some bleeding-heart hippie; he didn't go adopting every stray kid he saw out on the street. He was just trying to balance bad and worse, and maybe keep his family intact through the worst of it.
Ford didn't talk about the multiverse or whatever much, and the kid hadn't seemed surprised at any of the shit that the dragon-girl who'd used to be human had been talking about. That meant that the triangle demon had seen all this before, or a hell of a lot out there that was like it. Small wonder Ford didn't want to talk about any of that shit, if it was all like this.
Not that Stan had needed to know all the details or anything, to figure shit out - he'd gotten a pretty good idea of things during their Weirdmageddon. All those 'demon friends' of the kid's… that was a problem. And Ford was right - there was nothing stopping them from coming here now, or anybody else. Not after they'd killed Bill Cipher.
What Ford didn't seem to think about was the fact that they'd killed Bill Cipher. And Ford seemed to think for some reason that somehow, everybody out there in the rest of those other universes would know that. -Fine. He wasn't gonna argue his brother on that one. What he was gonna do was think about the fact that there was always somebody tryin' to make a name for themselves, and if people were people - and assholes were assholes - then somebody out there, sooner or later, would think that killing the people who'd killed Bill Cipher, the biggest of big-bads around, would net them a hell of a lot of street cred.
And chances were that it'd be one of those unkillable-demons that Ford wasn't nearly so worried about coming here as maybe he should be. -Ford thought they'd come for Cipher? Hell, Stan was surprised they hadn't come for them yet. (...He'd thought maybe it'd be Bill's 'friends' to worry about at first, but after talking with the kid, and what 'friends' were in demon-speak… yeah, no, revenge for Bill dying wasn't on any of their menus, Stan would bet more than just money on that. Technically, he'd been betting on that right from the start, already, in getting the kid not to call 'em or get in contact with them in any way. If the kid found out otherwise later, he'd lose the kid to them right away, he'd have no doubt. But when the kid had talked about them, it hadn't sounded anything like Miz and her friends at all; it was night and day. ...One less thing for him to worry about, at least.)
"Dunno if you noticed, kid, but… you seem to be actin' a lot more human to me this morning," Stan pointed out to Miz. He figured he really ought to bring it up now. If the kid had been acting like this before… okay, well, all the dimension-talk probably would've set Ford off, and the killing-stuff too... but not in anything like the same way as before.
Miz blinked. "Huh…" She tapped the headband. "I don't think I'm acting any differently. But I guess I wouldn't be able to tell?" She turned to Bill. "Am I acting any different? From yesterday?"
Bill blinked at her. "I don't think we've been talking about any of the things you like to do, or find funny or hilarious," Bill told her. Those were the things that seemed to consistently set Shooting Star or Pine Tree off by accident, whenever he got a 'stop' or 'no', as far as he could tell. "And Stanley had a high tolerance for terrible things." He glanced over at Stan, then said, calmly, "Miz, what was the… most-upsetting-to-others thing that you've told Stan this morning?" (Stan looked over at Bill. Was the kid really going to pull a-)
"Uh… he didn't seem to like the fact that I kill people?" Miz frowned. "I mean, most people are upset by murder."
"Which you noticed because of his reaction after the fact, but still said anyway," Bill said. "That's fine, we were having an honest conversation; you did well!" he grinned at her, then looked a bit more serious again. "-What was the next most-upsetting-to-others thing that you said?"
"Ummmmm…" Miz had to think for a bit. "My… friends maybe not wanting to be with me, but still being trapped, because I tricked them into being immortal?" Miz bit her lip. "Because free will is important."
"And the next most-upsetting-to-others thing?" Bill prompted her. Miz said almost immediately, "My friends dying. People dying is upsetting." That had come up a few times.
"And the next one?" Miz thought for a bit longer this time than the last. "...Going to jail when I didn't need to?" She was kind of straining to think about it. Generally, killing people was the worst thing, right? Stan had seemed very upset by this one, though.
"Why?" said Bill. Miz frowned. "I… I don't know? Because it's unnecessary suffering?" she guessed.
"If you didn't know to start with, then why did you pick it?" Bill asked her lightly, not looking at Stanley. Miz glanced over at Stan, though. "Because Stan looked like it upset him? But… not like… 'don't talk about it' upset, just kinda… sad? I'm not sure?"
Bill looked over at Stanley. "Which you noticed after you said something. It wasn't something you thought of before." Miz nodded slowly. She didn't see the problem with it personally, she went to jail, she felt like she deserved it.
"...Well, shit," said Stan after listening to all of this, running a hand over his face. He'd hadn't thought to do that with Miz, but now he was thinking he really should have. -He'd pulled a similar thing on the kid a couple of times before, to what the kid had just done, in trying to explain mental attacks to the kid, and how he just didn't get it. Most of what Miz had been saying that morning so far had just sounded like the same shit he'd seen and dealt with here, just on a much larger scale; Stan hadn't realized Miz hadn't been filtering because she hadn't known that she should filter it. He'd thought she had just been trusting him the same way that the kid did these days.
"Gotta question for you, kid," Bill asked Miz next. "Since you used to be human and all." He tilted his head at her. "Did you ever talk about killing people with your sisters?"
"Like… usually as a joke. My youngest sister was a Gen Z and they're all like 'Death, take me now' and morbid jokes." Miz shrugged. "She would slump over on the couch and beg for someone to just kill her now so she didn't have to do homework anymore. Not seriously though, it was a joke."
"Interesting," Bill said, and he did look interested. "Tell me. Do you remember your youngest sister well enough to know how she might respond to certain things? Or at least know whether you would know or not what she would say?"
"Yeah. I used to sometimes have conversations in my head with her… and then I thought I really DID have that conversation with her. She was kinda upset to realize that, that was the reason why I sometimes spoke with her about stuff that she didn't remember us talking about." Miz said. Stan wanted to ask about the 'having conversations in her head and thinking they were real' thing, but kept his mouth shut and just observed.
"Good!" Bill enthused. "Now. Tell me." He leaned in a bit closer, watching her carefully. "If your sister was sitting right next to you now, and you turned to her and told her that you were killing entire planets worth of people for a favor from someone who wanted them dead 'for reasons', what would she say to you?"
Miz blinked and then looked sad. "Oh… she might… think it was a joke first. And if she knew it was real… she… would tell me not to do that anymore… she…" Miz looked down at her hands. "She… would say that I shouldn't do that. Because it's awful…"
Bill had both elbows on his knees, his hands steepled in front of him, and his chin resting on them, and his eyes were alight in a way that Stanley had never seen before.
"INTERESTING," said Bill. And then he moved his eyes, rather than turning his head, towards Stan.
Stan pulled in a slow breath. He felt like he was skating on thin ice here, almost. Knife at your back, about to get shot… Bill was watching him closely.
Stan still swallowed, took the plunge anyway, and said, "Miz. Kid. Maybe you should think about what your sister would say to you, if she was in the same room with you and you said something to her, first, before you maybe say it out loud to anyone else. Y'know, just in case she might tell you that that thing might be a bad idea to share around my brother, or somebody." Miz nodded slowly, looking like she had never considered that before. Stan almost wanted to punch a wall.
Bill's smile slowly grew.
Bill flicked his eyes back over to his little sister. "It might be sad to think about her, since she's still dead right now, but in the meantime, you can remember her too. So it's almost like she's here with you. Right?"
Miz nodded, tearing up slightly. "I… I miss her so much…" she admitted. "I was the older sister.. I watched her grow up… we shared a room and… and I was always in charge while our parents were away..."
Shit. Stan shifted in place uncomfortably. The hell was he supposed to do here?
Bill watched her for awhile.
And then Bill said, after a bit of thought and some searching through his Seen memories, "Is this one of those times when hugs are supposed to be offered to humans?" Stan blinked at him. The kid was offering to have her come over and grab him up in a hug? After the last time?
Miz sniffled. "Yes."
"Hm," said Bill, dropping his hands to his lap. "I think I will offer then!" Miz looked up at him and wobbled over to wrap her arms around his waist, burying her face in his chest as she let out a few quiet cries.
Bill grimaced a bit right when she first grabbed him, unable not to, but he was able to wipe the expression off of his face after some clear effort on his part. It took him a bit longer to raise his arms up and lower them again, one at her back and one on top of her head. Miz was still crying softly into his shirt.
Stan stared and not quite squirmed in place, feeling highly uncomfortable. He was no good with girls crying. What was he supposed to do about a human-demon-triangle-dragon-girl one? "Uh…" he said.
"Stanford likely thinks that he's in a different place at the moment, doesn't he?" Bill said lowly, and it took a minute for Stan to realize that Bill was talking to him, even after he looked over at Stan. "It's likely switching around quite a bit, as he tries to get his bearings. To find something that will fit."
Stan felt a cold chill go down his spine. He also felt a hot anger rise up in his chest.
"I've seen it before," Bill confirmed. "He does this when something he really doesn't like happens. He decides it's not real; it can't be. ...And I used to accommodate that, for him, because I thought we were friends," Bill said almost graciously. ...Scratch that, Stan was hot all over and really wanted to punch him.
"How do I fix it," Stan said quietly. He had to. Any louder and he'd end up shouting at the kid instead.
"You don't." said Bill. "He's just going to have to handle it this time." He looked straight into Stanley's eyes. "Unless you want me and Miz to leave, and never come back, and you all just… pretend this all never happened, and we were never here. That he's misremembering somehow. That he's missing time for some other reason, and none of you know what he's talking about, if he ever brings any of it up - which he won't," the dream demon told him. "-That ain't happening," Stanley responded angrily. He wasn't about to hand the damn demon an excuse to up and bail on him now! (To run off, doing who the hell knew what. And when the triangle demon came back here, because Stan knew he would sooner or later-)
"Well, then, Stanley, I don't know what will happen next," Bill told him, as he patted Miz softly on the head. "He's never broken this way when he's been awake before, and while he always bounces back, the few times he'd realized that the thing he tried to believe wasn't real did actually happen… he was very unpredictable afterwards."
Miz sniffled as she looked up "Was… this my fault?" She asked in a small voice.
"No," Bill told her. "It would have happened eventually. The barriers between sets are coming down. There's more than one Bill Cipher, and eventually another one will come here." And they probably wouldn't be as docile as Miz was. This wasn't said aloud but Stan heard it clearly. ...And now he knew exactly what had set his brother off.
"Why didn't you tell him there was more than one of you before," Stan ground out.
Bill looked up at Stanley, who was fuming. "I did," said Bill. "Or I tried. I just about gifted him all the underpinnings of the concept. He didn't take any of it well. He knows that demons kill anyone else who happens to have their name because of summoning problems. He knows that new dimensions are created all the time. He knows that multiples of most people exist in other dimensions. He was the one who never connected the ideas together," Bill told him. "He didn't want to."
"You should have told him," Stan repeated directly.
"I didn't know," Bill told him. "Not for sure. Not until Miz and Seb came here; not for certain. Why would I have told him when I didn't even know?" Bill said. Miz commented absently, "There were a LOT of Doors…"
"And as far as I knew until you came here the first time, none of them had ever come here yet," Bill told her, patting her on the head again and smiling down at her. Miz nodded slowly. "That other Bill I saw couldn't open the doors. And Seb only managed to open one while he was with me… I don't know if that means anything or not? Haven't really tested it…"
"WELL," said Bill, with a growing grin. "That's what experimentation is for! -Just remember to bring your supplies and broken-Bill repellant!" he said, patting her on the head again, then not quite flicking the end of her nose (it came closer to tapping it lightly) and pulling his hand back to splay it across his chest. Miz managed a shaky giggle.
"Kid…" Stan said warningly.
"Go downstairs and talk to your brother, and decide what to do," Bill said, not looking up at him. "Just be aware that he's far more likely to start shooting now than he ever was before." Stan struggled to keep his temper down. He shoved himself to his feet slowly.
"That ain't helpful, kid," he told Bill.
"Isn't it?" said Bill, turning an almost-innocent look on him that would probably fool someone somewhere, Stan figured, except that it was coming from a murderous triangle demon that didn't care one bit about any of them. Stan glared at him. "...No?" Bill got a larger grin all of a sudden. "Well, then. I'll just promise you this - when he sees me downstairs and attacks me next, I won't kill him."
Stan's eyes narrowed. "'When' don't sound like a 'I don't know what he's gonna do', kid."
"I think in the long-term, Stanley; you know that," Bill said, dropping the grin. The kid was giving him that long stare again. "He's going to attack me, and I won't kill him. You shouldn't try to stop him, and I won't hold it against you," Bill told him. "Call it a... 'freebie'."
Stan glared at him for a moment, then turned and stomped his way back downstairs.
Bill flicked the area settings back to one-way audio-in-only again.
"We're not gonna hurt them are we?" Miz asked quietly. "I'd feel bad."
"Humans have a VERY low tolerance for hurt," Bill told her. "But yes, we will try to keep it to a minimum." He looked down at her. "I'd prefer it if you not interfere," he said to her. "And if I tell you to leave the room, I want you to come back up here straightway, straight up those stairs," he told her, gesturing at them. "Can you do those two things for me? No matter what happens?"
Miz nodded. "Ok big brother." Bill eyes were alight. "Good." He smiled down at her. "That will be very helpful!"
He patted Miz on the head again.
Stan sighed heavily as he made his way back downstairs. Well… shit.
He scrubbed both hands over his face. The kid was pushing it. This was the second time in two days that he'd talked about leaving the dimension… or maybe leaving the entire freaking set. Damn.
Ford was down in the kitchen, helping the kids make lunch.
"Ah, Stanley," Ford brushed off his hands on his apron, which had been hastily thrown on at Mabel's request. "Good. I think we might need help with this salad." He frowned down at it. "I am not entirely sure of the composition of it. Are most salads these days meant to have fruit and vegetables in them?"
Stan sighed heavily at the happy smile his brother was giving him. So long as no one talked about Bill, Ford would… be okay. Sort of.
...Like that was supposed to be helpful. Yeah, sure. He'd figured that one out from how antsy and downright defensively angry (...and paranoid, and confused...) his brother had gotten at the first mention of the triangle, right at the start, after they'd gotten him back to the Shack. The kids had picked up on it almost as fast as he had.
"What do you need help with?" Stan said, walking on over. "Picking out fruits?"
"Ah, yes." His brother readjusted his glasses almost nervously. "Actually, perhaps you had better take over-" Ford began, starting to back away from the counter, and Stan already knew where that one was going, and put a hand down in the middle of his shoulders and pushed him back into position.
"Nope," Stan said. "Lunchtime. You're helping with the food. No running off in the middle of things." Ford's smile quickly became strained. "I won't be long. I just need a minute- really, just a moment-"
"Nope." Stan wasn't going to let Ford out of his sight. Especially with the not-quite threat Bill had made. "Kids? You maybe looked up whatever so Ford can figure out what he needs to figure out on this salad, yet?" he asked them.
"Almooooost… -Found it!" Mabel called out triumphantly, lifting her phone and waving it around. Melody had found the recipe and since she wasn't there right then, they had to look it up themselves.
"Pineapple-watermelon salad?" Stan read out, once he'd managed to gently capture her wrist and stabilize the phone enough to read what was on the screen. He just as gently let go. "Where are we getting the pineapples from?" He was pretty sure they'd used them all up last night.
"TADA!" Mabel said. "BAM!" And she reached out of nowhere and slammed a full pineapple down onto the countertop next to Ford, leaving both of the elder Pines blinking. ...Make that out of a grocery bag down on the floor next to her, Stan realized, when he leaned back and peered down at the floor, as his brother also did.
"Soos and Melody are out picking up more stuff at the store." Dipper said. "Melody said we needed more fruits than just watermelons since M- er… someone's allergic to melons."
"Who's allergic to melons? Mabel?" Ford asked, turning to peer down at Dipper. "None of us," Stan said. "Don't worry about it."
"But-" Ford began.
"We're making the same one as last night, right?" Stan asked the kids. "Yeah. Pineapples, lettuce, honey, watermelons…" Mabel looked over at the large green fruits.
"...Except without melons this time," Ford said slowly, remembering perfectly well what they'd all eaten last night. "Because someone can't eat them." Someone who wasn't them.
"Yeah." Mabel said slowly. "That's why we're getting more fruits, different fruits."
"Who else, precisely, are we feeding this salad to?" Ford asked, twisting away from Stan's hand on his shoulder slightly and taking a step back, while looking at Stanley with an odd, undirected sort of suspicion.
"The goat, if you get the amounts wrong," Stan told him flatly, and Ford blinked, then frowned.
"Stanley, we are not feeding the goat fresh fruits and vegetables," Ford told his brother in descending tones. "That would be a waste of-"
"-Better not get it wrong, then!" Stan told him brightly, clapping him on the back, then moving around him towards the fridge. Ford frowned after him. "Stan-" he began, then stopped when he realized that all he was talking to was Stan's back, and it was clear from his posture that he was going to refuse to answer him. Ford let out a frustrated sigh, and readjusted his glasses again. "This isn't going to any of the gnomes, at least, is it?" he asked of the niblings. (He'd never been entirely sure if they'd always gone after jam for the fruit content, the sugar, or both, and he'd never quite gotten a chance to test it. He generally forgot to grab fresh produce, on the once in a blue moon that he remembered to venture out to the store, and then forgot that he had it to begin with, until the mold colonies started taking over the fridge again.) He felt at least somewhat relieved at the shaking of heads he got back from them both that they were not trying to either appease, or potentially try and shift the diet of, that particular colony of small cryptids in the woods.
He flicked his eyes over to Stanley, and then back down to the fruit bowl. There was no point in trying to signal to Dipper again; each time he'd attempted to do so, the boy had seemed oblivious.
Had Dipper never fallen downstairs into his lab? Was the Rift even there? If it was, was it cracking? Or had it all just been one long nightmare wrought by Bill? Ford frowned down at the pineapple, as he pulled out his laser knife, and started chopping away at the exterior. ...It could be the summer after Weirdmageddon possibly, which would far better explain why Stan was so much more friendly with him and his being around the children. ...Except that he hadn't done anything like this with them before, upstairs, without cryptids involved, so maybe it was only that - potentially endangering the children - that had had Stan so upset with him before.
No-one would even tell him the date, other than that it was the summertime - which frankly, he'd been able to deduce from the children's presence and from looking out a window - and not a one of them had left him alone for long enough for him to sneak down to his lab for a moment and try to ascertain on his own exactly how much time had passed. Looking at what he'd made down there, and how much progress on what, would be a perfect metric for him to regain his bearings, but they all seemed just as determined as he was to go down there to not let him actually go down there. ...Well, as much as one could without physically trying to tie him up with rope and chains and lock him in his room to keep him from doing so, that is.
Currently, Mabel was turning out to be the one of them most effective at corralling him, Ford had found, and he had the distinctly uncomfortable feeling that she'd also noticed that, too - and was taking full advantage of that fact. He simply could not bring himself to brush her aside, or say no to her… or, even worse, ignore her.
He tried to tell himself that it was not likely at all that Bill had put her in a prison bubble of her own making, effectively forcing her to jail herself within her own mind… that sort of thing would cause lasting trauma, certainly! Especially in such a kind, gentle, weird loving soul such as hers. ...No, that couldn't possibly have happened to her, so he had no reason to feel so unreasonably guilty that it might... and yet he still found that he could not say no to her.
Surely, it still had to be that first summer. Surely, Stanley and the children were not trying to keep him out of the basement for some sinister reason. Surely, there had to be some rational reason for his family's behavior towards him. Surely...
Ford's mind felt like it stuttered for almost a moment, as it occurred to him that Melody, Soos's fiance, had not been with them that first summer. She'd left the town shortly after… the kids had told him that she'd… And then Ford blinked, because… he'd never actually met her that first summer, had he?
...She could have flown in to visit Soos, though. Except- Stan wasn't wearing his Mr. Mystery suit. And that likely meant- Ah, no, they'd said the Shack was closed again today. Perhaps not.
Ford put his hands on the edge of the counter in front of him and leaned forward, closing his eyes. He felt tired. ...And not quite well. But if he tried to lift a hand to his head again, reassuring himself of the metal plate that was there, at the same time as he tried to relieve at least something of the outer-inner ache on his skull with a bit of pressure, Stan would-
"Ford?" he heard his brother say, and he slowly opened his eyes and looked over. And his brother looked worried. Ah. Apparently he couldn't even do that without causing...
"I'm fine," Ford told his brother, giving him a smile and taking most of the weight off of his hands, straightening back up. "What did you need?"
He adjusted his glasses, and tried not to think about the Rift that might exist, inside or outside of the container that he may or may not have made, that might or might not be residing down in a dark corner of his hidden basement lab, potentially cracking even further at that very moment.
It wasn't too pressing. The world wasn't going to end in the next five minutes if he helped his family finish preparing this salad, or another ten if he sat down and ate it with them...
And maybe if it did, it was worth it anyway.
-of course it wouldn't. No-one was downstairs, or could get downstairs since he'd changed the code. And there would be other indications that the containment unit was in danger beyond a sudden, abrupt, and catastrophic failure in integrity, so long as he kept the Rift out of the hands of Bill's puppets, and that failure was not externally induced. Because if it did, and if he did...
Ford knew better than all of them the horrors that Bill could unleash. He had to be watchful. He had to be vigilant.
He had to find a way to slip away from them unnoticed, for just a moment, to check. Everything would be fine. He just didn't want to worry them; that was all. It was just a slight problem with his short-term memory, that was all. He'd had this problem before; he'd handled this before. It was nothing. It was fine. He was fine.
It wasn't as though he was going to have to resort to jumping tables and chairs, and getting in a shooting war with his own family in order to make a run for the gift shop, and the vending machine, and his elevator. That would be sheer madness! He didn't need to do that, bringing peril to his family and their lives in some way, in order to learn the truth of the situation at hand…
...did he?
When Stan went to his room to get another shirt, after he got soaked with lemon juice as Mabel had too much fun juicing them, he found an envelope half-slipped under his door. He grimaced a little, looking back and forth down both sides of the hallway, before entering the room and closing the door behind him. They would've have to have gotten downstairs somehow to manage this one, but, judging by the open window he saw when he walked in, he figured that this one was a bit of a 'team effort' on the demons' part. That was almost definitely Bill's way of showing that he'd gone down the outside of the house to deliver the thing, not through the inside of it, and hadn't slipped it under the door at all. The kid had sort of a feel to how he did things, Stan was coming to find.
Bending down, grunting in effort to do so, Stan gingerly picked up the envelope. He didn't recognize the handwriting but the words [I'm sorry -Miz] were on it, so he figured it was probably from his newest house guest.
He walked over and closed the window, while debating if he should open this 'sorry' gift or not. If it was from Miz… well, he was pretty sure the human-demon didn't mean any harm. And there was no way she could have gotten it to him without her 'big brother' knowing about it, so the kid had to think it was an okay 'gift' for him, too…
Stan sighed and hefted the envelope, feeling a heavy weight inside. Huh. He grunted and opened it; it wasn't even sealed. He blinked when a gold necklace thunked out onto his desk. This was… really nice quality too. He pulled out the letter that came with it.
[Hi Stan, I felt bad and wasn't sure how to make it up to you. Bill said you liked gold. So I made this. I know it's probably not enough to make up for anything but I couldn't really think of anything else. You can probably pawn it for some money. -Miz]
He sighed. Figured. The kid had brought up 'money' and 'wealth' both when he'd been begging. And it wasn't like he didn't like paging through an old copy of Gold Chains For Old Men now and again. But… his old necklace had sentimental value, not just a monetary one. And he wasn't so sure that the 'pawn it for money' wasn't some subtle dig at him, or his old man, or not. ...Hell, the two of 'em both had a pair of All-Seeing Eyes between 'em. He'd stopped assuming the kid didn't know shit about him from day one. Only real question was: did they mean it the way that he thought they did?
Probably he should just ask them about it later. He slid the thing back into the envelope, along with the letter, and shoved it into a desk drawer for now. Last thing he needed was Ford seeing something like that and putting two and two together, if he'd understood the kid right earlier.
He changed his shirt, opened the door and walked back down the hallway, then out to the kitchen to see what was happening.
Melody was on her way to the staircase, bringing some food up to the demons now. She'd mentioned to him earlier that she would ask them about any other potential allergies when she went up there, just in case. Stan still wasn't sure why Miz would be allergic to anything, let alone melons - didn't she make that body herself? Why would she do that to herself? - but what Stan was sure about was that Bill would probably throw a fit if something they fed his 'sister' actually ended up hurting her, accidentally or not. So… it was probably a good call.
Stan got back in the kitchen and grunted when Mabel waved at him sheepishly. "Sorry again, Grunkle Stan!" He sat down and grunted again, ever the most eloquent. Mabel slid a bowl of the fruit salad over to him. Fruit-vegetable salad. Apparently the recipe was just fruit but Melody had wanted Soos and the kids to eat more vegetables. Stan sort of approved.
He saw that Ford was already halfway done with his. "You hungry?"
"I'm merely amazed at the way this all comes together. Vegetables and fruit. Fascinating." Ford stabbed another bite, picking up lettuce, pineapple, cucumber and a strawberry slice with his fork. Stan shrugged. "As long as it tastes good." He took a bite. Huh. Sweet and sour with some crisp crunchiness. Not bad.
"Where did Melody go?" Ford asked. "Is she eating upstairs?" He had noticed her leave with a bowl of salad and a plate of incredibly burnt toast. It looked too burned to be enjoyed. It sent a niggling thought through him. Burnt toast was…
...No. No, that couldn't be it. -Ah, perhaps she was bringing food up for Mabel's pig! The toast must had been burnt accidentally and they hadn't wanted to waste it. Though they could have fed that to the goat down here… And Melody was probably giving the pig some fruit salad as well because Mabel doted on that animal. That must be it. Did that really make sense? Ford ate quickly, the salad WAS delicious but it was more of a means to an end. He wiped his mouth and got up from his chair. "Thank you for lunch." Ford walked over to the kitchen counter to drop his bowl in the sink. Then, he strode quickly out of the room. After all, he was finished eating. "Ford!" He heard Stanley call out.
"I'll be right back. Just checking on something."
Ford found himself having to come to a halt, though, when Melody appeared out of nowhere to block the doorway. "Oh, Dr. Pines. You're leaving already?" she asked. And then Mabel whined from her spot on the table: "Don't go! I still want to tell you about the painting I made using ketchup and mustard!"
Dipper stared at Mabel, horrified. "Mabel! You made that thing last night! It's rancid!" Mabel huffed. "It's ART!"
Ford felt a little helpless as he was not-quite herded back to the table, but now he knew for certain: there was something going on. Stan had probably asked the kids to help keep him away from the lab. But why? He was sure Stan didn't mean any harm by it; perhaps he was worried that Ford would lock himself in the basement and ignore him again?
Well, he wasn't ignoring Stan on purpose - he just got distracted with his work sometimes, is all. Still, Ford couldn't help the niggling thought… the spark of worry. He didn't know if the Rift was there or not or whether there never was one in the first place, or whether Bill might still be out there, plotting and planning to hurt his family and-
"Ford. Breathe."
Ford snapped out of his thoughts at Stanley's words, and at the feel of Stan's hand on his shoulder. He began trying to breathe a little more deeply like Stanley had told him to, slowly calming himself. As Ford did so, he reminded himself that Stan cared about the kids. If something dangerous was going on, Stan wouldn't be so calm, right? And… maybe this was the summer after, and the Rift had already been dealt with. Perhaps Bill was gone and they had won… but then again, how likely was that?! Could he even risk not knowing for certain, for long?
Still, Ford calmed as Stanley watched him and grounded him, like he had on the boat at times. (Maybe it really was the summer after?) He was a little… miffed about how worried everyone seemed. They were acting as though he was made of spun glass. Soos tried to break the tension by launching into a story about how he'd just bought a new video game: Grand Theft Horse 2. He asked Stan if he could bring it over so the twins could play.
"Depends. Is it appropriate for children?" Stan grunted. Mabel was bouncing in her chair. "There's horses?! Can you ride them? Can you brush them?"
"Ah… isn't that game violent?" Dipper asked. "I heard you can do train robberies in it."
"But it's the wild west dudes! With cowboys and the Oregon trail!" Soos's eyes sparkled. Melody laughed and patted her fiance's arm. "That's great, but I think it might not be suitable for the kids." Soos pouted, looking much like a sad gopher. (Ford would still sometimes double take when he saw the man from the corner of his vision, so sure that Soos was some sort of alien.)
Mabel asked for a game where she could play with horses or cute animals. A game called Zoo Crosswalk was brought up and Mabel, who had finished her salad, demanded that Ford play with her. Soos dug out his old GS2 to let them play the game in the living room.
Ford couldn't turn her down. He sat with her as she directed her game sprite to shake trees to pick fruits and run around talking to all the cute animals. He wasn't sure why he had to be here when it was clearly a single player game but Mabel would pass the controller to him and claim she needed help with fishing because, "You've got awesome reflexes right?"
Ford played the game with her and wondered when he would be able to make his escape from all this attention, and make a break for the vending machine.
"Is it really ok to sneak out like this?" Miz asked as Bill climbed down the side of the house. Miz was carefully glommed onto him piggyback-style, while using what little power she could use (inside the bubble her bracelets made for her inside the barrier) to make herself much lighter, and therefore be less difficult for Bill to carry. Her brother was a bit tense, not liking being grabbed quite so tightly as was necessary for this, but he hadn't trusted her to try climbing down herself while her senses were impaired, so being carried had won out. Miz apologized for having to hold on so tightly. "I don't like being grabbed much either, hugs are different…" She mumbled.
"It's fine, I can handle it," Bill told her about the grabbing. "And yes, it's 'okay' - why wouldn't it be? -I 'sneak out' all the time!" Bill told her, as he continued to make his way down the side of the shack more slowly than usual. "Stanley says that's what teenagers do." Miz frowned. "I never did that when I was human… though I did sneak out while I was a triangle."
"Oh? Do tell?" Bill's moved his arm to grab another hand hold and carefully lowered the two of them down just another foot.
"Well after I graduated school, the Council assigned me the job of Archiver, which wasn't a bad job all things considered since Triangles were usually only allowed basic labor jobs-"
"So you had to do whatever job your Council gave you?" Bill asked. "You didn't get to choose?" Miz nodded, resting her head against his shoulder. "Since I was an Unnatural, I was allowed a slightly higher rank than a normal triangle got."
Bill blinked. 'Unnatural' as higher ranked? In his dimension, 'irregulars' were killed just for existing - almost the opposite. "What do you mean? 'Unnatural'? ...Not 'irregular'?" He needed more than just a definition, here; he needed background.
"Well, I don't know how it worked in your Flatland, but in my world, some Shapes were born Unnatural. It referred to the shape of our genitalia. Since the shape of our mating parts determined the shape of our children." Miz closed her eyes and shivered at the memory of her check up. "It's different from being Irregular, in which your outside shape is different. Irregulars are kinda looked down on for being 'ugly' but if their mating parts are normal then they're allowed to get jobs and get mates."
Hm. "You mentioned that on your blog. But how did that fit into the stupid-hierarchy-rules?"
"Well, it was how a Shape could elevate their status. A triangle could have a square shaped piece and father squares. A square could have a pentagonal piece and so on. In that way, through multiple generations of careful Pairing and breeding, you'd get a many sided shape that could produce Circle children."
Ugh, that sounded almost as bad as how it had worked in his dimension, except for the whole strange 'pieces' thing. "But you broke that mold too, HA!" Bill grinned. Miz shrugged. "Yeah. I was a triangle with a round piece AND slot. So… the Council was unsure what rank that made me." she sighed. "If I wasn't still too... small to mate, the Council probably would have sent me off to breed for the rest of my life…" Bill stopped moving for a moment, and his grip on the side of the house tightened, knuckles going white before he forced himself to relax and keep going. "Well. That didn't happen, did it?" he asked lightly. He remembered reading something about her inventing things, so...
"No. I did something that caught the Council's interest. In a good way." Miz leaned closer. "I was actually trying to do something else. I wanted to see if there was anywhere I could run away to. So I could take my brother and leave that awful place. So I built a mode of transportation, based on some stuff I remember from being human… I only meant to use it so I could travel faster, farther, so I could see how big the world was, see if there was anywhere I could go…"
Bill remained quiet as he listened. This sounded like a listening-time thing to him.
"But the Council was interested in the thing I built. They wanted more. I was transferred to the research and development building instead. It paid better. But it wasn't what I wanted. I was still under observation by guards who'd been ordered to keep me away from my family, because the Council said I shouldn't associate with lower class…"
Bill frowned slightly in thought. Miz's past was very different from his own.
"So I tracked down the triangle rebellion. I figured there HAD to be one. And I found them." She didn't sound all that happy about it. "They were all about overthrowing the Circles. But they didn't care about equality or freedom. They just wanted to put themselves in charge, flip the hierarchy as it were."
Miz shuddered. "And they had no problem using me the same as council did. They wanted weapons, they wanted information, they wanted me to birth Circles to infiltrate their ranks…" she sneered. "Of course, I threw THAT plan of theirs out the window. Naw, I somehow sped up their plans by causing mass hysteria and rioting while we broke into the government hall and dragged the Council out in front of the angry crowd."
She was trembling as they made it to the ground and Bill crouched down so that she could more safely and easily slip off of his back. "You know what happened next," she said quietly, as she let go of him to stand on her own two feet. "I'm still not entirely sure what… precisely was going on. But Will died, I a-ate him… and then everything was on fire…" Her voice shook. Bill pet her head again. (The 'not entirely sure what precisely was going on' sounded very familiar to him; he knew what that felt like.)
It still hurt to talk about for Miz, but that's precisely why she did it. Talking about it was better than ignoring it. Even if it hurt, it was better to let it out than to bottle it up inside, right?
"It wasn't your fault." Bill told his little sister as he allowed Miz to hug him again. He was slowly getting used to this. She was getting better at it, too. She never held him tightly, never grabbed him. She just pressed herself against him with a faint pressure, sometimes wrapping her arms around him, until she finished getting whatever comfort she needed. (As long as there wasn't too much pressure, as long as she couldn't go from holding to grabbing him in a way that he didn't know he could immediately get out of, Bill was fine with it. When she did the arm-wrapping thing, it was more difficult, but when she only pressed up against him, it wasn't-very.)
So he held himself still, and waited, until she got what she needed from him again. He heard her take a few deep breaths, before she pulled away with a quiet, "Thanks."
Bill smiled down at her.
Once Miz had calmed herself, Bill stood up and led her away. Stan had said they could take the boat out to the lake. Bill wanted to give Miz a chance to take her Seal off. Not being able to See was horrible! And if she could use that time to See and study how his world held up without a pillar, then that was even better!
The two made it out of the edges of the barrier and Miz sighed in relief as she took off the bracelets. "So, teleport to the lake?" she asked. Bill's almost-immediate response to this suggestion was, "-Define 'teleport'." After all, the way he was hooked into his body right now was probably problematic for several things involving energy.
Then Bill tilted his head. "Why don't we fly instead?" They could stay at least thirty feet up, which would be out of the range of any humans on the ground, and Bill really missed floating - this would be the perfect excuse if Stanley asked him about it later! Miz blinked. "Like...turn into my full dragon form and fly?" That...would be kinda cool. Bill blinked back. That hadn't been what he was suggesting but now he was very interested in HER idea.
Bill grinned. "Well, I was talking about-" he ran over to the outhouse and pulled a long, thin metal lantern rod out from behind it. "-this! I can make it fly... but now I want to see your full dragon form. Exactly how 'dragon' is your vessel?" he asked, still grinning, and Miz raised an eyebrow. Flying lantern rod? Like a witch's broom but COOLER?! "I still want to see your lantern rod," she said. Bill laughed. "And I want to see your dragon form!"
"So I'll show you mine and you'll show me yours?" Miz cackled. She fingered her headband. "Should I take it off before we go?" she asked. Bill nodded. They were far enough away from the Shack by this point that the only one Miz would get anything from was HIM, and he was… largely non-problematic right now. 'Self-regulating' his emotions was something he was perfectly capable of doing, in his opinion, even if he was having trouble properly regulating his energy-self right now; they were two different things. "-Make sure to check that we don't get spotted by the other humans, or put up a perception filter," he reminded her, in case she was too distracted to remember. Miz nodded and pulled the headband off, shivering as everything came back at once. She stumbled a little and held her head.
Bill hovered there with his hands up to catch her if she fell, but Miz breathed long, careful breaths for a few seconds before straightening up. "Oh, wow. That's a rush." She massaged her head. Bill smiled at her words but watched her carefully. She sucked in a slow breath and let it out at the same speed. "Ok. I'm good." She looked up at him with a soft smile. "To the lake?" Bill nodded, eyes bright and watching her closely now because he wanted to see what she did! He was very much curious as to what she meant by 'dragon'. (In his experience, there were multiple dimensions with different versions of what a 'dragon' was.) Miz tossed up a Perception Filter around them and shook out her hands, loosening her shoulders before she let her powers get to work.
Miz sighed as she closed her eyes with her head tilted back. A rippling went through her body as brick shaped scales grew along her skin while her form lengthened and grew. Bill stared. The 'dragon' form was very odd looking. Its head was triangular with a large single eye set above a pointed snout and a jaw filled with sharp needle-like teeth. Her golden antlers poked through her long mane of black… hair? No, those thin black tendrils were wiggling. Her body was long and serpentine with oddly noodle-like black arms and legs tipped with claws. She shook herself as she looked down at her new form, twisting around to examine it. "Huh… that's… pretty neat…" she mumbled. Miz wasn't all that big for a dragon, around the length of a bus and standing perhaps six feet tall. She flicked her tail and wiggled the tendrils that made up her mane.
"Did you not know what you would look like?" Bill questioned. Miz shrugged. "I didn't have a real idea in mind, just let my powers do what they wanted, which was 'Take a triangle, and make it a dragon'. I like seeing what cool stuff happens when I do that."
Bill blinked. That… was an unorthodox way to go about things. He always planned out every last detail. He never tried to wing it, not knowing what he might get. (Probably because the last time he'd done anything that might resemble 'letting his powers do what they wanted', all he'd really gotten was a really large mess!) He didn't see his powers as separate from him, with their own 'wants' (and, potentially, 'needs'). ...But then, thinking about some of the things Miz had written to him, it seemed that maybe Miz did feel that way about hers.
Hm. ...INTERESTING.
"Alright," said Bill, as he turned away from her slightly, to lift his lantern-rod and hold a hand over it. It took him a moment or two to construct the proper mandala spell-pattern inside his mind for what he wanted, and to whisper a keyword that enacted the spell and enchanted the rod he was holding with it. "We'll fly over, stay at least thirty feet away from the humans above them." That shouldn't be too hard; most of the trees were taller than that. "You stay in the air once we're there. I'll land and get Stanley's boat out. ...Maybe some tackle-bait, too," Bill told Miz, before he let go of the rod for a moment - now floating mid-air, to sit down onto the main body of it side-saddle. Once seated upon it, he cast his own 'bubble of invisibility' perception filter around himself - making sure to allow Miz to see through it - and then wrapped a hand around the rod and mentally commanded it, exerting his will upon it, lifting rather quickly up into the air. As he gained altitude, he started to grin...
Miz wiggled her hips before leaping up, twirling through the air like a ribbon. She giggled brightly, feeling her senses stretch out and See through every knot on every birch tree they flew past. She felt so free.
Being a dragon was so cool!
Melody went upstairs to get the dirty dishes and blinked when she found the bowls next to the stairs with a folded piece of paper. She opened the note and read [Hi, Brother and I are going to play at the lake. We'll be home for dinner. -Miz]
Melody sighed. She hoped this wouldn't be a problem. She blinked when she picked up the bowl and found another note.
[Ticket for 1 free back massage from Miz, to be cashed in whenever]
Melody let out a soft laugh. Weird kid.
...Oh, right. She should probably talk to Mr. Pines about what Miz had told her earlier about her dietary needs, when she'd first brought up breakfast. Melody went back downstairs and put the bowl (licked clean) in the sink. "Mr. Pines?" She walked around the first floor, passing by Ford and Mabel, who were playing video games together. Dipper was sitting with them, complaining about how the Racoon had raised their debt again. Ford looked up at Melody.
"Oh, not you Dr. Pines. I was looking for your brother," Melody assured him before walking off. She missed his look of suspicion. Mabel nudged Ford. "Should I buy this new dress or the hat?" she asked.
Melody found Mr. Pines checking the closed shop front, probably so he'd be here to stop Dr. Pines if he tried to get into his lab. "Bill and Miz left-" she said.
Stan nearly had a heart attack at that statement, freezing in place.
"-and she wrote that they'll be back for lunch." Melody handed Stan the note along with the ticket. Stan pulled in a breath and grunted as he took the notes to read over. (He felt stupid now; shouldn't have overreacted. He knew that if the kid was leaving, the kid'd do it with all sorts of fanfare, just to rub it in their faces. ...Y'know, assuming the demonic triangle didn't just kill them all before he left as a 'going away present' to himself, or something. ...Unless that kind of 'kill everyone' thing was maybe more of a 'breaking out' thing, instead...) The back of the ticket for a free massage had more words on it, to the tune of: [Hi mister Stan, you looked like you might need one].
Damn. There were about twenty different ways he could take this, and none of 'em were good. 'Looked like he might need one'? That had at least two ways he could read that. And he hadn't even given the gold necklace back yet; she didn't know he wanted to do that, or she shouldn't know, unless the kid had put up surveillance in his bedroom and the demon-kid had done the empath thing (both of which they both damn well knew not to do). So, what, this 'massage' was supposed to be on top of that gold chain gift-thing? And how old was she inside her head?
Was the kid's little sister messing with him? It didn't really feel like it, though. This felt more like a kid trying to fix things but not knowing how to make things alright. ...How bad did this demon-dragon-whatever want him to say, 'I forgive you', huh?
Stan pocketed the ticket and sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. This was giving him a headache.
...He might actually have to take her up on something, even though he knew that was a mistake with the kid watching him like a hawk. (He'd have to have a long talk with the kid first, separately, but…) For a demon, she really was like a kid. Stan had a feeling she was going to continue trying to give him stuff until she felt like he'd forgiven her, even if he tried to tell her he had, no matter what he said or did, unless he really put his foot down with her. (Reading Miz's note, he could sort of picture her with a 'guilty Mabel' look on her face. Like after what had happened with that 'rainbow-blinding incident' last summer… once he'd been able to see again. Ugh. 'Aggressive forgiveness.' It made him want to shudder.)
"Oh, Mr. Pines, before I forget - earlier, Miz told me that the only thing she has a real issue with is melons, spicy foods, and carbonated drinks." Oh, right. Melody had used to do food carts and stuff; food allergies were a thing with that kind of stuff, he'd heard, really important. "Apparently she finds the bubbles painful, so she prefers tea or milk." Yeah, tea. The kid lived off that stuff, too. Milk, not so much. "She's mildly lactose intolerant, but it's not bad enough that she would need to stop drinking milk. And apparently melon-flavored things are fine, she just can't eat the actual fruit. Honeydew and cantaloupe make her throat itch and watermelons make her nauseous."
"Uh… Huh." Stan grunted. It still left the question of why she was allergic to stuff, when she could make bodies ('vessels', right, whatever) out of thin air however she wanted, as far as he could tell. Melody seemed to pick up on Stan's confusion. "Ah, she said that she wanted to 'keep features' from the original her. I'm not sure what that means, but she said you would understand."
Stan nodded slowly. He thought he sort of got it. The kid talked about some stuff with his own body that way, 'features' and stuff. If Miz meant it the same way, then… she'd make her body allergic to stuff on purpose to be… exactly like her old body? So, she'd been allergic to stuff way back when, too? ...Was it to help her feel more like herself, and less like a crazy triangle? ...He'd have to ask her when she and Bill got back.
...If they returned.
Stan rubbed a hand over his face. No, he was pretty sure he'd read that dragon-demon-used-to-be-human right. He was pretty damn sure that she wouldn't go abducting Bill off someplace without any warning, or keep him from coming back even if she managed to do that and steal a march on Bill somehow. Stan was pretty sure that the kid would come to him first before leaving, if his little sister told him she wanted to leave, too. Just to… settle things out. (The kid knew how Stan felt about the idea of him jumping dimensions all on his own.) They hadn't left left; they hadn't even gone someplace that Stan hadn't recommended they go.
Hell, she had even left a note saying where they'd gone and that they would be back. The kid didn't even do that for him; he just left without saying anything, half the time. Lying about where they were going wouldn't occur to the kid; they hadn't had to leave the note in the first place. The only way Stan would've found out about it was the next time he would have gone upstairs, since Melody couldn't enter up there or check to see if they were there on her own - she didn't have access. They would've had until at least lunchtime, and maybe even dinner.
So yeah, Stan was pretty sure that Miz had meant it. So, he didn't worry about it. He had bigger things to worry about in the meantime. He had to figure out what to do about Ford.
Bill waved Miz out over the lake, and then turned and dropped in altitude rapidly, touching down carefully behind the 'Bait & Tackle' shop.
He hopped off of his flight-capable lantern-rod, looked around - no, no-one was looking in his direction except Miz - and dropped the 'bubble of invisibility'.
He casually wrapped his arm around his lantern rod, holding it up against his shoulder, as he walked around two-and-a-half sides of the shop, to then walk straight in the front door.
Bill came to a stop just inside the open door. No-one else was in the shop besides him, and...
"Tater," he said, looking up at Glasses' son, who was standing behind the counter.
"Bill." The man responded. His hat pulled down low over his eyes as per usual.
Bill walked up to the counter.
He pulled out a gold coin and slapped it down on the counter.
"I'm taking the Stan O' War out today," he informed him. "My little sister is with me. Stanley gave us permission to use it." With the preliminaries of Tater's 'pier guard' duties out of the way, Bill went on to address his 'lake ranger' duties with: "She is not a lake monster, she just looks like one sometimes. She will be in and above the boat with me. No-one but me should see her above the boat."
Glasses's son said nothing.
"This," Bill lifted his hand and pointed down at the gold coin on the countertop, "Is solid gold. It should cover the pier cost and some bait." He'd made a few of them using the universal manufacturing unit in the spaceship days ago. He hadn't liked using that much heavy matter to do it, but he hadn't had a chance to pull a job on the unicorns for some 'natural' gold, yet. (He'd thought of that a few days ago, trying to think of ways to 'work with' Stan, to get him used to 'working with' him more, to work him up to… well. OTHER THINGS. And Stanley hadn't done 'two-man cons' before, but he'd WANTED to, hadn't he?)
Bill couldn't pull it off himself easily, but if he could get Stanley to go with him… (Right now, it wasn't looking likely that he'd manage to talk Stanley into doing anything like that soon, though... Not unless he pushed that Stanford to fix himself first, so Stanley could stop having to 'worry' about him for Pine Tree and Shooting Star, and all that.)
Bill was all about the planning, though - he hardly counted on anything that wasn't a sure-thing in the timeframes he wanted to work within. So OF COURSE he'd tossed enough matter into that unit to make himself a few pieces of gold to have on him at all times, just in case. (It was the closest thing to a 'universal currency' in existence.)
Of course he'd taken over the spaceship to start with, in order to take it out of play and away from anyone else, to use. Bill wasn't stupid, despite what that Stanford might think! Bill knew that Stanford was meeting up with Glasses 'behind his back'. He knew that his Zodiac talked to each other. He knew all this; he didn't have to even try to use his injured Eye to check, damaging it further.
Bill hadn't taken over and reprogrammed the security system on the spaceship to keep it out of that Stanford's hands or Glasses' reach, though. He'd done it because of what would have happened if the man standing right in front of him had decided to get mad, get involved, and gotten his hands on it before he had.
Pine Tree was still young, and he was going to be dangerous as anything out there and then some when he got older. But Glasses's son? The man was already older. And just as brilliant as his father. And less insane.
And a hell of a lot more pissed off with him than he acted, or acted on.
...Yet.
"It's not current legal tender," Bill told him of the gold piece, "And it is not a bribe." Bill felt he needed to be clear about this. "Taking it to the jeweler and having it exchanged for cash-monies will cost you time. You decide how much your time is worth, and the cost of what I am paying for today with it, and you can count the rest as credit," Bill told him. "I'm opening a running-tab-in-reverse."
"Debit system," Glasses's son told him.
Bill blinked at him, scanning his memories of human-things-Seen for the term. "Yes. That." Bill took in a breath, maintaining eye contact with Glasses's son. That sort of thing was important with dangerous humans. "My little sister and I might be coming here multiple times. It will be easier to not have to carry around money to pay every time." Glasses's son said nothing, so Bill continued, finally addressing the final duties that Tater had here: 'shop owner'. "And I want to buy a bucket of bait and a kit of tackle for fishing-rod fishing." Stanley had made the fishing part sound important last time, part of the boating-part, so Bill wasn't going to leave that out with his little used-to-be-human sister out here with him. "We're doing human-things. You should not have to evacuate the lake because of us."
Glasses's son said nothing.
Bill stared at him for a moment, then grabbed a half-full bucket of bait off of the counter, scooped up and dropped a box of tackle into it, and then slipped it onto the 'S' end of his lantern-rod.
He gave Tater something of a wide grin. "WELL. -GOOD TALK!" Bill enthused in bright tones, but more than a little artificially, then turned on his heel 180 degrees and started back towards the door.
He froze in place for a moment, mid-step, when he heard Glasses's son say behind him, "That stage of yours was a thing."
Bill felt his face twitch. He put his foot down.
(Bill shouldn't have turned his back on him.)
He swiveled back to face Tater (nearly taking out a postcard display at his side with his lantern-rod in the process) and said, "STAGE? WHAT STAGE?" Bill's grin got wider and even more forced. "WHAT, THAT STAGE SHOOTING STAR AND I CLEANED UP? HAHA! NOT OURS! PUBLIC PROPERTY! ABANDONED! IN THE LAKE! CLEARLY! -COULD'VE BEEN ANYBODY'S!"
Glasses's son said nothing.
Bill shut his mouth and debated the merits of saying something along the lines of, 'If you want to not have something terrible happen to Glasses, like DYING FOR INTERFERING WITH ME AGAIN, you'll make sure to keep your eyes on him and keep him away from Stanley's house and my Six-Fingered-Hand for the next forty-eight hours.' But. Telling him that could backfire badly.
(It would probably be even worse than telling Tater exactly what had happened with the portal three decades ago, and exactly how much Tater OWED him for what he'd done and not-done to Glasses back then. ...Because he might actually understand it. He was that smart.)
Bill backed out of the shop, walking stiffly with his back straight and staring at Glasses's son unblinkingly the entire time.
Once he was past the door, Bill quickly walked his way to the 'boathouse' and got the Stan O' War out of there, cast a set of 'waterproof' and 'breath-underwater' spells on himself as he went (just like he had last time, the first time, he'd been out on the lake with Stanley). He got into the rowboat and set down the things he was carrying in the bottom of it. He picked up the paddles and started splashing and smacking away at the water with them. He did all of these things without any interference from Glasses' son or anyone else whatsoever.
He was a bit focused on getting things ready for Miz, glancing up at the sky above him from time to time, as she ribboned through the air in lazy spirals overhead. So it didn't occur to Bill until after he and Miz were ensconced out in the boat in the middle of the lake, with a 'go-away-cryptids' and 'go-away-stupid-humans' set of warding spells that went out at least forty feet, that by the time morning had come around on Summerween day, it had already been raining for hours. The whole thing they'd set up out there the night before had already well-disintegrated by that point; it had in no way resembled a stage anymore. ...So how had Tater known what it was? Let alone that it had been HIS?!
(It didn't occur to Bill until much, much later than that, after thinking on an odd comment from Stanley, that, perhaps, Glasses's son had actually been… complimenting him on it.)
(And when that happened, it left Bill feeling all out of sorts and odd in ways that he didn't want to think about and know how to identify, let alone handle.)
"We should catch some fish." Miz was leaning over the side of the boat as they drifted out further into the lake. (They'd been out for awhile already, just letting the time pass by, getting used to the boat a bit, looking at things…it was peaceful and comfortable.) She stared down into the water, feeling their little blips of life as they swam around. "Fish is yummy. And maybe I can bring some home for dinner? I'm not the one cooking it. I'm just bringing home my catch, so it should be acceptable, right?" She had one hand in the water, swishing around and wiggling her fingers. She was half-floating, half-lying in the boat, her long tail dragging through the water. Part of her wanted to go in for a swim. She loved playing in water.
Bill thought about it, from where he was sitting in the bottom of the boat. He was lounged oddly up against the side, with his head thrown back against the bench slat behind him, sprawled out and relaxing in the summer sun, soaking in the heat. "Maybe." Stanley had complained about her cooking before, but that had been more of an 'at the same time while I'm already using it' sort of thing, Bill had thought. Then again, with that Stanford downstairs… "We can ask."
Miz finally looked away from the water and sat up with her head tilted back. She Flickered. Bill watched as her eye flashed through images and information at speeds faster than thought. She stayed like that for a few minutes before the images faded and she blinked slowly. "Huh… well… that explains it… no wonder I was so confused!"
Bill watched her straighten out. She'd been confused? "What did you learn?" he asked. Miz looked sheepish. "So… I seem to have gotten several versions of your dimension mixed up. They all START the same from an aesthetic point of view where a humanoid Bill shows up the year after Weirdmageddon…" She grumbled. "The Ax in charge of this dimensional set is a lazy ass!" she complained, as she flopped back on the bench and kicked her legs into the air.
Bill stared. That didn't sound lazy to him - that sounded like it might be the OPPOSITE of lazy, if he was right about what she was implying...
"Who's supposed to be able to tell the difference between them?! And one of them is a video game?! Aaaauuuuggghhh!" Miz rolled around on the bench, her tail flicking the water.
Bill slowly began to frown. "...You…" he wasn't entirely sure how to put this. "...don't like games?" he asked of her carefully.
"I love games! But this is… urgh… it's hard to explain… there's a whole dimension where their world is apparently a video game? I can't quite understand what I'm looking at here…"
"8-bit or High-resolution?" Bill asked next.
"High definition. Looks almost like real life."
Bill blinked at her. "Two-dimensional or three-plus?" he asked of her next, raising his head.
"Three. And the Ax there is apparently some kinda system admin or a central processing AI or something? Which, makes sense actually now that I think about it… but… that's not the weird part."
Bill slowly straightened up in place at the mention of the stupid lizard, and how she had described it. "...What's the weird part?" he prompted her.
"The Bill there… isn't Bill. He's… Will." She got very quiet at that.
Bill had been about to ask her about- but what she'd said derailed every thought process he had going on entirely.
"...You're… sure it's Liam?" he said, blinking rapidly.
"He… he called himself Will… but tried to deny it? I… don't know if he's…" She made a frustrated sound. What even the fuck was that?
Bill didn't quite know what to say. If that… person?... tried to deny it, then… -no, but Miz would recognize their/his/a-Will-Liam, wouldn't she?
WAIT.
Bill's eyes narrowed. "Was he talking about The Game?" Bill asked. "Or... The Rules?" If he could, then that would mean he wasn't a demon-from-the-outside. They always VANISHED on Bill (...vanished on EVERYBODY, really...) after doing that - or, well, trying to do that, when Bill tried to tease, force, cajole, or otherwise TRICK any of them into- ...and then they never came back, not anyplace that he could See. (Stupid lizard. Not wanting him to find out…)
"I think… he mentioned A game, but their whole dimension seems to be some kinda game so I'm not sure. But he looked like your human-ish form." Miz frowned at Bill. "It almost feels like your Ax set up a bunch of dimensions with the same starting point and just… let them go loose to change and evolve in different ways."
"But they all ended up at the same fixed point," Bill said, repeating what Miz had just told him earlier. "If it set things up so that, no matter what we did, we still did the same thing at the end and ended up losing, even after we... diverged?" What had been the starting point, and when had they all started diverging? Should he ask? (She'd said 'starting point' before, in referring to 'coming back', but… had she meant the same thing now? Or had she meant earlier in their trillion-years-so-far?) "That's not lazy. That's the OPPOSITE of lazy, if we all still ended up like..." Bill gestured at himself with a frown.
Miz was quiet. "But… why? What kind of… experiment is your Ax running?"
Bill let out a breath that was a half-sigh half-groan. "Probably the same one it's running everywhere! -I think your dimension is different," he told her, "Because you're different. -You're a demon," he told her, "But YOU didn't come 'from-the-outside' like 'demon' demons do." He relaxed a little bit, leaning back against the seat behind him. "I think it's trying to figure out one of those demons, maybe. So it made us. And isolated you," he told her, "Because you were more demon-like than the rest of us, and it didn't want EVEN MORE interference from other demons when it was trying to figure something out. -Though that begs the question," Bill said darkly, "Did it make us FIRST, or did it make us LATER." The stupid thing had Rules, after all. And the stupid lizard interacted with demons-from-the-outside differently than any person inside the infinite dimensional multiverse; it generally, in Bill's experience, never interacted with any of them at all, the ones who had always been-and-stayed 'inside'.
Except for him. Just Bill. Just once.
"...I don't know. Can't see anything really important for some reason." Miz frowned, her tendrils wiggling around her. "Like it's blocked."
"It does that," Bill confirmed. "Doesn't want us getting into things too deeply. Been working on my Eye since forever-and-a-day, and there are still things I have trouble trying to See," and not just in the 'taking a LOT of effort' way. "Are you being blocked from seeing things earlier, or later? Certain locations, not times, or just times?" Bill asked. "Are they the same as us, or are they other-Bills?"
Miz just groaned as she flickered a few more times before giving up. "Anything before the whole…'is now a blue haired human-ish' is kinda blurry."
Bill blinked at her.
"...So, you don't know how we all started out," Bill said slowly. Apparently, they both had VERY different definitions of what 'starting point' meant.
"A couple of them I can get a sense for. Was a yellow triangle, started Weirdmageddon, got punched by Stan. That seems to be the trend in most of the dimensions I've Seen."
Bill blinked at her again. "...I wasn't yellow when I was living in my dimension, before it burned down," he told her carefully. "How far back can you See?"
"Specifically you? Not too much. It's all...vague? But a lot of elements overlap with others and I got them all confused and mixed up with each other."
Well, "It should be vague with me!" he told her with a smile. He hadn't been expecting her to see much about HIM, specifically, because… "I locked down most of my own Information, here, a long time ago," he admitted to her. "Keeps idiot demons from seeing weak points!" Bill waved it off far more casually than he actually felt about it. (He did NOT want to think about how many times he'd had to handle some of those… individuals... talking shit about his brother without even knowing him; Bill had put a stop to that VERY QUICK. And once he'd done that…)
Bill hadn't expected other Bills to potentially have done that, locked down the ability for others to view their own pasts, but… maybe he should have? He'd done it himself, after all. And while Miz and Seb were hims-that-were-also-hims, and seemed to have far less control than he did… they had been from much 'farther' away. It was interesting to him to be given such easy confirmation that Miz truly wasn't close enough to being him that his own spell- and weird-work automatically recognized her as being himself; quite the opposite. (Because while Bill had locked others out of viewing the details of his past, it wasn't as though he'd locked HIMSELF out of viewing his own past - though he did it but rarely, given that his own memory was one of perfect recall. It was looking FORWARD that had caused him problems.)
These Bills, by Miz's own comparison, were potentially 'closer' to him, and potentially closer to being the same as him, after all. Maybe he shouldn't have let Miz and Seb so strongly inform his thinking about what Bills were like, up until this point... but. "My dimension was grey, mostly. Tints of black; not much white." The circles had outlawed color.
"There are… dimensions where Flatland had no color, like you described." Miz frowned. "My Flatland had limited color. But Seb's Flatland was colorless." she paused. "And he had a Liam too." she paused again "Instead of a Will like I did."
"So, Seb and I might be closer in our timelines," Bill mused, thoroughly unamused. "I wonder if that's shared-similar history, or shared fixed-points instead."
"Well, there was a door called [Flat Dreams] that had multiple other doors stretching behind it. Yours and Seb's doors were around that area." Miz pointed out. "My door was… kinda isolated."
Bill tilted his head at her. "Doors in your Dreamscape have similar origins?" he asked. "Starting conditions for us?"
"More like they're organized in some way." Miz hummed. "Like… grouped together by similar features?"
"Hm," said Bill. "Did you organize them, or was it the lizard?" If it was the stupid lizard, there was no way they'd figure out what those features were. The big frilly jerk.
"Well, I'm a naturally organized person who likes to sort things, so I wouldn't put it past my own unconsciousness sorting the doors." Miz paused. "So like… I guess you and Seb are from worlds with a grayscale Flatland and a big brother named Liam."
"...That would imply that you can See things unconsciously farther than you can See them consciously!" Bill told her. HA! -That was something she'd have to work on. (But at least it was something she COULD work on, that wasn't starting from absolutely NOTHING and trying to MAKE SOMETHING from THAT.)
"My mind is a really weird place." Miz sighed. "After all, I was born already knowing a basic timeline for how a Bill Cipher's life was supposed to go… and I proceeded to mess it all up."
Bill let out a laugh. -Well, he couldn't contest that! "Weird is good! ...But." He paused for a moment. "How did you know how it was 'supposed to go'?" He left it at that; he'd already discussed with her how 'messing it up' was a GOOD thing.
"Back when I was human, there was a story. Multiple stories actually." Miz wasn't sure if this would be too existential for Bill but, he DID ask. "I liked reading the stories. There were hundreds of them, all branching off from the first. A story about a pair of twins who got sent to live with their great uncle for a summer…"
Bill tilted his head at her. "What's your point?" (He didn't make the connection. It was too general, and he didn't think like a human. He didn't always pick up on the same patterns - read: almost never did. ...Not if he wasn't reading minds-)
"It was the story of the Pines, Gravity Falls and… how they defeated a yellow triangle named Bill Cipher."
Bill blinked at her again. "What's your point?" This was strange to her? (People told stories about him all the time! Granted, they usually didn't talk about his defeat, but… was she not familiar with the concept of…?)
"I read a whole BUNCH of those stories. And...I think… a lot of those doors I have… lead to them." Miz admitted. "I remember thinking that the door that said [Flat Dreams] sounded familiar but I couldn't figure out why. But I think it was the name of one of the stories I read."
Bill let out another laugh.
He grinned at her and stretched a bit.
"Kid," he said, as he relaxed his stupid human-ish body's muscles and dropped his arms again, "What do you think 'infinity' is?"
Miz made a weird face "So… you mean… there's a door out there… leading to a dimension where there's a human-ish Bill Cipher getting fucked by both Ford and Dipper at the same time?" It was FINE when it was just a stupid smut-fic, but to think that it was REAL? Ew….
"Eh." Bill waved it off. "Not all dimensions exist at the same time. And if THAT'S happening somewhere right now," he not-quite-snickered, "Then I would NOT call THAT one of 'us' a Bill Cipher who is like us!" Bill-as-himself certainly wouldn't go around doing such… icky and stupid body-things. Just… ew. And he certainly would not 'let' any Zodiac of his get away with disrespecting his boundaries or bodily-integrity like that, let alone let things progress to that point. (Why would any one of him want that? Clearly, that was an other-him-that-was-not-him. Clearly.)
Miz shuddered. "Two at once… in the same hole… how did they manage that without magic?!"
"Ears are larger than you think," Bill said sagely. Then again, maybe she'd meant a hole made in their midsection with knives? That seemed more up a Stanford's alley. You could do just about anything to a body once it was dead. Miz stared at Bill and blinked slowly before deciding she wasn't going to correct him. Less traumatic for her.
The more important question to his little sister on that, though, at gauging her human-looking reactions to the idea of what she'd just said, was… "If you didn't like that story, then why did you read it?" Bill asked her.
"...because I was bored…" Miz blushed orange.
Bill let out a laugh. "If you're bored, then you're booooooooring~" he teased with the start of a grin, then grimaced and lifted a hand to his throat, cutting himself off from singing any further. Ah, his voice really wasn't what it used to be. This stupid form he was stuck in… He couldn't hit any of the etherics at all, he was pretty certain of it, let alone any of the ultrasonics or infrasonics in the usual frequencies he usually liked to toss in there, just for fun! (He'd avoided doing much more than humming before, because he hadn't really wanted to confront that…)
Bill slumped in place and let out a bit of a huffy sigh, not quite massaging his throat with his fingers and a continuing grimace. Would Stanley consider it a large change to add just a little more range? An octave or twenty-four?
Miz was still muttering quietly to herself about… what was apparently a whole bunch of really awful stories she'd read. And her horror at those stories being somehow real in a dimension somewhere. "The freaking Once-ler outfit from that god-awful movie!"
Bill watched her discomfort for awhile, and it occurred to him to wonder if he should worry about whether reading so much of so many things before when she'd been bored, had potentially somehow set his sister up to be hurt by it, or break over it in some way, now. He slowly started to frown. He had a feeling that a 'there-there' or a hug might not be enough this time...
"...Well. If there are stories you liked… then they may also exist too?" he tried, then stopped and had to rethink when that didn't seem to help her any. ...So it was the ones she didn't like that were the problem, were they? "And not all of the ones you don't like may exist YET," he told her. "If I kill the stupid lizard first, then they may-never?" He looked at her somewhat-hopefully. Had he fixed things for her, at least a little?
"Well. I'm gonna try to find more info about the dimensions around yours now. To… take my mind off this topic." Miz coughed as she looked away and started Flickering again. Finally Miz slumped over. She had an arm draped over her eye, a low whine escaping her throat. "Why're they ALL Blue?"
Bill wasn't sure how to react to this. Was there something wrong with blue? He liked blue! Did she not like blue as a color? ...But he should be supportive of her anyway, even if she didn't like it. He was her big brother, after all. Stiffly (as usual), Bill placed his hand on her head to press down, lift, and press down again. (That was how patting worked, right? She hadn't complained yet. So he was probably doing it right!)
"There, there?" he told her, trying to be supportive of her likes and apparent dislikes in color choice. That would be a stupid thing to fight with her about, after all. She could like and dislike whatever she wanted. That was fine! (Not liking blue didn't mean she disliked HIM, even if his hair was mostly blue, in the color-shade he really REALLY liked…)
Miz sighed. "Thanks big brother…"
"...Do you want to tell me?" he asked her. (...instead of asking what he probably shouldn't ask her about what she thought of the color blue: do I want to know?)
"...your Ax is a weirdo… also I think blue is very nice color. Will was blue, it was really pretty. I'm just wondering why your Ax's dimensional set contains so many blue Bills." She mumbled darkly, "If they get mad and turn red, would it turn into Bled?"
'Weirdo' was not how Bill would describe 'his' lizard. But at Miz's evaluation of blue, Bill relaxed quite a bit. (...Though he did get an odd feeling at the idea of someone potentially thinking his blue was 'pretty' - he wasn't pretty, he was a snappy dresser who was THE WORST! Haha...)
But at the last thing Miz said to him about the so-called 'color' Bled, Bill's eyes went a little wide and he looked more than a little bit horrified.
"..." said Bill. (And if anyone had asked him about it later, he would have told them that he'd probably hit some of those out-of-stupid-human-ish-body-vocal-range frequencies on his response to the idea of ever turning that particular color.)
