Illusion is Reality
Chapter 76
-I might have overstuffed my resume-
Miz groaned when the noise woke her up. She rolled over and reached for a pillow but realized there was none. Just Bill's back. She blinked blearily and looked around. She spotted her Kirby doll a few feet away. Must have rolled away. The Xanthar doll had also been knocked away and was up against the side of the railings. Miz yawned and got up to get her dolls back. She blinked and looked around. Ah…
A quick Flicker and she sighed. Right, school just let out and there were kids and teenagers playing all around the beach. She crawled over to peer down at them. Huh… were young Ford and Stan going to come back? The dragon looked around and then up at the fish where they were hanging on the hooks. Good thing she'd put a Preservation effect on them. (It even kept the smell to a minimum!) She picked one off a hook and swallowed it. She didn't NEED to cook it, what with the way her stomach worked, but she was a little sad about the taste. Probably should have cooked it first, but she was feeling lazy!
Bill didn't so much as twitch as the noise picked up around them. He'd fallen asleep to far more and worse near the Shack when the museum had been open and there had been tours going on, and here he'd fallen asleep well up away from the commotion, much farther up and away than just a measly three feet and a dozen yards or so.
Luckily, the barrier did its job, and the locals stayed away as they usually did, thinking the boat empty. Miz took this time to people-watch. She really hadn't been paying enough attention to the Stan and Ford of Bill's world, or the other humans in it. She needed to get better about that…
It was only when the crowds started to thin, and transition from teenagers having escaped from school, to adults who were wanting to get in some time on the boardwalk before dinner, that Miz heard a stirring of sound from below deck echo up through the hatch. She looked over. Were the others waking up? She watched as the hatch opened and Stan climbed out. Miz waved. "Good mor-evening?"
Stan grunted, glancing over her and Bill, to make sure they'd both made it through the night okay. Then he headed over to the railing to stare out across the beach, looking around at the people, to get a feel for things. While he was doing this, Miz decided to ask bluntly, "How come you don't want things to help your pain go away?"
Stan looked over at her, to frown at her in minor confusion before he finally caught on to what she meant. "Eh…" Stan shrugged, not really responding or wanting to put it into words. Most people… he was just uncomfortable with the idea of just some random person touching him who he didn't know, who didn't care at all about him. (Why would he pay some random person to do something like give a massage to him, when they could do a lousy job of it and really screw him up instead? No, thank you! And even if it was somebody he did know, who wanted to help him out, would they even be able to do it right? It was easier to just not worry about it all that much. He was old; he was used to it. Besides, he had his orthopedic back pillow for the really bad days. That was really all he needed.)
"If it's like… you don't want to be touched while you're vulnerable… I can kinda understand that." Miz mumbled when it seemed like Stan wasn't going to give her a real answer. "I haven't been able to get a proper massage in eons. I used to really like going to the spa for that…" She stretched, groaning at the way her spine popped. Sleeping on the ground probably wasn't good for her physical body.
Stan gave her an odd look. "Used to?" (She get thrown out or something? How many spas did you have to get thrown out of before the entire multiverse banned you?)
Miz nodded, not looking his way, staring out past the railing. "I stopped being able to let people touch me like that after one guy drugged me with an aphrodisiac while giving me a back rub." She missed the horrified look on Stan's face. "It was while I was in my triangle form… so it's not… like he w-would have been able t-to do anything… but…" She trembled lightly. "And I'm still trying to get over it because I miss getting a back rub and sometimes my bricks feel a little out of place. Dropping my vessel helps a bit, but it's just not the same, you know?" She reached a hand back to rub her shoulders. "One of my friends offered to give me a massage once. And… it was… ok? I let him push a brick back into place but not much more than-"
"-Kid." Stan interrupted, pinching the bridge of his nose. "You really need to see someone about your issues."
Miz groaned. "I know. But where would I find a human therapist who would be willing to work with me?" She leaned back to lie on the deck. "I guess, when we get back to your dimension I could try finding and entering the dream of one? Maybe ask them in there if they would help?"
Stan kind of winced, then rubbed the back of his neck. "Yeah, uh," he began, looking a little uncomfortable. "Turns out, uh, apparently most people… don't control their dreams? Like, uh, some kind of you-lucid-clid-ean-something?" He wasn't so sure he'd gotten that right. (Ford got incomprehensible sometimes when he started talking dreams and math when he was half asleep, the big nerd-owl. That had sure been a couple of long, rambling, half-asleep conversations on the boat.) "Eh, anyway. Most people don't take dreams seriously." Not like his brother did. "Better talk to somebody when they're awake." Especially since she'd probably have to start all over again every time she did it, if she did. Even Stan didn't always remember his dreams. Stan paused, staring out over the railing, thinking. "...Could talk to the multibear, maybe. And hey, he knows a good Shiatsu. So, y'know, one or the other?"
Stan glanced back over his shoulder at Bill, who was still sleeping. "Just, uh, be careful what you ask for from the kid," Stan added. "Make sure you both really know what you want and don't want, if you go askin' him to help you find some human-help." Not like the demon could help with human stuff like that himself, Stan figured. Kid would probably try, but he'd probably get it all wrong if he did. And Stan wasn't so sure the kid might know of somebody else who could help, either. If there was someone the kid could've talked to, who he could've trusted enough to help him, the kid probably wouldn't be such a mess. So Stan wasn't so sure there was anybody the kid didn't trust himself, that he'd be willing to trust with his kid sister instead; Stan kinda had a feeling it would be the opposite. (-Definitely. Definitely the opposite.)
Miz nodded. "I could look it up… maybe do that while I'm here, in a dimensional set that actually has therapists?" She kicked her legs over the side of the boat. "I used to go to one back when I was human, when I was a child. I didn't realize until I was older that the nice lady who talked to me was some kind of therapist. I'm not sure what I was in for though? My parents never told me."
And that was further confirmation for Stan that this kid wasn't all there even as a human. He seriously doubted being turned into a triangle had helped with whatever problem she'd had, either. Probably made it worse, to be honest. ...Well, at least she sort of came across as human most of the time, without even trying. She was better than the kid at it, even when the kid was trying. (...At least, she did fine with it, up until she got riled up or anything and started talking about-)
"Hey mister Stan?"
"Yeah?" Stan grunted as he began setting up breakfast, squatting down to root through one of the crates.
"When I'm old enough to get my own Ford, I'm gonna try not to break him." (That had Stan pausing in what he was doing again, to look over at her and to listen to her more carefully.) "So I wanna learn what is or isn't ok for me to do. Because a broken Ford just seems too sad." Miz leaned onto the bottom rung of the railings, and Stan let out a slow breath. (Looked like she was past wanting to hurt his brother on purpose, at least. Good.) "I just wanna be friends with my zodiac… well, maybe not Gideon. If my Gideon ends up being ANYTHING like yours I'm not sure I would like him…" she muttered.
Stan snorted in both amusement and horror at the last. Yeah, no. He didn't want Gideon ANYWHERE near this kid. Especially not when she was so willing to do stuff for people without thinking. So as long as he kept her away from… aw hell, hadn't the niblings told him that Gideon had actually summoned Bill for a Deal, once?
"Don't make any Deals with your Gideon if he's anything like ours." Stan told her, hoping he could cut that one off at the pass. She nodded but didn't really look like she was gonna listen. Stan sighed, and tried again. "I'm serious. He's…" Ugh. There was a lot Stan could say, but he just settled on: "A little pint-sized jerk."
"... I'll be careful. My Deals don't work like brother's." Miz looked back at Stan. "If he summons me, I'll at least listen to what he wants. Whether I do what he wants or not is a different story."
Yeah, that wasn't gonna fly. Not when Stan had seen the little brat sweet-talk people a lot less gullible than her (read: the kids, at first) into doing stuff for him. ...And Bill himself had made Deals with him before, too. And not liked the aftermath either time. Hm. Stan glanced over at Bill, who was still fast asleep. Probably should let the kid weigh in on that one, then, once the kid woke back up again. Maybe he'd get through to his little sister better.
"Why do you even want your zodiac?" Stan asked Miz, finally. From what he could tell, she wasn't trapped in her Nightmare Realm like Bill was. (Stan was half-convinced that the only reason the kid had ever made any deals with the little glad-handing brat had been because he'd felt he had to, as a backup or somethin'.) She didn't need to escape from there, so why…?
"I just want to meet them. I've seen them in other Bill's dimensions. And I started getting curious. I want to meet my own. They're mine after all," she said simply, as if claiming people as her own was perfectly natural. Which it was! Ax promised her a zodiac! So she'll get a zodiac! Though, when she asked Ax about it, he got all… deflective about who her Zodiac actually WAS.
"...There really ain't more to it than that?" Stan asked her. Because the way Bill talked about it… and y'know, carefully talked around it as much as he could without sayin' much of anything… kid didn't sound like that was all of it for him, not by even half. Because 'not having a choice' about any of them? That had thrown up a red flag when the kid had muttered that one out. Because the kid was all about getting what he wanted, which… had kind of led to triangle demon doing what he wanted most of the time, Stan figured, except that the kid did seem to recognize that there was a difference between those two things sometimes, right when you were doing them. (...Oh hell, who was he kidding, of course the kid knew that. Stan was starting to realize that that had probably been the whole deal, and problem, with the triangle demon and Ford. It was pretty clear to Stan that the kid had felt forced to go along with that deal with Ford, because the kid had thought going along with it had been his only way out. And now that the deal was off… the kid still wasn't being real honest with how pissed off he was about it. -Not that Stan was looking forward to that one, when that happened, but maybe if the kid would just freaking admit it, then...)
Stan shook his head. "This one of those things that's real different between you two? Or the same?" he asked of Miz, as he rummaged through the crate and pulled out a pan and a small propane tank and camping stove stand.
Miz hummed. "Our dimensions work very different. Because the rules our Ax's set are very different." She frowned. "I'm not sure what that means though. My zodiac is just… my way out in a different way." She paused. "Is this something I should tell you? It's one of those upsetting to other people things."
Feeling a little like he didn't want to know, Stan still responded, "Eh, if you think you want to tell me." Miz drew her lines differently than he did. He didn't really have an idea what she was getting at... unless she was talking about something from the list Bill had walked her through earlier on 'upsetting' things. (If it was something she'd remembered to 'ask' the memory of her sister about, then it could be just about anything, Stan figured.)
Miz was quiet for a bit before glancing over at Bill, making sure he was still asleep. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "My zodiac circle thing might actually kill me. In a way I can't come back from. So, they're my way out."
Stan pulled in a slow breath, feeling like he'd been dunked in ice water. -Hell, now he knew why she had glanced over at Bill first. The kid would have a damn fit at what she was implying, with what she had mentioned about trying to kill herself dead before… "Then why would you want to meet 'em?" Stan managed to ask her, trying to keep calm. Maybe this wasn't really some suicidal thing that'd get the kid all riled up (and messed up) over later if she went through with it. Was she… worried that if she didn't, they'd circle her anyway, even without knowing her? She'd said earlier to Bill that she wouldn't 'leave him alone' when the kid had asked her, but…
Miz was still looking away. "Well, if I'm not an entirely bad person, then nothing bad would happen, they would have no reason to do it. And if I DO grow up to become a bad person…" She seemed to deflate, looking so weary and tired. "... then I would prefer that I was stopped." Stan stared at her. "Because I don't want to hurt people. But if I do, if I get worse…" than she already was. Than she already thought she was.
Stan tried to hold down a groan. Why him? "It's too early to deal with this right now," he grumbled. He also found himself angry at her lizard dad for 'letting' her have this 'way out'. With how the kid talked about the lizard here, and from what he'd been piecing together from what Miz had said about her current situation over there, Stan figured that this circle-thing for her was a setup. Stan figured that if Miz hadn't come here and talked to the two of them… maybe it could've taken another 400 billion years for her to finally wise up on her own? And once that jerk baby wasn't able to make her kill people for him anymore, with that lizard wanting her to 'get along' with him? Having a circle like that would be an easy way to off her, once she started causing more trouble than just evacuating some people some places; eventually, she'd probably give up on trying to 'fix' things inside the system, toss shit to the wind and take the fight straight to those Federation jerks. -And then that lizard and jerk-baby would want her gone for trying to kick the status quo in the head, whether she was suicidal anymore- liked it or not. (Stan had seen this kind of shit before in the mob families. Never ended well.)
...Not that any of that was gonna register with Miz, or was anything Stan really wanted to push the point on now. There was a way to get across what he wanted to without having to try and tackle any of that, though. (So Stan came at it sideways, just like he did it with Bill.)
"Kid," Stan said to Miz, rubbing a hand over his face. "You're already hurting people. And if 'your Ford' is anything like my brother…" Stan let out a breath. "If yours has got some kinda 'morals', he's already gonna have a problem with you working for that jerk-baby as his hitman, from what ya told me before," Stan told her, straight-up. "Especially if you were doin' it to get off a bunch of sometimes-mass-murderers who you call friends. Besides," Stan looked over at her, "Thinking you're not gonna have something bad happen to ya because 'you're not a bad person' ain't a thing. People do a whole bunch of horrible shit to each other everyday, for no good reason. Good or bad. -You should just stay away from 'em, your 'circle'," Stan told her.
"Oh…" Miz looked a little saddened by that. "But I just wanted to make friends…" She kind of understood what Stan meant, but it was still sad. She really wanted to make friends with her own Mabel. And tease her own Dipper. And hang out with her own Wendy...
Stan almost said, 'define friends', but he kind of knew that one with her already; probably treated them more like family, from what she'd told him before. So instead Stan went with: "Yeah, great, but if you end up with a Ford in your dimension that's anything like my brother, he won't want to be friends with you, once he knows about however many people you've killed. And yeah, maybe you try to explain," Stan let out a sigh. "But he either ain't gonna listen, or ain't gonna care. He'll think it's just some kinda excuse you're tryin' to throw at him," whether she meant it that way or not, "And get more mad at you, instead."
Miz wilted. "Even if it was for a reason I thought was good?"
"Your 'good' and my brother's 'good' don't match," Stan told her. "I might be fine with it, 'cause I don't really care what happens in other places a billion years ago, or whatever," Stan waved off. Kid had told him a couple things already that Stan knew his brother would have a problem with if he knew about 'em (and hey, maybe Ford did). "And maybe that other me might feel the same way I do about junk, if he ends up havin' to deal with the same people I did? But…" Stan shook his head, looking grim.
"What would he consider good?" Miz asked of Stan. "The Federation send down soldiers to gun down helpless citizens and that's considered fine, but when I get ordered to do it by the head of the Federation's council, it's apparently not fine?"
"Hey, some Federation ain't gonna be tryin' to make friends with him," Stan pointed out, sitting back on his heels. "That's you." And Ford would probably have a problem with these Federation mooks, too, if that's the kinda shit they were really pulling over there where Miz was from.
Miz folded her fingers together. "That doesn't feel fair… I know the world isn't fair but… why can't it be?"
"Heh," said Stan, looking back down at the crate. "You sound like the kid," Stan told her, as he rummaged through said crate for the box of pancake mix and powdered milk he knew should be in there, if this boat really was anything like the one he'd had back home, way back when.
"Is it wrong to want the world to be fair?" Miz asked quietly.
Oh sure, toss him an easy one, why dont'cha? Stan sighed and sidestepped that big old landmine partially, by tossing a 'hammer thought' at her head instead. Not like he was gonna get stuck down in that kind of quagmire like an idiot.
"Easiest way to make things 'fair' is to make everything dead," Stan told her, "Hardest way is probably whatever the kid's going for." Stan shrugged. "I figure I'm okay with the second one, whatever it is," as long as he got a say in it - but hey, guess what? He did get a say in it, because… "The kid actually listens to me mostly."
"Brother wants to kill the AXOLOTL and take over as god. Then he gets to set the rules and he said he would make it so everyone would be happy." Miz told him. "I don't really want him to kill dad, but he said that he would leave my version of dad alive once he becomes the new god."
Stan considered this for a moment as he stared at the can of powdered milk in his hand. "...Sounds like somethin' the kid would do." Stan set it down on the deck. "And screw up, because he don't get 'happy' right," Stan said with a sigh, and rubbed his hand over his face. "And everything in-between." He dropped his hand and looked up at her. "He really say that he'd leave your lizard alive, though?" That was new. He was pretty sure the kid straight-up hated the thing. If the kid was even considering doing that for her... that said a hell of a lot about what the kid thought of his little sister.
Miz sighed. "Yeah, because I love my dad. Even if he isn't the best dad. He still made it so I wasn't all alone until I met my friends." She paused and added, "I don't think it's possible to create a world where everyone is happy. Not without destroying free will. And I don't want a world with no free will."
Free will, huh? Did the kid's little sister really think that having no choice about anything at all ever would make people happy, somehow? (Even if she didn't want to do it, because she'd made it pretty clear the last time 'free will' had come up that she thought it was 'super important', as Mabel would put it…) That didn't sound right to Stan.
"Well, making everybody happy forever without destroying stuff sounds insane, and the kid is insane," Stan told her with a shrug. "Could maybe take somebody insane to figure that one out, I guess. Depends on what the kid's thinking of doing. Never asked him to define 'happy' to me; not yet." He was definitely going to do that pretty damn soon, if this was actually a thing - and it sounded like it was one, that Miz wasn't lying to him about this stuff. (He didn't want to think about what might happen if Miz convinced Bill that the only way to get what he wanted was to turn everybody into puppets. The kid had seemed kind of invested in the whole free will thing, too when Miz had brought it up, but… definitely not as much as her.) Stan frowned a bit. "You tell the kid how you feel about what he's tryin' to do?" Stan asked her next, figuring it was better to hear how bad this might be already.
Miz checked to see if Bill was still asleep. "I won't stop him from trying." She rubbed her face "Bill's mad at the AXOLOTL because he COULD have stepped in to right any wrongs, to stop injustices… he's god after all. But dad DOESN'T step in to help. He doesn't interfere. And Bill hates that. The fact that he COULD help, but chooses not to."
Stan let out a long breath. Okay. Probably the kid wasn't planning on doing anything drastic right away. 'Not stopping him from trying' meant the kid must not know what he was doing yet, still. 'Trying' was way too uncertain for a direct action from the kid. That said…
"Kid's got a funny way of showing it," Stan muttered, about the kid hating somebody who 'could help but chooses not to'. Wasn't like the kid had a leg to stand on there, for most things. And hell, 'righting wrongs' and 'stopping injustices'? Didn't sound like the triangle to Stan, either. This all was the kinda junk that was up Ford's alley, though; Stan was pretty sure that Ford wouldn't have any kind of problem with the triangle if the kid was actually doing that. But the kid wasn't.
Miz leaned back against the floorboards. "But I realized that my dad can't step in because he wants us to do it ourselves. Make our own decisions. Retain our free will. If dad interfered in a conflict, he would need to pick a side. And he can't do that because he's supposed to be a neutral party, you know?" She closed her eyes and groaned.
Stan frowned at her at that. "Y'know, you can stop fights without taking sides," Stan put out there. "I do it with the kid all the time." Stan looked at her oddly. "That don't got nothin' to do with 'free will', or whatever." ...did it? That didn't sound right to Stan, either.
"Dad, at least the one in my world, is in charge of regulating life and souls. He creates them and sends them out to be born and grow and die and return to him so he can recycle back into the system." Miz rolled onto her side. (Yeah, this was all pretty far out of Stan's experience again already.) "And he watches what every soul does in their life. He can control their souls easily, because he created them. So if he thinks about wanting two people to stop fighting, he doesn't provide a solution, his will would simply alter their souls so that they were no longer in conflict. It's just how his powers work in my world." Miz sighed.
Stan snorted at that last bit. "What, like how you feed off emotions, unless you've got that headband on? It 'just happens'?"
"Yeah." Miz looked over.
"So? Make him a headband, then have your dad talk to whoever like everybody else and their dog, instead," Stan told her, folding his arms. "Not really seein' the problem here."
Miz blinked. "Would closing his connection to souls cause the cycle of life-death-rebirth to halt?"
"You're askin' me?" Stan asked her, sounding almost amused. Because how was he supposed to know that one? Not like he'd ever met her crazy soul-lizard-dad.
"Well, I've never thought about this before." She looked up at the sky. "I can ask him when I get home. See if maybe he'd go for it."
"...If he actually wants to do it," Stan said, crossing his arms and thinking hard. Lizard was supposed to be a mob-ish kinda guy, right? (So if he didn't want to go for it…) "He ever had problems with altering souls or whatever, without meaning to, like you did with feelin' people's emotions?"
Miz frowned. "He refuses to talk about it. But I think he has done something like that before. I can't feel anything off him so it's hard to tell but he seems really sad sometimes. And spends most of his time moping in his own section of Reality." She snorted. "I go and bother him just so he doesn't sleep forever."
"So then, your dad ain't all that impartial then," Stan told her. "He's thought about it at least once, to know about that thing being a thing, to tell you about it. Right?"
Miz nodded slowly. "He seems to think it was bad for him to have done that."
"Okay." Well, that was… probably a good thing, right? The same way that Miz didn't really want to kill people if she didn't think she had to. Free will was a thing, right? "Hey, does your dad have a pillar thing going on, too? That halting thing sounds kinda like that jerk-baby time thing."
"Yes. He's the pillar for Reality. If he dies, all of existence goes with him. Space collapsing in on itself, an infinite dimensions wiped from existence in an instant."
Stan blinked. "Uhhh…" He stared at her. "That sounds like a thing that is definitely not good."
Miz frowned. "It's a scary thought." She shivered. "So if anyone takes him out, they'd have to be really quick on propping that pillar up.
...Or the whole place would come down? Stan stared at her. What if that was what they wanted? To bring down… Ugh. Stan rubbed a hand across his face under his glasses. ...How was this his life?
"...You maybe think it'd be a good idea to come up with one of those curse-things for, uh, automating that pillar thing he does, too?" Stan asked her tiredly.
Miz looked confused. "But he stays in his own Space between Spaces all the time."
Stan looked up at her. "And you can get in there with him."
"...yeah?" Miz wasn't quite getting it.
"Aren't you havin' a problem with a broken-Bill Cipher chasing you around?" Stan asked her, because the human-demon here hadn't forgotten about that, had she? "What happens if it gets into your dimension? You don't think it couldn't get at that lizard like you can, too?"
Miz paled. "Oh. I… I didn't even think about that… huh, is THAT why dad keeps telling me not to mess with my Doors?"
Stan shrugged at her, as he pulled out a bottle of water and upended it into the pan, then added some of the powdered milk and pancake mix. "Hey, if you can get places, opening doors and stuff, other Bills probably can, too." The kid certainly talked like he thought he could figure it out, the way she did her Doors thing. "If the kid thinks he can kill the lizard here, and is only talking about leaving yours alone for you..." Stan shrugged again. "Maybe there's another Bill out there who wouldn't get along, but could kill it like the kid, and get around like you, too." What with that whole 'infinite places' thing that was sort-of(?) a thing.
Miz frowned. "Well I'm definitely having a long talk with dad when I get home." She tapped her headband again. "And see about the headband thing for him too."
Stan nodded. "Might want to think about what you'll do if he says no," he warned her. Miz nodded, eyes far off.
...Aaaaand she still wasn't listening him, not really. Stan stirred the mixture in the pan, thinking about how he might get through to her. After awhile, he added, "Does your dad control your soul, too?"
Miz rolled back into a sitting position. "I… don't know? When he first found me, he told me that I wasn't what he was expecting. Brother says it's because I'm more powerful than a Bill Cipher was supposed to be. 'Cause I have created my own dimension, by accident, and I keep 'breaking molds' as he puts it. So I don't know if dad can control my soul or not."
"Heh, pretty sure that's a compliment from the kid," Stan told her, as he finished mixing the 'pancake mix' up, and set the pan to the side to set up the propane stove. "Might want to figure that one out before pushing things too far. Or find a way to block it," Stan told her. "Because if you tell it about something it doesn't want to do, and it decides that it wants the opposite… what happens when it decides what it thinks about that thing? Yeah?" Hell, maybe she could just surprise it with the headband thing, toss it on its head first, then say something later.
Miz nodded. "The Ax in this world is very different from mine. I wonder how he does things. All I really know is that THIS Ax can block my Sight. And he's even more elusive than mine. But from what I can See, he doesn't have the same problem mine does… which is why I think brother hates him so much for literally not helping him even when he probably could… unless he's got something going for all this."
"If the lizard that's here is just sitting back and letting 'injustices' happen 'cause it doesn't care," which is what Stan was getting from this, "Then the kid's probably got a good reason for being so mad at it, maybe," Stan grunted, thinking of how the kid's entire dimension apparently burned down way back when, before completely destabilizing and becoming one big prison-like trap for the triangle demon. "Pretty sure that the kid wanted it to help him, from some of the junk I've heard him say." The only two things Bill had raged out about the lizard on were the thing not talking to him, and not doing anything - refusing to help him, or anyone else.
Then again… "What are you talkin' about when you say 'injustice', though?" Because that was the one thing Stan really didn't get out of all this, and it had come up twice, now. Bill had never used that word with him. And Stan had no idea whether Miz had the same demon idea for it as the kid did or not - probably not if she was right about Bill here, because that had never been what the kid had said he was mad about any of the times the kid had yelled about the lizard to him - but even the normal-people definition of 'injustice' was kind of… vague. "You wanna define that for me?"
Instead of answering, Miz kicked her legs over the side of the railings for a bit before asking, "If… if your brother was killed for having six fingers, if there was a LAW that said that he HAD to be killed for not being 'normal', how would you feel?" she asked suddenly, making Stan do a double-take at the sudden change of subject. And Stan got a sinking, sick kind of feeling as he realized that she wasn't just talking about hypotheticals here, and... it wasn't some kind of threat against his brother or anything, he was pretty sure, yeah, but... he still really didn't like what she was saying, there.
That only left Stan with one question, really. But before Stan could ask it, Miz continued. "And, if the government came to take your brother away so that he could be killed for being BORN looking like he did, and your parents had LET them take him. If they didn't even try to fight or stop them, because they thought obeying the LAW was more important than FAMILY… how would you feel?"
"Kid…" Stan said slowly, feeling a chill go down his spine, but Miz continued on, voice wavering and cracking. "W-wouldn't you get angry? Wouldn't you just want to burn that whole, aw-ful world i-into the ground because they took the person you cared about away from you because of a STUPID law that was unfair and…" Stan reached out and placed a hand on top of her head. Miz jumped a little before quieting. She was crying though, tears streaming from her eyes as her shoulders shook at the glimpses she'd seen of Bill's past, at the past of multiple other Bills who'd had it so much worse than her and-
Stan let out a long sigh. He was well and truly pissed off. He really wanted to punch someone. (Maybe whoever the hell had made that stupid law Miz was talking about. Though, if Stan was reading between the lines correctly, one of these two demons had already taken care of that. And then some. By a lot.)
"Kid," Stan said heavily. "We talking about you? Or the kid, instead?" he asked her. Because this wasn't the kind of thing Stan was gonna leave to a guess at the implications, here. He'd guessed that the kid had a brother, sure, with how the kid knew what brothers were supposed to be like, in how the kid defined them. But this was...
"...Bill," Miz confirmed, wiping at her eyes. ('Aw, hell', thought Stan.) "My dimension had the same stupid hierarchy but they didn't outright kill the Irregulars, just gave them the worst, most underpaid jobs that could get them killed working it. Unless they were high enough on the social ladder. And if they were lucky enough to have normal-shaped mating parts they might even be allowed to marry and produce children."
Stan pulled in a slow breath. He wasn't liking anything about this at all.
"So, you're tellin' me that Bill had a brother that… was different, kind of like my brother is different… and he got murdered by… the government?" Stan said. "And that their parents were okay with it. And Bill wasn't." Stan stared at her. "This was a thing that actually happened. To Bill."
Miz looked miserable. She rubbed her eyes. "Liam wasn't an equilateral triangle. And triangles were ALREADY the lowest caste in the system. No-one was ok with it, but it was 'normal' for irregulars to be gotten rid of. That's just how it is. That's just a fact of life. Circles are the ruling caste and triangles were the lowest of the low. Because that's how the world worked. Irregulars had to be destroyed. That's just how the world worked. The government and its laws have to be obeyed. That's just how the world worked." Miz trembled. "But Bill refused to accept that. So he destroyed it all… but it didn't make him happy. It didn't fix anything."
She breathed carefully. "So Bill wants to make a world where things like that won't happen. Where everyone is immortal, no-one dies and everyone is free to do whatever they want without any rules or laws, if they don't want any. And I don't know if such a thing is even possible." She frowned. "Bill has the power to bring Liam back. If he rolls things back far enough, he'd be able to pluck him from the past and bring him HERE."
She clenched her fists. "But according to Bill, Liam would be really upset if he found out Bill destroyed their dimension. So Bill can't, won't, bring Liam back until he fixes it. Even if Bill doesn't want to. Even if Bill wants the circles to stay dead, he said that if Liam would want them to be brought back to life too, then he would."
Stan had that walking on a knife's edge feeling again. When that purple square had shown up, calling Bill 'sad' and 'angry-sad', and had started to ask the kid if he'd been thinking about 'Lee-' and Bill had started screaming '-AAAAAAAAAAH' to drown the square out as he'd grabbed it, and then yelled a bunch of other random junk and raced away upstairs with the square? It hadn't been 'Lee' it had been saying, was it. The square had been about to say 'Li-am'. ...And Bill had not wanted a one of them to know a damn thing about him.
Stan looked over at Miz, who was checking to make sure Bill was still asleep.
...Yeah, probably a good idea. Stan was pretty sure that this was the thing that Bill had behind all those drawbridges and lines. Endgame.
And Stan could've stopped and waited, tried asking the kid about it all, direct and upfront, once the kid had woken up again. Kid wouldn't be all that happy with him for 'cheating' like this, making an end run around him with his little sister's help, Stan was pretty sure. If he stopped right now…
But Stan didn't wait this time; he asked his next question out of Miz, anyway, knowing exactly what he was doing. "Miz. Kid. Was this Liam, the kid's brother… Bill's twin?" Because with a name like that… and the way that Ford talked about the kid and threes… it'd make sense if the kid was supposed to have another set of twins as part of this whole Zodiac-circle-thing, somehow.
Miz laid her head down on the railings. "Liam wasn't a twin, just a brother and he was really nice." She frowned. "A Bill from another timeline brought back his Liam… and he was so upset at what that Bill had done, they had a fight and that Bill lost control of his powers and accidentally…" She went quiet. "That's why brother wants to fix everything first. But he doesn't have the power to do that yet. Not until he can usurp Ax and take his place. So he needs to keep the Nightmare Realm from collapsing… so he can try and fix it." (Okay. So that explained a little better why the kid had pitched such a fit about that before, with the place maybe collapsing sooner…)
Miz paused again before she clarified. "Bill was really young when they took Liam from him. And no-one ever tried to help him grieve. They all just ignored it, like they were trying to forget about what happened."
Yeahhhh… that wasn't good. Stan stifled a wince. "This Liam. He older or younger than Bill when that happened?" Stan asked next, though he would lay bets on 'older'. (It'd explain a hell of a lot. ...Hell, it'd explain everything he'd been seeing with the kid. Why the kid hated rules and laws with a vengeance. Why the kid sorta knew what an older brother was supposed to do, but not actually how do to it, and got kind of confused about the whens and hows for offering praise of his own for things. Why the kid hated parents. Why the kid was so big on control and not doing things by accident. Why the kid responded so damn well to somebody actually looking out for him, positive reinforcement, all of it. Maybe even why the kid got so chatty with him so easily when it was just the two of them together, alone. All of it. ...Shit.)
"Liam was the older brother." Miz sniffled. "He took care of Bill. Taught him stuff, read to him…"
Stan ran a hand over his face and blew out a breath. (Shit. -He'd tripped over that one completely by accident, hadn't he? Taking care of the kid kinda, and teaching the kid stuff with the whole 'learning' thing… He'd known it was a thing, but this? Damn. Almost made him feel guilty about it. …Almost. Not like he was gonna stop. Just meant he knew why it was working so well for sure, now.)
Stan dropped the hand and asked next, "How different was it for you? -I know, your brother wasn't irregular or whatever, they got treated different in your place. But was there other stuff just as bad? A different kind of bad?" Stan needed to know if she was going to need help with any of it. If the kid couldn't handle it… then Stan would have to step in, though Stan didn't really know what either of them could do about it. He was pretty sure the kid would half-kill himself trying if she let him, or if Stan didn't step in and try to stop him by giving the something else to try, instead. (And who knew what that would look like, how bad that could get. Stan didn't want to know what the kid running off the rails looked like; hell, it already looked pretty bad even when the kid was actively trying to stay on the rails, with the agreement that was in place.)
"I was the older brother… who wasn't born… normal." Miz said quietly. "It was different in my world where you could be Irregular on the outside or Unnatural on the inside. I was unnatural. The Council took me away from my family and little brother, Will, forbid me from ever seeing them again. See, in my world, producing children was different from Bill's world. Your inside shape determined the shape of your kids and normally that meant your insides and outsides matched. But my insides were round and… that meant I could birth circles…"
"Okay, hold up," Stan said. Girl to boy, fine - he got that. But… "Without getting into, uh, triangle sex and junk. What's the bottom line we're talkin' here." She'd lost him there.
Miz took a deep breath and let it out. "The council wanted to use me as Breeding stock once I was old enough. Lucky for me, I was still too small for them to do so before everything went to shit and I accidentally burned the whole place down… hah, that's what they get for starving me when I was a baby! I didn't grow up big enough! Hah!" Despite her words, she was shivering, glad that she hadn't been forced to mate.
Stan was staring at her, trying to wrap his head around all this, starving her and... "...What? Breeding… stock, like… dogs?" Only time he'd ever heard anything like that kind of talking was with the pug breeders, and...
"They would have Paired me with some other circle and made me produce children for the rest of my life if they could." Miz scowled. Thank Ax for her stunted growth.
"-Okay, no, stop, I hear ya!" Stan said quickly, very much feeling what Mabel would've called 'squick' already, even before the feeling of alarm really hit him. ...And then the thing about them starving her as a baby really registered, and then how happily vindictive she sounded about 'burning the whole place down'. "You, uh, you were the only one they did this to?" he asked, really not wanting to. "Or were gonna do it to?"
"I think? I haven't Looked into the other other worlds that were like mine. Generally the council wouldn't be so drastic since most Unnaturals were only one rank up on the hierarchy, but I was a TRIANGLE that could birth CIRCLES. It was a really big deal." She sighed, rubbing her face. "Burning the place down was an accident. But aside from feeling bad that all the innocent people were killed… I've just… gotten kinda resigned to it all. It happened because I fucked up and I don't know if I can fix it. Bill seems to think I can… but I'm not so sure."
Right. Because all that happening to her was her fucking up? ...Maybe she just meant the 'burning down the place' part. (Hopefully.) Stan let out a long breath. At least she already knew about that little issue of 'maybe innocent' people dying when she'd done that? (Stan hadn't really been looking forward to bringing up the possibility to her, if she hadn't thought of that herself.)
"Sounds like that ain't gonna be an easy place to fix," Stan told her, in what was probably the understatement of the century. "You're actually thinkin' about tryin'?" It hadn't exactly sounded like she was, the way she'd talked about it up until that point.
"Bill has a better chance at fixing it than I do. His dimension became the Nightmare Realm… my dimension became the 3rd Dimension… so trying to fix mine would end up reversing the creation of Earth and all that stuff. I don't feel right doing that. Especially now that humans have evolved and… I don't want to wipe them from existence just to bring back that old world I hated so much." Miz was quite frustrated about this. Maybe she COULD simply recreate the entire 2nd Dimension from scratch, but that would require more power than she currently had.
"Yeah. Pretty sure stuff in a place like here? Ain't as bad as all... that." Some stuff here was bad, but it wasn't like everyplace was… well. "Fixin's usually supposed to mean not breakin' a lot of other shit, right?" Stan said, shifting gears and trying to reach for something maybe slightly less insane than… reversing entire universes? Shit. How was this his life?
"If I got Time Baby and Dad to work together with me, I might be able to recreate the 2nd Dimension, but Time Baby doesn't like changing the past. 'A fuck up is a fuck up and we need to accept it and move on.' That's essentially how he feels about it." Miz kicked her legs again. "And it's just all sorts of unfair."
"Heh." Stan felt a little weird saying what he was gonna say next. Probably get him in trouble, too. But… he was trying to be honest with the kid, and he was pretty sure that lying would just get him into trouble later with one demon or the other, for not really being able to back his own shit up…
So Stan rubbed the back of his neck, and said: "Y'know, I didn't give up on getting my brother back. Didn't accept that, or move on. ...Maybe you don't have to bring the whole place back or nothin', but maybe you should think about what you really want and if you want it bad enough to go for it? I mean… when I was tryin' to get Ford back, I had a choice to keep on pretendin' to be him, or to try and, well, stay me?" he told her, sitting back, and checking to make sure she was following what he was saying.
...Well, she was still listening to him, so Stan kept on going. "I chose bein' my brother, instead. Trashed my old life so I couldn't change my mind or get distracted by any of the rest of it. I had to be all-in," Stan told her. "Couldn't really do what I needed to do if I didn't. Cut every last tie I had with every alias and name I ever took." It hadn't been easy. Not all of it had been bad - a lot of it, yeah, but not all of it.
And settling down? Trying to stay in place after so long on the run? It had been hard. No more running. No running away from anything.
...Not even his own reflection in the mirror, the closest thing he'd had to his brother, staring back at him.
Miz glanced over at him. "... and that's pretty much how Bill feels about Liam too. He doesn't want to give up on trying to get him back. Even if he had to keep collapsing dimensions into the Nightmare Realm to keep it alive long enough for him to get the power he needed to make it happen…" She looked down. "I know that what he did was horrible and he hurt a lot of people, but he thinks that once he's the new god he'll be able to fix everything. Bring back all the people he's killed, fix all the dimensions he broke… and then get Liam back." She wiped her eyes again. "For him, it all would have been worth it, to get his brother back…"
Stan's eyebrows went up. He stared over at her for a bit.
"That's really what the kid's planning on doing?" Stan asked her. That was... a surprise. Because sure, sometimes the kid talked about 'fixing everything', but... Stan hadn't thought that the kid might have meant, y'know, everything. Like, everything-everything, the whole Belgian waffle stack, everything the kid had ever done wrong. (...Did Ford know anything about this? Was Miz right about this?)
Miz nodded. "I want to support him, even if I don't quite agree with his methods. He's just doing what he can with what he has. He told me he would fix everything and I'm sure he really means it. But he's broken and I don't think he fully knows how to fix things."
Damn. He'd still have to talk with the kid himself, make sure that the human-demon hadn't misunderstood Bill, or was misexplaning the kid now, but…
Stan thought about this. And...
...Stan's surprise slowly morphed into a frown, because something really wasn't adding up here.
"...Why's Ford got such a problem with the triangle, then?" Stan asked, almost suspiciously. If that was really what the kid was trying to do, then... that was the kind of thing Ford would be totally on board for, one-hundred percent. Ford lived for that stuff, fixin' stuff and saving people, didn't he? Acting all 'heroic'...
Stan shook his head. None of this made sense. Not at the kind of scale Miz was talking about. Not if all the kid wanted was his brother, and his dimension, back. Besides: "Why was the first thing the triangle demon did once he got out… -the first thing the kid did was try and wreck the place," Stan pointed out. Bill hadn't tried to fix his own dimension; the triangle demon had only gone off and tried to wreck theirs. "That don't jibe." And Stan had still never really gotten a straight answer outta the kid on that one, yet, either. (Not one that didn't fall flat when the kid said it.)
"You'd have to ask him for that. I think some of it might have been how messed up he is, both from the eons spent in a collapsing dimension and whatever mind-altering Deal he made with Ford. And there's that prophecy your Ax gave him that I still don't fully understand. Ax is blocking my Eye about that." Miz groaned. "But I don't know the details of how brother thinks. We're both insane but in different ways. And I don't always understand what anyone's thinking, even if I can feel them," ...like how she apparently couldn't fully understand what the heck Ford was about. He acted like a jerk to Stan but he did like him? But he also didn't trust him? She didn't understand.
Stan sighed. "Yeah, okay." He'd just have to work with the kid to get him to the point that the kid would talk about it all with him. Because becoming a god of… everything? Seemed a hell of a lot larger than… just fixing one dimension? Stan knew he was still missing one hell of a lot; had to be.
"... probably shouldn't talk about Liam with him though. He's really sensitive about that. Loses his temper over it at even a mention," Miz warned him. "He freaked out at Stitched Heart's parents over being 'parents' too."
"Yeah, I think I got a preview of that one," Stan said. "There was this purple square-" Stan stopped. "Wait, the kid freaked out at who?" Stan asked her with a frown. "-Define 'freaked out'," Stan ground out. Because, shit, had the kid gone off on somebody in town? Ford was gonna kill him...
"Robbie." (Okay yeah, right, the Valentino kid, not just some random person. That was probably-) "His parents were being super-pleasant and Bill just told them that he hated them, kinda yelled at them before storming away so he wouldn't hurt them. And then I gave him a doll to bite and scream into until he calmed down." Miz blinked. "I think Bill did really good in leaving before things got bad."
"...When did this happen?" Stan asked, glancing over at the hatch as he heard a slight creaking noise, and then he nearly did a double-take at spotting Ford's partially-hidden form peeking through the gap in the hatch. (...Shit. How long had his brother been listening in on them there?) "This thing with, uh…"
"A few hours before Ford stormed up to the attic to try and assault Bill. We snuck out to go to the cemetery so Bill could play their piano."
Stan blew out a breath. "Right. ...Well at least the kid's still listenin' to me on the avoiding-fights stuff." He glanced back over at Miz. "He has a real hard time walking away from fights, still," Stan explained to her, mindful of how Ford was listening in just then. "Thinks it makes him look weak, and that he's just settin' himself up to get attacked worse later. Really has a hard time turning his back on people, too; same reason. ...The kid really did that for a couple of somebodies who weren't part of his Zodiac?" Stan had thought Melody might be the exception, because Soos liked her, sure, but the kid seemed to (kind of?) like her too? Stan hadn't been holding his breath to think that maybe giving a pass to non-Zodiac that the rest of them cared about might be more of a rule, instead. (...Maybe he should've? Kid kept surprising him.)
Miz nodded. "He stood up and stormed out of the room." He'd been so upset he'd even forgotten he was leaving her behind. But that was fine. She hadn't been in any danger.
"Huh," said Stan. "Heh. Remind me to pat him on the head for that one later," he told Miz, with a ghost of a smile.
Miz paused, then added, "Robbie tried to come after us to tell brother off but it was resolved peacefully."
Stan's eyebrows went up. "Make that three head pats," Stan said, sounding bemused. The Valentino kid could be a little shit sometimes.
Miz looked a little down. "I'm surprised. He… controlled his temper a lot better than I do…" She hung her head. "I feel like a failure on that end."
"Kid doesn't always," Stan told her. "But yeah, he can. ...Kid's also a hell of a lot older than you, right? Probably has a hell of a lot more practice under his hat to go along with that," Stan told her. After a moment of thought, and remembering a couple of things Miz had said about 'her own humans', Stan added, "With other humans, even."
"Yeah. I'm not even a trillion years old yet. But you'd think I'd be better at it since I used to be human. Even if I haven't really interacted with other humans again until recently."
"Well, you've been doin' a lot better with the headband on, yeah?" Stan said, making a gesture with his thumb at his own forehead. "And hey, you even stopped when Ford tried to bait you earlier. Maybe I had to ask ya to, but you were able to back down. I've met a lot of guys who wouldn't be able to do that; you did a good job there." Stan gently mussed her hair as a sort of reward. She seemed to enjoy it. "You ain't doin half-bad, kid. Just try keeping that up. Yeah?" Stan told her, leaving his hand on her head. Miz nodded. "I'm going to try harder."
Well, with the whole 'her feeling other people's emotions' thing fixed now… probably should be easier for her to keep her temper, Stan figured. She'd even said things had felt more distant, right? Maybe she wouldn't get as mad, even when she did. "Well, you've got that-" Stan gestured to her headband, "-to help out with it, now. Just keep it on when you're around other people."
Miz nodded. "It should help. I just still get angry about stuff." That was probably a problem with being a being of pure energy, she felt emotions with her whole being, which got hard to handle sometimes...
Stan snorted. "Everybody gets angry about stuff." Stan shrugged. "You just gotta find ways to deal that don't mean punching somebody in the face right away." And Stan spoke from experience on that one. (The number of times that had gotten him into trouble…) "It ain't wrong to feel mad. Sometimes, you should! Just, y'know, don't go doin' stuff without thinking first and bein' sure about what you're gonna do, if you ain't right in the middle of that fight and got no choice but to go all-out swinging, yeah?"
Speaking of which... "Heck, you can probably get out of fights a hell of a lot easier than the kid can right now, get yourself some breathing room to do that thinking. Right?" Stan was all for more thinking, less 'destroying', here. Especially because... getting the kid distracted and removed from things? Getting him past the initial rage and actually thinking? Usually made it possible for him to actually handle stuff with the kid. (And nine times outta ten, once Stan got the kid to that point, he didn't even have to explain to the kid why he shouldn't jump right back in and pick up that fight himself again, himself; the kid already knew enough to figure it out himself, thinking through the agreement and everything else. He just needed the reminder sometimes.) "Think about what your sister would say about things, gettin' back in that fight, before you do somethin'." That oughta cover the 'second human opinion' part for her there, in case none of them were around the next time that happened somewhere.
(Hey, just 'cause Stan didn't care about other dimensions didn't mean he was against things maybe going not so bad over there in other places, or anything. Besides, it would give the dragon-lady more practice at getting along with other people better, anyway, so she could do better when she was here and visiting the kid again.)
"Ok…" Miz mumbled. She perked up when a distinctive jingling tune reached them though, echoing across the beach. Stan looked up to see an ice cream truck trundling down one of the roadways. Miz was up and alert, staring at the vehicle as it finished its journey to the end of the road, and pulled up right beside the beach. "Ooh! Oooh!" She seemed to bounce in place. Stan snorted. Easily distracted, this kid. Just like the other demon, only more cheerful.
"You want some ice cream?" Stan asked kind of rhetorically, already reaching for his wallet. Probably break the bank on her, with how she ate, but after everything she'd just told him, it'd be more than worth it to keep her on his good side. (Or, uh, whatever. Ford didn't think "Stan's side" or whatever was good enough for triangle demons to want to be on, apparently; so what.)
Miz nodded, staring at the truck with an eager expression. Stan was about to pull out some cash when she spoke up. "Your money's from another time and dimension. I can just scan and copy the ice cream I want."
Stan looked down and grimaced. She was right; he only had those new funny-money looking bills on him. Damn. (So much for that idea. Made Stan feel a little useless.)
Miz glanced at him. "Should I get some for the kids too?"
"Naw, that's fine." Stan sighed, putting his wallet away. (He'd have to figure out something for money for the next, what, two days? Shouldn't be too hard, though. The beach was easy.) He saw Miz slip down and slide over the edge of the boat to run towards the truck. He waited a bit.
And as soon as Stan was sure she was out of earshot, Stan turned towards the hatch. "Ford," he called out lowly, and he watched his brother emerge from belowdecks. "...How much did ya hear?" Stan asked.
"'Jerk-baby's hitman'?" Ford stated, not actually a question, and Stan visibly winced. Shit.
"...You don't know the half of it," Stan told him warningly, as Ford approached. Because Ford hadn't been in on any of those conversations he'd had with the demon-kids up in the attic. Not in any way, shape, or form; Ford couldn't spy on the triangles up there. The kid had set it up that way, right from the start. "Seriously, you don't."
"Do I need to?" Ford asked him, and Stan grimaced.
"There's a lot of junk you don't know-" Stan tried again, not quite a reference to his own issues with the mob. But Ford just frowned at him.
"That doesn't change the fact that she killed people."
...And it was shit like that, that made Stan wonder (in a really not-great way) what his brother would think of him if he'd ever actually pulled the trigger on somebody (...or, y'know, somebody that wasn't a demon like Bill) and killed them. Damn it.
"She didn't want to," Stan ground out. "The jerk baby told her that killin' was all she was good for." Did his brother really not get what the mob could do to kids, when they got them that young?
Ford gave him a flat look. "But she still did it. She had a choice. She killed other people, just to get some other monsters out of prison or some other kind of 'made up' trouble?" Ford not quite scoffed. "And you think that somehow gets her off the hook as some kind of actual excuse? She has no morals." Stan clenched his jaw. (Guess that answered his question…)
"Look," Stan told him, "What do you want from me? I only met her a couple a' days ago, and I've been giving her advice on how to not have to do that anymore, from day two." Just like the triangle. "She said her friends stopped causing trouble after they found out what she had ta do to keep 'em out of the slammer, so whatever the hell was going on there that we don't know about, they're actually watchin' each other's backs. She cares about them, and they care about her. Like family."
"You're being far too naive if you actually believe that she's been telling you the truth about any of that, or would even listen to you." Ford gave Stan a tight, angry smile. Stan huffed out a breath.
"And you're being obtuse - and yeah, I know what that word means, Ford - if you think these demon kids can lie to me. The kid listens to me and I'm pretty sure that this one does too." Stan leveled a look at him. "And if that oh-so-great lizard of yours wasn't tryin' to stop her from killin' people for this baby-jerk, when it's supposed to be her dad, what's it say about her? Or maybe the lizard?"
"'Supposed to be'," Ford echoed with nearly a sneer. He made his way closer to Bill. "It's time to end this farce," Ford told him, sounding angry as hell. "If you're really too blind to see it," Ford stomped his boot into the deck only about a foot from the kid's head. "Then I'll just have to show it to you," Ford added coldly, as the kid gave a full-body flinch at the jarring vibration so close to him and stirred, his eyes half-opening into blinking slits.
(Ford was convinced he knew what Bill's game was now, and was completely offended that his brother was actually falling for what was, apparently, some sort of 'multiple-man con'; Bill, Miz, and that 'anti-Bill', three.)
(That said, Ford wasn't entirely certain what role that 'Seb' had had to play in all this, but Ford was certain that he must have been involved in the con as well, somehow. ...Possibly to simply lend credence and backstory to Miz's supposed far-reaching travels. ...and to make Ford himself look quite insane and like some sort of paranoidly misguided fool, with that eye-trick they'd managed to pull off somehow.)
Bill, blinking, stared out across the deck for a bit. Then he slowly sat up. (That was usual for the kid after a longer sleep, Stan knew. Kid was trying to get his bearings, get his body back in whatever 'state' he liked having it in that didn't have him too 'low' in it, or whatever.) He watched as the kid winced and rubbed at the right side of his head like he did sometimes.
"...Stan-ley?" the kid said slowly. It took the kid another second or two, before the kid straightened in place and started looking around. "-Where's Miz?" Bill asked, turning to Stan, eyes narrowing.
"Why don't you simply review the recordings your suit was taking for you, and see for yourself?" Ford said coldly, crossing his arms and taking a wide-legged stance a bit to the left and back from Bill. That had Bill twisting in place to glare up at Ford, as he continued with, "It does have that rather basic functionality, doesn't it?" and...
Oh shit. Stan hadn't thought the kid had set up anything here. Stan interjected quickly, "-She went to get some ice cream. She's fine," Stan told Bill, directly offering up the info the kid had asked for (which was part of the learning promise he'd made to the kid), while glaring at his idiotic brother for being so stupid. Because if Bill saw (or heard or whatever) some stupid recording of the conversation he'd just had with Miz-
The fingers of Bill's left hand twitched on the deck, and Bill was still glaring up at Stan's brother for a couple of seconds… before Stan saw Bill's eyes go a bit distant and all expression just fall off of the kid's face.
Stan let out a deep and angry sigh. Damn it, Ford. Stan ran a hand across his face, and watched as Bill slowly dropped his chin, and just as slowly swiveled his head on his neck around to face him.
The kid was staring at him expressionlessly. Stan looked right back at him unapologetically.
"What do you want for breakfast, kid?" Stan asked the kid, turning away. Because hey, if the kid wasn't gonna toss a fit? Stan wasn't gonna go looking for one - that's for damn sure.
Out of the corner of his eye, Stan saw Bill slowly pull in a breath, and open his mouth-
-and before the kid got a word out, Ford overrode the kid with, "Did you really think my brother would fall for your lies, William?"
Stan watched the kid go still, and Stan had a sinking feeling as Ford continued with, "Really. You may be learning how to lie from my brother, but you still have a long way to go." Ford gave them a humorless chuckle. "Hardly creative of you, William," Ford said next. "'Bill' and 'Liam'."
Stan looked up at his brother slowly. The kid wasn't moving. He was barely breathing.
"Ford," Stan said carefully. "Dunno where you're going with this, but…" he'd better stop. His brother had to know better, right?
...except Ford had talked about doing things he wouldn't normally do to throw the triangle off, after Stan had finally gotten through to him after they'd listened in on Bill and the kids, before they'd scaled the ladder onto the boat. (-Which, y'know, Stan had been okay with 'in principle', but this had not been what he'd meant!)
"Stanley, this whole-" Ford made an irritated gesture "-story of his has been one, long, unmitigated lie!" Ford told him. "He's 'repackaging' your own life to you, and presenting it as fact and truth!" And Stan slowly began to realize, Ford didn't just look desperately angry, he looked desperate. "Bill doesn't have a brother he's trying to save; he never did!"
Stan felt a chill go down his spine, as the kid stopped breathing next to him. ...Oh shit. That… shit. Shit.
And for one dizzying moment, Stan was worried that his brother might be right. That he'd fallen for some con of the kid's, hook line and sinker. Because it did sound way too close to everything that had… it was just too messed up. Way, way too close and too messed up. And there were so many holes in it that just didn't fit.
But…
...that was what shit was like. That's what life was like. If it had all been too neat and pat, everything tied up in a bow, then yeah, maybe he'd have a real damn good reason to be suspicious as hell about it. But life was messy and the kid couldn't lie worth a damn, Stan would bet his life on it (hell, he kind of was, and had to), and…
...when Stan looked over at the triangle, he didn't need all the logic in the world to tell him whether the kid was lying or not. He could straight-up see the dead pale look on the kid's face as the kid dropped his chin slightly and actually seemed to second-guess himself and his own memories and… Stan knew that look after his own recovery after the memory gun, and…
No. Oh no. Oh. Oh, this was gonna be bad.
"-Ford, take it back," Stan said quickly, in a rush, as he remembered something Miz had said, and with how the kid was reacting - Stan suddenly realized what his brother had just said, and done. "Take it back right now-!" But it was already too late.
Stan saw the very second, the moment, the instant when the thought flashed across the kid's face - as Bill finished remembering, knowing, and then told himself: 'No, I remember my brother, I'm not that kind of crazy…'
And Stan saw it, in the very next instant, when the kid completely wrote off his brother forever, too.
Stan remembered the echo of Miz's throwaway line "They all just ignored it, like they were trying to forget about what happened," and realized what it actually meant, how bad it really was, and had been, for the kid.
Stan realized it all as the kid straightened slightly in place, as the kid's shoulders and hands unclenched, as Bill Cipher mentally relegated Stan's brother to the trash heap of 'parents, government, and everybody else' who had told the kid 'no'. Who had told Bill that his brother was nothing, less than nothing; that his brother didn't deserve to live; that it wasn't even worth it to think of him later; that Bill shouldn't do anything more than forget about his brother and pretend that Liam had never even existed just like the rest of them...
The kid was never going to listen to Stan's brother again.
And that scared Stan to death. He'd been walking a tightrope balance of trying to keep his brother and the kid from going that far, from pulling that trigger, from completely taking the gloves off with each other. What had happened out on the porch had been bad enough, but at least something good had come out of it - all of the deals they'd ever had with the kid were now off. But his brother had just... here and now… Ford had...
Stan hadn't wanted to know what that would look like on either of them, really taking the gloves off, but especially not by the demon; and now, Stan had no plan moving forward. He'd been trying to keep things from ever getting to that point - telling his brother to stay away, work on other things, not even think about the triangle. (He'd thought the kid was going to be the problem there, obsessing over Ford forever and never really letting go, but he'd known he could handle the kid on that. He'd thought he could trust his brother to just… but Ford hadn't. Ford had pulled the trigger on him, in the very worst way.)
And now, Stan had no idea what the kid was going to do next.
"Don't kill him," Stan breathed out, as Ford said, "Why in the world would I take it back?!" all outrage and irritated confusion, oh hell. "-I want you not to kill my brother, Bill," Stan repeated. "You hear me? Don't kill Ford."
And the kid closed his eyes for a moment more and blew out a long breath.
And then the kid opened up his eyes again, breathing in, and looked up at Stan with a smile. (Not a grin, just a smile.)
And then Bill told Stan, to his face, lightly and pleasantly, "Why would I even think about killing him? It's just a waste of my time." Bill's smile got just a little bit wider, or maybe deeper. "I have better things to do," the kid told Stan, as the demon looked down, brushed off his knees, and slowly stood up.
Stan couldn't entirely suppress the shudder.
"'Efficiency', right," Stan croaked out, thinking of a snap of the fingers, and several unmoving and suddenly-dead fish.
Bill looked down at him. He surveyed him for a moment.
"Really, Stanley," Bill said, putting his hands on his hips. "You weren't expecting this? ...I probably should've," Ford's old muse mused to himself, tapping his chin with a finger. "But then… I wasn't thinking clearly for quite awhile there, now, was I?" Bill gestured with a hand, then frowned slightly. "Certainly not along straight lines; so consistently-inconsistent of me." Bill looked back to Stan and leaned down slightly.
"Isn't it better that I don't have that problem now?" Bill asked of Stan.
"Stop threatening my brother," Ford growled out nearby.
"I-" Stan didn't know what to think. Stan stared up at him almost blankly, because... He had thought the kid was going to lose it. …Why wasn't the kid completely losing it?
"Really, Stanley," Bill continued, all-smiles towards him, as the kids slowly made their way up onto the deck. "It's fine."
...And why did that simple phrase cause such a foreboding inside of Stan's poor, old-man heart?
Miz was sad. She made herself sad by thinking of things she probably shouldn't have been thinking of. She didn't like being sad. So when an excuse came up to distract herself with something NOT sad, she allowed her thoughts to drift away and focus on the NOT sad thing instead.
...For now, at least.
She knew it would come back once she wasn't distracted anymore, but that was why she loved distractions. A nice song. A new game. A tv show. A day out with her friends. Focusing on cooking. Focusing on building things. Focusing on learning something new. Anything to drive away the awful feeling that would consume her if she wasn't distracted.
Miz stood up on her toes so she could see into the ice cream truck. Creamsicles… ice cream sandwiches… cones and cups and fudge-covered pops…
She wanted chocolate. It was a better alternative to alcohol. She didn't have anything to celebrate with alcohol anyway. She stared at the ice cream other people bought as they walked away. Each template was saved inside her Mind to be able to be called up again later.
She was scanning a wafer cone with cookies and cream ice cream when she heard heard a voice ask, "So… you like ice cream?"
Miz looked over to see teenage Stan grinning at her charmingly. Teenage Ford was standing just behind him, looking giddy and holding a notebook. Miz grinned widely.
She's found a BETTER distraction!
"Hello again~" she waved. Her Perception Filter was still on, as noted by how no-one paid her any mind aside from the twins before her. She wasn't invisible, she was just uninteresting to pay any attention to. From the look on young Ford's face though, he found her VERY interesting. Miz couldn't help but feel rather flattered.
"So… uh… are you guys space pirates or something?" Stan asked her first, managing to get a question in before even Ford did.
Miz giggled. "We're travelers from a future in an alternate dimension of your timeline." She expanded the parameters of her Perception Filter to include the twins as well. "Though me and Blue aren't human," she said simply.
Time Baby was dead and fuck the path of fate. They've already fucked stuff up just by BEING here.
"Oh. Are you just… allowed to just tell us that?" Ford asked nervously, looking around. He wondered (rather belatedly) if they were breaking some sort of future-law somehow, just by talking with her and hearing about cool things like other dimensions!
Miz shrugged. "As long as you two can keep this a secret."
Stan narrowed his eyes at her, because even as a teenager, he could pick up on things. A very perceptive child. Unlike Ford, who was so gullible and naive that Miz really, really wanted to bullshit something to him just to see his FACE. But no, Stan asked, "Why're you trustin' us with your secret? Why'd you guys take our boat?"
"Because the boat is technically ours. Or rather, Stan's." Stan looked confused by her response but Ford put it together first. Travelers from the future. Those two old men. The way one had yelled out Ford's name but hadn't actually been talking to him-
"Oh my Einstein! Those were us!" Ford gasped. Stan looked over.
"Sixer?" Ford was squealing. Stan smacked his arm.
Ford coughed and tried to be professional. "Lee! Those old guys are us from the future!" he gasped out.
"Alternate future," Miz clarified. "That fact that we're here already changes what future you two are gonna have." The distinction was apparently lost on them, though. She looked back at the ice cream truck as Ford and Stan practically went into spasms over the information.
"D-did you see the super cool fighting moves the future ME pulled on those cops?!" young Ford squeaked. "I'm such a Badass!"
Young Stanley was laughing and slapping his knee. "Even as old men we still get chased by the cops!" he exclaimed with no small glee.
Miz glanced over at them. "Hey, wanna see a cool trick?"
"What?" the twins asked eagerly, looking right back over to her.
Miz pointed. "What ice cream do you guys want?" The two blinked. What was she gonna do?
"-Peanut brittle cone! Two scoops!" Stan said immediately.
Ford hesitated a little before he responded with, "Vanilla cone with jelly beans?"
Miz nodded and wiggled her fingers, lifting up the sand into the air as it swirled and the atomic particles rearranged until she was holding their requested treats. As she thought, the looks on their faces were AMAZING. Then she winced. (Yeah, Ford really WAS hitting decibels only dogs could hear… wait, did that mean she was part-dog right now?!)
"Here, a freebie just 'cause I wanted to show off," Miz said smugly as she handed the ice cream to them. The two were staring at it.
Stan took one experimental lick to make sure it wasn't actually sand (it wasn't! Cool!), but was already digging in and halfway through it by the time Ford was almost finished inspecting his own.
"This… was sand?" Ford stared at his own ice cream cone warily. If this was some kind of joke to make them eat sand... Ford had had enough of bullies making fun of him and his brother for one lifetime already, thank you.
"I took the sand, moved its atomic particles around and changed it's molecular make up to be ice cream instead," Miz told him, grinning. She then proceeded to form her own blackberry cone with fudge and bite into it, partially to show young Ford it was okay, but… yummm~. She was good!
"Is this… some kinda super cool future technology? Did I invent it?" Ford asked, finally taking a few licks.
Miz shrugged. "Naw, this is my own thing. But your future self did make some-" She was cut off by the SURGE of energy in the air. She paled. Oh no. Oh shit. Even through her headband she felt that. (Which made her realize the spell on it was probably wearing off and she would need to reapply it NOW before she felt any more than this and-)
She gasped and squeezed her eyes shut, slapping her hand to her forehead. Re-apply spell first. Check to make sure Bill didn't kill anyone after. Shit. Shit. Shit. She ran off, dropping her ice cream as she went. "SorrysomethingjustcameupIhavetogobye-!"
Stan and Ford looked at each other.
"...Follow her?" Stan asked of his twin.
Ford was already running across the beach after her, barely keeping his ice cream in hand. His notebook was clutched tightly in his other.
"Hey! Wait for me!" Stan called after him, before shoving the last of his cone in his mouth and then booking it for the rocks on the beach himself. (Good thing he'd kept the binoculars on him!)
Miz ran up to the boat, gasping and wavering on her feet at the intense feelings roiling inside her like a tropical storm. Augh… filter… filter...
She wobbled in the air as she jumped up onto the boat, almost losing it, trying to do too many new things at once. But then she felt a strong wind suddenly gust up underneath her, stabilizing her.
Miz let go of her own flight and focused on her filtering. When she reopened her eyes, she realized she was hovering right next to the railing, against which Bill was leaning casually, one hand casually outstretched towards her. She hadn't realized that it had been him standing there, she'd been too overwhelmed by-
"T-t-that… I… you…" She gasped, trembling. "Are you… alright? I just… felt… spellwork… faded… and…" She shook her head. God what the hell did she just feel?!
"You felt spellwork fading?" Bill tilted his head at her. "What spellwork?" he asked. Then he frowned. "Are you all right?" She'd looked a bit wobbly.
"M-my headband…"
"-Fix it," Bill said immediately, straightening.
"...needed a recharge…" she whimpered, pressing a hand to the side of her head. "Didn't think… it would run out so soon…" Her eyes were tearing up as she held back a sob. What had happened up here? She leaves for FIVE minutes to get some ice cream and THIS-
Bill blew out a breath, then frowned a bit and leaned forward, activated a different (v-e-r-y experimental) feature of his suit, and looked the headband over. (He couldn't do anything about anything she'd felt from anyone before now, but he could help solve the problem again.)
"You didn't tell me it would need recharging," Bill frowned, as he analyzed her spellwork on multiple levels, letting himself focus on that, instead of... He was still frowning as he leaned back again. "You had that… one with the piece of metal on it a few days ago," he said. "Add that, and put the spell on that instead?" Bill suggested. "Should be easier to add layers to it, and etchings are more stable. It should last longer."
Miz nodded. "I… think having to keep my power suppressed was wearing down at the spell…" She groaned softly as she finally managed to filter out the worst of it. Suppressing the powers of a demon god? Yeah, definitely wore down the spell.
"I can teach you some of the 'ambient energy feed-in' runes I've been using for my own spellwork, if you didn't get a good look at them before," Bill added. "Should keep the energy levels up, and there are ways to continually refresh the durability of the metal and the etchings as part of it."
"T-thanks…" Miz said, as she took control of her own flight and finally floated down to lie on the deck. (Bill canceled his own spell, as she took over.) Miz glanced over at him, eyes wet with tears. "But are you alright? I just felt…" Even with the pounding headache, she was more worried about Bill, what he'd just felt was...
Bill stiffened for a moment, then let out a sigh, looking frustrated. "-Don't thank me," he said, sounding annoyed, as he crossed his arms in front of him. "I should have thought that, that might have been a problem and said something when you first made that." It didn't take a genius to realize that Bill had entirely sidestepped her question. "Are you feeling all right?" Bill asked after a long beat.
"I'm… going to be ok." She closed her eyes. "I'm sorry. I… was this my fault?"
Bill looked back at her and blinked. Then he turned towards Stanley.
"Stanley," Bill called out. "Is saying 'sorry' for things incessantly when you had nothing to do with them a human thing? I think that's a human thing," Bill said.
That got him a grunt from Stanley and a: "For some people, yeah. Why?"
"How do you get them to stop?" Bill called out next, and Miz huffed before poking at his arm.
"I can't help it," Miz pouted. "I feel bad and some illogical part of me thinks apologizing would make me feel better."
"Could try saying 'stop', but that won't work," Stan called back, from where he was sitting down and making pancakes using a propane tank and the small camp stove he'd gotten from the crate. "Gotta help 'em stop feeling guilty for everything they see."
"Ah," said Bill. "A challenge." He turned his head back to Miz. "Challenge accepted?" he asked.
She managed a small snort. Then she frowned again. "Ugh… what… why would…" She Flickered to try and see what the FUCK had happened here and… oh. "I can't believe Ford said that to you! Of all the insensitive…"
Bill simply shrugged at this, though he did look over at where that Stanford, Pine Tree and Shooting Star were sitting together next to each other, on nearly the opposite side of the deck from where he was.
"He thinks old Seven-Eyes was telling him the truth, the whole truth, and nothing-but the truth," Bill told her under his breath. "I don't particularly feel like wasting my time trying to correct the notion," he told her far more smoothly than he felt about the matter.
"Jessie's just as capable of lying as anyone else. And it's not like she'd always know the full story either." Miz muttered, rubbing her eyes. Her own Jessie lied about being friends with her all the time, so long as she was Miz and not Bill, they could be friends.
"You don't know the half of it," Bill said quietly, watching Stanford with a flat stare. Then he realized what he was doing and turned away, opting to look at Stanley instead. Miz glanced over at Stan.
"I'm done wasting any more of my time on him," Bill said succinctly. "That Stanford does not deserve my help, or my brilliance." He got a flash of an almost evil (really, nastily smug) expression, as he said, "Or anything else from me."
Miz moved her glance over to Ford and blinked. Oh. OH. So that was what that surge of power that wasn't just emotion was. This was… Miz blinked. "Did you just… to Ford…" She slowly sat up, staring at Ford. "I didn't realize you could DO that."
"He's part of my Zodiac," Bill confirmed. "I can't do anything about that." He was himself, and he was never going to change; he certainly wasn't going to risk what would happen if he tried to rip himself loose of that Stanford entirely. (And if he hadn't hated the stupid lizard for what it hadn't done for him BEFORE that stupid prophecy, WELL…) "But that doesn't mean that I have no choices left available to me, as to how I want to handle things with him moving forward," Bill told Miz.
Stan narrowed his eyes and glanced back at them over his shoulder. "What did you do to Ford?"
"It's more like what I won't do for that Stanford, anymore," Bill clarified under his breath, only loud enough that it still carried to Stan over the sounds of the cooking stove and the frying dough. "He thinks I'm a liar? He doesn't want my help? He wants to tell me that my own mind is lying to me and my brother doesn't exist and never did? -Fine. NO help for that Stanford from me. NONE," Bill intoned.
Miz scowled across the deck at Ford. "The angry part of myself wants to give him what he wants to dish out. See how he likes it, to have someone talk to him that way…"
"You already did," Stan informed the pair of demons dryly. "Out in the forest, two days ago. So back the hell off."
Miz closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths, actively working to filter out of herself any remaining flavors of the tumultuous emotions she'd felt off Bill earlier. That left her a little calmer, thankfully. "Ok. I'll back off, but… shit. Do you even have any idea what I just felt earlier? Damn."
Bill looked very on edge, probably not liking the idea that his own emotions might've hurt his own sister on this one. Stan glanced between them, then got back to his cooking.
"No, I don't," Stan said, because he didn't. (He could guess what the kid had been feeling, maybe, some of it. But Stan wasn't gonna split hairs here, and he sure as hell didn't want to talk about it right now, and get the kid any more riled up about it just then!)
"-Kid, maybe you should take her below deck and help her out with whatever 'version two-point-oh' you need to do for that headband of hers," Stan told the two demons both, as he took his spatula and removed the cooked pancake from the pan, to lay it on inside a large upside-down pot lid sitting next to him, before starting to add more of the ingredients to the pan to get mixed together and then cooked again - water first, this time. "Don't think you want to risk her feeling like you just did, again," Stan added, not reading between the lines so much as reading the lines themselves.
The two demons got up and headed for the hatch. Miz was still sending Ford sad looks. How could he be so insensitive? If she'd been going for a sob story she'd have chosen something less complicated to craft a lie about.
Ford was sending her nasty glares right back. He was convinced she was helping Bill try to con his brother in a very bad way.
Miz sighed before saying softly to him, "You're a bully," before she climbed down the hatch.
Dipper and Mabel looked back and forth between them. What had happened? "What did you say? What happened up here?" Dipper asked. They'd noticed the tension earlier when they'd come out on deck, and how Bill seemed to be acting a little… different than usual (more standoffish?), but...
"Bill finally showed his hand," Ford told the two niblings. "The sob story lie he's trying to sell my brother…" Ford gritted his teeth. "That to all appearances Stan is falling for." Ford pulled in a breath. "...And she is helping Bill do it."
Dipper frowned while Mabel bit her lip. They exchanged glances. Mabel wasn't so sure that was true - Grunkle Stan could spot a liar from a mile away! And Miz had been very open and truthful to any questions they had asked her. (Hadn't she? She'd sure seemed to be!) The only outright lie they'd ever heard from her was pretending to be a dragon (or maybe not, since she really WAS a dragon) and just a little prank with her glasses. Right?
"Are you sure?" Mabel asked Grunkle Ford. To this, her other favorite grunkle responded by blowing out a breath and… oh no, Grunkle Ford suddenly looked really tired.
Ford ran a hand over his face, shoulders slumping slightly, and said, "Stan isn't perfect. He has his blind spots."
"What did Bill say? What sob story?" Dipper asked him. He was a little skeptical still, but he knew Grunkle Stan wasn't perfect. They'd gotten away with the decaf coffee swap with him, just the other day. If it was something Grunkle Stan wasn't looking for...
"It's hardly worth repeating that dreck," Ford told them, leaning back against the railing. "I'd rather you not even think about falling for it, either."
Dipper and Mabel glanced at each other again. ...Well, even if it was a lie, they still needed to hear it, so they'd know what the lie was so they could not accidentally fall for it. Dipper had learned this lesson last year about keeping secrets. Lying to Mabel about the Rift had only come back to bite them all in the butt.
"What did Bill say?" Dipper asked again.
"For me, it was acting as a muse and a friend for three years," Ford told them quietly. "For Stan… it is an impossible task to help a brother who does not exist."
The younger twins both flinched. They thought back to when Miz had revealed she had siblings out on the deck, just before bed, and when they'd asked Bill about it… he'd dodged the question. He'd refused to answer it, the way he ALWAYS did when something was true but he didn't want to risk them figuring out that it was true (...like how he'd made that mistake out in the forest with Grunkle Ford, how he hadn't been planning on doing that). Bill was really bad at lying. Bill was really only good at leaving things out - which was still pretty bad! But... when Bill was answering some things but refusing to answer others (which he'd been doing with them ever since Dipper had broken his deal with him out on the porch a couple weeks ago)… it got kind of obvious what Bill didn't want to talk about pretty quick.
The two glanced over at Grunkle Stan this time, then looked back to Ford.
"...Um, not that we don't believe you Great-Uncle Ford, but," Dipper began, then hurriedly said, "-How do you know that Bill's lying?" They knew he was good at telling when Bill lied, but if Miz had been helping Bill…? She was better at lying than him. So who had said what? (And how had they convinced Grunkle Stan of… that? How would something like that even come up?)
Ford closed his eyes and sighed heavily, leaning back against the railing further - trusting it with his whole weight now, not to collapse. (He'd not even heard a creak out of it earlier. Stan really had built it up quite solidly.) "-Dipper, do you remember when I told you about Jheselbraum the Unswerving? The Oracle?" Ford asked of his grand-nephew, as Mabel snuggled up against his side a little more closely. Dipper nodded, and Ford continued. "She told me about Bill's past, about what happened to his family. He never had a brother."
"...Oh," said Mabel, as Dipper bit his lip and frowned for awhile. She'd gotten to read the a little more of the Journals, too, before they'd tossed them into the Bottomless Pit. She knew a little about Grunkle Ford's oracle-friend, enough to know that she was really smart, knew a lot of stuff, and that Grunkle Ford trusted her a lot.
"Yes," Ford said simply.
"Well, okay," Mabel said, exchanging glances with her bro-bro. "We'll be careful, Grunkle Ford!" she told him.
"Thank you," Ford said, relaxing a bit as he lay a han d on Mabel's shoulder. She looked up at him and smiled, then curled up against him a little more.
"So, um," Mabel said next, realizing her brother needed some time to think, and that her grunkle maybe needed some time to not-think about some other stuff? "You know, Dipper and I have gone on a lot of trips to the beach before, only in California! Right?"
"Yes?" Ford said, with a bit of a furrowed brow still, but also the starts of a smile. "Do tell?"
"Well-" Mabel said leadingly, and she launched into the first of what Ford knew could easily be a sequence of many varied retellings just from her tone, in Ford's (quite happy) experience.
After a long tale of sandcastles and waves from two summers ago, during which Mabel was engaging as she could possibly be, and in a longer lull after several interested questions from their Great-Uncle on the details of another trip three summers ago to a farther-away beach, Dipper finally spoke up again and said, "...Great-Uncle Ford?"
Ford blinked and looked down at him, and Mabel stopped getting ready for the lead-up to the next story. "Yes, my boy?"
Dipper felt really uncomfortable about this, but maybe it needed to be said. "...What if you're both right."
Ford blinked down at him, and adjusted his glasses. "...Pardon? Both right?" He hadn't thought he'd contradicted Mabel in some way-
"You, and… Bill," Dipper said next, and Ford frowned, reorienting himself to their previous discussion. Ah. Oh, dear.
Ford sighed. He'd thought he'd been clear about this. "Dipper, the unadulterated truth is-"
"-I know," Dipper said hurriedly. "I know Bill lies, and you can tell. I just... " Dipper let out a breath. "Bill gets stuff wrong sometimes though, right? Like, really, really wrong," Dipper noted. "Like, opposite of the way things actually work, wrong? The way things actually are?" His great-uncle was staring down at him.
"...Yes?" Ford said. "But I don't see what that has to do with Bill lying about-"
"-What if he wasn't lying," Dipper said in a rush, and Great-Uncle Ford stopped. "I mean, he's insane, right? What if… he thinks he had… -I mean, maybe he really didn't have a brother, but… what if Bill thinks that… he..." Dipper trailed off, feeling incredibly nervous as Great-Uncle Ford stared down at him, and the silence grew.
Mabel spoke up softly. "Dip-Dop, if Bill really thought he had a brother that he cared about a lot, that he'd want to help… then why did he treat us so bad?" she asked him. Dipper looked over at her. She didn't look very happy right then; she actually looked a little mad. "I mean, Bill must think his brother died, right? Since… his dimension was destroyed or something? And he's got that eye that's supposed to be able to see things anywhere? So if he doesn't have a brother, and couldn't find him anywhere after looking everywhere, then he'd have to think that…" Mabel trailed off, then shook her head. "But Bill said he was going to kill you! And he hurt Grunkle Ford a lot! He… he was going to kill me..." She took in a breath. "If he knows what that really feels like, to lose somebody he really cared about, then why would he do it to anybody else?" she asked of her brother.
"I don't know. He's insane." Dipper muttered.
"Because he doesn't care," Grunkle Ford told them quietly but firmly. "He's a demon. They don't care about anything or anyone but themselves and the little games they like to play, that destroy everyone else."
Mabel and Dipper paused again. "He cares about Miz," Dipper said, and Mabel bit her lip. She hadn't thought about that. And Bill really did seem to care about Miz, too, at least a little? Maybe even a lot more than that. Did… Bill really not care about anyone else? Was that really what it meant to be a demon? To not care about things that happened to other people, even if you knew they'd hurt if they happened to you?
"It's an act," Ford told them. "I've seen similar before. -Give them an excuse to turn on each other, and watch them do it like clockwork."
Mabel bit her lip again. "Well… even if Bill's acting, Miz isn't? She really does seem to like Bill." But Mabel didn't think Bill was acting either… he was too awkward about it! (And… only sort of seemed to know what he was doing? Mabel had never really seen them hug each other… Bill should at least like hugs from his sibling, right?)
"She tricked you both with a pair of glasses and a lie not three days ago," Ford reminded her. Dipper and Mabel both blushed.
"But that was a prank," Dipper muttered while rubbing his eyes, trying to not remember the horror of what he'd seen when he'd looked through those things. Ew. Just… ew. (He felt bad for Great-Uncle Ford.)
"But she also knows how to act," Ford noted, "And she fooled you with that act. -You have to be careful around her," Ford warned them. "I'd rather you didn't speak with her at all, and simply not give her the chance."
Dipper made a frustrated noise. "But we could learn so much from her! She really answers every question I ask her-"
"-And that might actually be helpful, under the assumption that she is not lying to your face with every breath that she takes," Ford told him grimly.
"She let me inspect her dragon form," Dipper brought up, not really wanting to let this go. (He hardly ever got anybody who knew that much and would tell him anything he wanted, without getting short with him eventually. Miz hadn't stopped wanting to talk with him yet, and Dipper wanted to make the most of it while he still could!) "I got to check her teeth and claws and everything."
"-Which is dangerous," Ford ground out. "And will likely have her enjoying the look on your face when she offers to do something like that again for you, you walk right into it... and she turns around and bites you for doing it, instead!" Ford worked his jaw. "That's exactly the sort of thing that demons like them enjoy doing. -They like that look of surprise, and betrayal, and despair that people get, when they turn on them!"
The twins sighed, and Dipper pulled down on his cap. They exchanged a look. Grunkle Ford wasn't actually listening to them. He had an explanation for everything, but… he wasn't asking questions. He'd already made up his mind. It was like the thing with Grunkle Stan all over again, when they'd been talking to Grunkle Ford about it in the basement. He hadn't really been listening to them then, either. The only difference was, this time Grunkle Ford was actually telling them what he thought.
They weren't sure if Grunkle Ford was really right about Bill and Miz on this or not, but... he wasn't even thinking about what they were telling him, really, which meant they couldn't really talk to him about some of the stuff they'd seen. -Which was bad, because he really was wrong about Bill not caring about Miz - because he really did care about her! - and…
...they both realized right then and there, that there was no way their great uncle was ever going to change his mind about Bill, no matter what the demon said or did, whether he was lying or not. Because even if he saw something, he'd never actually believe it.
It worried Mabel more than Dipper, because she understood better what her Grunkle was trying to do. Dipper hadn't been in on either of those conversations, and they'd been so busy lately that she hadn't really gotten a chance to tell her brother about it - she'd been confused by the first one, enough that she hadn't tried to share it with him.
-Grunkle Stan wasn't trying to change Bill, he was just trying to get Bill to change his own behavior. If they all treated him the same, no matter what he did, then Bill would just go ahead and do his worst, because it wouldn't matter! Because trying to be good would still get him treated like he was bad. -Bill wouldn't feel ashamed and keep trying; he'd think he had no reason to. (And trying to be good was hard for him. He really didn't know how to do it! They had to keep telling him stuff - and Mabel had seen how confused and frustrated Bill got about some things before with Grunkle Stan. 'Being good' didn't 'make sense' to him, and the way Grunkle Stan had to explain it to Bill… just wasn't normal.)
But the same way Grunkle Stan was making it easy to stay at the Shack with food and things, Grunkle Stan was trying to show Bill that 'being good' didn't necessarily mean that Bill had to do a lot of things, or anything! Grunkle Stan was starting small, showing Bill that there were things that, if Bill didn't do them, then he'd get treated okay by people, just fine. And Grunkle Stan was also trying to show Bill that there were okay things that Bill could do that, if he did do them, then he'd get treated even better! (Grunkle Stan called it 'positive reinforcement'! ...Well, lots of people did - Mabel had looked it up online, when Grunkle Stan had told her that he'd looked it up, too. He'd found a book on it online, or something. She hadn't found a book, but she'd found a bunch of articles and blogs instead, and they'd been really helpful!)
Neither she or Grunkle Stan had been trying to help make Bill and their other favorite great-uncle try and get along, of course, because that was stupid and nuts and just not gonna happen, duh! But this was… gonna be kind of a problem, if Grunkle Ford was going to keep pushing at Bill, even when Bill was trying (most days) not to push back. (Especially since most days wasn't ALL days, so when Grunkle Stan wasn't around to try and stop them...)
And then Mabel thought back to Miz's comment, 'You're a bully,' and frowned. Because Miz was right, kind of. (Well, in the way that Bill was usually 'right, kind-of' sometimes, anyway.) Even if Bill totally deserved it, and even if everything else was a lie, the way Grunkle Ford was treating Bill - attacking Bill when he wasn't trying to do anything wrong - was kind of like bullying. Maybe Bill really just deserved it for being a jerk to her Grunkle Ford for so long; Mabel didn't know about that. But what she DID know was that she didn't like how it was making her Grunkle Ford act, or feel! Grunkle Ford wasn't happy. He was really unhappy! And treating Bill like that just made her grunkle feel horrible about himself. -What had happened after the thing with the explosive bracelet things out on the porch… that just proved it! Grunkle Ford had been a mess after that.
Mabel had seen the way people had bullied Dipper all their lives. And now her own Grunkle Ford was acting just like them, almost. (He had a really good reason to do it! Bill was horrible, really all the time! But…) -And the way Miz had gotten angry… reminded Mabel a bit of how she'd get mad when the other kids sometimes decided to pick on Dipper. (Mabel had fought back at them sometimes if she'd had to, after giving them a chance to be friends with them instead, but she really didn't like violence. She'd rather just make new friends who would get along with her and Dipper, instead of trying to hurt them.)
"Grunkle Ford…" Mabel began. "Maybe you should stop pushing Bill." At the look she got from him, she said, "-I know, I know, he's a stupid-head demon-dorito chip, but it makes you feel horrible, and it isn't helping!" she told him.
"Mabel, sweetie, if I don't stand up to him-"
"-you're just making him angry, and making yourself feel hurt, and then sometimes he says stuff that hurts you, too," Mabel told her grunkle. "I'm not telling you to stop because I like him," Mabel said, because she knew where that shocked look her grunkle was giving her was coming from, "I'm telling you to stop because I love you!" she told him, hugging his side. "You're hurting yourself more than you're hurting him, and I don't like it!" she said, huffing out a breath and trying not to cry, as she buried her face in his side.
"...Mabel," she heard her grunkle say softly, and she felt him curl an arm in around her. "If I don't…"
"Then maybe he does something, and maybe he doesn't, but why does it have to be you?" Mabel asked him. "We can help! Grunkle Stan can help! And you're not standing up to him if he's not attacking you first! You're just giving him a reason to attack you back without breaking the agreement-thing Grunkle Stan made for us all, and that's stupid," she told him, smacking him in the arm, because her grunkle wasn't stupid, he was smart! And... "Grunkle Stan said Bill's allowed to defend himself! And if you attack first then he's allowed to hurt you back!"
"That's…" Ford huffed out a breath. "Mabel, I know this. That isn't the issue," he told her. "The issue is everyone simply letting Bill do whatever he wants without anyone trying to stand in his way. That cannot stand," he told her. "Someone has to try and stop him."
"Hey now," Stan said, as he walked his way over to them. "I'm not letting the kid do whatever he wants, Ford. You know that," Stan grunted, as he set down the pot lid full of pancakes in front of the three of them. "And stop him? From what? Playing the piano? Going fishing? Falling asleep on the picnic tables outside? I want him doing those things, Ford. Means he's not doin' something else, like starting a second Weirdmageddon or killin' people, instead."
Ford pulled in a breath, and let it out again. "It's all just a front, Stan. We talked about this."
"Yeah, we did," Stan told him, sitting down and passing out forks. "And I told you, I'm okay with him 'pretending' at me for three years at a stretch, with another punch in the eye in-between if I have to, until I get him all settled out."
"That's not what's going to happen, and you know it," Ford said darkly, as Stan speared himself a pancake.
"You don't know that's not what's going to happen, and neither does the kid," Stan told him right back, before he rolled his pancake up like a cigar and took a big bite out of it.
Ford opened his mouth to object, and Stan shot him a look. "-Eat your breakfast, Ford," Stan told him, as the kids took one look at each other, and tried the 'pancake roll' eating method their Grunkle Stan had just inadvertently shown off to them. Mabel slathered corn syrup on hers.
"We really should be trying to shift our schedule to the times in this dimension," Ford told him. It was early evening here, even if it was morning back in their home dimension. That only produced a shrug out of his brother, and a careless, "We're only gonna be here another day, Ford. Relax."
"...Assuming we trust Bill to get us all home and in one piece," Ford muttered, though he did spear a pancake of his own without needing another glare from his brother to prompt him.
Towards the end of their meal, the hatch opened up and the two demons climbed back out again, Bill first. Miz had changed her headband again; there was intricate embroidery in the cloth sections and etching across a metal plate that covered most of her forehead. She was still adjusting it as she came out. "Still think I like yellow better, but Ford would probably throw a fit…"
"Yellow doesn't blend well," Bill told her, "This isn't the Mindscape. You don't need to stand out in the same way, here. And you certainly don't need to be displaying 'attack colors' to the idiot while he's here, armed, and thinks he's dangerous," Bill shrugged off, waiting for her to get the rest of the way up and out, before closing the hatch behind them.
"'Here'?" Ford repeated slowly. Did Bill think he was going somewhere?
Bill barely spared him a glance. "What, you weren't thinking about running off and trying to 'fix' things for your counterpart here? Or should I say, 'keep things from breaking'," Bill said, as Miz rolled her eyes.
Ford sucked in a breath, hard. Stan froze in place.
"Oh, right, I'm talking to a Stanford," Bill said flatly. "What I really meant to say was: 'keep someone from breaking someth-'."
"-Stop talking. Now." Ford said angrily, rising to his feet. Bill turned his head to look at him, arms crossed, eyes hooded.
Miz sighed. "Brought this on himself for being an ass…" she muttered before stepping back to let Bill handle this.
"What, you don't think actions have consequences?" Bill said. "Oh, but don't worry," Bill added. "I know how this is all going to play out."
"What. did. you. do." Ford demanded, advancing on him.
"Oh, I didn't do anything," Bill said. "That's rather the point. -The lesson," Bill drawled out, glancing down at Stan, to meet his eyes. "Which, really, let's be honest here, is why I'm not going to be trying to make a portal tomorrow morning," Bill told them all. "It's going to be tomorrow evening, instead," Bill told all and sundry, arms still crossed. "Because when you are done trying to 'fix' things, Stanford," Bill said, lifting an arm up to point a finger at Ford's chest, "And breaking them even further, he," Bill pointed to Stan, "Will then do what he always does, and go ahead and then actually fix it!" And Bill was almost staring snake-eyes at Ford, who was practically shaking with rage.
"You seem… to have… your causality rather mixed up again, Bill…" Ford managed to get out without attempting to punch the demon into next week. (Mostly because he knew he couldn't. Not with that suit Bill was wearing; the tech in it would let gun blasts ricochet off of it, to say nothing of absorbing the impact of his fists.)
Miz was leaning against the railing. "I really want to tell them. The truth about what happened," she grumbled. Ford nearly turned on her then and there, but he halted when she held up a hand and, to Ford's horror, a modified version of Bill's suit flickered into view for a brief second on her, as well.
"Oh, they'll figure it all out soon enough," Bill told her, keeping his eyes on that Stanford. (He'd known about the suit; he'd helped her make it before heading back up to deck where that Stanford was. Just in case.) "Best not to spoil it! Besides," Bill added darkly at the end, "IT'S NOT LIKE THEY'D BELIEVE US IF WE TOLD THEM."
Miz whined, "I hate misunderstandings that aren't innocently funny."
"...Kid," Stan began slowly. But Bill just looked down at him and said, "You'll be able to fix it. If you want to. That Stanford's an idiot," Bill told him, "But you'll know EXACTLY what to do."
Stan not quite glowered at Bill. Meanwhile, Ford stalked past him. "-Where are you going?" Stan called after him.
"I'm going to keep watch on the house," Ford called back angrily. "To stop you from doing anything stupid. Again!" He reached the stern end of the boat and vaulted the railing.
Stan stared after him. He felt suddenly cold.
"Idiot," Bill said of that Stanford, watching him go.
"He really acts like he doesn't like you," Miz groaned. "Besides, the young twins are still spying on us from that rock…"
Stan pulled in a shaky breath.
"...Grunkle Stan?" Mabel asked him.
Stan let out that breath again. "Yeah, well… Ford's an idiot sometimes," Stan said. "But not that much of an idiot. Dinner's at six. They'll be gone soon. Ma would kill 'em… us… if we weren't back in time. So..." he shrugged.
"...you really love him." Miz noted. She had a pained expression on her face. "It's not fair."
Stan let out a long sigh. "I really screwed things up for him," Stan told them all, as he grabbed up the empty pot lid and other debris left over from the meal. "He's got a right to be mad about that."
"You didn't, though." Miz muttered. "He still got to go to college. He still got a huge fancy grant check to do whatever research he wanted…"
Bill let out a soft laugh. "Oh, Miz," he said, leaning back. "You're focusing on ENTIRELY the wrong things…"
"Stan was seventeen when he was kicked out." Miz complained. "He was a child! Thrown out and living all by himself! Ruin Ford's life? Heck, Ford's not the one who had to worry about getting enough to eat or staying warm or not dying."
Stan looked highly uncomfortable at what Miz had just said (...while Bill continued looking all kinds of amused). "I was fine," Stan told them, more to the niblings than to the two demons. "I had my car, I had my… our boat, and I had all the funds and food and junk I set aside for…" He looked around. "...this." Stan's shoulders slumped. 'Things just got harder later, because I was tryin' to find a way to get rich quick, to try and buy myself back into the family.' He didn't say that out loud, though.
"It's still not fair." Miz sniffled, wiping at her face. "You shouldn't have had to go through that. Especially when-" She stopped and turned away in frustration. Stan noted that. Bill had told her not to say anything and it looked like she was obeying her brother. Stan let out a breath and scratched at his cheek, before he looked over at Bill again.
"You're enjoying this," Stan said darkly to the demon.
"Oh, you have NO IDEA," Bill said, grinning. "I want to see the LOOK on YOUR FACE when you stop feeling bad about having gotten kicked out." Stan's eyes narrowed. Miz made another frustrated sound, clearly wanting to tell Stan whatever it was that Bill must have told her not to say.
Mabel and Dipper sat up at that. Miz was clearly struggling to keep the truth hidden, because she wanted to tell them whatever she knew about what had happened. And holding onto this information for Bill was clearly frustrating her. They exchanged a glance, thinking about what their Great-Uncle had said about the demons being liars, but also what they knew about how the two of them acted from what they'd seen themselves. -What was it that Miz wanted to say so badly, that Bill didn't want her to share with them all, about what had happened with their grunkles, that she thought they needed to know?
Bill lifted a finger and twirled it slightly, then side-eyed Miz and made a flicking motion.
Stan looked downright alarmed, glancing between them. "What did you just-?!" He hadn't thought the kid would attack his own sister, let alone raise a single finger against her!
"-It's just a little bit of help," Bill said. "A bit of a relaxant and a slight garble-words spell. Not very strong. She can shrug it off easily if she wants to, whenever she wants to. Nothing to keep her from doing it."
Miz sighed, feeling the guilty tension in her chest go away. "Oh… I hate keeping secrets…" She slid down to lay on the deck (which she had thoroughly and microscopically cleaned way back when they'd first gotten here, she wasn't going to lie down on something dirty) before groaning out, "Thanks, big brother."
"Mm," Bill hummed at her thanks. "You know, it's not a secret," Bill told her. "It's a surprise!"
"I don't like surprises," Stan told him flatly.
"Grunkle Stan…" Mabel said slowly, looking between him and Bill. (She sort of recognized that tone from some of the things she'd done with Bill at the spaceship, doing 'lab things' with him. Bill sounded a little… angrier maybe? But he was still…)
"-You're also a con-man, not an actor," Bill told Stanley. "But I'll tell you what," Bill said. "If you go through all of everything that's coming in, oh, the next 24? 36? hours or so, and you can't come up with a perfectly good 'fix' by just reacting to things as they come? Then I'll work out whatever nonlinear time loop we'll need to do to settle things out for you, just the way you want them to go, instead." Bill tilted his head at him.
("Mabel," Dipper said slowly, but Mabel wasn't sure… This didn't feel like the learning lessons that Bill had set up for her for science-things, or the way Bill had promised to keep things from going too bad, as long as she 'colored within the guidelines' close enough for Bill to fix things if she screwed them up with any of the chemistry stuff she sometimes liked to play with. To Mabel, this was starting to feel a lot more… mean, underneath it all.)
Miz was crawling over to grab a pancake. "Ugh… I still haven't gotten around to apologizing to Ford yet. Every time I think I can, he just does something else to make me too annoyed at him to be sincere about it." She stuffed a whole pancake in her mouth.
"I don't want to be playing games with you, kid, ruining two other kids' lives over this beef you have with Ford," Stan told the demon staunchly, talking over Miz's head.
"Who said this is a game?" Bill said. "A game implies a winner, a loser, and a prize. There's no prize here, and you can't lose."
("Oh no," said Dipper, having a bad feeling where this might be going, and Mabel didn't feel any better about it, either. Great-Uncle Ford had warned them about Bill and games...)
"Kid," Stan said angrily. "We've talked about the difference between not losing and winning."
"Yes. We have." Bill eyed him. "What makes you think I don't want you to win? Besides," Bill said, "If you decide to 'play', then no lives will be ruined by the end of it!"
Stan gritted his teeth. "What does my brother lose out of this?" Stan asked, because he'd better damn well know the stakes before he went any further.
"His pride, dignity, and any high-horse high ground he ever thought he had about that STUPID project of his, that he's built up to be so great," Bill told him promptly, with an edge to his tone. (Dipper and Mabel both exchanged a glance, Mabel wincing.)
"...You're really wanting to take my brother down a peg, aren't you," Stan said slowly. "And you were plannin' this even before this whole thing… on deck." Bill nodded once. (Stan didn't even have to ask what he'd be getting out of this; Bill had already told him: knowledge. Something the kid valued above all else. And Stan knew that if he devalued that...)
Stan gritted his teeth. "...Rules?" Stan asked.
"Grunkle Stan, no!" Dipper said, as Mabel chimed out a similar protest.
"Oh, it's very simple," Bill said. "You, and Pine Tree and Shooting Star and Miz and myself, don't discuss the science fair project - or anything else that happened surrounding those events - with anyone untilllll…" Bill stopped to think. "Hm. At least 8 o'clock tomorrow night. Unless and until I say otherwise," Bill added, and Stan recognized that last bit of wiggle room from the 'no dimensional talk' thing; Bill was leaving them all a little leeway on that one, but they'd have to go through him for it.
Miz lazily waved a hand. "Will do~" Bill smiled down at her.
"Thank you, Miz!" Bill said winningly. He looked up at Stan expectantly.
"...That's it?" Stan asked. Bill nodded. "And Ford does whatever the hell he wants in the meantime." Bill nodded. "What are you offering up as an incentive, yourself?" Stan asked next. If knowledge was something he'd get out of 'playing', not straight from the kid, then Stan wanted to know what the kid's own buy-in was for getting to watch how it all shook out.
"Any help out of me that you'd like in the meantime," Bill said promptly, and that left Stan blinking. "And in your 'fix' later, if that's what you want to do."
"You're serious," said Stan. Bill nodded. Shit. This was a recipe for disaster. The kid was positive that Ford was gonna fuck it all up somehow.
"Grunkle Stan, you know Bill makes bad deals…" Dipper said slowly, eyeing Bill. He didn't really get this whole thing. Bill really thought he and Mabel would agree to some weird terms for whatever this thing was that was going to hurt their Great-Uncle? "Why are you even talking about this with him?"
"This ain't a deal, Dipper," Stan said heavily, giving the kid a long look.
"-More of a promise, really!" Bill said brightly, which had both Mabel and Dipper frowning at him, because… a promise? Since when did Bill make promises to people? And how was that different than a Deal?
"Grunkle Stan, whatever you decide to do, it's okay," Mabel told him, getting up and walking over to touch his arm. "We'll help. Okay?" Because whatever Grunkle Stan wanted to do… she wanted to help. He knew Bill better than they did right now, and if Grunkle Stan thought this was important… she'd trust her grunkle.
Stan looked down at her and pulled in a breath. "Okay, sweetie," Stan told her. "I, uh, I gotta think about this some more first," Stan told her, which got him a bright smile and a hug from her before she ran off to the other side of the deck, where Miz was with the fish. Dipper gave Stan a long look, before getting up and walking over after Mabel himself.
"-Oh my gosh!" Mabel gasped when Miz unhooked a fish and swallowed it whole. She'd seen her do the same thing as a dragon, but seeing her do in in her 'human' form looked really weird. "How big of a thing can you swallow?" Mabel asked her.
Miz shrugged. "Haven't really tested."
"...Mabel," Dipper said, feeling a little nervous. He was still a little stuck on some of the things Great-Uncle Ford had said before, both with Bill and with Miz. And it wasn't the sort of thing he wanted to find out he was wrong about by being wrong about it...
"Like, how wide can you open your mouth?" Mabel asked Miz, undeterred.
Miz frowned. "I probably shouldn't try. Don't want to accidentally bite you. That would suck, I actually like you," she said matter of factly. "In fact, please don't put any body parts in my mouth. I'm fine if I'm well fed but I'm a little hungry right now so it might be dangerous." She grumbled under her breath about an idiot summoner who had wanted to get in her mouth.
"Don't go eating any of my Zodiac, Miz!" Bill called out, as he walked over from the other side of the deck, letting the reminder hang in the air before him. He tried not to complain about her eating habits - she could just jump bodies when she needed to, so it shouldn't influence her that much if her stomach was breaking things down as far as she said it did, but still… couldn't she at least have some better standards? Jumping into gnomes, and eating random summoners, were both just...
Miz shrugged, entirely unrepentant at her gluttonous attitude. "I won't eat your Zodiac. Or any other person without consent."
"Define 'consent'," Bill muttered, then grimaced and waved it off, apologetic. He knew how serious she was about free will. Miz blinked. "Should I answer? Just so Stan and the kids know, at least?"
"If you want," Bill told her, glancing back at Stanley, who was thinking to himself, as he'd said he would. (Bill had thought to give him some physical space for it, since he'd seemed to need it.) Stanley always seemed interested in what he called 'triangle demon definitions' for things. Something about being a 'multilingual translator', apparently. It had been a bit confusing, but Bill was fairly certain he'd gotten the main point Stanley had been trying to make, at least.
Miz glanced at them. "For the eating thing, I don't like eating food that's still alive. So like, if I catch a moose for a snack, I check if it's capable of understanding words and reasoning. There's a difference between animals and people, sort of thing. If it's an animal, I kill it and eat it. If it's a person, I generally let them go. But there are some species that don't particularly care about being eaten, male Cyclopians are kinda biologically into that. The problem is that they want to mate before being a meal and I am not comfortable with that."
(The twins made disgusted faces, but… Bill had said it was like a praying mantis so they could sort of understand it a little, even if they both found it gross and more than a little messed up.)
"-and there was that time I got summoned by this idiot who's Deal was that he wanted to get in my mouth. I told him what would happen to him if he did such a thing but he insisted. Course, he was wearing a bomb and had his friends hidden behind some rocks, hoping to kill me from the inside by sacrificing this guy… and I'm getting off topic aren't I?" Miz frowned. "Sorry, that happens a lot with me."
Miz shook her head. "Anyway, I don't eat people unless they specifically tell me that I can. I need them to agree to it before I'm comfortable doing so."
The two young humans just stared at her with their mouths hanging open. Finally Dipper said (very clearly), "I do not want you to eat me." ("Same!" Mabel echoed, putting a hand up in the air.)
Miz nodded. "Ok. I won't anyway since you're Bill's and he doesn't want me to, but it's nice to know for sure! I promise I will not eat you, kill you, or harm you on purpose. -And I'm gonna try not to hurt you by accident either, but I can't promise accidents away. So I'm just going to tell you to not stick your hands in my mouth while I'm hungry."
"Why are you hungry anyway?" Mabel asked. "Can't you just weird-magic it away?"
Miz shrugged. "I think it's half mental and half the vessel I'm wearing. My vessel is physical, and has some needs. I enjoy fulfilling those needs and I like eating, so I don't mind. There's plenty of food here anyway." She took another fish and swallowed it.
Dipper thought about that a bit. "Wouldn't you feel better if you just didn't feel hungry at all?"
Miz tapped her chin in thought. "Sometimes, maybe. But I like being able to feel things. It makes me feel alive. Which I AM but part of me wants biological urges to really drive that point home."
It made her feel alive? Dipper wondered about that. He remembered what it had felt like when Bill had dragged him out of his body, and he'd been stuck in the Mindscape, unable to touch or feel anything. (He hadn't exactly felt 'alive' like that. Maybe…) He got a thoughtful frowning look.
Miz sighed and was looking over to the ocean again.
"You can go get more food. You don't need my permission to go get something to eat," Stan called out to her, looking over from his continuing mulling over what Bill had said (trying to figure out all the angles), having noticed when she finished off the last of the fish from before. Miz gave him a grateful smile, before turning back into her dragon form and slipping out into the ocean.
Bill leaned back against the railing to watch her, while Dipper and Mabel stood around somewhat anxiously for awhile, slowly drifting their grunkle's way… until they heard their Grunkle Stan let out a sigh and a grumble.
"Grunkle Stan… what do we do now?" Mabel asked her grunkle quietly, as she walked a little closer to him and hugged up against his side. "Do we just… let Grunkle Ford go off on his own?" She felt worried about everything, the longer they let things go.
Stan grunted and wrapped an arm around her side. "My brother can take care of himself," he told her. He looked away and let out a sigh, as he kept half an eye on watching Miz swim; she was staying within sight of the boat, just like he'd asked her before. (Stan wondered a little about that. She did seem to be trying pretty hard to listen to him, even without even a proper agreement in place with her. ...Was it really because her brother was part of it that she wanted to play nice? Or was something else going on?)
Well, she was easier to handle than the kid at least. More eager to try and make him happy with her as well. (...which was probably part of why the kid didn't trust the two of them alone. ...Heh, fair. He'd already gotten a bunch of info out of her that Bill hadn't been ready, or all that willing, to share.)
"But hey," Stan told the kids, "That doesn't mean we're gonna let the knucklehead run off and get into any more trouble without us." He looked over at Bill. "I'll play this 'game' of yours for now, but I pull the plug on it when I want. Understand?" he said, ignoring the gasp he heard from Dipper for now.
"I told you, it's not a game. It's more of a promise," Bill repeated, then he got an odd glint in his eye. "-No no, actually… it's more of a LESSON," Bill enthused out next with the start of a smile, and that sent a slight chill down Stan's spine. (Mabel frowned.) "Call it… something like a penalty, for trying to get information about me out of someone else other than me, instead of asking me directly."
Stan sighed. Yeah, he figured the kid wasn't happy about how Stan had talked to Miz about his family and his brother behind his back. But still… "You were planning on doing this before that," Stan pointed out. (He should've known the idea of him taking penalties for some things would come back to bite him soon enough.)
"Yes," said Bill. "But I might have let you talk me out of keeping things to myself before." Bill gave him a long look. "Now you get to see what it looks like when I keep things to MYSELF, instead. So you'll know the DIFFERENCE, for later." Bill's eyes flashed angrily. "Since you obviously CAN'T TELL the difference right now." The kid looked pretty angry with him. (Right. Because he hadn't really listened to the kid earlier, before they'd left, and had rushed him and practically told him to shut up, instead. Like being stuck for two days in another dimension away from home with his brother freaking out on him left and right wasn't enough of a problem as it was...)
"You don't just get out of lessons or penalties just because you don't like them," Stan noted, not wanting to set a bad precedent, here. "This isn't either of those. -I want to be able to call this thing off. My choice," Stan stressed. Bill nodded but continued to narrow his eyes at Stan.
"Oh yes," Bill said. "Your choice. Absolutely. But. Then I don't have to HELP you with any of it anymore, since there will be NOTHING more to help YOU with! And..." Bill paused for a moment, shifting weight from side-to-side, bobbing slightly in place (and looking like he was trying to build up some kind of argument to keep going, Stan had seen this out of the kid before…)
"But?" Stan prompted him.
Bill frowned slightly. "Most of you seem to think that one of my problems is, hm, OVERSHARING about certain things that then lead to a 'stop'?" Bill said lightly.
"-Not with me," Stan said quickly.
"But with others?" Bill asked. "Like Shooting Star and Pine Tree? Or 'your brother'?" Bill asked of him, leaving Stan grimacing. "-Well, we might as well try to 'calibrate' things a bit, and see if not saying anything at all is actually undersharing!" Bill grinned at him. "And I didn't say it's a 'penalty'. I said it's 'something like a penalty'."
Stan and Bill stared at each other for a long few moments, the tension building. Stan really didn't like this. (What he liked even less was that the kid was trying to get him to trust him, thinking that he knew Stan well enough to know what he could or couldn't do… and maybe help him after the fact if things went all to hell. This was practically turning the whole agreement on its head, upside down. Bill was trying to take the lead, here.)
The tension was broken when Miz slapped down a freaking MARLIN onto the deck. "I got a BIG one!" she cheered, wagging her tail like an excited puppy. ("Whoa!" Dipper backpedaled quickly out of the way, nearly getting hit with some of the splash, and almost hiding behind Grunkle Stan at the end of it.) She nudged it with her snout towards Stan. "How do we cook this?" She bounced in place, one clawed hand resting on the fish's side to keep it from flopping around. It twitched weakly, paralyzed from her stinging tendrils.
"Geez, it's huge! How…" Dipper stared at the blue fish. He'd never seen one of these up close before.
Mabel gasped. "That's enough to last us like… a week!"
"More like a day or two, with how much Miz usually eats," Stan put out there, grounding expectations. He glanced over at Bill again. Miz asking for help with the cooking reminded him of something Bill had said that had almost slipped by him. "Give me a minute, Miz," Stan said. "-Kid, you said you'd help me with whatever I want in the meantime, if I go along with this thing. Yeah?"
Miz was shrinking back into her human form, currently dressed in a one piece bathing suit. Probably since she was planning to go swimming some more later. Mabel noted that she had made it a soft green color, probably for their comfort by wearing less yellow.
Bill tilted his head at Stan. "Yes?" the kid said, not looking the least bit suspicious or held back about it. ...And that just turned everything on its head all over again for Stan and left him blinking, because the kid wasn't just trying to get Stan to maybe play by his rules on something, to his own tune and dance. -The kid was wanting to see how far Stan would go with this, too.
Hell, the kid hadn't laid out any limits except keeping one set of information out of the way for the next, what, day, day-and-a-half? He hadn't given any limits to Stan himself on what he could or couldn't ask out of Bill as 'help' in the meantime, and Stan was the one with the authority to call it off. -This wasn't just some game, here, and it wasn't just some 'getting even' session for the kid with Ford. This was a test. A damn big one. Kid really wanted to see what he'd do, and the kid was trying to balance it out with something just as big - almost unconditional and unrestricted, unlimited help. Up to and including things like time travel, which even Ford didn't know how to do. Hell.
(...But the thing was, as much as Stan wanted to bite and try this out - better sooner than later, when things could go really, really wrong back home - Stan still wasn't sure why now and why like this. The kid must have been planning this since earlier, when he'd first said 'two days', but… hell. Ford had seriously pissed the kid off and now... Would Bill had even said anything to remind them all about this? Had the kid been planning on keeping them all distracted until the last minute before they were going to leave for home, instead of dangling 'fixing things' in front of them all, before Ford had pissed him off and gotten written off by the kid and… How had that changed things for them? Had it changed things for them? Would the kid have even offered to help him with it all at all before?)
(Ford had acted like Bill was trying to lie about ever having a brother. And Stan… hadn't said anything about it yet, other than to not kill Ford over it. That probably meant that the kid didn't know where he stood, on something he considered important, but… Stan didn't even know what the right question was, here. And now Bill was trying to test him, to figure something out; this whole thing wasn't just about 'not listening to him' - that was just the window dressing, the surface, not the depth the kid was going for, here. Not by a longshot - Stan got that. So what did the kid want to figure out about… him? That had to do with… Liam? And what the hell could how Stan up and decided to handle something with another set of twin-thems, have anything to do with any of that?)
"...What's your risk?" Stan asked the kid, finally, and as straightforwardly as he could - because maybe this wasn't what the kid would call a 'game', but… "I recognize a gamble with a payoff when I see one," and he saw Bill's eyes darken slightly at the question.
"My risk," Bill said quietly, "Is that you'll figure something else out that I don't want you to know before we're back in your dimension again. And that would cause problems for me."
Stan blinked, then considered the kid carefully. (Okay, so that answered one question. With the way the kid had been trying to keep Miz from 'telling all' about things here, the kid probably would've just tried to get them to leave before, without getting into anything with the twins lives here. Not with the way he was talking about things now, and what he didn't want talked about.)
"...Me askin' you to do something crazy ain't a risk?" Stan asked of the demon next, who just blinked at him.
"Is it?" the kid asked him. ...Well, shit. That... was a LOT of 'trust', there.
Stan blew out a slow breath, then eyed Bill. "I could ask you to tell me what the thing is that you don't want me figuring out before we're back, right now," Stan put out there.
"Yes," said Bill. "But then I'd say that that was related to the science fair project closely enough to not answer it. And not give you the pass on it."
"But that… expires here, after I'm done fixing things, and we go home," Stan said. Bill nodded. Stan gave him a long look. 'Three days,' the kid had said to Miz before. …Aw hell. Maybe the kid was distracting him here with this, too. Maybe the thing he should be more worried about wasn't what was happening here; the real problem was gonna be something with himself, and Ford, once they got back, instead.
...which meant that everything that happened here was, what exactly, to the kid?
"Fine," Stan ground out, not real happy with the whole situation here at the moment, or the kid in general. "We'll do this. -Kids?" He turned to them, and Mabel nodded, but Dipper looked a little belligerent. "Dipper," Stan said with a sigh. "I need you to trust me…" Dipper looked away, tugging at his hat.
Miz was keeping herself busy descaling the fish, ignoring the conversation so she wouldn't be tempted to spill any secrets. She cleaned the fish, purged it of any and all parasites or harmful bacteria as she went.
"...If I tell you I want you to tell Bill that this 'game' thing is over, you'll do it?" Dipper asked of his Grunkle Stan finally. After what had happened to Great-Uncle Ford in the woods, and Grunkle Stan still not doing anything about it, Dipper wasn't exactly feeling the trust.
"Yeah, okay," Grunkle Stan said, kneeling down in front of him. "You two are the ones with the 'threads' looking out for Ford in the agreement, yeah? So if you're that worried about him…" Stan glanced between them both. He knew he could count on them for this, even if he got pissed off with his brother, no matter what else might happen. (Not like the science fair project wasn't still a sore spot for his brother, apparently. So if he lost it, too...) "If you and your sister agree that this thing should stop? I'll pull the plug on it right then for you. Okay?" Stan trusted the kids to be both their safety nets, to stop them before things got too bad.
(It wasn't like Stan didn't remember what had happened with the circle the first time. He'd listen to the kids this time. He would.)
Dipper exchanged a glance with Mabel, who nodded at him, looking almost as worried, but also willing to trust their grunkle... and Dipper let out a long sigh.
"I really hope you know what you're doing, Grunkle Stan…" Dipper said, looking at him and letting go of his hat.
Dipper didn't feel too much better after the unhappy smile his grunkle gave him, but at least he knew his Grunkle Stan was taking him seriously when he clapped a hand on his shoulder and said, "Yeah, kid. I know. ...I know."
Miz spoke up quietly, a certain topic crossing her mind again. "How does one apologize for existing?" She was still trying to figure out how to finally give Ford an apology. Stan looked over at her. He was dead-tired of this.
"You don't," Stan told Miz, dropping his hand from Dipper's shoulder and slowly standing back up. "You never apologize for existing. Somebody tells you otherwise, they're the one with a problem. Not you." Because fuck that noise, no matter who it came from. (Ford might be his brother, but he didn't have the right to make anybody feel that way. Nobody.)
"But that was what made Ford freak out. And I still haven't been able to apologize for making him freak out." Miz groaned. After all, the kids still wanted an apology from her to Ford, and she still didn't know how to do it.
"I told you," the kid said, and he sounded almost as stressed out and angry as Stan felt about what Miz had just said, though for a very different reason. "You existing is not the problem. It's that Stanford's fear, and stupid 'morality', and control issues, and decisions, and choices-" Shit, the kid was getting himself worked up.
"-Bill," Stan cut the kid off, and the kid looked irate. "Breathe." He wasn't trying to tell the kid to shut up, just trying to calm him down. "-Miz. Ford knows you're some kinda demon. He ain't freaking out about that now. Not anymore. Whatever the hell he's trying to work through ain't just you showing up on our doorstep."
Miz glanced over at Stan. "...So what do I do now?"
Stan sighed deeply and ran a hand over his face. "You think you could maybe find a boning knife down in the hold, in one of the other crates in the bottom of the ship?" he said to her, dropping his hand and going with completely changing the subject. (Hey, if it worked with the kid…) "I'm pretty sure it's in one of the ones with a lot of beans on top. -Bags, not cans."
Miz nodded and went off to search through the indicated crates. As she slipped down the hatch, Mabel turned to Stan with a wide eyed look. "Is… that what Miz thought she was supposed to apologize to Grunkle Ford for? For… ever being born?" Mabel asked him in rising tones, looking horrified. She remembered how Miz had said her existence was what upset Ford, but she hadn't thought Miz had meant it like THAT.
"Yeah," said Stan. "They told me what they said out in the woods to him, more or less. It was pretty much that, but… it's not just Miz being Miz and being alive," Stan told the twins. "Hell, Ford probably would've freaked out at least as bad, if he'd seen what's chasing after Miz instead." At the confused and startled looks he got from that, Stan realized that he'd never really explained that, and added, "The thing that's after Miz is half the reason she's been hanging around the Shack with Bill, right now."
"Okay, but…" Mabel frowned, still confused. "What is Grunkle Ford so afraid of?"
"Bill, mostly. And… other demons that are kind of like Bill." Stan shifted in place slightly. It wasn't really the best way to put it, but… he didn't exactly want to give away that they'd overhead the niblings and the demons, and knew that they knew about Miz being a 'Bill Cipher'. That said, if he brought things up this way... "Ford's problem is… it's more like… being afraid of spiders, but realizing that there's more than one spider anyplace-ever than the only one you ever saw before. Except, uh, worse. Worse than spiders." Stan winced, rubbing at the back of his neck.
Dipper looked down. Oh. So that's why Stan hadn't seemed like he'd done anything about what had happened in the woods. There was nothing he could have done, not really. He couldn't punish them for existing. (The only way to do that would be to, what, kill them both? Like trying to step on Bill Ciphers like they were spiders? How were they supposed to do that?) Dipper winced. Even more weirdly, Miz had thought she was supposed to feel bad for it? -She did feel bad for it. That made no sense. Dipper groaned and sat down. Why was life so complicated?
Then Dipper realized something and sat up. "Wait, what was the thing chasing Miz?" Because if there had been something chasing Miz that even she was afraid of... Dipper stared at Stan, who sighed.
"Yeah, well, turns out sometime when she was out playin' with her Doors and junk, she ran into... another Bill Cipher who ain't so nice as ours is," Stan said with a wince, going for the easiest route for them all to be able to talk about 'other Bill Ciphers' being a thing, without having to bring up Miz, or explain how it all came up in the first place. "She ain't stupid, so she ran the other way. She's hiding here because that other Bill can't open her Doors, and the kid double-locked ours against stuff that ain't her, so..."
Dipper's eyes were wide. "So, wait. There's another bad Bill Cipher out there who's trying to get into our world, too?" he gasped. So did his sister. "And Miz led him right to us?!"
"Well, it can't get in. But she can't get back out there, either. Not while it's roamin' around and the kid don't got a solution for taking the fight to it, yet. ...And, y'know, she and the kid did decide they're siblings, now. So that's why she's been staying with him at the Shack with us for awhile." Stan grunted. "Think she said something about the thing maybe getting bored and going away on its own eventually, so even if the kid don't figure something out right away..." Stan shrugged.
"And how long is that gonna take?!" Dipper gasped. How many Bill Ciphers were they going to have to deal with here?
Stan glanced over at Bill. He actually had a feeling that Bill didn't want his sister to leave yet, not when they were finally together and the kid had someone to care for and about. To his surprise, Bill looked… almost guilty.
"...Kid?" Stan asked, paying the demon a little more attention now, and Bill didn't quite wince.
What Bill did do was cross his arms and say, "I've been busy. ...I would have worked on it sooner, if she didn't have the emotion waves problem."
Mabel blinked slowly as she figured it out. "You don't want her to leave…" she trailed off. "You like having her here!" and wasn't that a surprising thought!
"I'll fix it!" Bill said. "I'll help her fix it. -Priorities!" Bill didn't quite blurt out. "I'm not trapping her here!"
"No one said anythin' about trapping nobody," Stan said slowly, glancing at Bill.
"-Right, Yes," Bill said quickly, looking away from all of them and hunching his shoulders slightly.
Huh. So, the kid really wanted her to stay but felt… guilty about it. ...Yeah, fair. The kid was trapped for the longest time and didn't want his kid sister to feel the same way. Stan could see that.
Mabel was grinning though. "You do care about her!" she said triumphantly. She'd been right about that!
Bill turned his head towards her and gave her a long, almost-frustrated looking stare. "OF COURSE I care about her, she's my SISTER!" he told Shooting Star. "What, did you forget about how siblings are supposed to work?" Bill asked of her almost sarcastically.
Mabel winced. "... Grunkle Ford said you were just pretending to care…" and now she felt bad for even thinking for a second that that might be true.
"Tch," said Bill, looking away from her again. "He lies."
Mabel frowned up at him. "But, if you know what it's like to care about siblings, then why did you hurt Dipper? Why did you try to kill us?" Mabel asked of him accusingly, standing up straight to stare him down.
Bill side-eyed her. "...When are we talking about here?" he asked.
Mabel huffed at him. "Taking over his body during the opera, and chasing us in the Fearamid!"
Bill raised an eyebrow. "I told you, Shooting Star. If I really wanted to kill you right then, I wouldn't have just chased you. I just would have killed you, not captured you. And I would have killed you together."
(Stan closed his eyes for a moment and tried to keep his breathing level. Right. Efficiency.)
"And I didn't hurt Pine Tree, I just took and used his body," Bill waved off.
"-We found your note!" Mabel said next, and Bill gave her a confused look.
"So?" said Bill. (Stan clenched his jaw and told himself to let the kids do whatever they were tryin' to do...)
"You were gonna throw his body off the w-water tower!" Mabel shuddered. "You were going to kill him!"
"No, I wasn't," Bill said, and both Mabel and Dipper looked up at him in disbelief.
"...You wrote a note laughing about how you were going to kill me, and didn't mean it," Dipper said, completely deadpan.
Bill looked at them for a moment, then seemed to get what they were saying. He grinned and let out a "HA!" while tilting his head back and slapping a hand across his eyes, much to his Zodiac's confusion. "You idiots," Bill said, almost sounding amused, as he lowered his hand and looked over them all. "I was going to break Pine Tree's body. I wasn't going to kill HIM!" He looked over at said ex-puppet. "What, were you not listening when I said 'like a ghost', and 'stuck in the Mindscape FOREVER?'"
Bill threw his arms out to the sides. "And I was gonna tell Shooting Star allllll about it, so that she'd want to do it too - to make a Deal with me, to be able to see you again!" Bill let out a laugh. "And then you'd both be together anyway. It would've been GREAT!" Bill enthused, looking happy at the thought of both of them being stuck together in the Mindscape with him, as both of the kids looked ill by comparison at the thought.
"Yeah, no," said Stan, stepping in, because: "Enough of that. -You ever think of doing anything like that again, you talk it out with me first and you let the two of them-" Stan pointed at the kids, "-know exactly what's going on and what they'd be getting into before any of you go off doing anything." (Because Stan wasn't exactly trusting that the kids might not feel forced into a bad decision for Ford's sake at some point, if it came to that. With the way things were going right now...)
Stan glowered at Bill. "None of this 'pick a puppet' malarkey anymore, where somebody's getting tricked into something else. -I want them being able to make an actual, informed choice!" Because like hell did he ever want anything like that ever happening again! And if the kid didn't get that-
Bill shrugged. "Fine." It was clear that he didn't see what the problem was, though, for whatever reason. At Stan's glare he added, "-I'll tell you first, so you can 'veto' it or 'override' it or WHATEVER," the kid waved off. "Not like they ask enough of the right questions anyway," Bill muttered, leaning back and staring up at the sky. The sun was setting now as the people along the beach left in droves, trickling away along with the light, and the stars were just starting to become visible.
"Fine." Stan glared at the kid a bit more, to make sure he got the picture - how important this really was to him - then turned and meandered off to go handle the camp stove, for the fish. The thing and all the utensils that he'd used before all still needed cleaning, for a start. He sent a long glance the niblings way… but they looked pretty damn determined to see through whatever they were trying to get at the kid about. Hell. (Stan let out a sigh and left them to it. He figured they'd use a 'stop!' if it got too bad…)
Dipper felt Mabel grab for his hand and he wrapped his around her, squeezing to let her know he was there. She was trembling slightly but still standing strong, glaring at Bill. "You… really don't get it, do you?" Mabel finally said. But at least this cleared up her confusion. Maybe Bill DID know what it was like to love a sibling with the way he treated Miz, but he definitely didn't understand that not everyone thought the same things were okay or 'fun' or 'funny' that he did. ...Which, to be fair, they already knew.
At least Miz seemed a little more… 'normal'-ish in this regard. Mabel blinked. Actually… Mabel turned towards Bill, "If someone did the thing you were gonna do to Dipper, to Miz, how would you feel?"
"Mabel!" Dipper hissed.
Bill blinked at her. "Miz is in the Mindscape whenever she's not in a body." Like him, really. -Usually. (Stupid anchor, keeping him down.) "If someone kills her body, she just makes a new one." It would piss him off if somebody tried to kill her - but even if they got her body, she'd be okay, and he would just kill them horribly outright, and everything would be fine!
Mabel sighed. "But what if she couldn't? And what if you couldn't get into the Mindscape to be with her?"
Bill rolled his eyes. He pulled a stone out of his pocket that had a bunch of marking scratched into it, and showed it to them. "This," he said, "Lets me see anything in the Mindscape that I want to be able to see, that could possibly cause me any trouble. I don't NEED to 'get into the Mindscape' to be able to see her," he told them as he pocketed it again. "And she's died before and… reformed after a thousand years." Bill didn't really like the idea of not talking to her for a thousand years, but... "She CAN'T DIE for good." Then Bill frowned furiously. "NOT EASILY," he added, slowly turning his head to look over at Stan, who tried not to wince as that carried over. (Guess that answered his question of whether Bill had gotten through 'reviewing' the part about the Zodiac being her permanent 'out'...)
Dipper's hands twitched; he really wanted to check out that magic rock but held himself back. He placed a hand on Mabel's shoulder. "I don't think he gets it." Heck, Bill hadn't even brought that up before, when he'd been talking about tricking Mabel into the Mindscape. (If Bill had offered to let Mabel see Dipper again, it could have been with that stone instead, not getting her stuck there, too! -But then, that probably wouldn't have been what Bill would have wanted, right? To only have one of them stuck there?)
Dipper glared at Bill. "He probably can't get it," Dipper said challengingly.
"Get what?" Bill said. "I can understand anything better than YOU can."
"That, even if Dipper and I would have been together in the Mindscape later, I still would have thought he was dead for a while. And that would have felt really, really awful," Mabel said quietly, wanting so much for Bill to just… understand. Maybe if he could, he'd be able to be a better person! …and …wasn't that what the problem was? Bill just… didn't have any empathy for any of them. (Maybe that was why Miz was nicer - because she could understand? Because Miz had… had to feel what other people felt, all the time?)
Bill shifted in place slightly, eyes flicking to the side. "You'd just think he was dead because you were being stupid," Bill told her. "You talked to him with the sock puppet. He wasn't in his body then. He told you that." (Bill had looked back at things later, to know that, having wanted to See everything that he might have missed while he'd been busy down in Pine Tree's body.)
"Well maybe I AM stupid! But I'd still FEEL sad!" Mabel cried out.
Dipper winced. (So did Stan, who also clenched his jaw.) "You're not stupid, Mabel…" Dipper said quietly.
"Well he wouldn't be DEAD!" Bill yelled back at her. "And you'd see him again after A DAY!" (That had Stan wincing again where he was sitting. The kids had no idea what kind of a nerve they'd just hit. But maybe that meant that they were actually getting through to him. If they had Bill thinking of his own brother, here...)
"And that makes it OKAY?!" Mabel yelled back. "Making me think and FEEL like my brother was DEAD?!" She wiped at her eyes. "It would still HURT!"
Bill gritted his teeth. "So, what," Bill said, "I could tell you BEFORE I did it, and you still wouldn't believe me?!" Bill glared at her. "You could have Pine Tree in his sock puppet TALKING through it to you - as you were, what, racing for that water tower, trying to stop me from jumping his body off of it - and KNOW he was ACTUALLY right there next to you, right then, and you'd STILL feel 'hurt' because you thought he was dead?! -That's on YOU," Bill told her. "So you hurt YOURSELF because you can't wait a little while for EXACTLY what YOU want. Boo hoo," Bill said in sing-song tones of almost thorough disgust. "-HE WOULDN'T BE DEAD," Bill sneered out at her.
"It's not the same! My body… Mabel's- our bodies… We're not like you, you crazy dorito! We can't just- I'm not okay with-" Dipper shook in place, fists clenched at his sides. "I wasn't okay with losing my body like that! -And neither is Mabel!" Dipper said angrily, knowing what he was talking about.
"YOU THINK I WANTED TO LOSE MINE?!" Bill screamed out at him, looking thoroughly irate.
Dipper startled, and the rest of them froze.
Bill's breathing was off. His fists were clenched at his sides, too.
And the longer they all watched him, the more clear it was that Bill was struggling to try to control himself and calm down. And that maybe he hadn't meant to yell that out at all of them at all.
Mabel's eyes were wide. "Oh..." she said quietly.
"Bill, walk it off," Stan said. "Okay? Just turn around, and walk it off." Bill didn't move a muscle. Hell. "-Kids, I'm calling a stop, here. Understand?" Stan ended on, because he couldn't see things getting any better from here if they asked the kid any more questions.
To the last, Bill simply snarled and (finally) stalked off to the other side of the deck, on the complete opposite side of the ship from the rest of them, not looking at any of them as he went.
Mabel pulled at her sweater, then grabbed Dipper's hand and pulled him across the deck and over to sit down next to Grunkle Stan. She could really use some grunkle hugs just then.
"I'm… pretty sure he wasn't lying about that," Mabel said quietly, as she snuggled up against his side, and Stan stopped what he was doing to gather her up in a hug. "...Right, Grunkle Stan?" she added, when he didn't say anything right away. Stan let out a sigh and grimaced. Mabel reached out for Dipper, and tugged at his arm, wanting him to come a little closer in, too, to get his own hug. But Dipper was busy staring at Bill's back, mind racing through theories and snippets of information and all the questions that he really wanted to write down and- darnit, why didn't he bring his journal?!
They all looked over as they heard the hatch pop open, and Miz poked her head out.
"-Found it!" she said happily, waving the boning knife around above her head, before hopping back out onto the deck. Then she stopped, looked around, and read the mood - she couldn't feel it but she could still SEE it on everyone's faces. She let out an unhappy, "Ah…" Quick! Think of a distraction! "Do you two wanna watch an Anime with me while Stan prepares the fish?" she asked the twins awkwardly.
Dipper and Mabel both glanced at each other.
"Kid's gonna help me prepare the fish," Stan said, waving Miz over, to take the knife from her. "Maybe you two wanna go watch this thing below deck for a bit?"
The twins nodded. It would get them away from Bill, give him time to cool down… and give her and Dip-Dop time to hug some things out and feel better themselves. (...And, well, Mabel didn't mind hanging out with Miz, to help keep Miz from hurting Grunkle Ford. She was sort of nice most of the time, for a Bill Cipher, even if she was a little strange; she was definitely nicer than their own Bill, most of the time!) The kids all filed back down below deck. Mabel asked Miz what anime they were gonna watch as they started moving down the ladder, while Dipper kept sneaking glances at Bill until he couldn't see him anymore.
Miz's voice echoed up from below. "Well, since you two don't like violence and stuff, I can choose one that's cute and peaceful? There's some sad stuff, but there's this one show that's about how to feel better if you're sad, and why having people who love and support you is important…"
Mabel managed a smile as she descended. "That sounds nice. What's it called?"
"It's called Fruits Basket, I watched it back when I was a kid and it helped me feel better during my angsty phase…"
Their voices cut off when the hatch closed.
Stan sighed and got back to his feet, to walk over and check out the fish. ...Huh, Miz had cleaned off all the scales and stuff already. That was gonna make the whole thing a lot easier.
"Kid," Stan called out. No answer. "Bill." Still no answer, and the kid wasn't moving. "What, you giving up on the gamble already?" Stan told him. "I want your help with something."
...Well, that got him half a head-turn. Guess that was something.
"Come on over here, yeah?" Stan said, and the kid looked away from him again, but finally pushed himself off of the balcony and not quite stomped his way over.
"Sit down next to me, will ya?" Stan said. Bill sat. Stan let out a sigh.
...Ugh, this was actually kind of freaky, talkin' to the kid almost like normal, not having to watch what he said in case it came out sounding like a 'command' or something.
"Look," Stan said, "You don't want to talk about things from way back when," like your brother, or losing your body, hell, "You don't have to. I ain't gonna force you to." No response. Stan grimaced. "Kinda why I asked Miz instead, okay? I knew you didn't want to." Kid looked away from him. "I didn't want to push ya," Stan told him. "But some stuff? Kept comin' up." Like just now with the kids, hell. And what would have happened if the kids had asked another question after that? Or if he had? "I kind of needed to-"
"-No, you didn't," the kid said. Stan watched Bill pull in another breath then let it out again. "...Not yet," Bill said quietly.
Stan eyed him carefully. "You want to tell me the reason why you didn't want to tell me 'yet', at least?" Stan asked of the kid, as he pulled out a handkerchief and started wiping down the knife that Miz had retrieved for him. Bill sat there for awhile, but Stan knew that particular set of the kid's shoulders. So Stan waited, and he waited the kid out, because the next thing Bill said was, "I don't want anyone trying to stop me."
Stan blinked. And it took him a moment.
And then he damn near dropped the knife.
Shit. Stan forced himself to pull in a breath. "Kid…" he began slowly. "...Ford don't think you ever had a brother, right?" The kid didn't immediately go for his throat, so Stan kept going, slow and careful. Very, very careful. "So, right now… Ford don't think there's anything to stop." Stan swallowed hard. "So… it ain't as bad as it could be. Is it." ...Because Ford didn't believe him. "Because if Ford actually starts believing you…"
"-Why don't we just let the idiot continue to think that I'm evil incarnate without a soul and with nothing and no-one that I've ever cared about, hmm?" Bill said lightly, and holy hell, it was official. The only reason Bill Cipher hadn't killed Stan's brother on the spot was because Ford hadn't outright said that he was going to try to stop Bill from bringing his brother back. Shit.
"Don't think you have to worry about that one," Stan said roughly. "Pretty sure he's never gonna believe otherwise," and that was what got him an amused and almost delighted laugh out of the demon? Hell.
Stan let out a breath and set both the knife and the handkerchief down. Well, at least they could move past that, now.
"Y'know," Stan said, knowing he was pushing it. "You can talk about that junk with me if you want to." Putting it that way meant something different to the kid, and he figured he wanted his bases covered, just in case.
From the slow turn of head and long, odd look he got from the kid for that one, he knew the kid had finally connected that one to 'not, not-wanting him to talk.' (The 'don't have to's, for some reason, the kid always saw as almost an explicit 'I don't want you to' and sometimes an implicit 'I'm really not gonna force you to' - not a 'you don't have to, but I'll listen if you do'. The kid always needed to hear it both ways.)
The kid turned his head away from him again.
"Do you want to talk about it with me right now?" Stan said, testing the waters again.
"No," said the kid, still not looking at him. ...But then he also said, "Not right now."
Okay. So, not a hard 'no'. Stan got it. "I hear ya." Stan let out another sigh as he looked down at the fish. "This thing actually dead yet?" Stan asked of the triangle kid, pointing to the fish. The kid nodded his head. (The fish had suffocated when the paralysis it'd been under caused its heart to stop, and the spell hadn't been removed soon enough.)
Stan looked the fish over, frowning. ...And then he got an idea.
He turned to the kid. "Hey," he said. "You know how people grill stuff like fish, right?" Bill seemed to hesitate, almost pause in place for a moment, then turned his head towards him and nodded. "With steaks about this big?" Stan sketched out the size of a good fish steak in mid-air. Bill tilted his head slightly. "How would you handle getting this thing from, y'know, like this, into being a bunch of fish steaks?" he asked the kid.
"Magic," the kid said, and Stan let out a sigh. "Okay, but how? -I mean, don't do it yet," Stan said. "Just… there any way you can show me, or something, before you do it? Like… maybe those pictures or video or whatever that Miz tossed up on the ceiling in the attic?"
Bill seemed to consider this. "I can do better than that," Bill said, and the kid turned towards the fish and… stopped moving briefly, for a moment of stillness.
Then Bill murmured something and the space in front of them almost exploded with light for a second. Stan blinked, and then he thought he was seeing double for a second, before he realized that it was like looking at stuff, but also a sort of see-through ghostly thing, at the same time.
He saw the 'ghostly'-fish (okay, not the actual fish, got it) seem to be raised up into the air, and a blanket off to the side - the one Miz and the kid had slept on the night before - also gained a ghostly copy that was pulled over underneath it. "Preparation," the kid said, as things seemed to move into place. "Cleaning spellwork," he said, and the 'blanket' and 'fish' seemed to flash for a moment. "Bone removal spell," Bill added, and the 'fish' seemed to almost burst open as white 'shards' flew out of it. "Skin and flesh removal spell," Bill said next, and the same kind of thing happened to the 'skin' - it just seemed to roll off of the outer 'meat' in ribbons, to lie in curls underneath in a second section of the 'blanket', Stan realized; the first half of it was where all the 'bone shards' were lying.
After the skin of the 'ghostly'-fish was gone, the 'meat' seemed to grow lines, then start falling off of the 'fish' in chunks, to seem to be caught and float down slowly, to settle on another part of the 'blanket'. "Offal removal spell," Bill said, and the whole rest of the thing - the leftover 'guts' and 'head' - went up in blue flames. The see-through ash that slowly fell from it like snow drifted over into the final free corner of the 'blanket'.
Stan stared at all of this.
"...You think of this all on the spot?" he asked of the kid. He got a shake of the head. "You seen somebody else do something like this before?" A nod. "Huh."
Stan considered this. "This gonna tire you out if you do it instead of just showing me?" he asked the kid.
"Showing you was more 'tiring' than just doing it," was what the kid told him, and Stan let out a breath.
"You gonna eat any of this if we make it?" Bill shook his head 'no'. "You mind doin' it anyway?" That got him a look from the kid.
"...Was that a question?" Bill asked him.
"Yeah, kid," Stan said. "Not like you'd be getting much out of it yourself." Bill seemed to consider this.
"...You'll cook it, and Miz will eat it," Bill said, almost a question.
"Yeah, all of us will, whoever wants any. That's the plan," Stan told him. "That good enough for you?" Bill nodded. "Go ahead, then," Stan said, and leaned back as he watched Bill wave away the ghostly-images of whatever, and actually do the magic thing.
The magic thing took less than two seconds, start to finish. Stan almost couldn't follow it.
Stan stared. The kid had… actually slowed it down for him, when he'd been showing it off? He glanced over at Bill, who was tensing and relaxing his arms a bit, rolling his shoulders. The kid wasn't breathing too heavily, or sweating or nothing.
"You gonna tell me when you start hitting your limits?" Stan told the kid, and Bill glanced over at him.
"...Do you want me to?" was what the kid said, almost curious, and Stan rubbed his hand across his face.
"-Yes, Bill," Stan told the kid, as he slowly stood up, and the kid looked up at him, "I want you to tell me any time you start to get tired, or if I ask you to do anything that's gonna make you tired. Yeah?"
The kid looked away from him, down at the deck. And then he nodded.
"Okay, good," Stan said. And then Stan did his usual, "Thanks, kid," and put a hand on the kid's head, patting it, before pulling away to turn around and go get a clean pot lid from one of the crates, to put a couple of the steaks on for soon-to-be-grilling on the camp stove.
He missed Bill's look of complete and utter surprise.
Mabel and Miz were holding each other as they cried. Dipper stared. This show was… actually really pleasant. There was plenty of sad things but the girls were happy-crying as the main character told one of the male leads that she believed everyone had their own kindness inside, even if they couldn't see it for themselves. Dipper glanced over at his sister who was sobbing. "Yes! You're not a bad person, Yuki! You just show it differently!"
Dipper looked back up at the screen the anime episode was playing on. "This show's almost saccharine-sweet," he muttered. Onscreen, the boy (Yuki) gave the main character a true, happy smile. Nothing like the fake polite smiles he'd shown before this point. Dipper thought it was cheesy, how the show addressed the topics in such simple, straightforward ways...
…but it was all about learning to love yourself by finding the good parts of yourself that were worth loving. Miz definitely hadn't lied about what the show was all about.
"Do they end up together?" Mabel asked Miz, already shipping the guy and girl. "But, oh, Kyo likes her too right?" which made Dipper groan. Love triangles. Ugh. Why did girls like this sort of thing?
"You don't mind spoilers?" Miz asked. Mabel shook her head. "Tohru ends up with Kyo in the end."
Mabel gasped: "But what about Yuki?"
Dipper rolled his eyes, while Miz patted Mabel's shoulder and told her, "Don't worry. The anime ended before it got to that point, but in the manga - um, the japanese comics! - he meets a nice girl who manages to win his heart."
"I'm so bored…" Dipper groaned, knocking his head against the floorboards slightly. The gimmick of the characters turning into animals was kind of interesting, but there was no plot progression! Not that Dipper could see. It seemed to be nothing but a bunch of 'slice of life' moments, with the characters talking about their feelings.
A thump came from the hatch above them. Miz sat up and paused the anime. "I guess Dinner/Brunch is ready?" She stretched, groaning as her joints popped before she started climbing up the ladder. The twins glanced at each other. Well, hopefully Grunkle Stan had talked to Bill and he was feeling 'better'… or at least less-murdery. (It wasn't the first time they'd seen Grunkle Stan have to basically drag Bill off and distract him and… do whatever he did, until they saw the two of them next. And Bill had pretty much always seemed calmer at the next meal. This was the first time they'd been the ones to leave the 'room' first instead of Bill, though.)
They all got up and the twins climbed up slowly after Miz, blinking at the savory smell of the grilled fish. Miz was over at Grunkle Stan''s side in a flash, nibbling on a large fish steak within seconds.
"Mmm~ ish sho good~" Miz leaned over to nuzzle against Bill's side. "Thanks big brother."
"I didn't do much," Bill said, between bites of cracker from his previously-claimed cracker box from the last meal. (It usually took at least three or four meals for Bill to finish off a full box. He still wasn't eating all that much.)
"Nah, don't let him get away with that, Miz. Kid helped out a lot." Stan told her with a smug grin. The kid raised his shoulders slightly and looked away.
"Didn't," Bill muttered.
Miz raised an eyebrow. "You're not being Tsun-Tsun right now, are you?" she teased lightly.
"Eh?" Bill said, looking down at his sister, startled. It took him a moment. "-No!"
Mabel, knowing the term, snorted and muffled her laugh behind a sleeve.
"It wasn't hard," Bill said. "I didn't do anything by hand." He shoved another cracker into his mouth.
"You don't have to do something difficult, for me to appreciate it." Miz leaned against his side, relaxed and content. "The fact that you did it makes me happy."
"Nnm?" went Bill, blinking and feeling a little confused, but he wasn't going to contradict his little sister, if she was feeling happy because of something he did. (He wasn't about to make her feel less happy for no good reason; that would be stupid.)
Stan stared at Miz. Was she… Hot Belgium waffles! She was! Stan had to turn away from her to hide his grin. -Looks like he had a helper on the 'positive reinforcement' stuff. Huh. (Stan took it back: suggesting the little sister thing had definitely been one of his better ideas to do with the kid.)
"Figure we'll finish eating here, then get the rest put away for later in a cooler or something, and then bring Ford something to eat, too," Stan told them all. "Maybe bring some of the bedrolls and other stuff with." He glanced over at Bill. "You got any ideas for that, kid?"
Bill eyed him. "...What are you trying to do?" Bill asked neutrally.
"Pretty simple," Stan said, looking down and grabbing another bite of fish with his fork. "I figure Ford's got some rooftop from one of the places on one of the nearby streets all picked out, for sitting and watching the house." Stan sighed. "Figure we'll go and pay him a little visit, maybe spend the night over there with him." He looked over at Bill. "Ideas, kid?" Stan repeated, just to be clear.
Bill mulled over this. "Food supplies need to be handled, you want to bring some to that Stanford because you don't know if he's eaten, and you want the bedrolls because… you think we'll be there long enough that Pine Tree and Shooting Star will fall asleep." He looked up at Stanley. "It will get colder than that." He looked off to the side. "Temperature control spell, stasis spell for the food, invisibility spell that no-one else including the younger local versions of you can see through…" Bill paused. "More blankets and pillows?" Bill said, looking down to Miz.
"I can help. I've done plenty of spells for that when I go out to play with my friends on planets with a harsh environment." Miz assured them all.
"Pillows and blankets from the sand castle?" Bill asked. "Won't have to expend more energy. I can do the other spells more efficiently," Bill said. "It'll keep you from feeling so hungry, using that much energy, and needing to eat so much." Bill was fairly sure that Miz didn't consider the sensation of hunger itself to be a 'pleasant' one. He was pretty sure that she only enjoyed the sensation of satiating that hunger.
"Okay. I've got plenty of bedding in there," Miz nodded.
"You have wood planks that haven't been used below, yes?" Bill asked of Stanley, as he finished up with his crackers and closed the box. Stanley nodded. "I can take pieces of those for carving the etchings into?" Stanley gave him a nod and waved him towards the hatch. Bill let off a soft 'rrah!' noise, as he yanked it open and went down the ladder.
"...He's using more spells," Dipper noted of Bill.
"Yeah, well, the kid finds them easier than doin' stuff by hand," Grunkle Stan told him. "And he said he was helping with 'anything' for me, for this 'game' thing, so…" Dipper gave him a skeptical look.
"It's faster," Miz mumbled through the fish steak she was chewing on.
Dipper and Mabel glanced at each other, and it took both Dipper and Mabel a moment. "Wait..." said Mabel, looking over at her brother.
"He's just… doing stuff you tell him to do? Seriously?" Dipper asked, staring. They both knew how touchy Bill got when he thought he was being ordered around (let alone actually ordered around…. which only Great-Uncle Ford seemed to think he could do), not that Bill ever went along with any of it, no matter who tried to do it.
Stan shrugged. "That was part of the terms of this 'not-a-game' game-thing, remember?" At the look the kids gave him, Stan sighed (almost a chuckle) and added, "Look. I ain't asking him to do anything he's not okay with. I ask him if he's okay with it, first. I ain't actually ordering him around."
Both the niblings let out a sigh of relief, Dipper more than his sister. (He knew what Grunkle Stan could be like when he was giving out unreasonable orders.) "-Dipper, I'm pretty sure the kid knows how to stick up for and think for himself," Grunkle Stan said, with no small amusement. "It's trustin' other people that's the problem for him."
"...Right," Dipper said, sharing a glance with his sister.
Miz was on her third fish steak. "Fish is soooo goood~" she practically purred.
Stan let out a laugh. "Yeah," Stan agreed. "It kinda is, huh?"
Miz nodded. "My human dad cooked a lot of fish. He also made a lot of raw fish. He was a sushi chef… made the most beautiful looking things…" She looked a little nostalgic.
"Huh," said Stan. "The raw fish stuff? -Not really my thing, but hey, we've got plenty leftover if you want to do whatever with it," Stan told her.
Miz grinned. "I could try that."
Bill pushed the hatch up and came up with three bedrolls and a small cooler in-tow, inside a wooden crate. He floated the crate to the deck.
"Stanley, I-" the kid began, then stopped, and Stan's head came up immediately. Stan recognized that one.
"What do you want, kid?" Stan hadn't thought they'd backslid. What was up there?
Bill looked a little… frustrated-thinky for a bit, before he said, "There's a better way to move things than me floating them."
"What's the better way?" Stan said.
Bill made eye contact with him, then said, "My hat."
"Your hat?" Stan repeated, then gave the kid a long considering look. "Thought you didn't know where that was."
"I don't," the kid agreed. "But I could find it."
"...And?" Stan said. Sure, the kid had wanted to know where it was. The kid had complained about it incessantly, almost like clockwork daily. (Apparently, the kid had a lot of stuff stored in it that he was missing and really wanted back. ...Also, accessorizing was a Thing with the kid, with a very capital T.) But what was knowing that gonna do for the kid?
"And pull it here," Bill said next. "It's my hat."
Okay. That was a thing. Stan thought about this. "...There a reason you didn't try and pull this before?" he asked the kid.
"The spell I want to use is easier when the thing you want is in another dimension," is what the kid told him, which made no sense to Stan, but whatever. He gave the kid a long look, though, because 'easier' didn't mean the kid couldn't have pulled it off before. "And that Stanford isn't nearby," Bill said. "So I can grab it and he won't know unless you tell him."
"...You're really sure my brother stole your hat and is being petty about it," Stan said.
"YES," said Bill, and Stan let out a sigh. Kid had never really let up on that one, and he almost looked like he was standing on an anthill right now.
"Fine," Stan said. "Go ahead and do your thing."
Bill perked up immediately, grinning, and ran off to the other end of the deck, to quickly turn around and sit down cross-legged. Then the kid closed his eyes, to… do whatever he was gonna do, Stan guessed.
Miz walked over to sit down in front of him and watch him closely, eager to learn how Blue did stuff. Stan walked over too, but stayed standing. The twins settled down to watch as well, though they were more wary about it.
Bill sat there, slowly building up the spell inside his head. It was a bit complicated - if he ran into issues, he'd rather have the spell fail safely than rebound halfway through and send his hat who-knew-where, potentially DAMAGING it. He tried to add in a few things that should work as workarounds for anything stupid that Stanford might have tried to pull - miniature wormholes and similar more 'scientific' effects that a magical or mystical barrier wouldn't stop - that would automatically try to move into position, depending on the parameters the remote-sensing parts of the spell would handle for him.
It was a bit step-by-step, but... in sequence, the spell as a whole would: create temporary 'listening' posts to zero in on (read: triangulate, HA!) the position of his hat - which almost certainly HAD to be in the dimension they'd just come from - then feed that information into the second part of the spell that would, in rapid, succession, try several different methods to retrieve it - with 'sensing' portions attached to each of those, too, and a few sorts of 'test retrievals' that would go off first, so that the spell itself would select the path of least-resistance to send it to him.
Bill got it all set up, added the keywords he wanted to each mentally-held-in-place mandala image spell-matrix that was being imagined up inside his own mind... and then Bill started murmuring them off, one layer-set at a time - bringing each to the forefront and letting it go with each word.
Miz stared at the way energy around Bill twisted. All the inputs and outputs stringing together into a long string of robust and rather simple effects. It really was a lot like programming, but without the numbers being actual numbers, more like the idea of numbers. Which, paradoxically, made it easier for her to understand.
Bill let the final set-piece go, and then held out his hands, waiting. He didn't really care WHERE that Stanford had been holding it, so long as he-
...a small piece of cloth fell into his hands.
Bill blinked, then stared down at it.
Bill muttered a half-interrogative in his clicking-chirping native tongue, and held it up. Then his eyes widened in utter disbelief.
Bill was holding an eyepatch from the end of one of two long pieces of string.
Miz winced. "Um…"
Bill started twitching in place.
And then Bill let out a string of very profane curses in Galactic Standard, as he pulled it towards his chest and looked it over, staring at it in utter disbelief.
Miz stared. Oh, she was DEFINITELY learning a few of these.
"-stupid JH'AkEkrll+$#-ian frilly know-it-all NOT EVEN FUNNY LIZARD!" Bill screamed out at the end of it, as both Stan's eyebrows went up.
"...he turned your hat into an eyepatch…" Miz tried to hide her mouth twitching.
"NOT FUNNY!" Bill shrieked out, as he made a twisting-tearing motion at the cloth, and the universe really didn't like that, but-
The eyepatch twisted up, and the universe more or less barfed it back as a two-dimensional very flat-looking top hat.
"HATE IT. HATE-HATE-HATE." Bill growled out. He looked up at the sky, as he 'jammed' his hat down on top of his head. "NOT! FUNNY!"
Miz tilted her head. "I didn't realize Ax had a sense of humor…"
"IT DOESN'T!" Bill shrieked out angrily. "BECAUSE IT'S STUPID!"
Stan considered this.
"...That was the eyepatch you were wearing out on the porch, wasn't it," Stan said, and Bill hiss-growled a bit at this, with a distorted ugly chittering-chatter underlying the sound of it.
Bill practically dug his fingers into his legs and shook with rage. His hat floated just an inch or so above his head.
"Gonna just… give you a minute, yeah?" Stan said easily, slowly pushing himself up and waving the kids off. "C'mon, let's give him a minute," Stan added, leaving the triangle some space to fume in relative peace.
After Bill was finished 'moping' (not that Stan would ever call it that out loud where the kid could hear him), they gathered up all the supplies they would need (Miz crawled inside her sand castle - under Bill's watchful "supervision" - and brought out multiple pillows, blankets and even some bean bag chairs), and they prepared to track down Stan's idiot brother.
"I am wearing it," Bill had announced, as he'd finally got up from where he'd been sitting (read: moping) and stomped over to the crate he'd grabbed from belowdecks earlier. "It is mine, that Stanford didn't have it, I don't have to hide it, I am wearing it," the kid had said authoritatively, as he'd all but ripped it off of his own head (out of position, where it had been floating), made a sort of flicking motion (which had the hat making an odd 'floof!'ing sort of noise as it expanded out to a three-dimensional… regular-looking tophat?)... and then, somehow, the kid had jammed his tophat over the crate top-to-bottom in a motion that had looked almost like it had come out of a cartoon.
And, somehow, this had worked, because before this, there had been a crate sitting there, and after this, the crate was no longer there, and the hat had been sitting there in the space on top of the deck where the crate had once been.
Bill had then picked up his hat and jammed it down on top of his head again (in a motion that stopped right where the hat stayed floating), let out a breath in a huff, and turned to the rest of them to (angrily) ask, "ANY QUESTIONS?"
Stan had wanted to laugh. (He'd managed not to, sure, but it had been a close thing.)
Instead, Stan had tossed a thumb back Miz's way and said, "Blankets?"
Miz had gotten excited about being able to use her castle for something, practically diving inside it to Bill's chittering half-dismay, and a hell of a lot of blankets, pillows, and bean bag chairs had all ended up in the hat shortly thereafter.
"How are you doing that?" Dipper couldn't help but ask Bill, as he finished up shoving the last of the pillows from Miz into the interior of his hat.
"I have a wormhole under my hat," Bill said tersely, as he jammed it back into position again above his head (post-supplies-add), without even looking at him.
"Why?" Mabel asked.
"It's useful," Bill said next.
"But… couldn't you make it a magical place full of rooms like Miz's sand castle?" Mabel asked next.
That had Bill glancing over at her. "It's not a pocket dimension of space," Bill told her. "I own the entire dimension that this is connected to." ('Own the entire dimension?' Dipper worried. Because… what did that even mean?) Bill stretched slightly in place, hands over his head, fingers intertwined. "I can move around the endpoint, but right now it's connected to a zero-g space that's effectively a bubble of static, dead time. Which reminds me-" Bill walked over to the fish and the camp stove "grill", and scooped all that up, too.
"That sounds useful." Miz was making mental notes. "And since it's time stopped, food doesn't go bad while it's in there." She had a Stasis-type effect on her pantry at home but hadn't thought of doing something like actually stopping time on a whole area, hers simply prevented progression of time to prevent things such as oxidation or bacterial growth.
"Yes," Bill said for Miz's benefit. "It's basically a natural stasis spell. Might piss off your Time Baby, though," he noted. "Might want to stick with doing it in dimensions only you own, on a small scale. ...At least until you figure out how to mask it," Bill told her.
Miz nodded. "Ok, big brother."
"Right. Well. -Let's go find Grunkle Ford!" Mabel raised her fist into the air with a determined look on her face.
Bill grimaced. "Yes," he said. "Let's go find your vagabond dimension-hopping-again idiot." At the look Stan gave him, Bill complained, "-What? I would've been happy to let him stay behind! He hates-" Bill stopped himself, closing his mouth on whatever he had been about to say next.
Stan looked around the mostly-empty deck at them all, then let out a long sigh. "Yeah, okay. Let's go."
