Illusion is Reality
Chapter 77
-Ask me anything-
Ford was determined. He had a mission. An important mission that he couldn't afford (he tried not to twitch at the 'HA! a-Ford!' pun that he was sure Bill would have made if he were here) to fail. He'd managed to outrun those rude cops (again) who'd tried to confiscate his guns (again), yelling something about gun control laws that he really found rather rude (wasn't it okay to give children weaponry in this dimension? so why not adults?), and once he'd lost them (again), he'd made his way to this rooftop. And now he was watching the pawnshop like a hawk. A solemn vigil in the night for the sake of protecting the future of the boy within.
He was dedicated. He was vigilant. He was…
...bored as shit.
Ford muffled a yawn as he crouched on the roof. His legs were cramping up and he'd been here for hours and nothing was happening. The younger version of him and Stan had rushed back earlier while clutching… paper of a sort that was usually found around ice cream cones(?), and neither of them had left the house since. He shifted his weight, groaning as his legs creaked. Stakeout was so… boring.
But he wasn't going to leave, of course! He had to keep his eye on the house, stop the young Stan from ruining his life- … the younger him's life. It was a noble goal. If Ford stopped young Stan from breaking his project in a selfish impulsive act of jealousy teenage emotion, they would both be fine.
And the niblings as they would exist here might never be born.
-All of them would be fine. Stan didn't have a crystal ball to the future; he didn't know that these versions of themselves wouldn't take care of their younger brother. And Ford could perhaps… leave them a note…? Yes, he could leave the young Stan or Ford a note to take care of Shermie once he was older and… and…
Yes. That would be enough. Surely, that would be enough.
He wouldn't waver. He would ensure that at LEAST in this dimension, the younger version of himself wouldn't go down the same terrible path of mediocrity and-. He would fix it.
"An old man with guns spying on two teenage boys. Now doesn't that seem like something that should be stopped?" a high-pitched voice drawled out behind him in a deadpan. Ford twitched and swung around, hand already shooting towards his gun before he saw Miz standing behind him on the roof (along with Stan, the niblings, and…)
"-What are you doing there, Bill?" Ford growled out, because the demon had the gall to ignore him! It had been Miz who had said that, while Bill wasn't even looking at him! Instead, the triangle demon was crouching down and pulling stuff out of… his hat?!
Ford stared. "-How did you get that back?" Ford demanded of Bill next. (And where had it been? Had that demon been lying about having it up until now? -He'd accused Ford of taking it for weeks!) But Bill continued to ignore him, which just served to aggravate him even further. How dare Bill ignore him like… like…
… like Bill didn't care about him. Like he didn't think Ford was worth his attention. Like he was nothing. (And it was that point that Ford's stomach seemed to drop out from under him. -No. No. Stay strong. Don't-) Ford tensed in place and forcibly suppressed the cold chill that ran through him at the thought.
"Right, well, just… straight to Bill again, are you sure you two aren't an ex-couple going through a really bad break up?" Miz asked with an annoyed look.
Ford turned to her and sputtered, "No! Stop saying that!" He'd never done any such thing! They weren't a couple! And Bill had never been his friend!
"Then stop acting like it! You're obsessed with him to the point that it's unhealthy." Miz rolled her eyes. (Ford nearly told the demon off - he wasn't obsessed, he was being watchful! Bill was a threat! A clear and present danger!) "I'm not even trying to make fun of you now. You're worrying the kids." Miz thumbed her hand back towards the twins behind him.
Ford finally glanced over at them and then stopped as the two shuffled their feet; they both looked slightly… ill? Dipper was pulling his hat down. "Can you please stop calling them a couple?" Dipper complained at Miz.
"He constantly wants Bill's attention, wants to know where Bill is, what he's doing, who he's talking to…" Miz listed off. "Like some clingy, overbearing, possessive boyfriend…"
Ford bristled at the implication - because, if anything, Bill was the one who had refused to just leave him alone and-!
"Stop, please!" Mabel said quickly to Miz (which was how Ford knew it had to be far worse than it had sounded even to him - Mabel was usually the first on board for any potential romance, no matter who it involved), and (thankfully) Miz (finally!) shut her mouth.
Stanley (the traitor) was holding his expression in that perfectly calm set that made it clear he was doing everything in his power to hold back laughter - which Ford did not appreciate in the least, because the current situation they were in was hardly amusing!
Meanwhile, Bill was quietly pulling out bedding and food from his hat. They soon had a cozy little campsite set up on this roof top, and Ford's stomach growled at the smell of freshly grilled fish.
Stan narrowed his eyes. "Eat. Now." He pulled Ford over to sit near the (still hot) grill. When Ford opened his mouth to protest, Stan grunted out, "I cooked it; it's fine. And we've all eaten it. -It's fine." He stared at Ford until the man ate the fish.
Ford was glaring at Bill the whole time he ate, as Bill set up various planks with carved-runes around the edges of the roof surrounding them.
"What is he doing?" Ford asked of Stan suspiciously.
"Setting up a temperature thing, invisibility that even those other kids can't see us through; the works," Stan told him easily. "Let him do his thing, Ford; it's fine." But Ford side-eyed the boards uneasily. Was it anything like safe? Or had Bill lied? (Ford wasn't sure that he could trust Stan to always know when Bill was lying anymore. Bill was inside the perimeter with them, though…)
"Bill," Ford demanded. "What are you doing?"
Bill, without looking at him or even slowing down in what he was doing, said, "Setting up a temperature control spell that keeps the inside perimeter between 66 degrees Fahrenheit and 72 degrees Fahrenheit, and an invisibility spell that no-one else including the younger local versions of you can see through, and a sound-canceler that blocks human-made noise from travelling across the perimeter inside to outside, using these boards," as he put down another board and added a small mark to it using his knife. "There's also a stasis spell for the food, on the crate that the food is in," Bill added in a neutral tone of voice, as he stood up and moved over several steps, to put down another board with intent, as if he was placing it exactly where he was putting it for a reason. (...And as far as Ford could tell, Bill had not just lied to him and was not leaving anything out.) Ford frowned as he shifted in place.
"Where'd he get that hat?" Ford asked of Stan next. It both looked familiar, and didn't. (Was it actually Bill's original hat? With the way it was floating above Bill's head, it seemed likely, but… It looked… odd in three dimensions.)
"Kid summoned it. With a spell." Stan's mouth twitched. Ford was confused at Stan's reaction to Bill's successful 'summoning'(?), but he didn't ask. He just watched Bill, as Bill finished what he was doing and sat down (and none of them immediately caught fire or died horribly as whatever spellwork carved into the wood sprung into being, in a succession of odd arcing flashes). Once Bill was done (and the spellwork had gone quiescent again), Ford lowered himself back down into a more stable crouch and went back to watching the pawnshop - taking another fish to eat as he did so, so that Stan wouldn't complain about him not eating enough.
As he settled back into his watch, he took the time to glance back occasionally, to see the kids (and demons) taking their time fluffing pillows and all in all getting themselves settled in for the night.
Ford sighed deeply, because it may feel like the afternoon for them right now from their current sleep schedule, but the night sky overhead was making them feel sleepy regardless. Perhaps they would end up conforming to the new local time after all. ...Or maybe they were going to be trying to pull an all-nighter here like he was as well. Either way, so Ford could hardly fault their logic; they might as well get comfortable, for whatever they determined to be the correct choice of action moving forward.
(Ford rather wished he had a strong cup of coffee at the moment, though, to help keep him going. Perhaps he should have put some in his flask… or the canteen he usually reserved for water, instead.)
Everyone stared at the pawnshop.
Minutes passed with nothing happening, and single minutes slowly ticked into tens of minutes with nothing happening...
...and Miz became bored quickly, shifting around in her seat and rolling along the blankets she'd laid out on the rooftop, pillows and extra blankets piled around into an odd nest-like shape. She shifted her clothes into an oversized, long sleeve t-shirt that hung down to her knees, one with a giraffe printed on the front. She flopped around, her t-shirt lifting up to reveal bare legs above where her thigh-high socks reached.
Stan looked over and frowned. "Are you wearing anything under there?" he asked, though not really wanting to. (Hey, at least he always wore boxers and a wife beater for full coverage!)
"Just my underwear?" Miz rolled over again as Dipper blushed heavily.
"-Put on some pants!" Dipper complained.
Miz scoffed. "Pajama pants are for squares!" to which Dipper groaned:
"Modesty!"
Miz shrugged. "I mean, I was essentially naked as a dragon and you had no issue with that?" she told him, and Dipper buried his face in his hands, embarrassed by proxy.
Stan sighed. "Hey, even with the kid's temperature stuff, it's still kind of cool out. At least wear pants for that, yeah?" he told Miz.
Stan frowned at Miz's lack of modesty before thinking over that dragon comment, and realizing that the kid had been essentially naked as a triangle himself (a hat and bowtie weren't really enough clothing for a human-being). And then Stan thinking about all those monster-demons of the kid's and what they had and hadn't been wearing when they'd been up against the Shacktron. So if Miz had been living with aliens like Bill's Henchmaniacs (okay, alternative versions of them or whatever) who were all pretty much naked as well… uh…
...Hell. Maybe this was part of the reason why the kid almost always wore loose and light stuff. Kid wasn't used to wearing clothing. Hell, the kid had problems with blankets, even. ...Great. So with the way the demons thought and Miz had just talked, the two of them probably thought the rest of them should just be grateful that the two of them wore any clothes at all, to speak of. (...The kid was wearing that full bodysuit though, and under his regular human clothes even. It made Stan wonder what it was made of, and how light it must be. The kid had told him before that he didn't like blankets because they were heavy and too constraining, and apparently that even included bedsheets.)
At Stan's words, Miz materialized some shorts. Shorts technically weren't pants, but… it was a compromise 'for modesty' and cool (but not cold) weather, for the 'A/C range' the kid had set up for them. (Stan wasn't gonna second-guess that; the range seemed fine to him, and they did have blankets.)
Stan snorted. Well, at least she'd listened to him. "Thanks, Miz," Stan told her. ...Hell, Bill even patted her on the head for him. (These two, Stan swore…)
They all continued watching the pawnshop as Miz arranged a plethora of stuffed animals around her in her 'nest'. Mabel glanced over multiple times until she couldn't contain her curiosity and love of stuffed animals; she got up and made her way over to ask about them. "So, did you pull these from a wormspace thing and another dimension like Bill does?"
"Well, the way my powers work is that I can scan an object or creature and then recreate it on the atomic level. So most of these are copies of the dolls I have back home or rough approximations of my memories of dolls I used to have." Miz held up a huge, pillow-sized Pikachu. Mabel grinned.
"That's pretty cool. What're their names!" Mabel asked, interested.
"There's Sparky, Neon, Jellybean, Poison, Batty, Flip and Zip and their 6 children…" Miz started picking them up and listing them off, the pikachu, a dolphin, a rabbit, a poison dart frog, a bat and a bunch of cats in different colors. "The six kittens are actually dolls that my human grandfather gave me back when I was a child."
Mabel was thoroughly enraptured by them all. And when Ford noticed that, he told Mabel (with no small frustration), "Mabel, you shouldn't talk to her."
"Grunkle Ford, she's got a really cool stuffed animal collection! Just look at all these cute faces!" Mabel said, holding up one of the stuffed animals for him to see.
Ford glanced over at Mabel quickly before refocusing on the pawnshop. "She's tricking you into liking her." She was a demon! (And… probably not another 'Bill Cipher' really, she just… had the same name as him, as Bill had admitted outright - and she had used to be human? That was hardly the same!)
(And because she remembered once being human… perhaps that was why she was far better at lying than Bill. Yes, that must be it. Obviously. -Which was why Bill had left her to do the storytelling for him, and why Bill himself had avoided saying anything about that fake-brother of his. Bill was probably waiting to do so until he'd finished learning how to lie properly - from either Stan or this Miz - before trying to pull off the lie on his own. Ford was on to him!)
"She's going to find a way to use it to hurt you," Ford reiterated to Mabel, speaking to her love of stuffed animals. (Would tearing them apart in front of Mabel make her sad? Alarm her? Or worse? He wouldn't put it past that demon to do so.)
"No, I'm just bored and I wanna play with my dolls." Miz responded, rolling her eyes because YEESH. There was paranoia, and then there was prejudice. "You wouldn't like me when I'm bored."
Stan snorted at this, while Dipper nodded; Dipper did not want to see Miz bored. (He'd heard Bill complain about being bored at mealtimes at the Shack a bunch of times by this point, and all the stuff that Bill came up with to be less bored - that Grunkle Stan pretty much always ended up vetoing - was always really weird and kind of nuts. So who knew what Miz would do if she got bored! ...Probably not the chupacabra thing, because they didn't have a goat right now!)
Miz turned back to her dolls. "This is Bushy." She pointed at an orange lion. "He's the king of the animal kingdom. Flip is his daughter and she's actually next in line for the throne. Her husband is from a commoner family-" Miz moved some dolls around to point at them as she explained. Mabel nodded with a grin. This reminded her of the way she'd used to play with her dolls as a child.
Then Mabel felt a little bad because she hadn't done that in a while, being too distracted with boys, her phone, and stuff. It was bad enough she didn't love all her dolls equally. But she hadn't spent time playing with them as much as she used to. She was… growing up.
Miz looked up. "Are you ok?" she asked.
Mabel nodded. "I just got reminded that I'm growing up and don't play with my own dolls like this anymore." She kind of missed playing with them, actually. It was sad.
"You shouldn't let growing up stop you," Miz pointed out. "You can still play with whatever toys you want no matter how old you are."
Mabel gave her a small smile. "You're right. I'm being a big dumb-dumb, aren't I?"
"-You're not dumb," Miz responded before anyone else could. "You're just busy with other things. You're gonna get more responsibilities as you grow up and it'll get between your personal time for things, but that doesn't mean you can't still play when you want to." She hesitated before handing Mabel a small polar bear, shaped like a rectangle. "I got Frosty here when I was 23. I didn't let growing stop me from getting more dolls."
Mabel smiled and squeezed the polar bear. It was really soft. "And you're like what? 600 billion now?" she laughed.
Miz giggled. "I'm like, 50 billion years away from 700 billion, but yeah. And I'm STILL collecting more." A bunch of them were in Ammy's room and her penthouse suite or scattered around the Death Star. She actually wasn't sure how many she had now...
The two girls played with the dolls, making up stories and weird voices for them as they went. Stan sat back on a beanbag chair and smiled at them. ...And wow, was this beanbag chair thing relaxing.
(Miz had Blessed the beanbag chairs, pillows and blankets to help ease aches and pains - hey, if Stan didn't want direct help for his aches and pains, then indirect was fine, right? Besides, all the bedding type stuff were enchanted for comfort and promoting better health, so it's not like she was helping him specifically…)
It was nice to see Miz could play like a normal kid without adding in a bunch of weirdness. Comforting even. ...The kid could play that way too, if he was told all the rules first (and by that, it really meant all the rules - like 'don't eat the dolls' and 'axes are not for stealing and beheading the dolls' for doll-playing, knowing the kid...). But so far, the only thing Stan had found (well, that Melody had found out for him, really, but hey, getting her to help babysit was his idea, so he was taking all the credit there!) that the kid seemed to actually be able to handle in the same way as a 'normal' kid withouta lot of extra explanation and junk? Was that FCLORP stuff with Soos and Melody. ...Which was, y'know, geeky as heck.
Stan noticed Bill was watching Miz and Mabel with a peaceful expression, same as he had been on the deck of the ship. Ford was still tense, glancing back now and then with a frown, whenever one of the girls giggled.
Really, the whole thing made Stan kind of wonder… because hell, the kid seemed to get more enjoyment out of watching Miz play than actually...
"Kid," Stan asked, "Uh, ya don't have to answer this one, but…" Stan scratched his cheek. "What kinda games did you used to play, way back when you were a little kid?" That got everyone's attention, and Stan could see Ford forcibly holding himself back from turning right around and staring right at Bill for his answer, instead of keeping on staring at the house.
Bill blinked, and turned his head away from his sister and Shooting Star, and towards Stanley instead. "...Why do you want to know," Bill said slowly. He wasn't sure he trusted the question, especially so soon after...
Stan shrugged. "Just curious, really."
The kid eyed him, then after a long pause, said, "Define 'little kid'."
Uhhh… right. Hell. Stan sighed. "I meant the first time you had a body. The whole triangle-triangle thing. 'Little' triangle kid. Before you decided to be a triangle demon, or whatever. -What'd you do for fun, back then?" Stan restated, because yeah, 'games' was probably not the best word to have used with the kid, there.
"...Listened to stories, asked questions," was what the kid handed him. And Stan waited. And waited. ...And then realized the kid wasn't just stuck trying to think of more stuff, he actually wasn't planning on saying...
"...Anything else?" Stan tried. "Maybe when you were a little older?"
"Learning things," the kid offered next. "...Deciphering codes. Reading. Thinking about... some things." Bill paused, before adding, "...Solving equations, sometimes." The kid didn't look as sure about that one, though.
"...Okay. And?" Stan tried again. And the kid just looked at him and blinked. "Anything else? ...Anything," Stan asked the kid.
"No, nothing else," the kid said breezily, and then Bill resituated himself in place, turning his head away from him as he went back to watching Miz and Mabel playing together.
Stan stared. (The hell? That was… it? Sonofa- Seven things. Kid had only seven things on his list from back when he'd had a brother? And… Stan did three of those with the kid on the daily - stories, kinda, answering the kid's questions, and the whole learning thing - and he pushed the kid to do a fourth all the time - think about new things that the kid hadn't thought about before. And the kid was reading things on his phone now sometimes, too, since he'd gotten ahold of Mabel's phone and 'cloned' it… which Stan had also been running interference for him on, for him to do.)
(Only thing that was missing there was the codes and the equations. ...Then again, half the time when the kid talked about his magic junk…? -Hell. That was it. That was all of it. ...And the kid thought he had "standards" for stuff?! Hell.)
Mabel and Dipper exchanged a glance at this (because they'd been expecting to hear something more crazy, like 'Turn all my enemies' heads into bees! HAHA!' or something…). Miz glanced over at them for a second and twitched. Oh. She liked to do that… was it not funny? She thought about what Kei would say: 'Why bees? Why not potatoes?' the mental Kei laughed. Oh, well… Miz had a feeling that was also an unacceptable answer… ah, what did she do for fun as a human? And in Flatland?
Miz spoke up quietly. "I used to read to, and explain stuff to, my younger siblings." She looked nostalgic. "Will liked to listen to my stories. My Birthers didn't like it though, said I was filling his head with nonsense. Said that Will should be focusing on learning how to take over our father's place in his job, like he was supposed to, because I couldn't…"
Stan frowned a little, thinking that didn't sound so bad. (It also didn't sound really different from the kid, yet. Probably meant the kid's Liam had been the one telling him stories.) Speaking of jobs... "Hey, stuff was different for you 'cause of the whole… y'know, right? What was it like for most other people?" Stan asked, because maybe Miz talking more about 'normal' stuff in her old dimension would get the kid talking more, too? Get some stuff off the kid's chest, and Miz's too? (That had happened a lot, in the attic, since she'd been there.) Because hey, it couldn't have been all bad, right?
Miz thought about it. "Most of the shapes I saw back then weren't allowed to play once they were old enough for school or career training. There was a schedule in place that everyone had to follow. Wake up, eat, work or school, break for lunch, work some more… that kinda thing…" She thought about it some more. "Unless you were female, in which case you just stayed home and took care of the children, birthed more children, cooked, cleaned… females weren't allowed a full education, the higher rank you were, the more schooling you were allowed, but once you were big enough to carry young, you were Paired off with someone and your duty was to take care of the home."
"Your dimension was less restrictive than mine, especially with the learning," the kid seemed to shrug off. "And technically also three-dimensional-plus-time.
Stan stared at the two demons. (...The hell?! Weren't allowed to play? Yeah, Stan had gotten the idea before that the place had been pretty bad, from some of the stuff that Miz had said, but… What Miz had just described was like some kinda... totalitarian Nazi prison camp bullshit - and the kid had said that was less bad than his dimension had been?! -Stan had been in prison in three different countries and… some of it had been as bad as this shit sounded to him, yeah, but it had been prison, not… And females weren't allowed a full education?! What? What kinda 14'th century bullshit was that? -Just, the whole learning being restricted thing? That… oh. Oh hell. Learning and rules. No wonder the kid-)
Miz sighed. "It was really boring. All the stuff I did for fun were things I remembered from my human life. There wasn't much that Shapes seemed to do in their spare time. I saw some elderly shapes walk around and sit in the park. That seemed to be it? The really young shapes would chase each other around like Tag..."
"-What about music?" Stan brought up suddenly, as it occurred to him. Kid played piano, and he liked it. He had to have learned it somewhere sometime. (Stan didn't really want to ask what happened if somebody broke the rules, because he was pretty sure he already knew that one. Stan did not want the kid ranting about that in front of the niblings.)
Miz winced. "My Flatland didn't have music. I kept trying to introduce it but everyone told me to shut up and stop being weird." She groaned. "Thank Spud the rest of the multiverse had music… I would have gone NUTS." She paused. "More nuts." She amended.
Mabel gasped, clutching the doll she was holding to her chest. "You didn't have music? -That's horrible!"
"The sliding scale of insanity is not musical!" the kid put out there brightly.
"Right…" Stan said. He was really not liking how the kid hadn't really commented on the whole 'not having music' thing. Did that mean the kid had or hadn't had it? Stan pulled in a breath. "...Uh, kid. The whole piano thing?" he tried asking again, more directly.
...And the kid just stared at him.
"The piano is a human construction," the kid said. "I learned how to play the piano from humans."
Miz raised her hand. "I introduced the idea of pianos to an alien race and let them invent it, so that I could learn to play it." And many, MANY other instruments, too.
Stan rubbed a hand across his face. Okay. Okay. Maybe he should start over. Miz had said kids had been able to play… for awhile, and the kid had only brought up a few things that the kid knew he'd liked. Didn't mean there wasn't more stuff that maybe the kid just hadn't tried out back then, to know whether he'd like it or not, right? "Kid. Was there, uh…" Stan looked around and his gaze fell on the dolls. "Anything like playing with dolls that was a thing in your old dimension?" Stan tried, because the kid and Miz did seem to have a bunch of junk in common.
"No," said Bill.
Okay, so- Wait. Stan blinked at him. "Nothing like dolls."
"Nothing like dolls, yes," Bill repeated.
Stan pulled in a breath. "Nothing like dolls, even for girls?" Stan tried again.
"Nothing like dolls, even for lines of any age, yes," Bill told him. Stan blinked at the kid.
"Nothing that was anything like that, for either of you to carry around with you, at all?" Stan said incredulously. What kind of dimension didn't have dolls? Or action figures? Or… or something?
Miz perked up. "There were accessories! Hats and bows and stuff. That was fun. Ornamentation was the closest thing I found to a 'hobby' that Flatlanders had." She'd only gotten the top hat though, should have tried to get more clothes… that was the only real way to be unique, even if all you had to choose from was black and white.
"Okay," said Stan. That seemed like a thing. Kid had accessorized as a triangle demon, so… "They have accessories in your old dimension way back when, kid?"
And the kid… made an odd uncomfortable sort of face.
"It… wasn't…" The kid's eyes weren't tracking right, and he looked frustrated. "-like that," the kid said abruptly, before adding, "My dimension was more consistent than hers, accessories weren't," the kid made an odd sort of two-handed gesture, "-because 'accessories' are irregular-looking and irregular was- was-" The kid was looking more and more agitated.
"Kid…" Stan said slowly, and Stan was getting a not so great feeling when the kid abruptly shifted his gaze directly to him and sat up.
And then the kid brought both hands up to his own right eye and peered through them and said, "I was a triangle!" and… his hands were forming a triangle in front of his eye. "Two-dimensions-plus-time, not three-" The kid huffed out a breath and dropped his hands. "I was math! A triangle. Geometry!" the kid said, and Stan...
...He got it, but… Stan also didn't get it at all.
"What did you have instead of accessories?" Stan tried, and the kid grimaced, but he also got a look in his eyes that Stan recognized, and Stan braced himself for the word barrage - because he'd just found a pathway forward for the kid to explain.
"-The idea of accessories," was what the kid said next, looking wild-eyed and almost relieved after he'd said it, gotten it out there. "It- I sold the idea of them! -You didn't wear them," the kid tried to explain, waving his hands about, "They- they weren't physical? -They weren't. You- you had to explain them to other- other-"
"Kid, breathe," Stan told him. "You… sold people ideas?" That was… what the hell. (Wasn't that kind of like the kid's… deals? Because he'd had to sell somebody on the idea of a deal first, then…)
"-YES!" the kid said, and he looked even more relieved as he said it for some reason. "I- I made them, and I sold them-! And when I- I finished the transaction, the selling-them, then I gave them the ideas, and they- the idea belonged to them, then!" the kid said, as Stan frowned trying to follow this. "They could tell other- other shapes and lines, you see? So they could… could see it? If they wanted to tell? -But it was still theirs!" Bill said. "It stayed theirs. The- the others couldn't make-it-take-it theirs away from them that way, they couldn't give it away like I could, there's a trick to it- you- you see- you have to UNDERSTAND the- the concept of a-hat entirely-" Bill said, bobbing side-to-side slightly and staring off into the distance.
(Stan felt like he was barely holding onto the concept himself, here. Everything sounded too abstract. How was somebody supposed to sell a hat if it wasn't a physical thing? And if it was… a description of a hat, maybe? Why couldn't somebody else just memorize the description and repeat it?)
"I- I didn't just think them up? -'Make' is closer, it wasn't just 'thinking' things up, it was more- more- more of a making-it, a- a-" The kid made another odd hand motion.
(...There was something wrong with the kid, right now, Stan realized. He wasn't acting… right. -Not that the kid ever acted right, but the kid... It was like his eyes were too… shallow, somehow? Like his thinking wasn't really… reaching far enough? ...It wasn't like the kid wasn't thinking straight, exactly, either, because the kid sort of was right now? But it was more like the kid was thinking… too straight, somehow. And then kept making these… jarring sideways-swivels in the way he was thinkin', or somethin'...)
"And- and I- I could think-and-make them up, over and over again, and I could give them away… -But-you-don't-EVER-give-any-thing-away-for-free-you-have-to-SELL-it-MAKE-it-WORTH-some-thing," the kid said next, in another mental-verbal sideways-swivel, and it sent a chill down Stan's spine, because that hadn't sounded like something the kid had come up with himself, with the way he'd just rattled that off. It sounded more like something the kid had recited like he'd memorized it, like he'd never really thought about it much before - not enough to really challenge the idea completely...
And then the not-so-great feeling Stan was feeling twisted slightly, as the kid rocked forward again and refocused on him again, and the kid was grinning like he was about to tell him a secret.
"...But?" Stan said slowly, because he had a feeling that the kid was waiting for a 'but?'...
"But I DIDN'T ALWAYS sell them!" the kid told him, "Sometimes… sometimes I GAVE THEM AWAY, for free!" the kid said, then chittered out something a bit in glee. Because… that was really the only word Stan had to describe the kid just then. His shoulders moved up and down slightly, he was grinning with his eyes crinkled up… the kid looked like he'd gotten away with something somehow, in doing that.
"...Broke a rule, huh?" Stan said slowly, watching the kid. (So, maybe the kid had challenged it, at least once?)
"Yes! No," the kid said, still smiling. "Not a circle-Rule," the kid made a face, "But a different one, yes!" Then the kid bobbed from side to side again. "-I gave one to a friend! It was fun! -She wanted a hat," Bill told him, "But she never told anybody she was wearing it! So nobody ever knew she was wearing it! Except us! Just her, and me! It was a SECRET," the kid told him, putting his chin on his hands, steepled out in front of him. "And we GOT AWAY WITH IT, too!"
"...Uh huh," said Stan, eyebrows raised. "Well... good for you, kid. Kinda… rebellious of ya, there." And that was really all Stan could think of to say. It just felt like some... petty, kid getting back at the adults kinda thing. A kind of invisible hat you had to describe to somebody else, for them to see it? It really sounded like a kid's game, played on the rest of the adults in the room. It left Stan feeling almost bemused, and maybe almost a little… sad. Because this whole thing just sounded...
"Yes!" the kid enthused, throwing up his hands. "I did that, too! -Joined the Rebellion," the kid told him. "I BLACKMAILED my way in." The kid was grinning.
Miz whooped, "Me TOO!", about the blackmailing and joining her own world's rebellion thing. Stan blinked as he looked at them both.
"...This friend of yours, that you gave the hat to," Stan asked of Bill, resting his elbows on his knees. "She part of this Rebellion, too?"
"Oh, yes," said the kid, nodding. "She - HAHA! - she burned down TWO PLACES, towards the end! -One of them was my shop," the kid said, like it was a throwaway thing, like… he hadn't cared about that.
"Didn't really care about the shop, huh," Stan said, just to see where this went.
"It was stupid," said Bill. He suddenly stood up. "HERE'S THE SHOP!" the kid said brightly, with a huge fake-false grin stamped in place, as he held out his arms at full-extension and spun in a circle in place, before coming to a stop. "DON'T SELL ANYTHING OUTSIDE OF THIS AREA! Because that's not a shop! -Lock it down TIGHT when NO-BODY'S SUPPOSED TO BE in it!" the kid said, as he half-fell half-collapsed back down onto his own bean bag chair again, no longer grinning. "SO STUPID," the kid grumbled out.
"...How do you lock down an area?" Stan said slowly. Because that just seemed… kind of nuts.
Bill made a groaning-chittery sort of noise as he flopped back in his chair, and waved a hand at him. "Time-locked it. -Different kind of time-lock. Not like the whole-dimension one I did for yours. Stupid human-American-English-language; not enough words. -Two dimensions, and I swear we understood TIME better than all of you idiots with three," the kid groused out, flinging a hand up and out at the sky. "It's like the third one just all, up-and-DISTRACTS-you-all too much!" the kid said, waving his hand around at nothing at all. "And then you don't get anywhere else!" The kid raised his hand up to his face, to rub at his closed eyes with his fingers, and something about his tone now was… "And people think that two-dimensional people are more stupid than…" the kid trailed off in a quiet mutter.
"...More stupid than what?" Stan asked, as he realized… the kid was back to what passed as normal for him. (The kid was back to thinking the way he usually did; Stan could hear it in the kid's tone. Something about trying to bridge the gap between now and back then had somehow…)
"...Everyone else," was Ford's quiet contribution to the discussion, as he kept on staring at the house, and Stan glanced sideways at him. "Most people, in most dimensions, who know anything at all about other-dimensional travel…" Ford continued on quietly, sounding almost subdued.
"Oh yes," Bill said, and suddenly his tone was just dripping with scorn and malice. "I'M JUST A STUPID TRIANGLE, AREN'T I, STANFORD."
Stan saw his brother flinch at his side, his back tense.
"HAHA," said the kid, not even looking at any of them. "It just MAKES you WONDER, DOESN'T IT, Stanford?" Stan clenched his jaw as his brother tried to suppress a shudder from where he sat next to him, as the 'just a triangle' said, "Because if I'M the STUPID one, here, then WHAT DOES THAT MAKE Y-"
"Stop," Stan said, cutting the kid off. "Nobody here thinks you're stupid, kid," Stan ground out.
There was a moment's pause. "That Stanford-"
"-Let it go, kid," Stan told him. "Don't matter what my brother thinks about ya, I'll set the kids straight if I have to, along with anybody else who thinks otherwise. Get it?"
Bill remained silent.
"Okay. Good talk," Stan said. "Learned a lot. ...Don't know how you go and make it so you can't hand off a hat-idea to a somebody-else, but-"
"-You want me to tell you?" the kid said, and that left Stan blinking.
"What? Uh…" Stan didn't really get it. "Why?"
"You made a hat for me," the kid said, and Stan blinked because, yeah, he had, that witch's kind of hat that he'd made out of black triangular cloth pieces and junk (because the kid had kept complaining and complaining about not having his hat, and so he'd thought that maybe he could replace the thing and just make the kid calm down) that the kid had gotten all excited about when he'd first given it to him, for no good reason that he could… see... (Oh hell...)
"Don't you want to know how to give them away properly to anyone?" the kid asked him next, cocking his head at him.
"...Sure, kid," Stan said slowly. "Why don't you tell me the, uh, trick to it, then. If you want." And the kid sat up straight and grinned at him.
"I want!" the kid said brightly. He clapped his hands together. "So! -The secret," the kid said, "and the trick is… you make them CUSTOM."
...Right. The kid had said something like that before. He'd asked him, hell, multiple times if Stan had made it just for him. (And then immediately shown it off to Melody after Stan had gotten done convincing him that, yeah, he had. The kid had worn it all day on that one single day, and hadn't really worn it since - or complained about not having his top hat on him anymore - which had had Stan thinking that having a hat had been enough until the summoning thing about an hour ago. The kid had just squirrelled his new custom-made all-triangles triangular hat away from them all for safekeeping... except for when the kid had worn it again that one time, for that FCLORP session the kid had NPC'd for Melody.)
So, apparently 'custom' was a thing for the kid, and the kid actually wanted to share something? Sure. Stan was all for getting the kid some more practice at sharing shit with other people that the kid thought was important. (He wasn't about to turn anything like that down, especially right now, when the kid had said before that the 'lesson' was 'him not oversharing'. Besides, hell, if Stan did that, the kid would probably think he was devaluing it, and the kid himself, again.)
So, sure. "Okay, kid. How do you do that for… idea-hats," Stan asked.
"Idea-hats! HAHA! Yes!" The kid grinned. "-You know the measure of the person you're making it for!" the kid told him. "And so, when you make the idea of it for them… you make it in their size," the kid said, "To match them."
"Okay…" Stan said leadingly. "Still not seein' how that's any different from a physically-there hat being too big or too small on anybody's head." Honestly, he wasn't really seeing it at all.
"Yes!" the kid said next. "The idea of the hat is relative to the size and measure of the shape! So they can describe it, as it fits them! But if anybody ELSE tries to describe it…" the kid grinned a little wider. "It doesn't fit them, because they are not the same shape or the same size!"
Stan frowned slightly. "Uh. Give me an example, kid? Like… for your head?"
"HM," said the kid. It took him a moment, staring off into the distance.
And then he got an 'aha!' look and took his hat off for a moment, then raised a finger to the center of his face, to point at himself.
"You see me, yes?" Bill asked. Stan nodded slowly. 'Course he did. "Out, five inches from center, between two eyes; towards top… curve." The kid moved his hand straight up, to leave his finger pointing at a spot right above the top of his head. "Following the curve to the left, 30 degrees, line moving outward-" and the kid gave some kind of string of letters and numbers that sounded like an equation, "-of length five inches." And then the kid moved his finger straight to the left five inches… and left a softly-glowing trail of light behind.
The kid did this, and talked his way through what looked like… the outline of his own top hat, when it had been hovering above his head, before.
And then when the kid was all done, he waved it all away, and held up his other hand.
"Different shape!" the kid said, holding up the same finger as before. He started it at the center of his palm. "Out, five inches from center," the kid began, and the rest of it, following the exact same rattled-off set of instructions… turned out to be a freaking mess, a crazy glowing outline that made no sense, and didn't even connect at the ends.
"...Okay," said Stan, struggling to hold down a laugh. "I think I see where you're going with this, kid." Because with that explanation? He really kind of did.
And the kid just grinned.
(He could practically hear the question marks dancing above his brother's head, there, sitting next to him, because his brother had refused to turn the hell around and watch the kid for all of the thirty seconds while he'd been showing them, there.)
Stan stifled a sigh, sat back in his chair, and thought about that one. "...Be a mess above my head, too, right?" he asked the kid as the kid waved away the mess and put his hat back in his head. Stan said it both for the kid, to show that he got it, and his own brother, so his head wouldn't explode tryin' to figure this one all out on his own. (Ford knew what the kid looked like, but hadn't seen what the kid had pointed to next.) "My head's bigger, don't curve as much as yours, looking head-on…"
The kid nodded at him, eyes lighting up.
"Huh," said Stan, as his own brother paused for a moment next to him, then startled next to him a few seconds later. (Stan managed not to laugh.) And then Stan let out a sigh. Because… it kind of was the same thing. Stuff not fitting. Just… a different way of how it was not fitting. ...Huh. -And that'd explain why nobody could steal it, too. If you had to understand the whole thing from the start, what it was supposed to look like from in front, then...
Wait...
Stan looked over at the kid.
"Kid," Stan said slowly. "If you're makin these things in two dimensions… what are the two dimensions?" Because… no matter how Stan tried to turn it around in his brain, he couldn't figure that one out. You needed the third one to check that, what it was supposed to look like, with the moving outline through the other two...
"Breadth and depth," said the kid, and Stan felt Ford startle next to him. ...That also kind of didn't help him, because that wasn't length, width, or height.
"Show me?" Stan asked the kid, and the kid thought for barely a moment, then raised both hands to his own eye-level, flat and fingers splayed outwards, palms-down.
"Breadth," the kid said, and swiveled his whole head, hands included, about his neck, like his head was fixed on a pole. "Depth," the kid said, and he moved his hands forward, then back again, like he was sliding them along a flat table top right in front of his eyes.
(Ford had turned around next to him for this, and he was staring.)
Miz blinked. "Cool, my Flatlands were more like… 2-D people in a 3-D space."
"So was the one I saw that confused me for a long time," the kid said, as he slowly lowered his hands, and Stan almost asked about that one, but he knew better; he'd be chasing the kid down rabbit holes forever unless he got the first concept first. He'd figured out that one within the first hour of the first day.
"What's the third dimension?" Stan asked the kid. (Ford's shoulders went tense. Because for some reason his brother was absolutely freaking incensed with him right now. The hell?)
"Time," the kid said next, "But it's more of a -half, because it was only-forwards not also-backwards for controlled-motion," the kid told him.
"What's the fourth one, then?" Stan asked next. (And hell, now he could practically hear Ford mentally screaming with impatience at him right next to him, for some reason. ...Well, if he didn't want to ask the kid out loud whatever he wanted to himself, that was his problem, not Stan's.)
"Height," said Bill. "A concept which can be approximated by 'hierarchy', but doesn't really fit or match or encompass the WHOLE of the idea, so..." the kid looked annoyed at this.
"How do you figure out what the shape of the idea-hat looks like from… above, then? To check it?" Stan asked him.
To that, the kid gave him an odd look.
"You don't," the kid told him. "There was no 'up'. You measured everything from the sides." He held up both hands again, next to each other - this time palms-outwards towards him - and kept the fingers un-splayed this time. And then the kid moved his right hand towards his left, then moved the side of his right hand along the side of his left hand, almost like he was rubbing it, and… then kept on moving it like… it sort of looked like a violin-string motion almost? Moving along and back again, with a different tilt? Except he kept going...
"O-kay…" Stan said. He pinched the bridge of his nose, because this was almost giving him a headache. "Not… not really sure how that works out, kid."
"Close your eyes," the kid said next, and Stan sighed and closed them. "There is a table in front of you."
"No, there isn't," said Stan.
"Pretend," the kid said with exasperation. "That there is a table in front of you. You are eye-level with it." (Dipper and Mabel looked at each other, then closed their eyes for a moment, to try and 'imagine' as well.)
"Okay." Stan didn't really see where the kid was going with this, but… "I see it."
"No, seeing is wrong," the kid told him. "The wrong sensory modality. This is feeling-with-touch," the kid told him. "In seeing, the lines converge, but the breadth does not ACTUALLY change with depth. Think," the kid said. "The table is right in front of you. It is two feet deep, and five feet wide." ...Yeah, okay. "If you reached out with your hands, across the tabletop, where would you feel the table below your hands-and-fingertips? -Forward, back, across, sideways," the kid said. "It's there, the actual physical thing. Your eyes lie to you, say that the thing becomes smaller when it is further away," the kid said. "You can 'see' that, but your touch tells you where it actually is. Straight out. Not getting any smaller."
Okay. Stan could sort of get this, but… "That's not sideways, kid, that's the…"
"There is a plate on the table," the kid said next, and suddenly Stan thought ground when it came to the table, and it came to him in a flash. The kid had needed something solid to start with, to- "You can move your hands around the plate, but your hands stay on the table. You can use both hands if that's easier," the kid said. "You trace the circumference around it. You know the shape of the plate. You can trace it."
Stan opened his eyes and let out a sigh, scrubbing his hands through his hair. Okay, so... if he was moving through a room in the dark, yeah. Kind of like that. Memorize where stuff was, how large it was, where it was, and try not to hit it. It was sort of a… these things are larger and here, thing, Stan guessed. Sure.
But that still didn't tell him… "How would you explain height to somebody if they only understood breadth and depth?" Stan asked the kid, because he wanted to know how the kid had got there himself, and he wanted the explanation to be something simple that maybe he could get - because he bet that the way that the kid had first done it had felt hellaciously complicated to the kid - and when stuff felt complicated to the kid, he liked making it feel complicated to everybody else, too. (Stan had figured out that one pretty quick, as well.)
"Ha," said the kid. He sat up straight.
"Start with breadth, rotate about a point at the center of you," the kid said, doing the head-on-a-pole thing again. "That's a rotation you understand. And you know others rotate about other points, their own points too - but that doesn't matter so much," the kid told him. "Depth, a line out in front of you." The kid used a finger to trace a line out from the tip of his nose, then back again. "This feels like a point at the surface here," the kid tapped the tip of his nose, "And this line intersects with and at and through the point at the center of you that you usually spin around," the kid told him, then paused.
"Okay, with ya so far, kid," Stan confirmed.
The kid nodded once, then held his hands out in front of him again… weirdly. Stan frowned. The kid's left hand was held out fine, palm-up… but his right arm was contorted across his left arm, elbow practically sticking straight-up in the air, and his right hand was flipped over, palm up and to the right of his left hand, as the kid was facing him; both thumbs were touching each other, and…
"There is a line, that feels like a point, out in front of you," the kid said. "You turn about that," the kid said, and he twisted his hands together, at the same time - counter-clockwise facing him - and suddenly both of the kids hands were… still next to each other, but held out normally, palms-down. "And left becomes right and right becomes left-"
"-and everything becomes upside down-" Stan heard his brother choke out, right next to him, so quietly that he almost didn't even hear it... (but why the hell did his brother sound so horrified…?)
("-and backwards and wrong-" Ford mouthed out, unable to get out the rest of the words, feeling completely out of breath as he stared at Bill.)
"And keep turning and turning..." the kid said, after only holding it for a few moments… and now the kid's right hand was held out, palm-up, normally, and it was the kid's left hand and arm that was being held all upside-down and weirdly now. "...aaaaand there you are!" the kid ended, then dropped both his hands back down to his lap.
('-and, and all twisted around on you by the end of it-!' Ford thought hysterically, feeling dizzy and very wrong himself as he shivered in place.)
Stan stared at this. "Okayyyy," he told the kid. "That seems like it'd be… kind of… jarring." Wasn't really sure how to put that. "Maybe like a fall in a direction you don't expect?" Stan tried, because those were pretty jarring. Slipping on ice sometimes felt like everything was spinning around on you, and kind of a lurch.
"Yes!" said the kid. "Learning something new that completely changes your whole view-of-the-world is-and-should ALWAYS be like that!" the kid said brightly, looking very pleased with him for some reason.
(...And Stan didn't really know what was up with his brother, now. Ford seemed really freaking angry all of a sudden for no damn reason that Stan could see, fists clenched in his lap and practically vibrating with rage.)
"Right. Different 'world view'," heh. Stan got the joke, even if Ford didn't. "Next step, view from above, right?" Stan asked the kid, settling back, and the kid nodded at him enthusiastically, grinning.
(...aaaaand now his brother seemed really confused and taken aback. Hell. They were really gonna have to have another long talk in the basement again after all this, once they were home again, weren't they.)
"Huh," said Stan. "Thanks, kid." The kid looked a little startled, but he smiled again, before settling back into his chair.
(Ford slowly turned back towards the house he was supposed to be watching, fuming. -Damn him. Damn him! This meant that- Bill had made everything that had ever felt that way like that deliberately- Damn him!)
Things got quiet again for awhile after that. Ford sat there, watching the house, still fuming, while Dipper kept sneaking glance after glance back at Bill, and staring down at his own hands occasionally (and wishing he had his journal with him, because then he could've recorded how Bill had just described his own hat).
Stan sat where he was next to his brother, watching the kid and Miz and Mabel, and the kid kept watching his little sister and Mabel playing more with the dolls again (with the occasional odd question from Mabel on whether Bill had sold bows and other stuff).
They all sat where they were (sort-of, mostly) peacefully for a while, watching the Pawn shop or each other, until Miz tilted her head and commented to Bill, "So your family were merchants? Mine were carpenters. I wasn't allowed to learn because my Birthers knew I would be taken away anyway and couldn't be their heir, so they birthed Will to be their son and replace me…"
"All equilateral 'perfect' triangles were merchants; isosceles were laborers and guards-" and the kid seemed to cut himself off right there. Then the kid pulled in a breath, and said, "No carpenters. -No height - no trees." The kid sighed. "No buildings, just concepts of walls and areas-of-exclusion with time-locks on them sometimes." He sounded half-annoyed again, at nothing in particular.
"Soooo…" Mabel said slowly. "You were… perfect?" She sounded skeptical.
"Sixty degrees that come in threes," the kid said almost sing-song, then said more soberly, "My OUTER sides were." Then he got a slow and almost nasty smile. "My inner-sides have been and always-will-be very, VERY irregular." He sounded almost pleased at this for moment, before his tone soured. "Too bad for them! None of THEM ever cared about trying to measure anyone's inner-sides AT ALL, just the OUTER ones that they could all see and touch. ...Idiots," the kid muttered out at the last, sinking into his beanbag chair further and glaring out at the world.
Miz shrugged. "Same, I was a perfect equilateral on the outside and my insides were all wrong, but in MY Flatland, they could measure my insides. Was a pretty uncomfortable experience…" She grimaced, placing a hand over the space between her legs unconsciously. Stan remembered Miz saying that apparently her 'genitals' had been wrong and shuddered as he realized what that meant for her. They had measured her insides? That was… (He really hoped the kids didn't understand that one.)
Bill frowned a little, remembering what she'd said about parts and slots. "Insides are not inner-sides," Bill said slowly. "Our insides were… homogenous?" He wasn't entirely sure. He'd never actually seen… he'd never killed anyone outright himself in his old dimension, back before it had all destabilized on him, just heard stories about what that was like. "Puncture and die. Break and die. Bend and… usually die, or be demoted. No going back." And most shapes had thought the latter was the worse of the two fates.
"That's a difference I guess? Our Flatlands are similar but not the same, in my world we could break but as long as the damage wasn't too bad, we could heal." Miz shuddered as she remembered the way that Circle had cracked like an egg, his outer shell caving in so… easily.
"No healing," said Bill. "Survive the initial blow or die. Fragile." Very fragile. He smiled though, as he said, "Lines were the most dangerous! But everyone tried not to tell them so. The circles tried to say the opposite. So stupid. HA!"
"That's another difference. Females were Lines in your world. In mine, everyone were Shapes, and male or female was determined by your insides." Miz hugged an elephant doll to herself. "Or you could be BOTH like I was."
"Wait," said Mabel, as she lowered her own doll, "There were no girl triangles?" she asked Bill.
"Girl… triangles?" Bill said, blinking. And blinking again. And blinking...
"Oh boy," Stan said, "Think you broke him again, Mabel," Stan teased. (Wasn't the first time she'd done it, either. Heh.)
"No nooooo, that's- noooooo," said Bill, shaking his head. His dimension was not like Miz's! "That's not how it-"
"But there could be a two-dimensional dimension with girl triangles, right?" Mabel asked next, curiously. "What would that be like?"
Bill opened his mouth and raised a finger to the sky. ...And then he stopped, almost seeming to grind to a halt as Mabel's question actually registered… and then he sort of let out an odd click...click…...click… sound.
And then Bill got a completely DISTURBED look on his face.
And sat there frozen in place for awhile.
"Yup, you broke him again," Stan said good-naturedly, because had he called it, or had he called it? Heh. (Ford had turned around again to stare at them all in confusion. ...Then stared at Bill for awhile.)
Then the kid shook his head back and forth abruptly, snapped his mouth shut, and practically glared down at Mabel when he was done.
"YOU-" the kid began, pointing his finger at her. "That's NOT how it-" The kid stopped again, closing his eyes.
And then the kid let out a seriously-strangled but forced-out anyway "HAHAHA!" and slapped that pointing accusatory hand to his own forehead.
"Right! Yes! FINE! FEMALE TRIANGLES! INSTEAD OF LINES! YES! WHY NOT!" the kid said, his voice getting higher pitched with each word that came out of his mouth. "DIDN'T THINK OF THAT BEFORE! MAYBE- HAHA! ...MAYBE EVEN MALE LINES INSTEAD?" the kid managed to get out next, and then the kid paused and looked completely disturbed all over again at what he'd just said (at only reversing what Mabel had just told him), before letting out another stressed-out "HAHAHA!" again.
(Stan let out a sigh. Kid always did that when he got slapped in the face with the fact that he'd been making an assumption about something, treating it like one of those 'absolute rules' that he'd said most 'stupid' people never even thought about crossing, because they didn't even know what violating it looked like. …In other words, that they didn't even know was there, treating it like a wall, when it was just another of the kid's so-called 'lines that you could step over'. ...Eh, the kid would get over it. Never took him long. Maybe a minute at most.)
"NOT ACTUALLY MALE OR FEMALE ANYWAY! 14 BILLION DIFFERENT GENDERS!l NEVER BOTHERED WITH THE PAPERWORK TO FIGURE IT ALL OUT! COULD BE THE OTHER WAY AROUND ANYWAY! HAHAHAHAHA!" Bill ended almost shrilly, laughing with a hand over his eyes and a too-wide grin on his face.
(Stan let out another sigh, watching the kid. Luckily, the kid looked like he was calming down on his own again finally, head tilted back and his breathing slowing. So Stan didn't have to get up to walk over there to sit down next to him, put his hand on the kid's head to help calm him down. Kid usually didn't get that worked up over things, never had before on a 'trip on a rule-line' thing, but there was a first time for everything.)
Dipper was frowning at Bill. The conversation had shifted and it seemed like nobody else had noticed for some reason, but… Miz had said that her birthers (was that like parents? Hadn't Miz mentioned something like that before?) had decided to have another child (Will, her little brother) to replace her? Because she wasn't a perfect triangle on the inside like she was on the outside? Why hadn't Bill jumped all over that? (It was pretty clear that Bill was trying to act supportive to Miz, and Bill didn't like parents to begin with. That was the kind of thing that usually got the stupid dorito ranting about stuff. But Bill hadn't called her parents out on being crazy-horrible. The triangle demon had just started talking about merchants and stuff instead, like it didn't even register. Like… like being replaced was normal?)
Dipper bit his lip before asking, "Miz, did you say your little brother was… supposed to replace you?" The thought of being replaced by a sibling was kind of horrifying to him. (...And was that why they had been Bill and Will, with almost the same name? That just made it even worse! ...Wait, didn't Miz say her birthers hadn't even named her?)
"Yeah. Because they knew they wouldn't be able to have me as their heir, the Council was going to take me away so… I guess they cut their losses and just tried again…" Miz frowned. "At first, I was angry and upset that my supposed 'parents' were so willing to just… write me off. But then I realized that having a brother would mean I wasn't alone anymore."
(As Miz spoke, Bill twitched hard, violently in place - almost a flinch - before glancing over at her. Because Miz's situation had been the opposite of his, the roles somewhat reversed, and… was… was that what Liam had felt like? 'At first'? Angry and upset that he… that… that… that couldn't be right… could it?)
(Dipper noticed that Bill had flinched when Miz had said 'angry', but… Bill just looked vaguely uncomfortable at the rest. ...Or indifferent. Dipper glanced over at Mabel…)
Miz continued, "And after he was born, I just…" She trailed off. "He was so small. So… helpless and tiny and cute and…" She wiped at her eyes. "...and I loved him. So much. Our father didn't like me hanging out with Will, but I did it anyway. And after the Council sent guards to 'politely' prevent me from going anywhere near my family, I had to start sneaking out to leave him letters. We only got to talk through letters for a while before…" Miz trailed off. "Well, my dimension burned to the ground and ah… that… yeah…"
"Not your fault," Bill commented on the burning. (Liam had always loved him. Thinking otherwise was stupid. No reason to think about it!) He fully intended to continue reminding her of what he considered to be a fact until she began remembering it regularly herself.
(Dipper and Mabel exchanged a look.)
Miz sighed. "Doesn't mean I don't still feel kinda bad about it." She gripped her doll harder.
"Shouldn't," said Bill. "It's not your fault. The others are to blame, so blame the-others."
"Was it your fault?" Dipper challenged Bill next. (Because Bill was really kind of all over the place, here. But…) Great-Uncle Ford had said that the Oracle had told him...
"No," said Bill. "The fire wasn't my fault. I tried to put it out."
Dipper had been expecting the first denial - Bill didn't take responsibility for anything that he did that was wrong. Dipper hadn't expected the second part, though.
Miz winced. "I accidentally started the fire…" she paused. "I caught on fire. And that started a chain reaction that caught everything else on fire." (And it was sort of her fault. Miz didn't say it but it was clear from her tone… to the other humans on the roof with her, anyway. But to Bill...)
That… felt almost familiar, the way she had said it that time. Bill stared up at the sky.
"There was fire… and it was blue…" Bill said, and his voice was far away. "I fell… and everything hurt… and…" He grimaced. Everything had felt out of sequence then. Time hadn't been working, progressing, properly. Bill wasn't even entirely sure whether he'd tried to Look for his brother before… no, it had been after he'd fallen, after he'd tried to drag himself back up for the second time and he'd been burning… no, not a second time, he hadn't dragged himself up the first time, he'd been dragged by that Sphere the first time - he'd only done it himself the next time, just the once...
"-was burning and burning but I didn't die, even though everyone else did. I tried to find survivors, but there was nothing but blue fire everywhere-" Miz was staring off into the distance, eyes faintly Flickering to scenes of a world filled with nothing but blue flames, the ground, the sky, the air itself...
"Oh, I died," said Bill oh so casually, so lost in old memories, that his Mind wasn't currently configured to properly and FULLY parse correctly and in their entirety at the moment, that he wasn't really thinking about who-all was actually listening to him at that particular moment. "But I refused to die. So I didn't die." And to Bill, at that point, when it had happened, it had really been that simple. (Don't die. Refuse to give up. Refuse to let go. Refuse to change. Refuse to let anyone stop you. Refuse to let it END this way. Refuse, refuse, refuse! And GET LIAM BACK!)
"-and then I tried to put it out by eating the fire, which was pretty stupid, looking back, but I wasn't quite in my right mind at the time… and then I exploded and that's how I lost my body…" Miz shuddered. Exploding wasn't the best sensation. She'd gotten used to it by now, being able to trigger them on purpose for a REASON, but that first time had hurt.
"And then I began screaming forever," Bill sighed out, skipping over talking about- or thinking about what had happened with that other Bill and other Liam, because he hadn't been him, was never going to BE him, so why dwell on it? "And then I put out the fire. Eventually."
Dipper's attention was ping-ponging between the two demons (and why, oh why, hadn't he brought along his journal?!), while Mabel just looked shocked and worried as she listened.
(Ford was stuck on the fact that Bill had just said that he'd died back then, because even though he'd seemed to contradict himself seconds later, he hadn't been lying either time. ...which meant that, to the best of Bill's own knowledge, that had likely been the first time that Bill had died. But the mechanism by which demons came back...)
(...if there was one thing Ford was certain of about demons, it was that demons didn't just get to refuse to die, and come back again almost immediately. The multiverse did NOT work that way.)
(Except that had been exactly what had happened with Bill and the memory gun, hadn't it?)
(So then what was Bill, really?)
"-and by the time I was aware again, a new dimension had been created by my explosion. I was the big bang, apparently." Miz sighed. It was a totally cool concept, but she didn't enjoy being part of it. "And then the AXOLOTL found me, probably wondering about this new dimension that HE didn't create. And he found me."
Bill blinked, then blinked, then shook himself, and seemed to come back to himself again.
"-Which makes NO SENSE!" Bill exclaimed, looking over at her. Then he paused. "But I love you anyway," Bill said easily, and without reservation. "...Also, I still hate that lizard," he huffed out.
Miz grinned. "I love you too. And you can hate the Axolotl all you want." Brother's Ax sounded like a real jerk.
"Yes," said Bill, because of course she loved him, she was his little sister! "And yes." He would continue to hate the stupid lizard. He just wouldn't necessarily kill her piece-of-the-it outright.
"...And your dimension became the Nightmare Realm instead," Dipper said, looking to Bill.
"It destabilized and collapsed a lot and I told that Stanford it was called that right away, so that he did not try to give it one of those STUPID random names of his that he makes up for things that already HAVE perfectly good names for them, yes," Bill told Pine Tree very straightforwardly. (Ford choked upon hearing this. -He didn't just name things randomly!)
That was weird. Dipper frowned as he thought this over. Miz had… exploded inside her dimension and created a new one, while Bill had only sort-of died and then actually been able to stop the fire in his own dimension... and it had imploded instead? Was this some kind of… big bang versus black hole thing?
Miz hummed. "Well I do have my own other dimension that I call the Nightmare Realm, which brother says is probably a collapsed dimension. That's fine, that means it's already broken so I wouldn't break it any more no matter how I mess with it. So I go there whenever I'm overflowing and need to release my pent up energy without hurting anyone." Miz snorted. "Though apparently other people can still be unfortunate enough to end up there from falling through portals." She shrugged. "I found Seb's Ford and Stan there. Good thing too. They would have died if I hadn't found them and brought them to safety."
Dipper sat up straight, eyes wide and hands twitching. "What?!" Was she really being serious there, about this Seb Pines guy? ...Or was this just some made-up story like Great-Uncle Ford had warned them about, just some kind of prank that she would laugh at them about later for believing?
Miz blinked at him. "Oh, well, like I've said before, I helped Sebastian fix his portal so he could get his brothers back, and that somehow got it temporarily connected to MY Nightmare Realm due to some energetic resonance. And since dimensions aren't time synched, even though Sebastian had been working on fixing the portal for 13 years, the Stan and Ford I found had only JUST fallen into the portal when I found them." Miz laughed. "Fordsie was so sleep deprived and paranoid he couldn't even realize I wasn't HIS…" She trailed off before coughing, "...that MY dimensional set wasn't his own dimensional set. Anyway. I took them back home with me and gave them some food and a place to sleep and get their bearings."
Stan, who had been listening to all this without comment, saw how the twins' eyes went wide as they both glanced over at Ford. He watched the kids try to stifle their own reaction at realizing Miz's near-thing there, that they had been talking about Miz having been a triangle, even though none of them had outright said she was a Bill… (and Stan barely held back the snort, because how much did the kids really think they could get away with them on, there? Sayin' things right out in the open like that?)
(The kids were worried because they weren't sure if their great-uncle remembered that Miz was a Bill Cipher or not. He knew what day it was, and he hadn't completely freaked out on deck the night before about multiple Bills being a thing, when Miz had brought it up again in front of them all when Grunkle Stan hadn't been around. But other Bill Ciphers maybe being somewhere else far far away was a heck of a lot different than Miz being one and right there…)
...but Ford wasn't looking at them and made no clear indication that he thought they knew that Miz was a Bill. (Stan, being the closest, was the only one who could see Ford's white-knuckled grip on his knees.) When it didn't seem like Ford was going to comment on what Miz had (nearly or actually) said, the kids seemed to relax and return to the conversation. (Stan stifled a sigh. The kids really must think they were dense. Well, as long as his brother was okay, it was fine, Stan guessed...)
So Stan left the kids and demon-kids to their falling for awhile. He had other things to think about, like what Miz had said a couple minutes earlier about-
And it was about that point, that Stan finally put together something Miz had implied from a couple of her earlier statements just then on the roof, with what Ford himself had said earlier at the boat.
Miz had been replaced by a younger brother, Will, because she hadn't been perfect. Bill was the younger brother, with an older brother, Liam, who wasn't perfect and had been killed for it, while Bill had been… -And then there were their names, that Ford had practically obsessed over. Will. Bill. Liam. And when Stan put all that together what Ford had said earlier, back at the boat - William - Stan…
...got an entirely different result than Ford had gotten. And Stan felt cold.
Son of a- The kid's parents had given him exactly the same name as his older brother Liam, the one who was going to be killed by their government, because Bill had been his replacement? Really? That would be bad enough, if that really turned out to be actually a thing with a kid, but... -Exactly the same name? 'Bill' and 'Liam' were both short for 'William', and- Hell, had those 'parents' of theirs actually-!?
-Damnit, forget 'no imagination', that was just plain out and out wrong. 'Replacing' him and giving them both the same name. Like it didn't really matter which- (And then gaslighting the kid like that afterwards, pretending that Liam had never even existed in the first place?! If that was what had actually happened to Bill… no wonder the kid was insane!)
Hell, even he and Ford had been Stanley and Stanford. Their parents had only started calling them both 'Stan' when they were younger, because they'd started calling Ford 'Sixer' like he'd wanted, but kept calling him Lee when he'd wanted to be called Stan. Ford had gone along with it, demanding that everybody call them both 'Stan' (just as Stan had), until nobody had called Stan 'Lee' anymore for at least a month straight - because that was what brothers did - but...
Oh, hell no. No, he was not jumpin' off of this cliff alone. (If he was doing this, he was taking Ford with him, damnit.)
(...Along with a goddamned parachute, because he wasn't a goddamn idiot.)
"Kid," Stan said. "How do you say your name in Triangle-speak?" Because he wasn't flipping born yesterday and he felt Ford startle next to him.
The kid eyed him, and let out a chittering-chatter of noise, then stopped.
"That 'William' in English? Or 'Bill'?" Stan said.
The kid opened his mouth and let out a much shorter chittering-whistle of sound, then said, "-is 'Bill'." Then the kid let out the same, much longer chittering-chatter of noise that he'd made before, and said, "-is 'William'."
And Stan, who had been listening intently to what the kid had been saying (first-half had sounded close, but not quite, so he knew he was gonna get this wrong, but…)
Stan made the second-half of the longer sound (not repeating any of what had come before that middle-cutoff point that he'd been able to pick up on from the 'Bill' piece), and then said, "-is Liam?"
Bill gave him a long look. He very slowly sat up, staring holes into Stan's eyes. ...And once Bill was fully-upright where he was sitting... then and only then, Bill made a shorter whistle-chittering of sound, that overlapped just a little bit with what he had done before, for his own name.
Kid was still staring at and into him as Stan said, "Thanks for clearin' that up, kid."
"Your pronunciation is horrible," the kid said flatly, still staring holes in him.
"Yeah, well, ya' haven't taught me Triangle-speak yet," was Stan's response, staring right back at him. Bill blinked. And then the kid started to frown slightly. ...And the kid's pose got just a little less rigid. (Stan wanted to punch the kid's parents. Because Bill had just not-quite (but definitely) confirmed Stan's guess.)
"-How does that translate to 'William'?!" was Ford's own challenge right next to him, and what the hell, Ford-
Miz shrugged. "Well, in my dimension, saying 'William' would be more like-" and then she let out a strange vibrating hum and clicking sound. Miz tilted her head. "Translation is weird."
"'William' means 'resolute protector'," Ford ground out angrily, and Stan glanced over at him. (The hell? Had his brother actually thought that about the kid at some point? Really?)
"Technically," the kid drawled out at them all, "'William' is 'wil' and 'helm'. 'Will, desire'..." the kid smirked, "and 'helmet of protection'. You know..." kid trailed off leadingly, leaning to the side to prop his head up on a fist, and the kid was... pointedly staring at Ford's forehead now. Ford, for some reason, looked absolutely ill as his hand rushed up to touch the center of his forehead, and what the hell was going on there? The kid grinned at him, and Ford looked truly disturbed.
"Well, I was actually translating the letters that make up the word 'William' over into the closest approximation of that in my language and then reading it back out." Miz shrugged. "I wasn't going for the meaning behind the word." Stan could tell that Miz was trying to distract them all away from whatever the hell her brother had just said, and considering that whatever Bill had just said seemed to really upset Ford… Yeah. Stan grimaced.
"Ford, might want to let this one go…" Stan told him quietly, and Ford shivered in place next to him, still staring at the kid.
"What did you do," was what Ford said next to the kid, and Stan felt a chill go down his spine.
"-Kid, do not answer that!" Stan snapped out, and the kid actually looked startled, before glancing between them.
"Stanley, the plate in my head is supposed to-" Ford began in shaking tones, and Stan glanced back at him and realized- he remembered the thing with the memory gun. Ford had a plate in his head. To-
-keep the memory gun from working, but… he'd said 'his mind wasn't safe' and 'it doesn't work' down in the boat's hold, clutching at his head.
"...What the hell am I missing here?" Stan grumbled out at them all, because damn it, how was he supposed to-?!
"He thinks the metal plate in his head is supposed to keep me out," the kid offered up to him slowly, and Ford shuddered and looked even more pale.
Stan stared, looking between them. "...My brother didn't like the alligators," Stan said slowly. "Or the moat." (Ford was staring over at him now.)
"No, he did not," Bill huffed out. "He kept getting himself into worse and worse-! …trouble," Bill ended on, looking frustrated. "She owed me a favor. It was fine. He's fine-!" Bill started to waved off, but the kid trailed off on the "...now." Because the kid saw, just as Stan did, how absolutely dead white Ford looked now.
"Jessie's capable of lying…" Miz frowned, picking up on what had happened here and what Ford was finally realizing. Even if Bill's Oracle and her own were ENTIRELY different types of people. But the one here had lied to that Stanford, telling him that plate would keep him safe, and Ford had thought she'd meant 'safe from Bill' and not actually what it was really for, and-
Stan felt another chill go down his spine, because Ford looked about to break apart if anybody breathed on him wrong. Shit.
"Ford, worst problem with this thing that you're worried about. Right now," Stan demanded out of him, in a voice that had always worked on the twins, at least.
"Bill can get inside my head when I'm awake," Ford breathed out, with a tinge of hysteria to his tone. And with the way Ford was staring at the kid, his brother looked cornered, like... 'cornered by a hungry mountain lion without a fancy sci-fi gun on him' cornered. "The plate in my head doesn't keep him out..." Ford said, sounding halfway to hysterical.
"Kid, counterpoint. Now," Stan demanded out of the kid, not looking away from his brother.
"The plate in his head keeps me out while he's awake if he wants me kept out when he's awake, when I'm in the Mindscape; I can't get into his Mindscape if he doesn't want me there," the kid said, and he didn't sound all that happy about that.
"Counter-counterpoint, kid," Stan said next, because he knew his brother, and what would happen if he just left it there. (And it wasn't like he didn't have a system for putting the kid through his paces already - it was what he was doing with the kid right now, just with Ford listening in this time.)
"Doesn't do anything to keep me out of his personal 'Dreamscape' still," the kid said. "Keeps everyone else out of everything; still 'leaks' thought waves on the right frequencies for communication with other intelligent and semi-intelligent lifeforms so he doesn't get treated as furniture; I can still See him in the Mindscape in general. -It's functional!" the kid put out there at the last, sounding frustrated with him. "I do good work!"
Miz sighed. "If he'd actually thought about it, he'd have realized it sooner…" she muttered out, and Dipper paled. (Well, that explained how Great-Uncle Ford could hear Miz speak telepathically, but… oh, this wasn't good.)
And Ford…
Ford slowly put his head down on his knees. And let out a shaky laugh.
(Oh, Axolotl. He had a metal helmet wrapped around his head that operated on will, that worked on Will. That Will- Bill- William, will-helm, had wanted him to have, to wrap around his head, while their Deal had been on, while Bill had thought they were friends, and… Ford wasn't entirely sure if he wanted to laugh or to cry.)
"She owed you a favor," Ford said quietly. "She owed you."
"You almost DIED," Bill said huffily, sounding aggravated and almost aggrieved, and Ford dropped his head down further and wrapped his arms around and over it.
("Grunkle Ford…" Mabel said quietly. She got up and made her way hurriedly across the roof, to sit down right next to him, curled up against his side. Dipper was a little slower making his way over, and a lot more tentative sitting down next to him from his other side, but he did the same.)
"The Oracle's a demon." Miz pointed out helpfully(?). "Which is actually another difference between our dimensions, MY Jessie's not a demon." She seemed oddly proud of this fact.
"Bill," said Ford, not picking his forehead up off of his knees. "Is Jhselbraum a demon?" He sounded a bit strained. Miz rolled her eyes, right, don't listen to her at all. Just Bill. Always Bill.
And the kid… remained quiet.
Stan glanced over at the kid, and the kid was looking between him and Ford.
...And Stan saw the kid do that odd head-tilt twist-twitch thing he'd seen the kid do before with the niblings once or twice, when the kid wasn't sure if answering was gonna be considered a mental attack, and the kid actually caught it early. ...And answering whatever the thing was anyway had usually ended up really upsetting the kids.
Stan pulled in a breath, and let it out slowly when the kid just… settled. The kid didn't say anything.
"Ford, don't go askin' the kid stuff like that," Stan said, trying to find the middle ground there, as he put a hand on his brother's shoulder. (He knew what his brother was doing: Ford didn't trust that any of them could always tell when Miz was lying, but Ford trusted that he himself could tell when the kid did and didn't do it. But if Ford got an answer out of the kid on this right now… it'd just drive him nuts, because...) "There's nothin' you can do about any of that right now. C'mon…"
"..." Miz looked frustrated.
Dipper saw that, even from where he was sitting at his great-uncle's side, and he didn't even have to think about it before telling her clearly, "Stop." And Miz backed down, pouting.
Well, the Jhselbraum in this dimension was a Demon, and Miz thought that maybe Ford would have liked to know the truth of his situation. But apparently, knowing the truth would upset him? The dragon-demon huffed. "So you don't want me to lie, but the truth is no good either?"
"Not if it'll hurt people," Dipper said firmly.
Miz groaned and said sarcastically, "So, lie to make people happy, and then have people get mad at me for lying? Sounds fun~"
Dipper glared at her. "Or, just don't say anything."
"Tell the truth, or don't go jumping in," Stan elaborated on. Maybe she'd listen, or maybe she wouldn't. (She'd better.)
Miz sighed and flopped down on her blanket nest. "Because ignorance is bliss?" she asked. It didn't sound like she liked the idea of that. "I mean, for some things, I can see how it'd be better. But he keeps bad mouthing demons as ALL being evil and then praising the Oracle, even though she's one too…" Miz muttered to herself, looking like she wasn't actually meaning for them to hear and was just speaking to herself. (Stan grimaced, sending a look over at Bill, who just blinked at him. Hell, no 'help' there. Kid wasn't getting it.) Then Miz brightened and sat up. Well, if Ford was just scared about being possessed by Bill, then...
"Well, Brother's NOT in the Mindscape right now. So…" Miz grinned, hoping that maybe this knowledge would make Ford feel better about his mental security.
"Not helping, Miz," Stan said, still looking at Ford as he rubbed his hand over his brother's shoulder. "And ignorance ain't bliss," Stan added, because letting that one go right now wouldn't do anything but get them in even more trouble really damn soon, if the demon kid started acting on that. "But," Stan grimaced, then got to addressing the main problem with what she'd just done: "You sure don't have to go runnin' right this second. You're just breakin' a whole bunch of other things, 'fixing' somebody's ignorance in a way that won't help them by hearin' whatever it is right then, just hurt 'em instead." Because seriously? She couldn't keep whatever to herself for another two minutes here? At least? "It'll keep."
"... How close is she to the three-strikes rule, Bill," was what Ford quietly said next, and the kid… went still.
"...Who are we talking about, here," said the kid, very slowly, and Stan watched as Ford slowly raised his head up. (The kids exchanged a glance across Ford's chest.)
"Your 'Miz'," said Ford. "Jhelsebraum. Anyone who might be a concern."
The kid remained silent.
"Three-strikes rule," Stan repeated slowly, looking between the kid and his brother again. Because what the hell was this?
"Go on, Bill," Ford said quietly, but his voice aure carried, and there was just a bit of steel under it. "Define what a demon is for Stanley. I insist." (Stan was looking between them again. He wasn't gonna stop them when they were actually talking almost, but...)
"Yeah. Tell me," Stan said to the kid after a moment. If this would help him understand what the hell was going on with Ford and the whole demon thing…
"Stanley…" the kid said warningly, not looking away from Ford, and he didn't look very happy with any of them at the moment. Stan glanced between them. Neither of them were looking like they were gonna stop their staring contest with each other anytime soon.
And Stan hesitated, for just a moment. "Kid, unless this causes some huge problem for you and me, or would break the agreement, tell me," Stan reiterated.
...That had the kid flicking his gaze over to him for a minute, and looking even less happy with him. And then Bill looked away from him.
They all waited.
"...Demons come from the outside," Bill said finally, not looking back at any of them. Miz blinked slowly. Wait, but… Brother… Miz Flickered to try and find out more. Well… yeah, the Jhelsebraum in this world was a demon. Definitely. Died, came back the same again anyway, over and over again. That was the gist of it. But Bill wasn't quite a demon-demon. Not like this Jessie. He was...
...He was a triangle demon?
Miz didn't fully understand either way from what she'd been able to See so far, about what 'outside' part Bill was talking about exactly, but she DID know that she didn't like the look Ford had on his face right now. So she spoke up with, "This dimensional set has very different definitions for Demon than mine. In my set, Demon is a descriptor given to entities that exhibit certain chaotic or harmful qualities, and even then, the specifics are different from dimension to dimension." She spoke cheerfully, distractingly. Listen to this, this was a much more interesting topic! "So like, in one dimension a Demon was any entity that was capable of wide scale destruction, while in another, being a Demon was a 9 to 5 punchcard job where you torture the Souls of sinners." Miz's tail was out and wagging. "The guys there actually fanboyed over me, you know? I actually didn't realize the Demonic community hailed me as some kinda celebrity."
(The kids were sending her long tense looks.)
Miz frowned. "But I didn't like hanging around them because all they praised was my kills. They told me they admired how destructive I was." She winced. "It felt nice to be appreciated but I realized it probably wasn't a good thing. So I didn't become Friends with those people." She glanced around to see if anyone was going to take the bait...
"You done with your still really not helpin' here, Miz?" Stan asked Miz, not looking away from Bill and Ford. "Gonna keep diggin' that hole?"
Miz hung her head. "Distraction failed…" She mumbled sadly. (That got her a hard look from both the younger twins.)
"Uh huh," said Stan. Then to Ford, for the kid's benefit, "You're really not gonna let this go right now, are ya, Ford."
"No," Ford said tersely. "Ask him to explain the outside to you." Stan watched the kid twitch in place.
-Hell with it. "Kid, same thing as before, but define 'outside', instead," was what Stan ultimately responded to Bill with, with a sigh.
Miz twitched. The thoughts being practically screamed out right now from that Stanford were… confusing, but he seemed triumphant? Miz also noted that brother never defined what the 'three strikes' thing was all about. Strikes? Whatever it was, it shouldn't affect her, she wasn't FROM this dimensional set.
"Stanley," the kid said evenly, and the kid turned his gaze back towards him. "What Stanford is trying to get you to do, is to get me to try and talk about something that demons can't talk about without disappearing," was what Stan got out of the kid next. (That got Miz shaking in place. Brother could… disappear?)
Stan stared at the kid incredulously.
"He doesn't know how it works," the kid told Stan next, picking up his staring contest with Ford again. "He doesn't even know what 'it' is."
To this, Ford got something of a thin smile.
(Dipper and Mabel glanced up at their great uncle, and Mabel hugged his side a little more closely. They both looked concerned, but didn't say anything, yet.)
"I knew you were doing something to keep them from trying a fourth time," Ford said quietly. "I just didn't know what, exactly."
(A fourth-?! -Son-of-a..., a three-strikes rule?! For demons trying to do… what to his brother?)
To this, the kid seemed to push himself back into his chair, and he rotated his shoulders as he rolled his eyes at Ford. The kids exchanged a long glance, communicating something.
"I'm NOT stupid," the kid repeated. "Unlike MOST idiots out there, I don't talk up 'penalties' I can't back up!" The kid eyed Ford with a look that said, 'You know that…'
(A three-strikes rule. A three-strikes rule that had something to do with making other demons stop doing something to his brother, that the kid had been… -no, was still enforcing somehow. Because Ford seemed to think... What the hell?)
Stan glanced between Ford and the kid. What he finally decided to say out loud was... "Ford, I thought you said demons keep coming back when you kill 'em, no matter what…"
Ford looked almost smug. (Almost.) He also looked incredibly pissed off with the kid. "Oh, they come back again when they die or get killed. But whatever this 'disappearing' thing is that Bill does isn't simply getting killed." Ford never moved his eyes away from Bill.
Stan glanced over at the kid. "...You jailin' them somewhere or somethin', kid?" If he was, then Stan would know how serious it was; he knew damn well how the kid felt about jails and prisons.
"No. Yes," said Bill. "If I was doing that, they could just drop dead to get out of it." The kid frowned as he looked over at Stan. "If you asked any one demon for specifics, and they could answer you, it would sound like they were being sent back to jail, though." The kid frowned. "Demons just won't TELL you that."
"Better or worse than your old dimension," Stan said.
"-Worse," Bill said with zero reservation. "Hands down." The kid tilted his head at Ford. "Demons come here to have fun. Spoilsport."
Ford let out an odd sort of chuckle that put up the hairs on the back of Stan's neck (and had the kids staring up at him again, confused). It was the kind of thing he'd remembered hearing out of some of pa's old drinking buddies, some of the few who'd come back from the war in 'Nam like pa had. And they'd all had one thing in common, besides being "just" survivors…
"Too bad for them," Ford said quietly, with an edge to his tone that made Stan take a second look at his brother. A really good look. (...And it made Stan's heart sink, even as he carefully kept what he was feeling well off of his face.)
Stan pressed down on his brother's shoulder slightly, where he was holding on. Just a little.
Bill got the slightest of smiles.
"'Too bad for them'?" the kid repeated, then leaned forward slightly. "What makes you think you weren't doing exactly what I wanted you to do, pawn?" was what Bill Cipher said just as quietly back.
Stan saw Ford's expression shift, and he caught the look before Ford suppressed it: it was pure rage.
He felt his brother tense under his hand, but Ford didn't jump to his feet this time, though. Didn't stalk over, didn't try anything. ...Didn't even reach for his guns.
"-Too far, kid," Stan said next. "Ford ain't anybody's pawn. Apologize. Now."
(Stan didn't get what was going on here at all. Just that his brother and the kid were in some kind of stupid pissing contest with each other.)
The kid just eyed him. "He's not my pawn anymore," the kid said. (…which was probably the best Stan was gonna get out of the kid right now on that one, hell.) "I don't need him."
"-You talk like you aren't part of the group," Ford threw out at the kid, like it was a crackling shot across the bow. "Third person. 'They', not 'we'." It left the kid looking as unimpressed as Stan had ever seen him.
"'They', not 'it'," the kid said dryly. "'It' implies incorrect gender and sapience-level connotations for non-objects in your stupid native language."
"You're being exclusitory," Ford repeated. "You exclude yourself from the description."
The niblings blinked at that, and were looking between them, and the kid practically bristled and verbally rounded on Ford for that. "Triangle. Demon." the kid said.
"You sleep," Ford said next.
"Dream demon!"
"You aren't actually a demon, are you," Ford said, bunching up his shoulders slightly, like he was gearing up for something. "It's just something of a self-chosen titular 'descriptor' for you, as Miz puts it. Isn't it."
"I'm a demon when I want to be," the kid said in dangerous tones, eyes narrowing. "And I will ALWAYS COME BACK."
"Ford," damnit, "How many times I gotta tell ya that we're not killing the kid with the circle or anything?" Stan said, wanting to smack the both of them upside their heads at this point. "Does any of this junk even matter?" Stan asked him in exasperation, shaking Ford's shoulder a little bit. "Don't you got a house to watch?"
"Stan-" Ford turned his head to actually look at him (finally) and ground out at him with no small irritation, "This is-"
"-What?" said Stan. "What is it, huh? How is any of this more important than that to you?" Stan said, letting go of Ford's shoulder to point over at the house. "-You're gettin' all worked up about the kid's name, when kid's first language ain't even English so he's gotta be approximating it," Stan complained at him, because how had that even been a thing?
"Stan-" Ford started, straightening in place, but Stan wasn't having any of that.
"-And you're worried about metal plates that don't keep the kid outta your brain when he's outside his body when, what, the kid's only sitting five feet away from you? And can just talk you in knots if you keep on talkin' to him, so he don't need to just climb right on in or whatever instead, to do whatever it is you're so worried about?" His brother was staring at him, and Stan rubbed a hand over his face. "Which he ain't gonna do, Ford, hell, we'll tell him to stop if he tries..."
"I-"
"And who cares whether some fancy 'oracle' you met one time way back whenever was some kinda demon or not, anyway?" Stan said, because he was sick and tired of this stupid demon stuff, and Ford leaving stuff out like the kid being able to make demons gone! For him! "This lady, she didn't mess with you then, right? And it ain't like you're ever gonna see her again." Ford got quiet at that. "And who cares if the kid's a demon or not, when it doesn't really matter, 'cause you can't kill him dead for good either way, and we ain't doing that!" Stan groused out at his brother next. "-Ford, what the heck does any of this junk have to do with anything that matters at all right now?" Stan asked him, because he really wanted to know!
(Okay, so, maybe he didn't, but that was only because he didn't think his knucklehead of a brother could explain, because there wasn't one…)
Ford blinked at him again. And for some reason - Stan didn't know what - Ford was staring at him almost like he'd never seen him before.
"Well?" Stan asked him. He didn't take no answer from the kid on junk like this, and now? He was starting to think that maybe he shouldn't let his brother keep getting away with it, either.
So Stan grumpily stared him down.
"...I suppose you're right," Ford said after a long moment's pause.
"I- well… uh," said Stan, deflating a little. "Yeah, I'm right," Stan blustered, but he couldn't help but frown. "You're getting all worked up over nothin'," Stan told him, not really sure if he was right about that now.
"Perhaps I am," Ford said without giving much away, and Stan eyed him for it with a deeper frown. (That wasn't giving up. ...Not that he was askin' his brother to do that, but… he couldn't just tell him what was goin' on?)
Stan glanced down at Dipper and Mabel, but they sort of looked between each other and then glanced up at him almost apologetically. (Well okay, Mabel looked apologetic, not knowing what was what. Dipper was frowning at him slightly; not mad at him, but not real happy with him, either.)
Stan let out a breath and rubbed a hand across his mouth. He looked over at the kid and his demon-lady sister.
He almost asked the kid how important he thought that Ford thought all this junk was. But he didn't. He knew that one already. Kid wouldn't have turned this junk all around on Ford if it wasn't. And what Stan really wanted to know was the why. But he wasn't gonna ask the kid that; he'd ask his brother and get it out of him, or nobody at all. Ford had his reasons, even if Stan really wasn't so sure they were good ones...
After that whole debacle, everyone settled back down to watch the Pawnshop. There was still a tension in the air as the children glanced back and forth between their grunkles and Bill.
Dipper really wished he had something to write this all down in. Minutes passed with most of their group sitting vigil, while Miz tried to bring down the tension with a lighthearted game of pretend with the dolls. It didn't fully work but it did ease some of the stress in the air - not for Ford, but at least it did a little for the rest of them.
Dipper was still trying to stay on target like Great-Uncle Ford, watching the pawnshop, and so was Mabel, but they were both getting bored.
When it hit close to thirty minutes of mostly silence, other than Miz's quiet play-chatter as Bill looked on and asked her the occasional doll-related question... Mabel gave Great-Uncle Ford a big hug, and sent Dipper a look before she started to get up.
Great-Uncle Ford caught her gently by the arm.
"What are you doing?" Great-Uncle Ford asked her, and Dipper shifted in place uneasily.
But Mabel just smiled at him and said, "I'm going to help keep Miz not bored." Great-Uncle Ford looked alarmed at this, but then Mabel said, "Grunkle Ford, we can help. Let us help? Please?" And their Great-Uncle looked torn.
"She'll be fine, Ford," Grunkle Stan said next. "Hell, they've played together out on deck for hours before, with only the kid watching out for them."
Great-Uncle Ford shot Grunkle Stan a look at that. "That is not reassuring, Stan-" he began.
"Ford, I've talked with the dragon-lady a lot," Stan said. "I'm pretty sure she'd chop off her own arms before hurting the kids. -And we're both sitting right here watchin' 'em," Grunkle Stan said next, cutting off Ford's next protest. "You trust me to handle the kid, Ford. You don't trust me and the kid to be able to keep her coloring inside the lines if we've gotta?"
"I don't trust Bill," was what Great-Uncle Ford said next. But Dipper saw him let go of Mabel's arm.
Mabel smiled at their Great-Uncle and gave him another hug. "It's okay!" she told them all, before she turned and bounded off towards Miz and her pillow and blanket pile.
Great-Uncle Ford looked uneasy still. Dipper looked up at him. "Demons seem to like her?" Dipper said, then winced at how bad that actually sounded out loud.
But Great-Uncle Ford just sighed and said, "That isn't a good thing, Dipper."
Dipper hunched his shoulders.
"Eh, could be worse," Grunkle Stan said with almost a chuckle, as he watched Mabel settle down with Miz and pick up a stuffed animal. Great-Uncle Ford actually turned away from the house to look over at him, as Dipper did, and gave Grunkle Stan a skeptical look.
Grunkle Stan turned to look over at them both He looked relaxed and kind of gave them a half-joking grin as he said, "They could really really like her."
Great-Uncle Ford made a face at him.
They both turned to keep watching the house again, while Grunkle Stan kept watching Mabel and the two triangle demons. (Dipper kept sneaking glances back at them, though. Bill had quieted after Mabel had joined the 'play' again, Dipper had noticed. Bill was just watching them again now. Had he been… trying to distract Miz before, too? That was... weird...)
It wasn't a couple minutes after that that Dipper really couldn't take it anymore. Maybe Mabel had the right idea: watching Miz and distracting her a bunch, to keep the demon-girl from getting bored and saying even more crazy stuff out loud that might hurt Great-Uncle Ford.
(And how bad was it, Dipper wondered, that he was a lot more worried about what Miz would say right now, than he was about Bill?
Dipper looked up at Great-Uncle Ford first, though. "Um… Great-Uncle Ford…?" His great uncle looked over at him, and Dipper let out a sigh of relief as he looked away again and gave him a half-shrug half-wave: Great-Uncle Ford didn't look happy, but he wasn't going to stop him. He did look kind of tense, and tired.
Dipper hesitated and looked to Grunkle Stan. But Grunkle Stan just looked at him and nodded his head at his sister.
...Okay, so Grunkle Stan would stay with him and keep watching for anything messed up. That left Dipper feeling a little relieved, but also a little itchy and weird and wrong.
But Dipper didn't know how to fix things with Great Uncle Ford, or make it any better by sitting there with him. He was pretty sure he could help with Miz, though. (And if they could get more information out of her, then maybe…)
So Dipper got up and moved in a little closer to Miz's nest, settling down at the edge of it as Mabel asked Miz, "How come you only have two human-shaped dolls?" while holding up a small ball-jointed doll. Miz held up the other one. "Well, these are Dolfies that I made myself. So I know they're safe. But… ah… I saw this scary movie about a serial killer who sent his soul inside a human-shaped doll and didn't really like them much ever since."
"Chickie?" Dipper asked, looking over. Miz nodded. Dipper paused. "You watch scary movies?" He stopped. "Of course you watch scary movies," he deadpanned. Then Dipper realized something else. "Wait, so you're afraid of human-shaped dolls?"
"... and mannequins. They're just kinda creepy." Miz shrugged, and Dipper stared.
"How are you afraid of things like that and yet you're not afraid of-" He glanced over at Bill. Miz looked confused. Dipper wasn't sure how to put this in a way that wouldn't offend her. "But you…" Dipper glanced at Ford before muttering: "...do have your own version of the Nightmare Realm, right?"
"Well… yeah? I don't see your point?" Miz tilted her head to the side. "The Nightmares in there are soulless, mindless monsters. They're easy to deal with. But people? Specifically people that like to hurt other people? Who can pretend to be toys for children? That's scary." She paused. "And mannequins are just creepy as frick get out. No souls and not alive but they look like people and they might move when you're not looking even though they shouldn't be able to...", because Ax might fuck up and Soul a few of them just like he does with Chairs...
The twins glanced at each other. Mabel shrugged. Dipper nodded. He got up and carefully made his way across the various pillows and blankets to them (not wanting to trip and accidentally faceplant into any of it, since he wasn't so sure it was that much of a cushion between him and the hard rooftop). He managed it without too much of an issue, and settled down right next to his sister, wishing once more that he had brought his journal with him. Miz looked over at him with interest, tail out and swishing side-to-side. Dipper figured that was as good an opening as he was gonna get.
"What are you afraid of?" Dipper asked Miz bluntly. That caught Bill's attention, because he immediately sat up and said:
"-Don't answer that."
Miz closed her mouth and nodded. Dipper groaned. "I'm just curious. It's not like I was-"
"-Fishing for weaknesses to exploit?" Bill drawled out, with an edge to his tone. Dipper looked down. Well, only a little.
"If we know, then we won't accidentally scare her?" Dipper put out there.
Bill, who was downright glaring at this point (clearly not trusting Dipper an inch on this one, that he was only interested in preventing 'accidents'), started to respond-
-but he was cut off by Miz, who nodded and said, "Then you should know this, for your own safety." (Bill started to chitter out a curse or two at the 'Then you should know this', but stopped and grimaced at the 'for your own safety'. And because of the agreement, he vacillated a bit too long on how to best handle...) "I'm terrified of binding circles," Miz told them. "I go into a panic and my powers start attacking everything around me. My last panic attack killed a few people-" She choked a little. "-including my adopted daughter…"
Everyone on the roof was staring at her now.
"What?!" Dipper gasped. ('Adopted daughter? What?') Bill didn't look surprised, though. Stan noted that. So he had already known about this.
Bill looked Miz over for a moment, then got up from where he'd been sitting to make his way across the blanket-pillow pile. He walked right over to kneel down next to her.
"Do you need a hug?" Bill asked her (kind of knowing what she wanted a little better now, from their last few talks up in the attic).
Miz nodded and pressed herself against his side, not actually hugging him, but gripping a handful of his shirt. (Bill grimaced slightly at the clothing grip, but was able to somewhat-relax again after a moment or two, once he realized that that was all the grabbing she was going to do.)
Miz wilted in place, leaning into Bill and tearing up. "God, I still feel awful about that." She wiped at the tears already forming at the memory of it. "You're all lucky as hell that Ford didn't put me in a binding circle the last time I was here. Bad enough he put Seb in something like one, but if it had been me, and I'd woken up in one…"
Ford went very still next to Stan.
Bill looked a little grim. "I wouldn't have let that Stanford walk off with either of you last time, if I'd thought he might actually even have a chance of being able to hurt or bind either of you," Bill told Miz, placing a hand on top of her head. (He'd known from that first visit that they were hims-that-were-also-him. He wouldn't have risked that sort of thing happening to them - hadn't Miz known that?)
Bill brought his head down a little closer to her own. "That Stanford knows how to create mystical barriers," Bill told her, "But all destroying your body would do inside one of those is pop you right outside of the edge of it, like slippery soap!" Bill looked over at Ford. "He doesn't know how to create any sort of working binding," he told Miz, looking back down at her. "I MADE SURE OF THAT," Bill intoned.
('What?' thought Ford, taken aback. Because what had Bill meant by that? How could he have possibly made sure of- Ford glared. It wasn't as if he didn't know about-!)
"No-one in this..." Bill grimaced slightly, "...in the-dimension-we-just-came-from knows how. I made sure of that, too," he told her, trying to be reassuring. And Bill didn't like the idea that she might've thought otherwise. (He doubted that anyone in THIS dimension could possibly know how to do it either, but he was ABSOLUTELY going to check and make sure of that. And watch out for her carefully in the meantime…)
Miz nodded. "You're so smart… I never even considered just… not letting people learn to do that… I like seeing people learn stuff…" (Dipper and Mabel blinked. Oh right, Miz had wanted to be a teacher.)
"Most methods are easy to avoid and dodge, once you know how," Bill told her very seriously. "I'll teach you before you go. The methods that are harder to handle… take a specialized sort of knowledge to put together. It's hard to kill an idea," he told her, "But it's easy to kill a person before that idea spreads, and burn everything they've ever thought of making to ash along with them," Bill said like he was talking about cleaning house, not killing people for the 'high crime' of knowing too much. (Ford glared at him.)
"And when the idea is hard enough to discover in the first place..." Bill got a small not quite evil smile. "Misinformation may be difficult," (Ford's glare deepened) and Bill didn't really like doing that anyway, it usually muddied the waters further and eventually splashed back on him, "But masking information with more information is MUCH easier! -Most don't go looking for that sort of specialized information specifically, so if you make it easy for them to find something else that solves whatever their little problem is better…" Bill said almost leadingly.
Miz pouted. "That feels like a waste. I like seeing how far they could go… just as long as their research doesn't hurt anyone."
Bill blinked down at her almost lazily. "A binding circle hurt you," he told her. Miz grumbled at that, because it was true and she felt kinda dumb.
"Hold up," Stan said, more worried about the other thing Miz had said. "What the heck are binding circles, anyway?" Stan frowned. "Kid," he said to Bill. "Is this the same kind of thing as that anchor-thing on your back?" Ford had thought that before, but the kid had been adamant that...
Bill looked over at Stan. "No. An anchor is an anchor. A binding is different," Bill said neutrally.
"Right." Kid still didn't really want to go there. Fine. "Miz, what do you mean, 'your powers started attacking everything'?" Stan asked next. He needed to know what the hell had happened, and how bad it had been, to tell how dangerous it was for the kids to be around her right now. How the hell was he supposed to stop something like that from happening (again? shit) if he didn't even know what the hell it was that he was supposed to be watching out for here, in the first place?
-How safe or unsafe was it really for the kids to be around her? If she didn't want to hurt the kids, that was one thing, but if she just had random panic attacks sometimes that she couldn't stop or control, then what she wanted or didn't want didn't mean squat. -What the hell was he gonna need to do, to make sure the kids stayed safe around her? He glanced over at Bill, who was lightly stroking the top of his 'little sister's' head, now. ...Shit. If the kid was trying to be comforting, this had to be bad… (Damnit, if the kid knew about this shit before, why the hell hadn't he said anything sooner-!)
"Ugh, it was so stupid. I was going to magic school with my daughter because I thought it would be fun," Miz told them. "Some kids were picking on me, don't know why, I think they were just assholes… and they thought it would hilarious to draw a binding circle in the hallway outside my dorm room…" Miz hugged herself. "I was stupid, wasn't paying attention, walked right into it. I don't remember much past that, just a lot of fear and screaming. One girl got turned inside out. My daughter jumped right in to smear the circle, break it, and I…" Her voice shook "...I killed her… I didn't mean to… and it just sucks because I keep trying so hard not to hurt people by accident but…"
"Shhhhh," Bill said, sounding a bit more like a waterfall more than a shushing. He made another, longer stroking motion with his hand over top of Miz's head. (Looking at his memories of people he's Seen, humans did this sort of thing to help calm other humans; didn't they?) "Shhhhh."
Stan didn't know what the hell to say to any of that. -Other than: "Dipper, Mabel, cover your ears." (The way Miz was talking sounded like those war stories he'd overhead his Pa tell with some of his old 'war buddies' once, sneaking down the stairs to listen in on them in the kitchen. She had the same half-dead tone of voice going, almost.) The kids, already looking horrified, looked back at him in confusion and a total lack of understanding, but they raised their hands to their ears and didn't argue when Stan said with quiet authority, "Now."
(Stan didn't miss Bill's questioning glance, and a slight gesture at his ear, and Stan nodded. He knew that Bill could- and Bill made a slight flick of his hand at the kids. Some kinda silence spell, just in case. -Good. Ford wouldn't say 'yes' to that, and the kid knew that and hadn't even tried. But he knew Stan could and would decide for the kids, and he damn well didn't want the kids hearing any more of this junk, if it was gonna be anything like anything he'd heard in the attic about...)
Miz took a deep breath and continued talking, explaining, the words spilling out because ranting had always been her best method for venting her feelings. "My friends told me that it wasn't my fault. But my stupid PTSD is stupid and I hate losing control of myself like that." Miz mumbled into Bill's shirt. "So, please don't put me in a binding circle or try to bind me in any other way. I don't want to hurt any of you."
...Not 'risk hurting', just 'hurt'. Stan got that one right away. -Okay, so this just sounded like only one thing they had to avoid, though, not a bunch of junk he had to look out for, maybe. Not great, but better than it could be? (Hell, maybe Ford was right about 'such lowered expectations as' he had.) But Stan had to work with what he had, and… "PTSD?" Stan barely managed to keep his voice level. "What's that?"
"Post Traumatic Stress Disorder," Ford said evenly. "Generally, it means someone went through something rather awful that makes them relive that awful moment again once a certain 'trigger' is flipped." (Ford had learned that one from the niblings. They'd brought it up after… well, after he'd been an absolute wreck after what Bill had told him on the porch. After the handcuffs. After…)
Ford pulled in a breath. "From what she's describing here, I'd postulate that she would tell us that she had a bad experience with a Binding Circle before that event." Ford didn't want to call the demon a liar outright. It was very realistic, the way she was acting - and Ford was certain that it had to be just an act - but…
...even if she was lying, it would be in horrible taste to act that way towards anyone claiming such an issue. (Not without absolute and undeniable proof that they were lying, and... that was hard to come by. It was best not to.) She might be a demon, but even if she was supposedly a 'Bill Cipher', there were things that were simply wrong to do, even to a demon.
(That said, Ford still remained highly skeptical of what she was saying. Causing PTSD in a demon shouldn't be possible, as far as Ford was aware, and she was a demon ...of some sort?. And a binding circle - a working circle, done correctly - from what he understood, should not have been a problem.)
"Kid," Stan said roughly to Miz. "You don't have to tell us what happened."
Miz trembled slightly but continued speaking anyway, shaking her head. "I need t-to explain why this is important! S-so you'll be careful and I won't lose it around you." Because she 'didn't want to hurt them', yeah. Stan grimaced, as Bill made that waterfall sound at her again.
(The kids were looking at each other, confused. They'd begun to realize that they couldn't hear anything that was being said. ...Probably a good thing that neither of 'em could read lips.)
"One of my summoners back when I was younger had a binding circle specifically tailored for energy-type beings like me. The binding runes were staked right into my energy form. I couldn't move, I couldn't escape, and he said that he wanted my body… stupid idiot thought my vessel contained my powers, thought that taking my vessel would give him my powers..."
Stan froze at this. So did Ford. And Stan didn't like where this was going at all.
(...And it was at that point that Ford realized that he'd never heard of a binding that worked on a demon who lived in the Mindscape, specifically. Anything he'd ever read about it had all referred to the use of some set of physical restrictions, in one form or another, at some stage in the process, and this was...)
Unaware of the older twins' reactions, since her face was still buried in Bill's shirt, Miz continued, voice shaking. "...so I h-had to pull each rune-stake out one b-by one and it hurt so bad and there were thousands of them but I wanted to escape, I needed to, and it hurt so much I blacked out a few times and my consciousness kept scattering when I pulled the runes out because it hurt but I wasn't thinking clearly by that point and…"
"Stop," Bill said quietly, surprising both Stan and Ford. Miz closed her mouth and just trembled.
"I was so stupid," she whispered.
Bill sighed at her and continued to stroke the top of her head. "No. You were trapped. You wanted to get out. You tried to get out. That's what happens when you're trapped. You try to get out."
Stan swallowed hard at hearing that one. He really didn't like the implications of what Bill had just said. He caught Ford's eyes, and... even his brother looked horrified at hearing what Miz had gone through. ...Yeah, he'd damn well better be. Stan remembered how Ford had laughed when he'd found out about the anchor on Bill's back and thought Bill had been bound to him. If this was what Bill had meant about Ford not knowing what the hell he'd been talking about, then...
"Kid," Stan asked Miz. "How can I help?" Because he didn't really have a damn clue. ...Because finding her a therapist like she'd been talking about trying? Like hell that'd be enough for something like this…
"I'll teach her how to get out," Bill said, continuing to stroke his little sister's hair. "I'll teach her how not to get caught."
Miz took a shuddering breath. "It's fine. It was a long time ago. And I'm more careful when I answer summonings now." She pressed in closer to Bill. "And my friends have been helping me get comfortable with hugging and physical affection… which helps."
Bill blinked down at her at that. "Hugs… help you? Get comfortable?" Bill asked her, confused. It didn't really make sense to Bill; he wanted to make sure he was understanding her correctly.
"Having a touch, from someone I know and trust that they wouldn't hurt me, helps to ground me. So that I don't start feeling like everything is pain. So I know that sensations can be nice. That being held down can also be a comfortable feeling and NOT a scary one." Miz explained.
(Stan blinked. So... she was trying to do some kinda exposure therapy thing? Like Mabel had tossed at him with that water tower? Did Miz need a blindfold to talk herself into that? Or, uh, was the headband that cut out her emotion senses and junk enough? ...Eh, she hadn't been doing that before with her family-friends, though; the headband was new.)
Bill thought about what Miz had said for nearly half a minute.
And the Bill slowly raised his arms and a bit stiffly, but carefully, curled them around her, until he had a not-quite snug hold around her midsection. Miz sighed and relaxed into his side, which left him blinking multiple times in rapid succession.
(Stan watched the two of the demon-kids doing this together. ...Whatever worked, Stan figured. Probably good for the kid, too. Get him a little more used to touch at all...)
Dipper and Mabel stared at this.
"I'll still teach you how to get out," Bill told her. Miz nodded.
There was a bit of a pause, as Dipper and Mabel glanced at each other, and at Ford, and then crawled their way out of the nest of pillows and blankets and junk. (They hadn't been able to hear anything, but they could see them all and read the mood. ...Well, okay, Mabel had been the one to tug at Dipper's sleeve, but they were doing what they needed to do.) ...Yeah, Stan figured that that was a good idea. He'd been about to wave them over. Let the kid handle this for now. Because Stan still needed to ask...
"...Is the summoner dead?" Bill asked her next, far far too casually for 'casual' to be an actual thing, and it left Stan almost wincing. (He did not want to know what vindictive looked like on the kid. That was a thing he could go without knowing.)
"Yeah. He's long dead." Miz's voice was slightly muffled into Bill's shirt.
"GOOD." Bill's eyelids drooped low, and Stan's next worry was… the kid wasn't going to do something stupidly overkill, was he? ...But then the kid let out a slow breath and seemed to start looking a bit more normal for… well, him again. (Stan realized he was gonna have to talk with the kid about this later. Kid had talked about it being stupid, not letting things things go after a death, but Stan figured it'd probably be a good idea to get an 'official no' out of the kid on this one. Looked like having a little sister get hurt might be one of those 'exceptions' to the kid's usual 'rule' on that stuff...)
"You shouldn't talk about this junk if it hurts you all over again, Miz," Stan told her.
Miz shook her head. "No, I need to." She insisted.
"-The hell you do," Stan ground out at her. "The hell kind of sense does that make, anyway? You either trust us enough to not do it when you tell us it's a problem, or you don't. How's talkin' about it make it any better?" Stan damn well didn't talk about his shit with the mob with anyone else. He'd feel like shit if he did. (Probably have the kids look at him like he was three kinds of idiot for fallin' for any of it in the first place. ...Or have them looking sad at him, which would be even worse.)
Miz took another shaking inhale. "Because if I let it out and talk about it instead of keeping it bottled up, I'll eventually feel better. Like a catharsis." And part of her was sure that Stanford might be dumb enough to actually test her on this for some stupid reason unless she made it very clear why he shouldn't try that on her.
Stan rubbed a hand across his face. He wasn't so sure about that one himself. Catharsis, nothing.
Miz relaxed a little more. "And I have gotten better. I'm not a screaming mess anymore. That's improvement, right?" Miz shook her head. "It's fine. I just need a minute…"
And after about a minute, she did slowly pull away from Bill (who pulled his arms away from her immediately, as soon as she began trying to move away) and she wiped at her eyes.
"Can we change the subject?" Miz asked. (Stan winced a little, because he still needed to ask…)
"...How did your summoner die?" Ford asked quietly but firmly. "The one who bound you?" Stan turned in place to glare at Ford, but his brother was staring holes in Miz like he'd just ask her again and again and again if she didn't answer him now. (Bill was giving Ford a long, flat look.)
Miz whimpered. "He actually killed himself to free me from the circle once he realized what I was doing. He kept telling me to stop tearing myself apart trying to escape." She shuddered. "I don't understand why he did it. He went through all that effort to catch me… and then he just… offs himself to stop me from hurting myself? I still don't really understand…"
Ford sat back on his heels. That clearly hadn't been what he'd been expecting to hear. ...Hell, he'd probably thought she had killed her summoner once she got free. Stan rubbed a hand over his face again. (And Ford seemed suspicious as hell at what he'd just heard Miz say. Right. ...Hell, maybe Stan should be counting his blessings that at least his brother had enough common sense not to call her a liar to her face on any of this.)
The fact that Miz didn't know or understand why her summoner killed himself didn't make Stan suspicious. She'd said she'd been in and out of consciousness, and the rest of the junk sounded horrible. Made more sense that she didn't have all the answers and didn't fully understand what had happened to her; Stan would've been more suspicious if she had.
"Yeah, we're not talking about this any more ever, got it?" Stan grunted. Miz nodded.
"Can I watch an anime?" she asked quietly.
It didn't get past Stan that this was the second time she'd wanted to do that here. And she'd been watching that stuff at least twice in the attic with Bill, right? And had a whole conversation thing with Soos about it that one night at dinner. ...Guess she really liked that stuff, huh. Stan wondered if she had used it as a distraction, to keep from thinkin' about horrible stuff like this, all the years she'd been living as a triangle demon or whatever.
(...And hey, didn't she say that the reason she'd decided she wouldn't harm any humans was because she hoped they would create more entertainment for her? Stan let out a sigh. He guessed tossing TV shows at her head to try and keep her happy was a hell of a lot better than her tryin' to wreck the place with a Weirdwhatchamacallit, and laughing at their 'entertaining' flailing and screams.)
(...Eh, as long as she wasn't causin' trouble for his family and trying to hurt them, that went a long way in Stan's book. ...Even if some of the stuff she tried to pull made him want to punch her in the face sometimes. -If watchin' this stuff kept her distracted from shit like that PTSD stuff too, that was just fine. Keep her busy with stuff that wasn't messing with his brother; she seemed to do pretty okay with the kids.)
Stan (and Ford) also noticed how Miz seemed to be consistently turning to Stan for permission before she did things. Stan was a little surprised; he'd thought that she would look to Bill for that more than him, but even when she asked Bill first, she usually looked to him for a final 'yes' or 'no'. Ford looked incredulous at seeing this yet again. (Why did the demons seem to listen to Stanley? What possible purpose could it serve them to continue to play along with him like this?)
"Kid, if you wanna watch something, that's fine," Stan grunted out at her, "But I gotta ask you something else, first. -None of this catharsis-details junk though, yeah? I just need to know what other stuff might make you panic, same as the binding circles." He should've asked her about this kinda stuff sooner, but he honestly hadn't thought of it. The kid was all about control; Stan had just thought that the dragon-lady was only younger and maybe just a little more impulsive than the kid was, not actually that much worse at control and even less careful about things. (...Maybe he should've thought of it, though, after the whole thing with the headband and the emotions thing. Hell.)
Bill gave him a long, hard glare at this.
"Kid, I gotta know," Stan said to him. "If there's stuff that sets her off, and she can't control herself-" Stan gritted his teeth as Bill let out an ugly angry chittering sound at him, then picked up what he'd been saying before the interruption. "-I gotta know, and you gotta know, too. She don't want to hurt the kids, and we both need to know for the agreement. To keep the kids from getting hurt or killed," Stan ground out at the kid, who looked downright furious at him. "And to keep her from getting hurt, too."
The kid still looked angry as hell with him, but… the kid just sat there breathing and looking angry. He didn't tell Stan off any further for it. ...And that in itself was telling to Stan.
But Stan knew well enough by now that silence from the kid wasn't assent. It was just a waiting game, waiting to see what he'd do next. -Waiting to see if he needed to attack him in response to a threat, and only probably 'just' with words, since the kid's little sister was in the mix this time, being the one threatened...
"Kid, if you think I'm gonna try to hurt her, just because she's your sister, you might as well say you don't trust me and kill me right now," Stan told the kid bluntly. He heard a soft choked noise from Ford next to him, and saw the startled and worried looks from the niblings at his sides. (They couldn't hear any of what they were saying, but they had seen how their great-uncle had just reacted to whatever Grunkle Stan had said, sitting bolt upright and going pale and looking scared-)
...and he got a long slow blink from the kid as the ancient alien space wizard digested this information.
"Even Ford isn't gonna pull this kind of shit with her," Stan said. "He ain't that stupid." (Ford sent a glare his way. ...Well, tough. He was speaking to the kid right now, trying to get him to understand him; this was insane-triangle-talk, not normal-people-speech. Ford should know that; Stan had told him about this kind of thing before…)
Miz herself looked skeptical at Stan's words, which made Ford frown at her. Did she really think he was that stupid?!
Bill glared at him, then Ford, then him again, and he didn't look all that happy with him, or the state of life and things in general. But the kid looked away from Stan first.
Yeah, no. Stan wasn't playing this game with the kid. "You trust me to try and keep anybody from doing something stupid to your kid sister and maybe panicking her? Or no." Stan kept up his own stare.
Bill grimaced. He shifted from side-to-side where he was sitting. His breathing increased.
"...Kid," Stan said, pushing him. He knew if he didn't, the kid would just try and draw it out forever. "You trust me on this? Or not." (Kid had trusted him out on the porch, for no damn good reason. Trusting him with a sister might be a stretch for the kid beyond that, but it wasn't like she was completely helpless herself. This wasn't all just on the kid. Miz was being strangely quiet about all this, though, watching Stan and Bill interact with a curious gaze. She seemed good with leaving things to her big brother, at least for now, while Stan was trying to work things out.)
The kid looked more and more agitated, leaning in closer to his little sister, almost like he thought the proximity might keep his dragon-lady used-to-be-human triangle-demon sister more safe from them. (...Or maybe the kid just felt that way without realizing it. Stan wasn't too sure where the boundaries were on the kid and some of his physical reactions at this point. Stan had managed to convince him to go pretty low down into that body of his, finally. Kid might actually be giving away things he didn't even realize he felt at this point.)
"Help me help you help her, kid," Stan tried next. "I can't do that if I don't know what I'm needin' to be looking out for, before someone-"
"-Fine," the kid spat out finally, looking over then away from him again. He looked pissed. Arms crossed, shoulders hunched a little bit, glower in place - the whole nine.
Stan just nodded once, as he let out a slow breath through his nose. "Okay. Good," Stan told the kid. "-You're on my side, kid," he reminded the kid. "I got your back. Family's part of the package. You know that, right?" he told the kid.
Bill twitched in place, almost strongly enough to be a flinch, and looked about to object about something there, but after a long moment of self-struggle, he managed to tamp down on whatever it was he was having a problem with there, and pull it back in. ...Yeah, Stan knew he was gonna have to have another conversation with the kid there at some point soon, when nobody else and his brother were listening in on the two of them.
Stan pulled in another slow breath and turned back to Miz. "Kid?" he asked her. "You wanna tell me what else I've gotta look out for you, here?"
Miz glanced from her big brother to Stan, and blinked slowly before responding. "I don't like cars. It's not… as bad as a binding, it just makes me uncomfortable and upset. I don't think I'd panic over it, just cry a bit. But I haven't tested that and don't plan to do so." She shuffled in place, looking almost… embarrassed.
Stan raised an eyebrow. That was… kind of random. "Why cars?" Stan couldn't help but ask.
"Because that was how I died." Miz said pulling at the blankets around her.
It took Stan a few seconds to put that together. "Okay," Stan said. He didn't need all the details. Didn't want a repeat of her reliving her way through some bullshit like before with the binding circle stake thing. (Like he'd said, that didn't help nobody. Cathartic nothin'.) "...We talkin' being around them? In them? The idea of them? -You seemed fine on the sidewalks earlier," Stan put out there, trying to get a feel for this without her having to be too specific about all the whys of stuff.
Miz nodded again. "I'm fine with cars existing, I just don't want to be near or inside them."
"Okay," Stan said. "Good to know that you don't like riding in cars," Stan said easily enough. "I won't ask ya to go to the grocery store with me then, or offer to drive you to town, once we get back. And we won't use taxis or buses or nothin' while we're here," Stan added.
Miz blinked up at him before smiling. "Thank you," she said gratefully.
"Don't thank me for tryin' to keep you from having a panic attack, kid, hell. Ain't that hard to work around." Didn't seem like a big deal to him. (Well, not having her accidentally kill somebody was, sure, but the whole not driving her around places thing?) "Not like I'm gonna try and buy or, uh, 'borrow' a car when we're only gonna be here another day." Because it wasn't like that made a hell of a lot of sense. They didn't need one, for starters. Stan thought for a moment. "We can stick to mostly the boardwalk while we're here, or the rooftops, if even just bein' on the sidewalks with the cars going by is that bad for ya, too. ...Is it?" Stan asked her.
Miz thought about it. "Well, the cars back in this time period aren't as bad. I should be okay with them being nearby, they're not as fast or loud. And as long as I don't have to be in them, I'm good."
Okay. That one didn't make a hell of a lot of sense to him, but whatever. He was pretty sure that the cars back then (...now?) were a lot louder, not quieter, and he wasn't too sure that her idea of 'aren't as bad' and his were the same thing, either. He couldn't do anything about the noise, but... "Define 'nearby'?" Stan asked her next. "Just so I know?"
"The sidewalk is fine. That's a good amount of distance."
"Okay. You walk on the building side when we have to do it, though, yeah?" Stan said to her, because they probably would have to at some point. Miz nodded. "Okay." Good. That made things a little easier. They could still use the rooftops and back alleys a bit more than usual. Not a problem.
Stan looked at her, to make sure she wasn't just trying to act like stuff was gonna be fine when it wasn't (and it looked to him like she wasn't), and then Stan asked, "Anything else that might make you panic or feel, uh, 'uncomfortable and upset'?" opening it up a little more, using her own words for stuff. He didn't want to miss something that could be a major problem later, just because of some dumb communication issue.
Miz seemed to think about it a little before responding, "Getting held down by my wrists. It's similar to being bound… sort of." She looked even more embarrassed by this.
Stan damn near froze in place for a moment. He looked over at Bill for a second, who looked confused and worried (hell, the kid hadn't known that one? Shit. Shit shit shit-), then Stan said to Miz, "We're probably gonna need to tell the kids that one. Mabel likes grabbing people by the hand and dragging them off-"
"-Holding hands is fine!" Miz said in a rush. "Just… I don't like people pulling me down and holding me there, where I can't move."
Stan pulled in a long slow breath. (He… really didn't want to know how that one had become a problem for her.)
"...Were the bracelets uncomfortable?" the kid said slowly next, then his eyes jittered sideways slightly and he went a little pale. "-I can make them anklets. Or armlets." (Bill had just realized that the metal could be easily fused together at a distance, and then pulled down by a magnet or similar by the magnets incorporated inside them, which would mean that Miz could be pulled and held down by the wrists by them, down to a metallic floor-)
Miz rubbed at her wrists. "They were a little uncomfortable… but i-it wasn't too bad. I was putting them on, so I knew they were going to be on me, and I could take them off-" She didn't want to trouble them any more than she already was.
The kid grimaced. "They aren't safe," the kid said without elaborating. "Not if-" the kid cut himself off. "I'll… make something of thick plastic instead. Edges of the clothing-sleeves. Not-" the kid looked frustrated.
"It's fine, kid," Stan told him. "You've got time. No weirdness barriers here that she needs to be able to get under to be staying with you. Yeah? You can talk it out with her and me, figure out something safe that won't make her feel even a little bit 'uncomfortable'." ... Aaaand the kid wasn't even looking at him, too busy thinking about who the hell knew what. (Probably how he was gonna try and fix the bracelets.) "Kid." Still nothing. "Bill."
Bill finally lifted his gaze up to him, and Stan caught it and held Bill's gaze with his eyes.
"This is the kinda thing I needed to know," Stan told him, flat out - because as far as Stan was concerned, it needed to be said. He needed to make it clear that... "This is an agreement thing, kid. She's your sister; family gets covered," Stan repeated. "If you want your sister to be able to be around the rest of us safely, without anybody getting hurt or breaking the agreement…" Stan sighed. "Look, if Miz fell asleep someplace with Mabel in town, running off exploring with each other together, and I came to pick 'em up and carried her into some taxicab to get 'em both back to the beach here myself…" Stan trailed off, letting that sink in for awhile.
The kid seemed to understand him - kid wasn't happy, but he got it.
"I can't help you two figure out something better than those bracelets, or anything else, without knowing where the problems are, and what they are," Stan elaborated. "And I can't ride Ford to keep him from doing something stupid, or warn the kids to keep 'em out of trouble, if there's something like that that I don't know about, either."
The kid let out an unhappy huff of breath at that, as Stan turned back to Miz. "Anything else I need to know?" Stan asked her. "I don't care if you think it's embarrassing. I can't help if I don't know," Stan told her staunchly.
Bill was giving him a long look that Stan didn't really get, and didn't have the time to get right now. (So was Ford.) He needed to focus on Miz right now. (He'd handle whatever else was up with the kid and Ford later.)
Miz was deep in thought, frowning. "...I guess, just don't try to surprise me with sudden loud sounds, getting startled is a thing, not too bad, but I guess you'd want to know anyway?"
"Kid's here, and I'm here. You trust us to look out for you enough to maybe do something to that headband of yours, to keep yourself from startling at loud stuff so bad that you might do something stupid?" Stan asked her. "Make the 'sudden' too-'loud' stuff quieter maybe?" Mabel could startle the hell out of him sometimes, without even meaning to. He didn't want to think of what might happen if...
Miz glanced between the two of them before nodding. "Okay."
Stan nodded at her. "Anything else?" he asked. "Anything."
"Nothing comes to mind. I think by this point it's just the normal stuff like, don't drug me with aphrodisiacs or things like that." Miz shrugged.
Stan winced. "Yeah, okay. Pretty sure none of us is that stupid. Or that horrible." He glanced over at Ford, who grimaced (and held down a shudder at the very thought). "Thanks for telling me. And my brother," Stan added, because that was a thing. (Bill sent a long look Ford's way, at that.)
Now that that was settled, Stan leaned back a bit and tried to relax again. (Kinda hard after hearing all that shit, but...) He glanced over at Bill, "Undo the silence thing, yeah?" and the kid tilted his head and made a twitching motion with his hand. "Thanks, kid." Stan knew the second it stopped working, because Dipper and Mabel blinked suddenly and looked between them all. (They'd dropped their hands away from their ears awhile ago, once they'd realized it made no difference.)
Ford grimaced. He didn't like that Stan had effectively asked Bill to cast magic on the niblings earlier. Stan could have had no way of knowing what exactly had been cast, or if it was really only what he'd wanted. ...Or if Bill would have understood correctly what Stan had wanted the demon to do. (...And wasn't that a scary thought. Why had Bill done that for Stan? Bill had been acting-)
And then Ford frowned, because Bill had been… earlier, when they'd first gotten here...
Ford slowly turned his head towards his brother, and sent a long look Stan's way.
"...Is it safe to listen now?" Dipper asked carefully, just to be sure. He glanced back at Bill. (Had that thing Bill had just done been kind of like what he'd done to Grunkle Stan's bed? He'd heard stuff like the wind, and the cars and things, but no voices at all. He hadn't really liked getting stuff cast on him without his permission, but he and Mabel had both seen how their grunkle and great-uncle had reacted to what Miz had said when they couldn't hear her, and...)
"Yeah. We're finished talking about this." Stan said heavily, looking tired. He glanced over at Miz. "Y'know, if you still want to do that 'anime' cartoon stuff, then..." Stan shrugged at her.
Dipper and Mabel exchanged a glance. Their Great-Uncle Ford was still staring at Miz with a strained, uneasy and slightly-distressed look. Bill looked a little stressed, but less than he had before they'd stopped being able to hear things. Grunkle Stan just looked tired and grumpy. And Miz herself had already flopped back on her back, and was waving her hands around to create another Screen to project the show onto above her.
"Do you guys want to continue watching Fruits Basket?" Miz asked Mabel.
"Okay," the other girl nodded, and so did Dipper (a little more tentatively). "Can I borrow one of your dolls?" Mabel asked carefully, as she shuffled over to lie upside-down on top of a bean bag chair at the edge of Miz's pillow-blanket play area. (Dipper pulled over another one for himself, to set it up next to his sister's.) But neither of them got any closer than that.
(They were both a little worried about getting too close right away without knowing what was going on, after the whole 'panic attack' thing Miz had been talking to their Grunkles about. Bill had been looking agitated, Miz had said something about hugs helping with something - if there was one thing Mabel could lip-read, it was the word 'hug'! But even Bill had seemed to be being careful about touching her when actually giving her that hug, so...)
"Yeah. That's fine," Miz told her, as she laid down in her own 'nest' of pillows, picking up and clutching at a very worn and faded orange teddy bear. The fabric was a little dirty and there were loose threads coming off it. It looked old and somewhat squished. Thinking about what Miz said about how some of these dolls were based on her memories of stuff she had had as a human, Stan figured this one was probably from her human life.
Bill picked up a stuffed animal nearby, seemingly at random, and tossed it to the edge of the pillow nest, for Mabel to lean over and pick up herself. (That got him a glance from both twins.) Miz rolled her eyes and huffed though. "I'm not THAT delicate." She had that embarrassed look on her face again.
Miz put on the continuation of the episode they left off at, and Stan blinked at the colorful pictures and soft music. ...Well, time to see what sorts of shows that Miz liked to watch. (Hey, maybe if it was sci-fi enough, he could try and distract the nerd owl with it.) And yeah, maybe he ran the risk of Soos trying to drag him into those weird conversations at the dinner table if he watched this with her, but he also wanted to make sure that this 'anime' was okay for the niblings to be watching, too. -Besides, if he was lucky, maybe it might be another Ducktective? Stan groaned a little as he pushed himself up out of the beanbag chair, then grabbed it and moved it over a little closer in so that he could see the screen.
Bill stayed right where he was sitting, in the middle of Miz's pillow-nest, right next to her. He did slowly lay himself down flat after awhile, and let out a breath as Miz pushed herself up against his side. (This was fine. He'd figure out the hugging that she wanted better, later.)
Ford glanced over at them all, but he didn't comment. (The niblings were out of arm's reach, at least, and Stan was right there with them, ready and able to pull them away to the side if he needed to. Unfortunately, there wasn't much else that could be done at that point, really. Not when things were as they were... and Ford couldn't do a damn thing about it. Because Ford didn't doubt that Bill could likely cast more than a few spells at a distance, possibly even out of line's sight, if the demon(?) thought of it and wanted to make them suffer…)
(If Bill really was going to continue to play whatever game this was with Stanley, then perhaps he shouldn't interfere too much. If he let Stan try to handle things himself, within this game of Bill's, however long Stan might be able to make it 'interesting' and 'fun' enough for Bill to not get bored enough with it to end it, to make it last for at least a little while longer… If all he himself could do was watch, and wait… No, there had to be something he could do. He just had to remain vigilant, to stop and think, to wait for a chance to...)
(...to what? What could he possibly do here, to-)
One thing was for certain, though, which Mabel had been quite right about - Ford wasn't about to hand either Bill or this 'Miz' a ready-made excuse to lash out at any of them and kill them all, in the form of an 'oh, I was suffering from a panic attack'! He wasn't an idiot. And it wasn't as though most of it would be hard to avoid; some of what the demon had said was nearly esoteric. ...If Stan didn't tell the niblings what to 'avoid' come morning - pushing Miz into cars, grabbing her by the wrists (and apparently forcing her to the ground on top of that), and binding circles that none of them (apparently) knew how to (properly) set up anyway - Ford would tell Dipper and Mabel himself.
